“My wish for you is not that Harvard becomes the last thing people know about you,” O’Brien said during the university’s commencement ceremony on Thursday. “But instead that Harvard becomes the least important thing people know about you.”

The 63-year-old comedian, who studied history and literature at Harvard before graduating in 1985, acknowledged the irony of delivering that advice. After all, the university had just awarded him an honorary doctorate—something he joked he “didn’t really earn.”

“Big surprise,” O’Brien quipped. “I have a giant ego!”

Still, his message carried a deeper point. Early in his comedy career, being primarily known as a Harvard graduate came with stereotypes that worked against him. 

“People thought the name of my show would be ‘Late Night with He Thinks He’s Better Than You,’ which I would have gone with but it didn’t fit on a shirt,” he said, adding that the experience taught him the danger of letting a single achievement define your success—especially at a time when isolation and division feel more common than ever.

“By de-emphasizing what makes us special—in your case, a prized degree—we can really find one another,” O’Brien said to graduates. “Not as an exercise in virtue but as a path towards greater laughter, love, and real growth.”

O’Brien’s path to a $200 million net worth has been full of ‘zigs and zags’

Born outside of Boston, O’Brien steadily built a name for himself in comedy, first writing for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons before eventually becoming one of late-night television’s more recognizable hosts.

Along the way, he said he recognized that no career is built entirely alone—and takes an army of family, friends, and “billion chance-encounters.” But just as important, he added, is realizing success rarely follows a straight line.

“I’ve had to course correct so many times in my career that my path is a crazed tangle of zigs and zags,” O’Brien said.

In 2009, he landed one of comedy’s most coveted jobs as host of The Tonight Show. But after a highly publicized dispute with NBC, his tenure ended just after seven months, with the comedian exiting the network in a $45 million settlement. Rather than letting the setback define him, O’Brien reinvented himself—launching a new late-night show on TBS, building a hit podcast, and expanding his digital media business. In 2022, SiriusXM acquired his media company, Team Coco, for a reported $150 million. Today, he’s also found renowned mainstream success as host of the Oscars, a role he is expected to reprise in 2027. 

Still, O’Brien told graduates that even the best-laid career paths are shaped by forces outside of anyone’s control.

“I always recognize the enormous role of luck in my life,” he said. “Refusing to see how luck has played a role in anyone’s success is simply ignorant. Many people are happy to mistake a lucky poker hand for their own brilliance, and fighting that human instinct has kept me sane.”

Too often, O’Brien added, people mistake fortunate circumstances for personal brilliance—a mindset he said he’s tried to resist throughout his career. And as he’s traveled the globe, that idea became more reinforced.

“It’s on these travels that I learned a great lesson: let yourself be bad at things,” O’Brien said. “I have been a bad dancer in every country I’ve visited, but the people laugh because it turns out everyone everywhere is related to at least one terrible dance.”

O’Brien’s net worth is estimated at $200 million.

From Warren Buffett to Mark Zuckerberg, some business leaders have questioned higher education’s value

While throughout O’Brien’s speech, he poked fun at the prestige attached to an Ivy League degree, he’s far from the only high-profile figure to question how much a diploma alone should define success. In recent years, a growing number of business leaders—and recent graduates themselves—have cast doubt on the value of traditional college education.

Warren Buffett—who was once rejected from Harvard—has said that he doesn’t care where people went to college. Though he once considered dropping out before earning degrees from the University of Nebraska and Columbia University, Buffett has argued that education looks different for everyone.

“I don’t think college is for everyone,” he said to students at Western University in 2012. “The best education you can get is investing in yourself. But this doesn’t always mean college or university.”

More recently, Mark Zuckerberg, who famously dropped out of Harvard University after launching Facebook from his dorm room, has questioned whether colleges are adequately preparing students for today’s workforce.

“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are … really big,” Zuckerberg said last year on Theo Von’s podcast.

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has echoed that concern. 

“I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning,” Musk said in 2020, adding that requiring a degree for employment is “absurd.”

Still, O’Brien’s message to graduates was less about dismissing education and more about reframing it. A diploma, he suggested, should be the starting point—not the defining feature—of a life and career.

“Your real education starts now,” O’Brien told Harvard graduates. “…From the depths of my heart I congratulate you, class of 2026—not for any piece of paper you receive today but because of your hard work, determination, humanity, and the boundless community that you have and will create.”