More from Ira Glass

You leave this school as well-armed for battle as anyone is. Nobody really knows anything more than you do. Everyone is just making it up as they go along. Figure it out.

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Ira Glass

Goucher College Commencement 2012, 2012

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The Story Behind This Quote

Glass closed his speech by dismantling the myth that the adults waiting on the other side of graduation have it all figured out. Drawing on his own career — which began with years of mediocre work at NPR before he found his voice and created This American Life in his late thirties — he assured graduates that the uncertainty they felt was not a deficiency but the universal condition. The difference between those who succeed and those who don't, he suggested, isn't insider knowledge but rather the willingness to keep showing up and figuring things out through trial and error.

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