Boom! 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

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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 protagonist and establish the rules of the world. How do things work? 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 herself? The all-important foundation of the narrative.

Then comes Act Two, where the complications appear that set our heroine on her journey.

These are the unexpected and unforeseen events that upend the rules of Act One. The meteor is on a collision course with Earth.

What do we do? There's an accident and a attack that destroys the peaceful order of everything that has come before.

A demented con man 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.

Our new heroine is born out of her struggle. The meteor collides, or it doesn't. Out of the rubble of the attack, a new city rises, the con man is exposed for his swindles and gets his just desserts. Or doesn't.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I guess in college I might have used an analogy of Saturday evening, Saturday night, Sunday morning.

Saturday evening is, I'm sure looking forward to this party tonight, Act One.

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