Peter Dinklage, the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor best known for Game of Thrones, returned to his alma mater Bennington College to deliver a raw, honest commencement address about the decade of struggle between graduation and success. His story of those years was deliberately unglamorous: couch-surfing, dusting pianos on Ludlow Street, pulling weeds, six years as a data entry clerk at Professional Examination Services. The climax of his speech was the story of NYU freshmen who ran up to him on the street, breathless. They were musical theater majors who weren't allowed to be in plays their freshman year. He told them 'hang in there' — but realized what he should have said was 'don't wait until they tell you you are ready.' This was the lesson he had learned at great personal cost. He had spent years waiting — for permission, for the right moment, for someone to tell him he was ready. At 29, he finally told himself that the next acting job he got, no matter what it paid, he would from then on be a working actor. He quit his data entry job, terrified, and the work slowly came. The permission had to come from himself.