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Try Thinkific for free today at thinkific.com slash E O F that's TH I N K I F I C dot com slash E O F. Welcome to the graduation speech of Maria Popova, the brain pickens founder and this takes place at Annemburg School of Communications University of Pennsylvania 2016.

I want to talk to you today about the soul, not the soul as that immortal unit of religious mythology for I may non-believer and not the soul of a pop culture commodity that veracious consumer of self-help chicken soup.

I mean the soul simply as shorthand for the seismic core of personhood from which our beliefs are values and our actions radiate.

I live in New York where something extraordinary happens every April in the first days of spring those days with the air turns from blistering to bombing a certain gladness envelopes the city people actually look up from their screens while walking in strangers smile at each other for a few short days is like a remember how we can live and who are capable of being to one another.

I also practically live on my bike that's how I get everywhere in 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 pelting 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 in the river in the spring air the smell 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 pedal fast.

But he kept catching up eventually he did overtake me and I felt strangely defeated but as he crews past me I realized this guy was on an electric bike I felt both a sort of redemption and a great sense of injustice unfair motorized advantage very demoralizing to the honest muscle powered pillar but just as I was getting all self right just

I noticed something else he had a restaurant 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 immigrant 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 better person.

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 pace to his my life to his I'm vacating my own experience of that spring day and a Jesse myself into a sort of limbo of life that is neither mine nor his I grew up in Bulgaria and I'm not going to be a good man.

I grew up in Bulgaria and in my early childhood I spent it under a communist dictatorship but for all his evils communism has one silver lighting when everyone had very little no one felt like somebody else was cruising past them motorized by privilege I came to pen straight from Bulgaria though that same confluence of chance and choice and yes a lot of very very hard work 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 under privileged end of the day.

And of life haven't worked hard enough because this is one of our most oppressive cultural miss in reality is so much more complex in any case when I came to pen I had an experience very different from my childhood suddenly I was working for jobs to pay for school I felt like everyone else was on 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 entrances the vampire librarians in a pardoning your late fees 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 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 byproduct 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 and bitter about how things are and about what's possible in the world.

Citizenism is a poverty of curiosity and imagination in ambition today the soul is in dire need of stewardship and protection from cynicism the best defense against it is vigorous intelligence sincere hope not blind optimism because that too is a form of resignation to believe that everything will work out just fine and we need not apply ourselves I mean hope bolstered by critical thinking that is clear headed in identifying what is lacking in ourselves or the world.

But that envisions ways to create it in endeavors to do that in its passivity 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 think our sponsors.

Whether you're a guitar teacher a business coach or a yoga instructor entrepreneurs all share something in common a desire to reach more clients and make a bigger impact without trading their time for money so how do you do that by creating an online course with thinkific exposure business to hundreds thousands or even millions of new clients worldwide with low impact on your time but don't just take our word for it meet Vanessa she runs groove therapy a business offers beginner dance classes for adults Vanessa was hearing time and time again the people couldn't make it to class because of time

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