Eric Church was invited to deliver the commencement speech to the Class of 2026 at the University of North Carolina. He did it with guitar in hand.

Eric assigned each of his guitar strings a pillar of life. He explained what each string contributed to the creation of a chord or song, and how those coordinating principles made up a life. The result...a creative, inspiring and hopeful commencement speech. Here's just a small part of his address to the Class of 2026.

"Six strings, six strings of life and willingness to keep them in tune. Six principles, six pillars. When all six are in tune with each other, the chord your life makes is full and resonant and true," Eric said. "All six will drift, not one or two, all six, in their own time, in their own season. Your faith will go quiet when you need it loud. Your family will get complicated in a a way only the people who love you most can complicate things. You will go through hard seasons with your spouse. Your ambition will hollow out and your resilience will wear thin. Your community will start to feel like an obligation and your world will try to sand down the edges of exactly who you are. This is not failure. This is not weakness. It's the inevitable universal experience of living in an imperfect world that doesn't stop to let us tune up. And the difference between a life that sounds like noise is whether you stop and listen."