Sara Blakely Urges Florida State Graduates to Bet on Themselves; Binance Says Emerging Markets Now Represent 77% of Its Users

Sara Blakely, who graduated from Florida State University in 1993, told the class of 2026 to bet on themselves in a commencement address. Blakely recounted being rejected by 20 companies at a campus job fair, after which she worked at a Disney World park for a few months and then spent seven years selling fax machines door to door.

When she was 16, her father gave her cassette tapes of Wayne Dyer’s book “How to Be a No-Limit Person.” “I heard a man’s voice talking about the power of your own thoughts and visualizing the future you want,” Blakely said. She listened to the tapes so often that she memorized all 10 cassettes front and back.

” This led her to journal, schedule time to think, and deliberately try things she feared. Blakely appeared on the cover of Forbes as the youngest self-made woman to join the 2012 billionaires list. She launched Spanx in 2000 with no investors and minimal resources, writing her own patent because she could not afford a patent attorney and trademarking the name herself.

“I had no experience, but I had belief,” she said. Blakely recalled making a major on-air mistake during a BBC interview about Spanx and using the embarrassment as a lesson. “You will be embarrassed,” she told the graduates. She also spoke at the Forbes 2025 Power Women’s Summit in New York City in September 2025, where she warned about protecting focus amid constant news and social media.

“You have to protect your time,” she said. Blakely concluded that graduates face one decision: “You can distract yourself or you can discover yourself.”

Beth Kobliner, author of the newly revised book “Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties,” advised new graduates and young adults to stick to financial basics. Kobliner, who taught Elmo about money on Sesame Street, said debt payments not including mortgage should be less than 15 percent of monthly pretax pay, rent or mortgage payments should be no more than 30 percent of monthly take-home pay, and savings should be at least 10 percent of take-home pay each month.

Kobliner noted that young people today carry more student-loan debt than previous generations and higher credit-card debt than their parents’ generation at the same age. ” The most important factor for keeping a credit score high is to not miss payments, she added, and carrying a balance on a credit card does not boost one’s credit score.

Separately, Binance reported that emerging markets accounted for 77 percent of its users in 2026, up from 49 percent in 2020. Users in emerging markets show savings rates more than twice as high as users in developed markets on Binance, according to the company.

Thirty-six percent of emerging-market Binance users with balances of at least $10 hold at least half of their portfolio in stablecoins, compared with 28 percent of global Binance users.

The company said stablecoins “drive 90 percent of Brazil’s crypto volume” according to data from Brazil’s tax authority. Binance cited World Bank figures stating that 1.3 billion adults lack access to financial services, 4.7 billion adults lack access to credit or loans, and 1.4 billion savers in low-income nations earn no deposit interest.

It added that 900 million unbanked adults own a mobile phone, 530 million own a smartphone, and 3.6 billion adults in low- and middle-income countries do not use digital payments or cards. Binance said users in these markets are treating crypto exchanges like banking apps that settle almost instantly at a fraction of the cost of traditional cross-border SWIFT transactions, which carry a minimum cost of $20.