Your school had an accomplished, well-known speaker prepared to address you today. And rumors that he’s literally tied up in a hotel room somewhere are… exaggerated. So I’m filling in. I’ll start with a quick anecdote.

In 1952, two future Supreme Court Justices graduated from Stanford Law School: William Rehnquist was first in the class and Sandra Day O’Connor was third. The number two in that class is lost to history. Pop quiz — no looking at Google or your smartphone — can you name a major court decision that either of them wrote? If you’re like most normal people, then you can’t remember a word they wrote (if you remember, then you or someone close to you has spent too much time in law school). Rehnquist and O’Connor have only been off the court for about a decade, and one was Chief Justice and the other was the Justice most likely to be the deciding vote. Today, we barely remember what these two people did, people who, for years, were arguably the second and third most powerful people in the country after the president.

It is possible that, here before me, is a future person who’ll be more than a footnote in the history books. Odds are that all of you will be like the 1952 Stanford Law Number Two. And don’t feel bad—at the end of my life, there’ll probably be little reason to remember me, your humble and accidentally-on-purpose speaker.

You’ve been schooling in a fairly predictable manner: first your lessons, then the test. I just gave you a taste of life outside of school: first the test, then a lesson you weren’t expecting. This time, you got the lesson fairly quickly. Sometimes, it takes years before the lesson is clear. And sometimes, the only thing that’s clear is that there was a test and you flunked. Maybe it was when you said the wrong thing or hadn’t read your Tolstoy. It’s okay to flunk some things.

Even Tolstoy had his off days. For example, in the very first sentence of Anna Karenina, he stated that every happy family was alike, but unhappy ones were each unhappy in their own way. Don’t worry, class of 2016, I’m not going to quiz you about about Tolstoy. But I am about to take issue with the great writer.

Happy families are all different for two reasons: first, each individual is different; second, because each individual changes.   I don’t think I need to say much about each individual being different. But each person varies a great deal over the course of a week, let alone a lifetime. You, my dear graduate, have days when you’re easy to like and days when it’s much easier to dislike you. I hope, for the sake of your family and those around you, that your good days outnumber your bad ones.

But for a family to stay happy, all the individuals are constantly adjusting to each other. When Dad is struggling, Mom and the kids help. When Dad is doing better, perhaps Mom needs his help, or one of the children does.

Happy families are different because everybody within them is constantly growing, changing, and in flux. Happy families aren’t perfect: they make mistakes. But they learn and forgive.

Meanwhile, unhappy families are all alike. Unhappy families also make mistakes, but they don’t learn. Back when I did pro bono legal work, I saw more than my fill of unhappy families. And they were all alike: each person so focused on himself that he couldn’t adjust to the needs of other people. Mothers, fathers, children—nobody thought through of the consequences of running off with a stranger, or of using EBT to buy food they didn’t need to trade for booze they really didn’t need.

Unhappy families make the same mistakes over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. But the happy families learn from their mistakes—and promptly make different mistakes.

The whole point of your schooling is to learn from the mistakes of the past so you don’t spend eternity misquoting Santayana. Your family will thank you for making a new mistake. But here’s the catch: when you study the past, you’ll find a thundering lot of mistakes. It’s hard to make new mistakes. Adultery is a mistake lots of people have made—Tolstoy wrote a whole book about it. Don’t make it yourself because it’s an old mistake. Find a new one.

Thank you for your time, Class of 2016.  Please don’t repeat our mistakes. Go forth, and make new mistakes.