Sci-fi/fantasy author Neil Gaiman's commencement speech at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia is getting passed around like crazy.

You can watch the video, read the transcript or check out his six key points below:

"First of all: When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.

Secondly, If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.

Thirdly, When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.

Fourthly, I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. And the mistakes in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing the A and the O, and I thought, “Coraline looks like a real name...”

And Fifthly, while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

Sixthly. I will pass on some secret freelancer knowledge. Secret knowledge is always good. And it is useful for anyone who ever plans to create art for other people, to enter a freelance world of any kind. I learned it in comics, but it applies to other fields too."

See also: Great commencement talks by Carol Bartz, Maria Bartiromo, Sonia Sotomayor and Sheryl Sandberg.

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