Bonus: Reid’s 2020 Commencement Speech: In a crisis, steer toward the emerging opportunities

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

New graduates 🎓are like entrepreneurs — standing on the edge of that cliff, ready to build their own plane and fly. But what if the blue skies and calm winds disappear? In a commencement speech for 2020 graduates — and anyone embarking on something new — our host Reid Hoffman says: Be optimistic. Be bold. But most of all, steer toward the opportunities emerging in this new world. How do you find them? Cultivate a network of people smart, curious people. This network creates a map of the world. And at uncertain times like these, you’ll definitely need that map.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	High listeners, read here, and a special hello to all you 2020 graduates.
0:05.9	Graduation is a time of extreme emotions. It is a key moment in life where exciting possibility
0:12.4	and optimism meet uncertainty and change. It is at once exhilarating and unnerving,
0:19.7	hope-filled yet disquieting. 2020 graduates are facing this transition during this time of
0:26.7	unprecedented global people and we still have no clear sight of the new normal. I've been thinking
0:32.8	about this a lot lately and on May 16th I published a commencement speech on LinkedIn. I called it
0:38.9	my 2020 Vision for Graduates, how to be optimistic in terrible times. I'll read it to you today
0:45.9	the way commencement speeches are meant to be out loud with the great optimism that you deserve.
0:52.8	I hope my new words will go some way toward helping you new graduates make sense of this time,
0:58.6	but most importantly, I want to congratulate you all and wish you the best on the exciting journey ahead of you.
1:22.8	Shortly after I graduated from college in 1990, America entered a recession. The unemployment
1:36.8	rate peaked at 7.3% in 1991. That same year the US experienced a record number of murders.
1:45.9	The world was also in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Tens of thousands of people around the world
1:52.4	were dying from a virus that was no cure for. My generation dubbed Generation X after a popular
2:00.4	novel of the same name was typically characterized as being aimless and cynical, prematurely
2:07.1	embittered by dead-end jobs that generally awful state of the world and an overall sense of cultural
2:13.6	exhaustion. In other words, compared to you guys, we had it pretty sweet. Congratulations,
2:20.1	Class of 2020, as the title of a movie for my early post-collegears puts it, Reality Bites.
2:28.1	In 2020 entering the real world means staying at home, sheltering in place, finding your dream job
2:36.1	never an easy endeavor is exponentially harder in an environment where any job is hard to come by.
2:43.2	Obviously, this is not the best time to be making a major life transition. It's a terrible time.
2:50.3	But it is your time to do this so you have to try to make the best of it. And one thing we can say
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WaitWhat, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WaitWhat and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.