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 thinking our sponsors. Fire Nation is time to stop trading time

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that with online courses. Try Thinkific for free today at thinkific.com slash E-O-F,

that's THINKIFIC.com slash E-O-F. And welcome to David McCullough Jr's commencement

address at Wellesley High School in 2012. So here we are, commencement. Life's great

forward-looking ceremony. And don't say what about weddings? Weddings are one-sided and

insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list

of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey everybody look at

me procession. No being given away. No identity changing pronouncements. And you can imagine

a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos. Their fathers sitting there

misty eyed with joy and disbelief. Their brothers lurking in the corner, muttering with

envy. Left to men, weddings would be after limits testing procrastination, spontaneous,

almost inadvertent during half time on the way to the refrigerator. And then there's

a frequency of failure. Statistics tell us that half of you will get divorced. A winning

percentage like that will get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore

Orioles do better than weddings. But this ceremony, commencement, a commencement works every

time. From this day forward, truly, in sickness and in health through financial fiasco, through

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