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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 thanking our sponsors interested in B2B sales strategies, the salesman podcast is the world's most downloaded B2B sales podcast. Hosts will bear and help sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win business in a modern, effective, and ethical way.

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I recently tuned into Will's episode on digital body language, how to have better zoom sales meetings. And I love how he provides relatable examples. So the strategies are easy to understand, listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Welcome to the graduation speech of Maria Popova, the BrainPickings.org founder, and this takes place at Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania 2016.

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I want to talk to you today about the soul, not the soul as that immortal unit of religious mythology for I'm a non-believer and not the soul of a pop culture commodity that voracious consumer of self-help chicken soup. I mean the soul simply as shorthand for the seismic core of personhood from which our beliefs, our values and our actions radiates. I live in New York where something extraordinary happens every April in the first days of spring. Those days where the air turns from blistering to balmy a certain gladness envelops, the city people actually look up from their screens while walking and strangers smile at each other for a few short days. It's like, remember how we can live and who are capable of being to one another.

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I also practically live on my bike. That's how I get everywhere. And the other week on one of those first days of spring, I was running from Brooklyn to Harlem. I had somewhere to be and was Pelling pretty fast, which I like doing, but I must admit, I take a certain silly pride in, but I was also very much enjoying the ride and the river and the Springer that smelled of plum blossoms. And then I sent someone behind me on the bike path, catching up, going even faster than I was going. I suddenly felt somehow competitive. He was trying to overtake me. I peddled faster, but he kept catching up. Eventually he did overtake me and I felt strangely defeated, but as he cruise past me, I realized this guy was on an electric bike.

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I felt both a sort of redemption and a great sense of injustice, unfair, motorized advantage, very demoralizing to the honest muscle power pillar. But just as I was getting all self righteously, existential, I noticed something else. He had a restaurant's name on his back. He was a food delivery guy. He was rushing past me, not because he was trying to slight me or because he has some unfair competitive advantage in life. But because this was his daily strife, this is how this immigrants made his living. My first response was to shame myself into gratitude for how fortunate I've been, because I too am an immigrant from a pretty poor country. And it's some miraculous confluence of choice and chance that kept me from becoming a food delivery person on an electric bike in order to survive in New York city.

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And perhaps the guy has a more satisfying life than I do. Perhaps he had a good mother and goes home to the love of his life and plays violin at nights. I don't know, and I never will. But the point is that the second I began comparing my piece to his, my life, to his I'm vacating, my own experience of that spring day in a Jessie, myself into a sort of limbo of life that is neither mine nor his, I grew up in Bulgaria. And in my early childhood, I spent it under a communist dictatorship, but for all its evils, communism has one silver lining when everyone had very little, no one felt like somebody else was cruising past them motorized by privilege. I came to Penn straight from Bulgaria though that same confluence of chance and choice in yes, a lot of very, very hard work.

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I don't want to minimize the importance of that, but I also don't want to imply that people who end up on the underprivileged end of life, haven't worked hard enough because this is one of our most oppressive cultural myths. And reality is so much more complex. In any case, when it came to Penn, I had an experience very different from my childhood. Suddenly I was working four jobs to pay for school. I felt like everyone else was on an electric bike. And I was just peddling myself into the grounds. This of course is what happens in every environment. Densely populated by so-called peers. Self comparison becomes inevitable. Financial inequality was just my particular poison, but we do it along every imaginal access of privilege in every dimension of identity intelligence, beauty, athleticism, charisma that in transit is the van pelt librarians in a pardon in your late fees.

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But here's the thing about self comparison. In addition to making you vacate your own experience, your own soul, your own life in its extreme, it breeds a resignation. If we constantly feel that there is something more to be had, something that's available to those with a certain advantage in life, but which remains out of reach for us, we come to feel helpless in the most toxic by-product of this helpless resignation is citizen that terrible habits of mind and orientation of spirit in which out of hopelessness for our own situation, we grow embittered about how things are and about what's possible in the world. Cynicism is a poverty of curiosity and imagination in ambition today, the soul is in dire of stewardship and protection from cynicism, the best defense against it as vigorous intelligence, sincere hope not blind optimism because that too is a form of resignation to believe that everything will work out just fine.

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And we need not apply ourselves. I mean, hope bolstered by critical thinking that is clearheaded in identifying what is lacking in ourselves or the world, but that envisions ways to create it and endeavors to do that in this pacivity and resignation. Cynicism is a harboring calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater Fire Nation, more value bombs coming up. As soon as we thank our sponsor,

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1 (7m 22s):
Not only that she started making thousands of new revenue every month hitting her financial targets and freeing up time to work more on her business. More than 50,000 entrepreneurs have already used Thinkific to build revenue and educated their students worldwide. Try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com/EOF. That's Thinkific.com/EOF. How have we been able to continue to create scalable systems and stay in touch with our customers, regardless of whether we're in the office or on a plane with the help of our CRM, if you're ready to grow bigger, faster, and stronger as a business and as a team, then the flexible and customizable HubSpot CRM platform is for you.

1 (8m 2s):
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We're about to enter the ecosystem of cultural production. Most of you will go into journalism, media policy or some blurry blob of the increasingly amorphous Venn diagram of these forces that shape culture and public opinion, whatever your specific vocation, your role as a creator of culture will be to help people discern what matters in the world and why by steering them away from the meaningless and toward the meaningful Eby. White said that the role of the writer is to lift people up, not lower them down. And I believe that's a role of every journalist and artists and creator of culture strive to be uncynical, to be a hope giving force, to be a steward of substance, choose to lift people up, not lower them down because it is a choice always.

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And because in doing so, you lift yourself up, develop an inner barometer for your own value, resist page views and likes and retweets and all those silly sounding quantification metrics that will be obsolete within the decade. Don't hang the stability of your soul on them. They can't tell you how much your work counts for and to whom they can't tell you who you are and what you're worth. They are that demoralizing electric bike that makes you feel if only you could peddle faster, if only you could get more page views and likes and tweets, you'd be worthier of your own life. You will enter a world where whatever career you may choose or make for yourself, because you will never forget that there are jobs that you can get and jobs you can invent.

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You will often face the choice of construction and destruction of building up or tearing down among our most universal human longings is to affect the world with our action somehow and leave an imprint with our existence, both construction in destruction, leave a mark that gives us a sense of agency in the world. Now destruction is necessary sometimes damaged and damaging systems need to be demolished to clear the way for more enlivening ones, but destruction alone, without construction to follow it is hapless and lazy. Construction is far more difficult because it requires the capacity to imagine something new and better, and the willingness to exert ourselves towards building it, even at the risk of failure.

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But that is also far more satisfying. In the end, you may find your fate forked by construction and destruction frequently in ways obvious or subtle. And you will have to choose between being the hammer wielding Vandal, who may attain more immediate results, more attention by tearing things down and people down and ideas down, or the sculptor of culture patiently chiseling at the bedrock of how things are able to create something new and beautiful and imaginative, following a nobler vision, your vision of how things can and should be done. Some active forms of destruction are more obvious and therefore to the moral and well-intentioned person easier to resist. It's hard not to notice that there's a hammer before you and refuse to pick it up, but there are passive forms of destruction, far more difficult to detect and thus safeguard against.

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And the most pernicious of them is cynicism. Our culture has created a reward system in which you get points for tearing down rather than building up and for besieging with criticism and derision. Those who dare to work and live in a place of constructive hope. Don't just resist cynicism, fight it actively in yourself in those you love and the communication with which you shape culture cynicism, like all destruction is easy. It's lazy. There is nothing more difficult, yet more gratifying in our society than to live with sincere, active, constructive hope for the human spirits. This is the most potent antidote to cynicism, and it is an act of courage and resistance today. It is also the most vitalizing sustenance for your soul, but you, you are a very special position leaving Annenberg because your courage and resistance are to be enacted not only in the privacy of your inner life, but in your outer contribution to public life.

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You are the creators of tomorrow's ideas and ideals, the sculptors of public opinion and culture. As long as we feed people, buzz, we cannot expect their minds to produce symphonies. Never let the temptation of marketplace mediocracy in easy cynicism. Robbie have the chance to a noble public life in a large that human spirits, because we need that badly today. And because you need it badly for the survival of your soul. So as you move through life pedal hard because that's how you get places. And because it's fun and incredibly gratifying to propel yourself forward by your own will and power of intention, but make sure the pace you're pedaling answers only your own standards of vigor remain uncynical and don't waste any energy on those who pass you by on their electric bikes, because you'll never know what strife is driving them.

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And most of all, because the moment you focus on that, you vacate your own soul instead pedal forth, but also remember to breathe in the spring air and to smile at a stranger every once in a while, because there is nothing more uncynical than being good to one another. Thank you. And congratulations, Fire Nation. Do you have an online store idea? Check out the idea to store contests by.store domains. They're giving away cash prizes up to $30,000 for sharing your online store ideas. Learn more at www.ideato.store.

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That's www.ideato.store. And I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side. Interested in BDB sales strategies. The salesman podcast is the world's most downloaded B2B sales podcast, hosts, wheelbarrow, and helps 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 examples. So the strategies are easy to understand, listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

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That's Thinkific.com/EOF.