But when I arrived, I learned my audience was made up entirely of freshmen: 18- and 19-year-olds without any real-world adult experience. It was October, so they’d been out of high school for maybe five months. I knew instantly, minutes before I was to speak, I was Mussolini in London. Unless I did something drastic, they’d ignore or heckle me as if I were a boring, out-of-touch, manager-loser type — the same way I would have if, at 19, I’d had to sit through a lecture about life in the corporate world.
