Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Are
you going? I'm going. Hi Violet my name is Wil Wheaton. It's 2013 and you've just recently
joined us on planet earth, so welcome. I'm an actor and I'm a writer and I'm a dad and
your mother asked me to tell you why it's awesome to be a nerd and that's an easy thing
for me to do because that's who I am. I don't know what the world's going to be like by
the time you understand this, I don't know what it's going to mean to be a nerd when
you are a young woman. For me when I was growing up being a nerd meant that I liked things
that were a little weird, that took a lot of effort to appreciate and understand. It
meant that I loved science and I loved playing board games and reading books and really understanding
what went on in the world instead of just riding the planet through space and when I
was a little boy people really teased us about that and made us feel like there was something
wrong with us for loving those things. Now that I'm an adult I'm kind of a professional
nerd and the world has changed a lot and I think a lot of us have realized that being
a nerd or being a geek is another word you'll hear and I sort of use the terms interchangeably,
it's not about what you love it's about how you love it. So there's going to be a thing
in your life that you love and I don't know what it's going to be it might be sports,
it might be science, it might be reading, it might be fashion design, it might be building
things, it might be telling stories or taking pictures, it doesn't matter what it is. The
way you love that and the way that you find other people who love it the way you do is
what makes being a nerd awesome. The defining characteristic of us, the people in this room,
and I'm going to ask your mom to turn this camera around in a minute. Go there, go mom.
The defining characteristic that ties us all together is that we love things and some of
us love Firefly, and some of us love Game of Thrones and some of us love- these are
things you'll be able to go see, they're in your history book- and some of us love Star
Trek or Star Wars or anime or games or fantasy or science fiction. Some of us love completely
different things but we all love those things so much that we travel of thousands of miles,
which is probably easy for you but we're still on fossil fuels I don't know what you're going
to be on, but it's difficult. We come from all over, in some cases all over the world,
so that we can be around people who love the things that we love the way that we love them
and that's why being a nerd is awesome. And don't ever let anybody tell you that that
thing that you love is a thing that you can't love. Don't ever let anyone tell you you can't
love that, that's for boys, you have to love this because you're a girl. You find the things
that you love and you love them the most that you can. And listen, this is really important,
I want you to be honest, honourable, kind, I want you to work hard because everything
worth doing is hard, and I want you to be awesome. And I'm going to do my very best
to leave you a planet that you can still live on. Have a great life.