After sharing the long, unglamorous story of his decade between college and career, Dinklage offered this observation that cut against the grain of every commencement speech that promises graduates their great moment is ahead. His point was subtler and more honest: defining moments aren't dramatic, recognizable events that announce themselves. They're ordinary moments that only reveal their significance in retrospect. Dinklage knew this from experience. The rainy night at Bennington in 1987 when he met the freshman who would become his greatest collaborator and eventually introduce him to his wife — that was a defining moment, but he had no idea at the time. The day he quit his data entry job at 29 was a defining moment. But so were all the nights he spent in his heatless Brooklyn loft with mushrooms growing in his shower and a cat named Brian who 'told me of the world outside.' The warning that 'it passes so quickly' carried special weight from someone who had spent ten years feeling stuck, only to look back and realize that even those stuck years had been shaping him into the artist and person he became.