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Shake the room Fire Nation. JLD here and 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 thinking our sponsors, now there's a better way to pay for healthcare and it's called CrowdHealth. Sign up today to get your first month free. Just go to JoinCrowdHealth.com and enter code FIRE at signup. That's JoinCrowdHealth.com, promo code fire CrowdHealth is not health insurance terms and conditions and may apply.

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Are you interested in business ownership for many entrepreneurs? Their journey starts with non-food franchising. Jon Ostenson. founder of FranBridge consulting and past EOFire guest represents the premier source for the best opportunities in the non-food franchise world. Sign up for a free consultation call with Jon today at franbridgeconsulting.com. That's franbridgeconsulting.com. Welcome to today's graduation speech from Garry Trudeau. He's a cartoonist and this took place in 2017 at the Macaulay Honors College. My task here, as I understand it is to ensure that you are not released into the world until you've been properly sedated.

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I must warn you. I've never failed at this, but you'll be grateful to learn that I have a very simple message for you today. Henry David Trudeau, once exclaimed about all things, simplify, simplify, simplify, although many have wondered ever since why he didn't just say simplify. So to simplify, I want to talk to you today about a single habit of mine that I hope you've been developing for two years here. One that your professors would hate for you to lose is the habit of seeing purposeful, seeing, seeing what's in plain sight was off to the side and what the world looks like through the eyes of others is perhaps not surprising that an artist would want to talk to you about seeing it's how he gathers information is the first step in making art.

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But if I could do one thing in my life over, it would be to go back and learn, to see as an artist all over again. There's so much I miss the first time around this. Wasn't always obvious to me. My first year in college, I took a drawing class and dedicated myself to making pleasant figurative sketches until one day my professor looked at what I was doing and decided he'd seen enough. Yes, yes. He said an exasperations. He knew I could draw. I clearly had some talents, but what he wanted to know was if I could see what I was producing, he said were charcoal, stylings, visual music filled with decisions. I made long before I entered the studio greatly agitated. He ripped the drawing from my board and to the great delight of my classmates toward into shreds.

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I should hasten to the point. This was back before you could sue a teacher for hurting your feelings. A few years later, I abandoned fine arts, but the lesson about inquiry about opening the mind and seeing through fresh eyes every day was not lost to me. I'm sure each of you has written an essay that should have been torn up or a chemistry project that should have been circling the drain or a sculpture that should have been returned to its natural states. Whether your choices are lazy or facile or different, whether you squander the gifts at hand, major opportunities are lost forever. Your education here was about taking a look and then another, and then another breaking through walls of complacency, whether they were built on self-deception or prejudice, always challenging the obvious asking the impertinent question.

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When you stop looking or when you only see what you want as a human being, you become a stenographer. The naturalist, Annie Dillard. Once we called her early ability to clearly see flying insects, this is not as simple as it may seem. It means you are focusing on the air, not on the reflective surfaces that lie beyond Diller spent whole summers training herself to do this. She felt that if she were going to inhabit space with other creatures, she owed them the courtesy of a look-see. Of course you have to be available to seeing in the first place, all of us start out that way. Young children are all artists with wonderfully egalitarian vision. The great Russian painter Kandinsky was floored by what he called the universal child.

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Why he asks, why do preschool children around the world from Eskimos to Aborigines? Why do they use the same icons? The same vocabulary of basic symbols? And why is there such a uniform beauty in their compositions? Anyone who has ever been dazzled by the art, the decorates first-grade homerooms may have wondered what can dusky did? How do we non children recapture the artists, seeing so pure and unspoiled by personal or cultural agenda? Moreover, how do we get the blinders off? Once they've been put on once we've narrowed our focus and chosen a path. If we're looking only to the horizon, what are we missing on either side of the road a few years ago, a guest on their radio show, Prairie, home companion, and told a story about a man who went to a doctor doc.

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He said, I've got a problem. I think I'm a moth. And the doctor said, I'm just a general practitioner. I think you need to see my psychiatrist. And the man said, well, I was on my way to see him, but I noticed your light was on. Well, this is the way life often works. You're on our way to something else. When you find yourself drawn to an unexpected light. Now maybe that light is just a small flickering flame, but once it has your attention, maybe a roars up into the sky, like a bonfire, maybe a lice away on who you are meant to be and what you were meant to do, or maybe it doesn't, maybe it can't bear. The weight of your interest. Stars can seem bright in our peripheral vision, but disappear when we try to look at them directly.

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But it's crazy not to try. The whole reason have peripheral vision is connected to our survival. Back on the prehistoric Savannah things to one side that were bright or in motion were of great interest and they still are or should be. So you have to welcome surprise, rebel and wonder resist the tunnel vision. That seems so necessary for success, Fire Nation, more value bombs. And we get back from thanking our sponsors. Are you interested in business ownership for many entrepreneurs? Their journey starts with non-food franchising. Franchising is simply the better path for many entrepreneurs. An interest in franchising is at an all time high lucky for you. Jon Ostenson founder of Fran bridge consulting is here to help you explore the world of non-food franchising opportunities today, John and his FranBridge Consulting team are part of the largest brokerage in the U S the FCC and are the premier source for the best opportunities in the non-food franchise world.

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They can help with virtually every type of non-food franchise, including car washes and oil changes, health and fitness installation, and driveways kids' education, business coaching, and more. John has been a guest on entrepreneurs on fire multiple times because he has served as an Inc 500 franchisor, a multibrand franchisee. And he's in the top 1% of consultants nationwide and client placements. The best part John is offering to personally speak with each and every Fire Nation listener who would like to connect and discuss franchise opportunities for free sign up for your one-on-one call with Jon today at franbridgeconsulting.com. That's franbridgeconsulting.com. As an entrepreneur, finding the right health insurance plan for you and your family.

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Isn't always easy. Plus health insurance can be a frustrating expense when you're a generally healthy individual. Well, now there's a better way to pay for healthcare. CrowdHealth, CrowdHealth, isn't health insurance. It's a community of health conscious members who contribute to each other's medical expenses, which can help you save thousands each year. You just contact crowd health and they find a great doctors who offer great prices. It's like getting rid of the insurance middleman. So the savings get passed on to you. Plus your membership is a monthly subscription. So you decide when to start or stop again. CrowdHealth is able to offer amazing prices because of its community of health conscious members to help in that journey. They have an unbelievable offer for you Fire Nation, sign up today to get your first month free and CrowdHealth.

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We'll send you a free apple watch after your fourth month. That's one month to try them for free plus the apple watch, but only while supplies last, just go to JoinCrowdHealth.com and enter code fire at signup that's JoinCrowdHealth.com, promo code fire CrowdHealth is not health insurance terms and conditions may apply, but there's more to this seeing while McCauley has encouraged you in countless ways to look through unprejudiced eyes, it has been no less insistent that you keep your eye on prejudice. Indeed. One of the main points of a liberal arts education at McCauley through your explorations of literature, history, art, science, and civilization through your study grants abroad through your passport to the cultural treasures of your own city is to help you see how things connect, to create a broad understanding of, and an appreciation for the world as people, other than you experience it a few years ago, a sociologist that studied the different ways in which very young children solve conflict during games, boys, she reported we're seeing quarrelling all the time, but when a particularly acrimonious dispute arose, the final word was repeat the play a solution designed to save the game.

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In contrast, when the players were all little girls, the eruption of disputes tended to end the game. The feelings of the aggrieved parties were far more important than the outcome of the game. An unthinkable reversal of male priorities, all of us play different styles of baseball and everything else. If any of you are escaping your youth without having once experienced a sense of being different of there, being something wrong with you, then there's definitely something wrong with you yet. Those torments of youth are adaptive. They make you more alert to the struggles of others. Again, it's about seeing the kind of seeing we call empathy without empathy. The one thing we know for sure is there can be no justice and without justice, we will continue to live in a world.

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God mad with grievance, Randy Newman, the wisest of our Securus once wrote a song about a man who walks out on his family. Everybody cried the night I left. It goes the lyric. Well, almost everybody did. My little boy just hung his head and I put my arm around his shoulder. And this is what I said. I just want you to hurt. Like I do. I just want you to hurt. Like I do honest, I do. And the second verse Newman fantasizes about calling all the people in the world together. I talked to the people and I'd say it's a rough, rough world. And things will always go the way we plan. But there's one thing we all have in common. And it's something everyone can understand all over the world, sing along.

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I just want you to hurt. Like I do sound familiar in his chilling offhand way. Numinous stripped the human capacity for evil down to its raw. His terms. He is explaining how parents are capable of hitting their children. How husbands are capable of abusing wives, how teenagers can shoot each other on the street with a flicker of remorse, how grievance can metastasize into riots and wars and terrorism, how people can brutalize each other for centuries, the endless cycling and recycling of pain. I just want you to hurt. Like I do. The unreasoning hunger for retribution is a big reason why so much of the world lives in the shadow of fear today. And the only thing I fear more than fear itself is a righteous certainty.

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It seems to engender in a climate of fear. Doubt can be unwelcome and faith can heart it into fanaticism and leaders can come to view themselves as instruments of God's will. And yet it has always been doubt, not certainty the constant questioning and testing of chairs, assumptions that his moods, as closer to the humane and just world to stop, seeing to stop looking for a better way to stop trying to experience the world as others do. So as the bindis closer is to give up on the whole idea of a better world. We are after all wired for empathy, it's in our DNA. Psychologists, Alison Gopnik noted this recently while defending toddlers from sprays comparisons to our presidents most should she wrote display altruism by the second year of their life by four, they have a strong, moral sense, understand fairness rules, the feelings of others because our early survival and small social units demanded it were actually designed to look after each other, to share resources, to sacrifice for the common good empathy is a natural adaptation.

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And yet paradoxically modern life is its natural enemy two and a half centuries ago. Well, before evolutionary theory, Benjamin Franklin noticed something on the colonial frontier that utterly baffled him. The unwillingness of sellers who had been captured during the Indian wars to return to their society. Once they'd been accustomed to tribal life, given a choice, they almost always prefer to live in a stone age, a village often running back to the tribe after they've been rescued, as Franklin noted this res awkward questions about the supposed virtues of civilization questions we wrestle with to this day, the developed world has produced only, ever increasing isolation where nobody depends on his neighbor for safety or sustenance or solace where individual autonomy is prized above all Laos, the natural communal imperative of tribal life.

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The sense of purpose and belonging, where everyone has a stake in the wellbeing of others is hard to replicate except on a personal level. And that's my final wish for you that in your life of seeing, you'd never lose sight of your tribe, the friends you've made here, don't let our current national tribalism give tribe a bad name, see to yours. And when I say C I mean old school, I mean showing up, leaving your phone in your car, I mean, whoop filled gatherings, excessive embraces. You're reassuring here for you. Physical presence make that happen. As often as you can for, if you nurture and cherish the relationships you have formed here, they will support you and delight you and sustain you for the rest of your lives.

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In closing. Let me leave you in the hands of Anne Dillard, whom I mentioned earlier, this is how she summarized her to ventures. And seeing there are a lot of things to see. She wrote unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly stuttered in strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand, if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then you have with your poverty, but a lifetime of days, it's that simple. What you see is what you get. Thank you and best of luck. Now there's a better way to pay for healthcare and it's called CrowdHealth. Sign up today to get your first month free.

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Just go to JoinCrowdHealth.com and enter code fire at signup. That's JoinCrowdHealth.com, promo code fire. CrowdHealth is not health insurance terms and conditions may apply. Are you interested in business ownership for many entrepreneurs? Their journey starts with non-food franchising. Jon Ostenson, founder of FranBridge Consulting and past EOFire guests represents the premier source for the best opportunities in the non-food franchise world. Sign up for a free consultation call with Jon today at franbridgeconsulting.com. That's franbridgeconsulting.com.