Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker behind 'El Mariachi,' 'Sin City,' and 'Spy Kids,' delivered a commencement address at UT Austin that reframed the graduates' uncertainty about the future as their greatest asset. He opened by telling them he didn't know how they would navigate the worst job market in 25 years — and that not knowing was actually the best thing that could happen to them. Rodriguez proved the point with his own career. He made 'El Mariachi' while still a UT student in 1991, for a budget so low that he had to volunteer as a human guinea pig for an experimental drug trial to raise the $2,000 he needed. 'I didn't know that it was impossible to go make a movie for such a low budget with no film crew,' he said. 'It just wasn't being done. It didn't mean it was impossible, it just meant no one had ever bothered to try it before.' The film won Sundance and launched his career. Rodriguez's argument was that knowledge of what 'can't be done' is actually a form of learned helplessness. He pointed to studies of young children who, when asked 'Who can be a doctor? An astronaut? A president?' all raise their hands. Ask the same questions ten years later and the hands start going down. 'They've been poisoned by this thing called "I can't."'