It wasn't exactly a graduation speech, but the advice Kansas City Chiefs All Pro defensive back Eric Berry gave to a commencement-sized crowd of nearly 1,300 at the annual Times Free Press Best of Preps banquet Thursday night was equally as inspirational.
The former University of Tennessee star said some of his words came directly from what he'd heard growing up from his father, James Berry, likewise a former Vol.
"Know thyself," said the younger Berry, who was the National Football League's Comeback Player of the Year for the 2015 season, "and be true to that. Everybody else [you might want to be] is taken. If I can be myself, no one else can be better at being me than me."
The Atlanta native says he didn't so much take the little things for granted during his nine months of recovery from Hodgkin's lymphoma in early 2015 as he did learn to appreciate them more.
Things as mundane as getting out of bed and going "outside and feel[ing] the sun on your skin," Berry said, and "experiencing the unconditional love from your family."
It was important, he said, "to see how marvelous and miraculous the world is."
Berry, at only 27, has a perspective most of the athletes in attendance, who were berween 15 and 18 years old and feel invulnerable, do not.
But he too found sources of encouragement from fans holding signs urging his recovery and from cancer hospitals he visited during his road back.
"You pull strength from different sources," Berry said. He related, for instance, that he saw young children with "tubes and needles" coming out of their bodies and "not complaining. I felt like I could muster enough strength" to come back.
"Willpower," he said, "is like a muscle," the implication being that if it is not used it begins to waste away.
Berry's comeback was all the more astonishing because he missed only the last few games of the 2014 season, having been diagnosed in December and then treated, and was cleared to play in time for the start of training camp in July.
From that chapter of his life he was reminded to set his objectives high, he said, to "give everything you have toward that [objective]" and even to "shoot past the sky."
Indeed, Berry said he has been shooting past the sky since "dominating at [the video game] 'Sonic the Hedgehog'" when he was 5 years old. Those who heard his message, he intimated, can do the same whether their future offers pro sports, being an artist, teaching school or selling insurance.
It is a lesson of personal responsibility worth heeding.