great speeches

You are not special. You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you... you’re nothing... See more

From JK Rowlings' 2008 Harvard speech, this line: “There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”

The world is opening up to the fact that genius does not stem from individuals like us on stage, but rather genius emerges from the collective. We are all products of our context. We are all descendants of something and someone.

And I want to acknowledge my context, my immigrant parents, my father who fell in love with movies because he needed to

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Wow. Wow. Wow. Incredible powerful message (incredible speech writing)—to those who stumbled on the wrong path and may ruin their future for not knowing the past. The weight of history