0 (3s):
Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here ends welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like the MarTech podcast today, we'll be sharing a special episode. That is part of a series that we've created of the greatest graduation speeches of all time. There have been some fantastic commencement talks over the past few decades, and we've collected the best of the best for you to enjoy. As soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors

NetSuite (33s):
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Helium 10 (53s):
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0 (1m 12s):
Welcome to the graduation speech of Colson Whitehead, who is an author. And this is at Connecticut college back in 2017. Somehow you did it. You made it through the meat grinder of elementary school, your teenage years, and now college with most, if not all of your limbs intact, that's quite a feat. I salute you. There's a great big world out there waiting for you in all sorts of possibilities. Time for you to follow your star, find a soulmate, find yourself finally, or so they say any good story has three parts act one where we meet the protagonists and establish the rules of the world. How do things work?

0 (1m 53s):
What kind of person is our heroine and what sort of world has she been born into? What does she want? How does she see yourself? The all-important foundation of the narrative, and then comes back to, to where the complications appeared. They set our heroine on her journey. These are the unexpected and unforeseen events that append the rules of act one. The meteorite is on a collision course with earth. What do we do? There's an accident and attack that destroys the peaceful order of everything that has come before. A dimension conmen takes control of the country. That foundation of act one is undermined. The assumptions of our heroine are tested. Then we get to act three. The synthesis of act one and two, all the chaos of the middle section is brought to some kind of resolution.

0 (2m 38s):
Our new heroine is born out of her struggle, the meteor collides, or it doesn't out of the rebel of the attack. A new city rises. The man is exposed for swindles and gets his just desserts or doesn't thesis. Antithesis synthesis, I guess in college, I might've used an analogy of Saturday evening. Saturday night, Sunday morning, Saturday evening is I'm sure looking forward to this party tonight, act one Saturday night is the complication of active to all sorts of crazy stuff is happening at the party. Clouds, chocolate pudding, and Sunday morning and act three, a new self awakes and says after that whole chocolate pudding thing last night, I'm going to have to reconsider some long-held beliefs about myself, the narrative arc of a story a night, a life, like I said, you've just finished act one.

0 (3m 25s):
You know, some things about the world. You've developed a few theories about how things work. Sure that freshman year seminar, our marks added a wrinkle and that social justice course really threw you for a loop who knew all that was going on, but you recover splendidly. And with the end of act one, you're ready to head out into the world, follow your star, find a soulmate, find yourself, believe in yourself. You can do anything here. Come the complications, find a soulmate. Find the person who really gets you understands what makes you tick like no other, the one person in the universe who can look past that front, you present to the world and see the real you behind it. I'm not the first one to point this out, but in all probability, your soulmate is dead.

0 (4m 6s):
It's simple numbers. I'm not trying to be negative. Nelly scientists say that 107 billion people have lived on earth up to this moment. And there are 7 billion people alive on the planet today. The OD speak for themselves. Perhaps your soulmate was a humble servant in ancient Egypt, washing primitive textiles in the waters of the Nile or a Christian soldier during the crusades, trying to wipe out his Muslim brother on the other side of the battlefield or less mundane, someone famous a maker of history like Napoleon or Harriet Tubman, which would have socked because Napoleon and Harriet Tubman had to travel a lot for work. And you wouldn't see them much between the world conquest thing and the underground railroad thing. And I don't even think they had Skype it back then.

0 (4m 47s):
Maybe your soulmate is not one of the 107 billion who have come before, but one of the 7 billion on earth right now, and they're an antique dealer in New Zealand or a cook in a food market in Thailand. Are you going to New Zealand anytime soon or Thailand or the chances that you'd run into each other? Even if you are going meet eyes over to antique bus of Abraham Lincoln or visit the kitchen to compliment the cook on the excellent beef. Larb maybe they're sick that day. You can't meet everyone. In fact, some of you soon to be graduates are looking around right now, going that guy was in my class. I've literally never seen him before. It's a big world and it conspires against you through numbers. Maybe they're 95 years old and at some may December, so many situation, but Sally, they won't live long enough.

0 (5m 30s):
You decide to go to New Zealand. It's a tragedy, or they're not even born yet in your one of their 107 billion people who lived on earth before they showed up. And you'll never get to have a romantic dinner on that marsh and colony, where we fled to you because of global warming, never gets a chance to say, I'm lucky to have found you. You can pass the soil and green complications, follow your star. At least here, you have it better than ancient peoples. And the fact that you live in the 20th century, isn't held against you back then you had to squint at the night sky to find your star. Maybe it was Ursa minor, and you had to get up at 4:00 AM to see it taking into consideration the rotation of earth. And you couldn't even set an alarm on your iPhone to wake up.

0 (6m 12s):
Sure. Nowadays, we have light pollution from cities and you have to get to the desert for a really unspoiled view. But we have telescopes. We have the Hubble telescope, a magnificent scientific achievements that allows us to see stars as far as billion, light, years away. And one of them, one of those twinkling beauties eternal void is the one that speaks to you guiding your life's path through darkness. Your odds of just shot up. Certainly intentionally in galaxies. Each of us contains 100 million stars. One of them shines for you. All you have to do is look, Fire Nation, more value bombs coming up. As soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors,

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NetSuite (8m 1s):
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NetSuite (8m 43s):
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0 (9m 2s):
I hate to burst your Hubble bubble, but there are complications given how long it takes for light to travel through the vast and indifferent interstellar cold of the universe. The star you see tonight, beckoning may have died millions of years ago. It's light and is only just reaching us, but it's long, long, long ago dead. And we only think it's real. I'm sure it's not the first time something in your life has turned out to be other than what at first seemed your freshman year roommate. For example, maybe that perfect thing in the sky twinkling with promise and meaning has collapsed on itself long ago and become a super massive black hole. The most deadly force in the universe sucking up everything that strays into his gravitational field and obliterating it, rendering it into Adams and entity of pure destruction like your freshman year roommates and speaking of failure of language and the troublesome problem of relativity.

0 (9m 51s):
We come to find yourself by now, you know, the self is an ever-changing creature, a Nebula of spinning gases, swirling, and reforming seeking a coherent shape. There's the, you have your elementary school years making your first tenant of guests at how people operate, how you operate the teenage, you taking a stab at identity, apart from your family and friends and making some really stupid clothing choices. And then college finally set free from the home life that has defined, confined. It confined to you for so long. The mutable self, the complications of act two, which will tip all you have been before and the chaos and been set up in a bedded by really clever foreshadowing in act one and all those slippery use over the years, in some ways you've always been a creature of chaos complications complications, which brings us to act three synthesis.

0 (10m 44s):
If you read about Hollywood, they'll often complain about a script third act problems. The setup is great. Jennifer Lawrence is a spinster school teacher who comes back for her high school reunion. Chanting TNM is her long lost childhood sweetheart. And he's, let's see a Marine biologist Navy seal. Just back from Afghanistan. ICQ plays a principal. He's a riot. The reunion is full of shenanigans, clowns, chocolate pudding. But now we have to figure out the third act, do these two star crossed lovers get together. What does this story saying about the world? Sing about love and possibility. Do we have an uplifting story of triumph on our hands or a tragedy? We didn't bother to figure out the ND before we started rolling the cameras act three, is everything, no matter the strength of the foundation, the assorted catastrophes of the second act.

0 (11m 28s):
Even if we don't have act three, we're really in trouble, will the heroin pull it out in the end? Or does she falter? Does justice prevail or the dull villainy of the world triumph? Here's the problem of every storyteller to make sense of the chaos, to gather all the plot strands into dramatic unity, to figure out the ending, no matter what the plot throws at you. I've talked a lot about numbers in the indifference of the universe, but maybe here in act three, the numbers are on your side and the Walt Whitman ESCA multitude of you. You add up to a lot over the years, the four-year-old you is apprehending the otherness of other people for the first time. The 14 year old you is recognizing yourself in a line of Shakespeare in you sitting here right now, wondering what comes next.

0 (12m 12s):
All those future sells at 25 and 45 and 65 adapting, Pratt falling and picking yourself up. All the shifting the jostling use all of their lessons. The universe may seem like a lonely place sometimes, but there are as many use as there are stars in the sky. Maybe one of them will step up at the right time and tell you what to make of it all. Congratulations again on finishing act one. Welcome to the complications

NetSuite (12m 40s):
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Helium 10 (13m 1s):
Ever consider starting your own business. Helium10 can help with Helium10. You can become a seller on Amazon. The world's largest online retail sites with minimal startup costs. Learn more about Helium10 plus get 50% off your first month of a Helium10 platinum accounts. When you visit Helium10.com/fire.