Really good advice
Robert Krulwich gave this graduation speech. While it is aimed at Journalism students, it has some good stories:
"As I say, he was a news writer, writing copy off in a corner, sometimes for Murrow, but he’s pretty much an indoors guy, and he’s dreaming of course, of getting outdoors where things are happening and one night – in the middle of the night, on the graveyard shift, two a.m.—the bell on the wire ticker goes off and says an airplane has just fallen short of the runway at LaGuardia Airport and is sinking in the East River, right now." (from Robert Krulwich Graduation Speech)
That story is about Charles Kuralt. You will have to read the speech to see how it ends.
The speech also has lots of good advice, for anyone:
Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from the New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care, No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again." (from Robert Krulwich graduation speech)