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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 thinking our sponsors Fire Nation, it's time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact. And you can do just that with online courses, try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com/EOF.

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That's Thinkific.com/EOF. Interested in B2B sales strategies. The salesman podcast is the world's most downloaded B2B sales podcast, hosts, wheelbarrow, and help sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win business in a modern, effective, and ethical way. I recently tuned into Will's episode on digital body language, how to have better zoom sales meetings. And I love how he provides a relatable example. So the strategies are easy to understand, listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the graduation speech of best-selling author, John Green, and this took place at Kenyon college back in 2016, 17 years ago, I was supposed to be graduating from Kenyon.

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It ended up taking me an extra semester, but I was in the audience that day with my friends and classmates. I remember nothing about the commencement address, except that it lasted 10,000 years, empires, rose and fell and still the speaker droned on like in his monotony. So I come to you today with a one solemn promise one way or another. This will be over in 14 minutes. I want to spend one of those minutes. If you don't mind in silence, this is a trick I learned from the children's TV hosts, Fred Rogers, if you don't mind, I'd like us all, not just the students, but all of us to close our eyes and think for a minute, just a minute about the people who loved us up into this moment, family and friends, teachers in kind strangers I'll keep the time.

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Those people, they are so proud of you right now. My thoughts turned in and it'll be back to my years, back at Kenyon to my professors, especially Don Rogan who died this school year. Professor Rogan was a brilliant teacher, but I've forgotten much of what I learned in his classes about female ecology and gospel reduction. What I remember most is he loved me and that he took me seriously. He and his wife, Sally welcomed me into their home, fed me, laugh with me, cried with me for many years. I wondered why he loved me. I was not a particularly good or committed students. I showed no special promise. And then when he died, I saw the grease stricken Facebook posts pour in from his old students and realized he loved us.

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All love is not like mass or energy. It is not conserved. And then the next 17 years, you will forget a lot, but you will not forget the kindness and generosity of those on this Hilltop who were kinder and more generous than they needed to be. So when I was a student here, there was widespread agreement among my peers that the so-called real world of proper adulthood was basically a disease you caught. And then eventually died from adulthood with its mortgages and spreadsheets and lawn maintenance seemed to be a thing to be dreaded and resisted until finally it overtook you like a zombie plague. Once you acquired adulthood, you start saying things like brand awareness in a fractured media landscape.

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And we need a president who knows how to get things done, to be an adult men engaging in totally an ironic conversations about the weather. I remember once when I was in Kenyon, my grandmother called me to tell me that she was watching the weather channel and it looked like it was raining in Ohio. I explained to her that I was reading Ulysses that I wasn't even in Gambier, but instead in Dublin, Ireland in 1904, that history of a nightmare from which Daedalus was trying to awake, that nothing literally nothing matter less than the current weather. And then after a moment she asked, well, is it raining or isn't it to be an adult was to be a river rock blasted by an endless torn of mundane terrorists from resume formatting to electricity bills.

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That would inevitably smooth all my hard edges until I looked and felt just like everything else. Now, this is the part of the commencement address where I'm supposed to tell you, in fact that adulthood isn't so bad and blah, blah, blah, blah. But now, now it is so bad. If anything, it is far worse than I could have even ever imagined. I mean, have you ever been to a homeowner's association meeting each of you in the class of 2016 is wondrous and precious and rare life in a vast and almost entirely dead universe. Imagine devoting two hours of your bright, but brief flicker of consciousness to a debate over whether the maximum allowable length of grass in your neighborhood's front lawn should be four inches or six, but as true, you will debate grass length or something equally stultifying.

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You will learn almost against your will. The difference between whole life and term life insurance. You will test drive a minivan and find yourself surprised by the quality of his handling. And along the way, you'll find yourself wondering, why am I doing this? Why am I doing any of this in this, in my experience is when your Kenyan education will come in very handy, because whether you studied economics or anthropology for the last four, or if you're like me five years, you've been investigating what constitutes a fulfilling, successful human life. And I'd argue that actually is adulthood. Like maybe adulthood is not something you spent your time at preparing for said, maybe you've been doing it.

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Albeit not on the minivan scale. You are probably familiar with the old line that a liberal arts education teaches people how to think. But I think mostly it teaches you how to listen in your classes and in your readings, you've been listening. You've listened to your professors and to your peers, but also to Toni Morrison and Jane Austin and John Milton, as you altogether examine the big questions of our species, what do we owe ourselves? And what do we owe others? What is the nature of the universe? And what is our role in it? How best might we alleviate the suffering within? And without you learn about these questions at Kenyon, but you won't leave them here. And while making your voice heard on those questions is vital.

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You've also learned that here, your voice gets stronger. The more you listen, not just listening to loud voices, but also to those that are hard to hear because they have been systematically silenced. I hope that listening will help inoculate you from the seductive lies of our time. The lie that strength and toughness are always assets. That selfishness is not just necessary, but desirable that the whole world benefits most when you act in your own narrow self-interest that seductive lie is appealing because it allows us to go on doing what we would have been doing anyways, because it imagines a world in which I am what I feel myself to be the exact center of the universe. But living for oneself even very successfully will do absolutely nothing to fill the gasping void inside of you.

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In my experience that void gets filled, not through strength, but through weakness, you must be weak before the world because the love and listening weaken you, they make you vulnerable. They break you open, and it is only when you are weak, that you can truly see acknowledge and forgive and love the weakness in others. Weakness allows you to see other humans, not as enemies to defeat, but as collaborators and co-creators in the end, we're making humanist up together as we go along, Fire Nation, more value bombs coming at you. As soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors in order to grow your business bigger, faster, and stronger, no matter what challenges come your way, you need a solid team in place to help support you. What else do you need an effective way to unite that team and the flexible and customizable HubSpot CRM platform can help you do just that.

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HubSpot is continuously adapting to the needs of businesses with sales teams like yours, with brand new updates and features. And what they've just rolled out is something you should be very excited to check out. Not only have they created business units that allow you to manage contacts, marketing, and sales assets, they've made these settings available across multiple brands. They've also just rolled out new admin features, including permission, templates and integrations, making it easy to add, remove, and edit users as needed. And that feature I know will be a game changer for so many businesses sandboxes, which give you and your teams a place to test experiment and iterate on ideas before actually going live. Learn more about how you can customize your CRM platform with hubspot at hubspot.com.

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That's hubspot.com. The pandemic has changed how we do business and how we make money. And over the past year, we've seen a lot of entrepreneurs turning to online courses to help hit their bottom line goals. But we've known just how impactful online courses are. For years. We've been using Thinkific the best platform to create market and sell it online course since 2017. But don't just take it from me. Meet Kate Klassen, co-founder of coastal drone company. She's been using Thinkific to train thousands of students to become certified drone pilots before creating online courses. Kate spent a lot of time coaching students. In-person constantly traveling around cities, but by teaching online with Thinkific, Kate has been able to reach more students, earn more income and achieve more location in time. Freedom. Now Kate easily creates an as new videos and lessons each week with Thinkific updating courses and lessons while on the go and our students love the simple user-friendly way thing.

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Kevin allows them to learn and take action fast. So if you're ready to create an online course as a lasting way to reach a wider audience, build revenue and make an impact, then Thinkific is the perfect partner to have by your side. Get started at Thinkific.com/EOF. That's Thinkific.com/EOF. At the homeowners' association meeting where the miserable adults are debating grass length. What they're really doing is hashing out what kind of neighborhood they want to share. When you are deciding between whole and term life insurance, you're actually thinking of a world without you and how you might be helpful to those you leave behind and how lucky you will be to leave people behind to have been woven so deeply into an interconnected web of the human story.

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All of it, actually from electricity bills to the job where your coworkers call themselves teammates, even though this isn't football for God's sake, all these so-called horrors of adulthood emerged from living in a world where you are inextricably connected to other people, to whom you must learn and listen, all that turns out to be great news. And if you can remember that conversations about grass length and the weather are really conversations about how we're going to get through and how we're going to get through together, they become not just bearable, but almost kind of transcendence. One more way that listening will be of use to you over the next few days. You will straggle out of this strange and wonderful place and enter a world where you will be at least for a little while, manifestly weak.

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If you are lucky enough to have a job, it will likely involve fetching coffee for ungrateful bosses or entering data or writing press releases that no one reads. Some people will probably treat you as less than fully human imagining you to be not the complex and multifaceted person that you are. But as said, as an easily replaceable cog and the clockworks of their organization, all of that will be easier. If you can see yourself, not as a protagonist in your own heroic journey, but instead as a collaborator and a massive sprawling human epic, I don't remember anything said at my commencement address, but I do remember Wendy McCleon speech the day before professor McLean. I apologize in advance for butchering your quote and for not swearing when you swore, but she says something like you are about to become a nobody.

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And that's important because when you become a somebody, if you can remember what it was like to be a nobody, you won't be a jerk looking back. I think that's a second best piece of advice I've ever received behind only that given to me by professor Rogan, who wants told me and this I can call directly, you're a good kid, but she needs to learn when to stop talking. So anyway, I'll shut up momentarily. I can offer you no real advice on how to live a successful adult life, but I don't need to. The people you thought of during that minute of silence, they are who you want to be. When you grow up, they have been strong for you, but also weak for you. They listened to you. They were irrationally impossibly kind to you.

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It's not just that you wouldn't be here without them. You wouldn't be without them. If they are here today, I hope you'll take a second to thank them. And if they aren't here, they may call later to ask you how it went. They may even ask what the weather was like, tell them it was rainy, inexcusably cold for late may. And remember to ask if it is raining in their pockets of the world, Fire Nation is time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact. And you can do just that with online courses, try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com/EOF. That's Thinkific.com/EOF. Interested in BDB sales strategies.

0 (13m 19s):
The salesman podcast is the world's most downloaded B2B sales podcast, hosts, wheelbarrow, and help sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win business in a moderate effective and ethical way. I recently tuned into Will's episode on digital body language, how to have better zoom sales meetings. And I love how he provides a relatable example. So the strategies are easy to understand, listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.