Denzel Washington shared one of his most memorable quotes during his commencement speech at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. As he spoke about the failures he had faced in his own acting career, he recalled advice his wife had given him: “To achieve something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done”.
The idea was simple: if you want to achieve something different, you have to dare to step outside what’s familiar and accept the possibility of failure. Washington even recalled that he had failed an audition for a Broadway play decades earlier, before eventually returning to the same theater and winning a Tony for that production.
More than 15 years later, the phrase continues to circulate as one of the actor’s best-known messages about taking risks and pursuing what you truly want.