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Accept your lack of knowledge and use it as your asset.

I know a famous violinist who told me that he can’t compose because he knows too many pieces.

So when he starts thinking of a note, an existing piece immediately comes to mind.

Just starting out one of your biggest strengths is, not knowing how things are supposed to be.

You can compose freely because your mind isn’t cluttered with too many pieces.

And you don’t take for granted the way things are.

The only way you know how to do things is your own way.

You here will all go on to achieve great things.

There is no doubt about that.

If your reasons are your own, your path, even if it’s a strange and clumsy path, will be wholly yours, and you will control the rewards of what you do by making your internal life fulfilling.

At the risk of sounding like a Miss America contestant, the most fulfilling things I’ve experienced have truly been the human interactions:

spending time with women in village banks in Mexico with FINCA microfinance organization, meeting young women who were the first and the only in their communities to attend secondary schools in rural Kenya with Free The Children, a group that built sustainable schools in developing countries, tracking with gorilla conservationists in Rwanda.

It’s cliche, because it’s true that helping other ends up helping you more than anyone.

Even at work, the small feats of kindness, crew members, directors, fellow actors have shown me, have had the most lasting impact.

And of course, first and foremost, the center of my world is the love that I share with my family and friends.

I wish for you that your friends will be with you through it all as my friends from Harvard have been together since we graduated.

My friends from school are still very close.

We’ve nursed each other through heartaches and danced at each other’s weddings.

We’ve held each other at funerals, and rocked each other’s new babies.

We’ve worked together on projects, helped each other get jobs, and thrown parties for when we’ve quit bad ones.

And now our children are creating a second generation of friendship as we look at them toddling together Haggard and disheveled working parents that we are.

Grab the good people around you and don’t let them go.

The biggest asset this school offers you is a group of peers that will both be your family and your school for life.

I remember always being pissed at the spring here in Cambridge, tricking us into remembering a sunny yard full of laughing Frisbee throwers after 8 months of dark frigid library dwelling.

It was like the school had managed to turn on the good weather.

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