WEBVTT 00:00:01.271 --> 00:00:04.421 thank you 00:00:04.421 --> 00:00:07.504 I never really expected 00:00:07.504 --> 00:00:11.687 to find myself giving advice to people graduating 00:00:11.687 --> 00:00:16.304 from an establishment of higher education. 00:00:16.304 --> 00:00:20.104 I never graduated from any such establishment. 00:00:20.104 --> 00:00:24.921 I've not even started at one. I escaped from school as soon as I could, 00:00:24.921 --> 00:00:28.905 when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning 00:00:28.905 --> 00:00:33.636 before I'd become the writer I wanted to be seems stifling. 00:00:33.636 --> 00:00:36.104 I got out into the world, I wrote till I became a better writer the more I wrote, 00:00:36.104 --> 00:00:39.704 and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind 00:00:39.704 --> 00:00:43.803 that I was making it all up as I went along, they just read what I wrote 00:00:43.803 --> 00:00:48.138 and they paid me for it, or they didn't, 00:00:48.138 --> 00:00:50.621 and often they commissioned me to write something else for them. 00:00:50.621 --> 00:00:57.414 Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education 00:00:57.414 --> 00:01:00.287 that those of my friends and family, who attended Universities, 00:01:00.287 --> 00:01:03.722 were cured of long ago. 00:01:03.722 --> 00:01:06.805 Looking back, I've had a remarkable ride. 00:01:06.805 --> 00:01:09.154 I'm not sure I can call it a career, 00:01:09.154 --> 00:01:13.204 because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, 00:01:13.204 --> 00:01:15.987 and I never did. 00:01:15.987 --> 00:01:19.406 The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was 15 00:01:19.406 --> 00:01:23.637 of everything I wanted to do. I wanted to write an adult novel, 00:01:23.637 --> 00:01:27.321 a children's book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, 00:01:27.321 --> 00:01:31.838 write an episode of Doctor Who... and so on. 00:01:31.838 --> 00:01:34.637 I didn't have a career. I just did the next thing on the list. 00:01:34.637 --> 00:01:39.786 So I thought I'd tell you everything I wish I'd known starting out, 00:01:39.786 --> 00:01:43.354 and a few things that, looking back on it, I suppose that I did know. 00:01:43.354 --> 00:01:47.471 And that I'll also give you the best piece of advice I'd ever got, 00:01:47.471 --> 00:01:50.721 which I completely failed to follow. 00:01:50.721 --> 00:01:54.938 First of all, When you start out on a career in the arts 00:01:54.938 --> 00:01:59.403 you have no idea what you are doing. 00:01:59.403 --> 00:02:02.521 This is great. People who know 00:02:02.521 --> 00:02:07.430 what they are doing know the rules, and they know what is possible and impossible. 00:02:07.430 --> 00:02:10.463 You do not. And you should not. 00:02:10.463 --> 00:02:14.246 The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people 00:02:14.246 --> 00:02:19.113 who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. 00:02:19.113 --> 00:02:22.330 And you can. If you don't know it's impossible 00:02:22.330 --> 00:02:25.747 it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, 00:02:25.747 --> 00:02:29.247 they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again. 00:02:29.247 --> 00:02:39.746 (Cheering) 00:02:39.746 --> 00:02:41.666 Secondly, If you have an idea 00:02:41.666 --> 00:02:45.283 of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just 00:02:45.283 --> 00:02:48.830 go and do that. And that's much harder 00:02:48.830 --> 00:02:53.098 than it sounds and, sometimes in the end, so much easier than you might imagine. 00:02:53.098 --> 00:02:56.563 Because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get 00:02:56.563 --> 00:03:00.646 to the place you want to be. I wanted to write comics and novels 00:03:00.646 --> 00:03:03.630 and stories and films, so I became a journalist, 00:03:03.630 --> 00:03:08.746 because journalists are allowed to ask questions, and to simply go and find out how the world works, 00:03:08.746 --> 00:03:11.546 and besides, to do those things I needed to write 00:03:11.546 --> 00:03:16.496 and to write well, and I was being paid to learn how to write economically, 00:03:16.496 --> 00:03:20.813 crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, 00:03:20.813 --> 00:03:23.463 and on deadline. 00:03:23.463 --> 00:03:27.930 Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be 00:03:27.930 --> 00:03:31.146 almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, 00:03:31.146 --> 00:03:36.080 because you'll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, 00:03:36.080 --> 00:03:40.730 paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get. 00:03:40.730 --> 00:03:43.496 Something that worked for me was 00:03:43.496 --> 00:03:47.680 imagining that where I wanted to be 00:03:47.680 --> 00:03:55.597 which is an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics, making good drama 00:03:55.597 --> 00:04:00.881 and supporting myself through my words 00:04:00.881 --> 00:04:04.699 Imagining that was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal. 00:04:04.699 --> 00:04:10.514 And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. 00:04:10.514 --> 00:04:13.947 And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, 00:04:13.947 --> 00:04:20.248 and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. 00:04:20.248 --> 00:04:23.248 I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, 00:04:23.248 --> 00:04:26.866 proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, 00:04:26.866 --> 00:04:32.198 attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. 00:04:32.198 --> 00:04:35.633 And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, 00:04:35.633 --> 00:04:41.098 because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time. 00:04:41.098 --> 00:04:43.365 I learned to write by writing. 00:04:43.365 --> 00:04:46.215 I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, 00:04:46.215 --> 00:04:53.664 and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work. 00:04:53.664 --> 00:04:56.348 Thirdly, When you start out, 00:04:56.348 --> 00:04:59.843 you have to deal with the problems of failure. 00:04:59.843 --> 00:05:04.660 You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. 00:05:04.660 --> 00:05:07.011 A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like 00:05:07.011 --> 00:05:10.943 putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that 00:05:10.943 --> 00:05:15.910 someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, 00:05:15.910 --> 00:05:19.644 and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: 00:05:19.644 --> 00:05:23.909 appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. 00:05:23.909 --> 00:05:27.777 And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle 00:05:27.777 --> 00:05:31.576 that winds up coming back. 00:05:31.576 --> 00:05:34.194 The problems of failure. The problems of discouragement, 00:05:34.194 --> 00:05:38.393 of hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it now, 00:05:38.393 --> 00:05:43.225 and things go wrong. My first book – a piece of journalism 00:05:43.225 --> 00:05:46.310 I had done only for the money, and which had already bought me 00:05:46.310 --> 00:05:51.326 an electric typewriter from the advance – should have been a bestseller. 00:05:51.326 --> 00:05:54.027 It should have paid me a lot of money. If the publisher hadn't gone 00:05:54.027 --> 00:05:57.177 into involuntary liquidation between the first print run selling out 00:05:57.177 --> 00:06:00.976 and the second print run never happening, and before any royalties 00:06:00.976 --> 00:06:05.592 could be paid, it would have done. And I shrugged, 00:06:05.592 --> 00:06:08.760 and I still had my electric typewriter and enough money 00:06:08.760 --> 00:06:12.760 to pay the rent for a couple of months, and I decided that I'd do my best in future 00:06:12.760 --> 00:06:17.259 not to write books just for the money. If you didn't get the money, 00:06:17.259 --> 00:06:20.443 then you didn't have anything. If I did work I was proud of, 00:06:20.443 --> 00:06:23.710 and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work. 00:06:23.710 --> 00:06:28.878 Every now and then, I forget that rule, and whenever I do, 00:06:28.878 --> 00:06:33.092 the universe kicks me hard and reminds me. 00:06:33.092 --> 00:06:36.901 I don't know that it's an issue for anybody but me, but it's true 00:06:36.901 --> 00:06:40.176 that nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money 00:06:40.176 --> 00:06:45.861 was ever worth it, except as bitter experience. 00:06:45.861 --> 00:06:50.243 Usually I didn't wind up getting the money, either. 00:06:50.243 --> 00:06:52.926 (Laughter) The things I did because I was excited, 00:06:52.926 --> 00:06:55.761 and wanted to see them exist in reality have never let me down, and I've 00:06:55.761 --> 00:06:59.890 never regretted the time I spent on any of them. 00:06:59.890 --> 00:07:05.063 The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success 00:07:05.063 --> 00:07:08.753 can be harder, because nobody warns you about them. 00:07:08.753 --> 00:07:11.787 The first problem of any kind of even limited success 00:07:11.787 --> 00:07:15.270 is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that 00:07:15.270 --> 00:07:21.171 any moment now they will discover you. (Laughter) 00:07:21.171 --> 00:07:24.020 (Cheering) 00:07:24.020 --> 00:07:26.804 It's Imposter Syndrome, something my wife Amanda christened 00:07:26.804 --> 00:07:30.739 the Fraud Police. In my case, 00:07:30.739 --> 00:07:34.338 I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard 00:07:34.338 --> 00:07:38.788 I don't know why he had a clipboard but in my head 00:07:38.788 --> 00:07:43.637 he always has clipboard, would be there to tell me 00:07:43.637 --> 00:07:49.054 it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, 00:07:49.054 --> 00:07:52.352 one that didn't consist of making things up and writing them down, 00:07:52.352 --> 00:07:55.405 and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away 00:07:55.405 --> 00:07:58.438 quietly and get the kind of job 00:07:58.438 --> 00:08:02.622 that I would have to get up early in the morning, and wear a tie 00:08:02.622 --> 00:08:06.154 and not make things up any more. 00:08:06.154 --> 00:08:09.370 The problems of success. They're real, and with luck 00:08:09.370 --> 00:08:14.321 you'll experience them. The point where you stop saying yes 00:08:14.321 --> 00:08:15.586 to everything, because 00:08:15.586 --> 00:08:19.154 now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and you have to 00:08:19.154 --> 00:08:22.321 learn to say no. I watched 00:08:22.321 --> 00:08:27.102 my peers, and my friends, and the ones who were older than me and watch how miserable 00:08:27.102 --> 00:08:30.571 some of them were. I'd listen to them telling me that they couldn't envisage 00:08:30.571 --> 00:08:34.388 a world where they did what they had always wanted to do any more, 00:08:34.388 --> 00:08:39.204 because now they had to earn a certain amount every month just to keep where they were. 00:08:39.204 --> 00:08:42.771 They couldn't go and do the things that mattered, and that they had really wanted to do; 00:08:42.771 --> 00:08:46.516 and that seemed as a big a tragedy 00:08:46.516 --> 00:08:50.854 as any problem of failure. And after that 00:08:50.854 --> 00:08:53.738 the biggest problem of success is that the world conspires 00:08:53.738 --> 00:08:59.054 to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. 00:08:59.054 --> 00:09:02.020 There was a day when I looked up and realised that 00:09:02.020 --> 00:09:07.204 I had become someone who professionally replied to email, 00:09:07.204 --> 00:09:10.120 and who wrote as a hobby. 00:09:10.120 --> 00:09:13.420 I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find 00:09:13.420 --> 00:09:17.571 I was writing much more. 00:09:17.571 --> 00:09:22.287 Fourthly, I hope you'll make mistakes. 00:09:22.287 --> 00:09:26.371 If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. And the mistakes 00:09:26.371 --> 00:09:29.987 in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled 00:09:29.987 --> 00:09:34.171 Caroline, in a letter, transposing the A 00:09:34.171 --> 00:09:37.420 and the O, and I thought, “Coraline 00:09:37.420 --> 00:09:41.572 looks almost like a real name...” 00:09:41.572 --> 00:09:46.615 remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist 00:09:46.615 --> 00:09:50.321 or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a singer 00:09:50.321 --> 00:09:53.421 a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that's unique. 00:09:53.421 --> 00:09:58.471 You have the ability to make art. 00:09:58.471 --> 00:10:03.087 And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that's been a lifesaver. 00:10:03.087 --> 00:10:05.971 The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets 00:10:05.971 --> 00:10:11.305 you through the other ones. Sometimes life is hard. 00:10:11.305 --> 00:10:12.971 Things go wrong, in life 00:10:12.971 --> 00:10:18.020 and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all 00:10:18.020 --> 00:10:22.655 the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, 00:10:22.655 --> 00:10:26.072 this is what you should do. 00:10:26.072 --> 00:10:29.504 Make good art. 00:10:29.504 --> 00:10:33.454 I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? 00:10:33.454 --> 00:10:38.918 Make good art. 00:10:38.918 --> 00:10:42.537 Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? 00:10:42.537 --> 00:10:46.187 Make good art. 00:10:46.187 --> 00:10:48.019 IRS on your trail? Make good art. 00:10:48.019 --> 00:10:52.104 Cat exploded? Make good art. 00:10:52.104 --> 00:10:57.254 Somebody on the Internet thinks what you doing is stupid or evil 00:10:57.254 --> 00:11:02.022 or it's all been done before? Make good art. 00:11:02.022 --> 00:11:05.837 Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, 00:11:05.837 --> 00:11:08.387 but that doesn't even matter. 00:11:08.387 --> 00:11:14.620 Do what only you could do best. Make good art. 00:11:14.620 --> 00:11:16.655 Make it on the bad days 00:11:16.655 --> 00:11:19.738 Make it on the good days too. 00:11:19.738 --> 00:11:23.655 And Fifthly, while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff 00:11:23.655 --> 00:11:26.387 that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. 00:11:26.387 --> 00:11:31.187 And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like 00:11:31.187 --> 00:11:35.305 a lot of other people. But the one thing 00:11:35.305 --> 00:11:40.473 that you have that nobody else has is you. 00:11:40.473 --> 00:11:43.720 Your voice, your mind, your story, 00:11:43.720 --> 00:11:46.753 your vision. So write and draw and build 00:11:46.753 --> 00:11:51.904 and play and dance and live as only you can. 00:11:51.904 --> 00:11:56.788 The moment that you feel that, just possibly, 00:11:56.788 --> 00:11:59.119 you're walking down the street naked, 00:11:59.119 --> 00:12:03.021 exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, 00:12:03.021 --> 00:12:06.485 showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be 00:12:06.485 --> 00:12:11.122 starting to get it right. 00:12:11.122 --> 00:12:14.021 The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was 00:12:14.021 --> 00:12:17.871 the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely 00:12:17.871 --> 00:12:22.204 be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together 00:12:22.204 --> 00:12:26.254 and discuss until the end of time. They always had that 00:12:26.254 --> 00:12:31.171 in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. 00:12:31.171 --> 00:12:34.437 While I was doing them, I had no idea. 00:12:34.437 --> 00:12:40.104 I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work? 00:12:40.104 --> 00:12:43.556 And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. 00:12:43.556 --> 00:12:46.421 There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. 00:12:46.421 --> 00:12:50.254 Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them 00:12:50.254 --> 00:12:53.537 as I did from the things that worked. 00:12:53.537 --> 00:13:00.354 OK. Sixthly. I gonna pass on some secret freelancer knowledge. 00:13:00.354 --> 00:13:02.121 Secret knowledge is always good. 00:13:02.121 --> 00:13:05.722 And it is useful for anyone who ever plans to create art for other people, 00:13:05.722 --> 00:13:10.125 to enter a freelance world of any kind. I learned it in comics, 00:13:10.125 --> 00:13:12.171 but it applies to other fields too. And it's this: 00:13:12.171 --> 00:13:17.521 People get hired because, somehow, 00:13:17.521 --> 00:13:21.739 they get hired. In my case I did 00:13:21.739 --> 00:13:25.753 something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, 00:13:25.753 --> 00:13:30.587 and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: 00:13:30.587 --> 00:13:33.752 when I was asked by editors who I'd written for, 00:13:33.752 --> 00:13:38.091 I lied. 00:13:38.091 --> 00:13:40.726 I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, 00:13:40.726 --> 00:13:44.389 and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. 00:13:44.389 --> 00:13:53.789 (Cheering) 00:13:53.789 --> 00:13:56.585 I then made it a point of honour to have written something 00:13:56.585 --> 00:14:00.343 for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, 00:14:00.343 --> 00:14:06.709 so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... 00:14:06.709 --> 00:14:08.254 But you get work 00:14:08.254 --> 00:14:11.553 however you get work. But people keep working 00:14:11.553 --> 00:14:15.959 in a freelance world, and more and more of today's 00:14:15.959 --> 00:14:20.092 world is freelance, because their work is good, 00:14:20.092 --> 00:14:25.419 and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. 00:14:25.480 --> 00:14:29.354 And you don't even need all three. 00:14:29.354 --> 00:14:33.653 Two out of three is fine. 00:14:33.653 --> 00:14:35.221 People will tolerate how 00:14:35.221 --> 00:14:42.988 unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. 00:14:42.988 --> 00:14:44.137 People will forgive the 00:14:44.137 --> 00:14:47.370 lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And 00:14:47.370 --> 00:14:50.987 you don't have to be as good as the everyone else if you're on time and 00:14:50.987 --> 00:14:54.662 it's always a pleasure to hear from you. 00:14:54.662 --> 00:15:05.295 (Cheering) 00:15:05.295 --> 00:15:07.750 So when I agreed to give this address, 00:15:07.750 --> 00:15:11.780 I though what is the best piece of advice I'd been given. 00:15:11.780 --> 00:15:14.829 And I realised that it was actually a piece of advice 00:15:14.829 --> 00:15:19.845 that I have failed to follow. And it came from Stephen King 00:15:19.845 --> 00:15:22.145 It was twenty years ago, at the height of the success 00:15:22.145 --> 00:15:27.694 of Sandman, the comic I was writing. 00:15:27.694 --> 00:15:30.380 Oh! Thank you. I was writing a comic that people loved 00:15:30.380 --> 00:15:34.629 and I was taking it seriously. And Stephen King liked Sandman 00:15:34.629 --> 00:15:38.878 and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he--he saw the madness that was going on 00:15:38.878 --> 00:15:42.962 the long signing lines, all that stuffs, and his advice was this: 00:15:42.962 --> 00:15:49.717 “This is really great. You should enjoy it.” 00:15:49.717 --> 00:15:52.403 And I didn't. Best advice 00:15:52.403 --> 00:15:56.470 I've ever got and I ignored it. Instead I worried about it. 00:15:56.470 --> 00:16:01.274 I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, 00:16:01.274 --> 00:16:04.159 the next story. There wasn't a moment for the next 00:16:04.159 --> 00:16:08.092 fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn't writing something in my head, or wondering about it. 00:16:08.092 --> 00:16:11.008 And I didn't stop and look around and go, 00:16:11.008 --> 00:16:16.574 this is really fun. I wish I'd enjoyed it more. 00:16:16.574 --> 00:16:19.541 It's been an amazing ride. But there were parts of the ride I missed, 00:16:19.541 --> 00:16:23.407 because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next, to enjoy 00:16:23.407 --> 00:16:27.941 the bit that I was on. That was the hardest lesson for me, 00:16:27.941 --> 00:16:31.557 I think, to let go and enjoy the ride, 00:16:31.557 --> 00:16:37.241 because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places. 00:16:37.241 --> 00:16:39.541 And here, on this platform, today, 00:16:39.541 --> 00:16:42.775 for me, is one of those places. 00:16:42.775 --> 00:16:46.093 And I am enjoying myself immensely. 00:16:46.093 --> 00:16:57.674 (Cheering) 00:16:57.674 --> 00:16:58.823 And I actually put that in bracket 00:16:58.823 --> 00:17:05.574 Just in case I wasn't. I wouldn't say 00:17:05.574 --> 00:17:08.407 To all today's graduates: 00:17:08.407 --> 00:17:11.108 I wish you luck. Luck is useful. 00:17:11.108 --> 00:17:15.220 Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, 00:17:15.220 --> 00:17:18.906 the luckier you will get. But there is luck, 00:17:18.906 --> 00:17:22.356 and it helps. We're in a transitional 00:17:22.356 --> 00:17:26.640 world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic field, 00:17:26.640 --> 00:17:30.157 because the nature of distribution is changing, the models 00:17:30.157 --> 00:17:34.207 by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over 00:17:34.207 --> 00:17:39.807 their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. 00:17:39.807 --> 00:17:42.141 I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, 00:17:42.141 --> 00:17:46.141 in bookselling, in music, in all those areas, and 00:17:46.141 --> 00:17:50.524 nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, 00:17:50.524 --> 00:17:53.957 let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people 00:17:53.957 --> 00:17:57.573 had built over the last century or so are in flux 00:17:57.573 --> 00:18:03.274 for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds. 00:18:03.274 --> 00:18:06.540 Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, 00:18:06.540 --> 00:18:09.330 and on the other, immensely liberating. 00:18:09.330 --> 00:18:11.591 The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're 00:18:11.591 --> 00:18:16.907 supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, 00:18:16.907 --> 00:18:19.988 are breaking down. The gatekeepers 00:18:19.988 --> 00:18:23.275 are leaving their gates. You can be as creative 00:18:23.275 --> 00:18:27.608 as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube 00:18:27.608 --> 00:18:31.324 and the web and whatever comes after YouTube and the web can give you 00:18:31.324 --> 00:18:35.591 more people watching than old television ever did. 00:18:35.591 --> 00:18:40.808 The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are. 00:18:40.808 --> 00:18:43.807 So make up your own rules. 00:18:43.807 --> 00:18:47.307 Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, 00:18:47.307 --> 00:18:51.073 in this case recording an audio book, and I suggested 00:18:51.073 --> 00:18:55.122 she pretend that she was someone who could do it. 00:18:55.122 --> 00:19:00.524 Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could. 00:19:00.524 --> 00:19:03.625 She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, 00:19:03.625 --> 00:19:08.407 and she said it helped. So be wise, 00:19:08.407 --> 00:19:11.272 because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot 00:19:11.272 --> 00:19:19.623 be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would. 00:19:19.623 --> 00:19:29.424 (Cheering) 00:19:29.424 --> 00:19:31.740 And now go, and make interesting 00:19:31.740 --> 00:19:34.980 mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious 00:19:34.980 --> 00:19:38.894 and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world 00:19:38.894 --> 00:19:43.878 more interesting for your being here. Make good art. 00:19:44.179 --> 00:19:48.179 Thank you (Cheering)