Samantha Saperstein Delivers 2025 Commencement Speech

June 27, 2025

Samantha Saperstein, Global Head of the Office of Women’s Affairs at JPMorganChase, is an accomplished executive with a three-decade long career spanning roles in banking, consultancy, marketing and journalism. A champion for women and communities, she has played a pivotal role in helping both grow their businesses, strengthen financial literacy, and advance professionally. Her work has been instrumental in empowering women to achieve their full potential across industries. Her inspiring remarks to the Class of 2025 follow below. 

Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed faculty, proud parents, and most importantly, the unstoppable Class of
2025: it’s an honor to stand here as your commencement speaker. Thank you, Sacred Heart Greenwich,
for inviting me to join you today.

For the past eight years, I’ve led a team at JPMorganChase called Women on the Move. My whole job is
to help women and girls advance in their careers and finances, fuel their ambition, and help them
succeed.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of successful women from every walk of life. They include business leaders
like General Motors CEO Mary Barra and former Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi; athletes like Megan Rapinoe
and Allyson Felix; actress Zoe Saldana; media mogul Oprah Winfrey; and former Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice.

What’s amazing to me that accomplished women in all sectors will talk about one common thing that
helped them achieve their goals. Can you guess what it is? It’s not hard work, or an unrelenting drive, or
even a great network of mentors and supporters. All of those things are indeed very important. But the
one common thing that propelled women to greatness is…FAILURE. As crazy as it sounds, they all
considered failure as a motivator to get back up and keep going. It drove them to try again, and again,
and again. What they learned is that failure is very different from losing. In fact the only way you lose is
if you don’t try at all. Embracing the possibility of failure frees you to take more risks and set your goals
even higher. Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is the path to it.

Now, I’m not telling you to go out into the world and seek failure for its own sake. I hope you find great
success in school and beyond. My point is to encourage you not to fear failure. You can learn a lot from
failure – it will force you to think about how you can do things better the next time. It will also teach you
more about yourself, in terms of your passions and also your resilience. As you start this next chapter in
your lives, try new things and take risks, even when you’re not 100% sure how it will turn out. I have no
doubt it will put you on the right path.

This advice may be unexpected from a commencement speech. So let me bring it more to life with a
question.

What do you think Harry Potter, Amazon, and the iPhone have in common? At their humble beginnings,
each one was declared a total failure!

J.K. Rowling was initially rejected by 12 publishers. Not one, but 12! Imagine getting all those rejections
from publishers who didn’t think kids would want to read about a boy wizard.

And speaking of books, in the 1990s, no one thought people would buy books – or anything else –
online. Jeff Bezos’s company was dubbed “Amazon dot bomb” on the cover of Barron’s Magazine.
A few years later in 2007, the first iPhone rolled out to scathing criticism. The CEO of Microsoft at the
time, Steve Ballmer, said the iPhone had “no chance” of getting any significant market share. After all,
who would want to be burdened by carrying around a phone all day?

These visionaries initially faced rejection. They were doubted, laughed at, and told they couldn’t
succeed. But they shared something very fundamental: they believed in their mission wholeheartedly
and did not let failure stop them from moving forward. They knew deep down that they were onto
something: a new story, a new business model, a new product.

No matter how many times they were told no, or were told their ideas were stupid, they kept going.
Thank goodness they stuck with it and were unafraid of failure. Because of them, we have one of the
most beloved stories of all time, we can buy anything we want without ever leaving our homes…and
well…can any of you really imagine what life would be like if Apple hadn’t created the iPhone?

Now let’s face it, you’re already a very successful group. Among the class of 76 graduates are athletes,
filmmakers, editors, thespians, singers, and even a National Merit Scholar. You thrived at Sacred Heart
Greenwich, one of the most elite high schools in the nation, and are going on to top colleges and
universities. So the question for you is: now that you built a foundation of success, what do you have the
courage to try, and to fail at?

Your class theme is believe to achieve. I believe you can be anything, and I’m sure your parents,
teachers, and coaches agree. You could be a CEO, a teacher, a doctor, an astronaut, a Supreme Court
Justice, an entertainer, an inventor, a scientist, a parent. And yes, one day, a woman will be President of
the United States. Why not you?

So let’s set you up on the path to success. I have four pieces of advice for you.

1. Hold tight to your ambition – With all you have achieved, you already have very high ambition.
Don’t lose sight of that ambition or let it wane. You may be challenged by hard college classes,
you may even be the only girl in a class, or you may encounter an instructor or a classmate who
doubts you. Remember the ambition that you have today, don’t lose confidence in yourself, and
don’t be afraid to voice it. It will be your north star no matter what challenges arise.

2. Embrace math and finances – Some of you love math, some don’t, and others want to love
math but think you’re not good at it. I want to encourage you all to give math a chance. It really
is like any other skill that you can improve on with practice. It can open up the doors to coding,
engineering, architecture, economics, business, entrepreneurship, and tutoring your high school
kids one day. And even if math isn’t central to your careers, don’t ever give up on understanding
your money. That’s a life skill we all need and shouldn’t outsource it to others. You never know
how life will turn out, so retain the independence that comes with a strong grasp of personal
finances.

3. Stay in the game - 42 of you played at least one sport this year and 13 of you have committed to
athletics next year. So you know how valuable sports are to your body and your mind.
Interestingly, many women CEOs were once competitive athletes and it’s easy to see why that
helped them go far. Athletes have discipline and work hard. They are used to winning – and
losing. And when they lose, they get back in the game and keep competing. As we discussed,
learning to rebound from loss – from any failure – is as important as learning to win. And for
those of you who don’t play a physical sport, let me recommend another game: poker. Yes, you
heard me correctly. Poker! It’s a game of strategy, risk taking, and asset allocation. You’ll
probably see a lot of guys playing poker next year. Take a seat at the table and learn how to bet
on yourself.

4. Lastly, harness AI - Don’t wait to use AI in the future – the impact of this technology is already
being felt in every sector. Select multiple tools and use them daily to unlock AI’s unprecedented
power, do things faster, and free up your time. Leverage AI in your life, and even better, become
the next generation of AI pioneers. Vision and creativity in AI will be rewarded, and non-users
will be left behind.

The next ten years will see more change than any other period in history. You literally have the ability to
shape the world. The winners will be the ones who fail and who get back up again. Remember, the most
successful women in the world credit their ability to embrace and rebound from their failures as key to
their success.

Class of 2025, you're ready to take on the world. Go out there, and be bold and courageous. Believe in
yourself. Believe in yourself. Looking out over the audience I see so many people who believe in you.
And we’re all looking forward to seeing great things from the Class of 2025 at Sacred Heart Greenwich.

Congratulations to all of you on your graduation. Thank you.