Tag / great ideas

Teacher tells graduates: “You are not special.”

There are some messages that need to be said, and some that people don’t want to hear. Often, a single message is both. When Wellesley High School English teacher David McCullough stepped up to the mic to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 2012, he delivered one of those messages. He told them:

“You are not special. You are not exceptional.”

McCullough tells students: "You are not special."

There are some messages that need to be said, and some that people don’t want to hear. Often, a single message is both. When Wellesley High School English teacher David McCullough stepped up to the mic to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 2012, he delivered one of those messages. He told them:

“You are not special. You are not exceptional.”

With his reading glasses and his slightly unkempt hair, he looked every bit the part of English teacher and strikingly resonated the message he was about to deliver. He told the students, “…your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma… but for your name, exactly the same.

All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.”

Now, before you begin leaping to conclusions and shouting things like “how dare he tell my little pumpkin that she is anything less than amazing!” allow me to add some additional context. McCullough continued:

“The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can’t ignore. Newton, Natick, Needham, that has to be two thousand high school graduates right there, give or take, and that’s just the neighborhood numbers. Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. That’s 37,000 valedictorians… 37,000 class presidents… 92,000 harmonizing altos… 340,000 swaggering jocks… 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. But why limit ourselves to high school? After all, you’re leaving it. So think about this: even if you’re one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you.”

He wasn’t beating them up to be mean or belittling. The truth is he was a teacher, through and through and to the end. Though they sat before him at commencement, the end of one era and the beginning of the next, he was taking one final moment to teach:

“As you commence, then, and before you scatter to the winds, I urge you to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance.”

“Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction. Be worthy of your advantages. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might.”

“The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you’re a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer. You’ll note the founding fathers took pains to secure your inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–quite an active verb, “pursuit”–which leaves, I should think, little time for lying around watching parrots rollerskate on Youtube. The first President Roosevelt, the old rough rider, advocated the strenuous life. Mr. Thoreau wanted to drive life into a corner, to live deep and suck out all the marrow. The poet Mary Oliver tells us to row, row into the swirl and roil. Don’t wait for inspiration or passion to find you. Get up, get out, explore, find it yourself, and grab hold with both hands.”

Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Go to Paris to be in Paris, not to cross it off your list and congratulate yourself for being worldly. Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special.

Because everyone is.

Congratulations. Good luck. Make for yourselves, please, for your sake and for ours, extraordinary lives.

Personally, I can think of no better message to deliver to our kids, at commencement and minute-by-minute as they work through school to reach that milestone. You see, part of the problem– maybe the biggest part– is us. Parents of our generation are creating such coddling environments that our kids have very little self-sufficiency. McCullough says that, “we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.” He’s right. And when he points this out to the graduating class he places the blame exactly where it belongs: with us.

“You’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…

But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.”

I admire him for his insight. I applaud him for his courage. I will honor him by doing all I can to remember these words with each interaction with kids, both mine and others, to encourage them to live their lives not to garnish the accolades, but the for sake of actually living their lives. I will encourage them, at all times, to “climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”

I’ve presented you with the Cliff Notes version. For the full effect, watch David McCullough deliver the address himself:

A great idea + creative masses = amazing results

Dear Photograph, Our wedding was the sweetest day, just like Grandma's chocolate." - Onno

Think of all the great creative minds and the world’s best ideas, and you might come away thinking that creative genius is found by an individual toiling away alone. I think this can happen occasionally, but not often. Beyond that, the ideas may be great, but they could have been improved by having other input. It seems apparent that one person can only take an idea so far until it reaches is maximum potential. At that point, better results can be found by bringing in other creative types to add their own contributions. It’s in this secondary stage that truly beautiful and profound things begin to happen.

Here’s an example: Dear Photograph. The idea is imaginative yet simple: take a new photo of an old photo and write a caption that captures your thoughts about the moment. It’s a nice idea. But when this idea gets unleashed to the creative masses, amazing things begin happening.

There’s a photograph a cancer survivor Eric Richter and his daughter with the caption “Her love was my chemo.” There’s the photograph of a man looking down at the photo of he and his wife on a bench: “Thank you for everything we had.” Or the photo of of a father and two kids standing in a hardscrabble yard: “We had nothing, but you gave me everything.” Or two kids sitting together on a Lazy Boy chair: “Dear Photograph, I wish I treated you better when we were in high school.”

The site is only about a month old and displays less that 50 photos. They are poignant, heartfelt, and beautiful in their ability to uniquely capture two distinct moments at once. You can be sure that this will be a hit. It’s nearly impossible to ignore, and in just a few minutes, you’ll have ideas of your own to share. And I hope you do; I can’t wait to see them.

Go visit Dear Photograph right now. Let me know what you think.

Be true to your principles, or solve the problem?

Malcolm GladwellI really enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s work. His approach to looking at problems is fresh and interesting, and he’s able to draw correlations that are not only unusual, but incredibly insightful. I find I’m often struck by the obvious relationship one thing has to another after he’s made it clear. This just happened to me as I was reading an article originally published in The New Yorker and republished in his book “What the Dog Saw.”

The article was about homelessness, specifically the cost of homelessness, both in the humanitarian sense and dollars-and-cents-sense. He explores the notion that many of us have about the homeless: that it’s a problem with a normal distribution (a bell curve) that represents a huge mass in the middle that accounts for most of the problems. Recent studies suggest, however, that homelessness is really what they call a power law distribution that is shaped more like a hockey stick, with a relatively small number of ‘hard core’ homeless that drive the cost. In fact, according to a study done by Dennis Culhane in the 1990’s, more than 80% of people in shelters are in and out very quickly. “In Philadelphia,” Culhane says, “we found that the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. The second most common is two days.”

Gladwell points out that when we perceive problems to have a normal distribution, the resulting impression is of something that is too big to fix, so we treat the symptoms instead. But if the problem has a power law distribution, then it’s possible that it’s a big problem caused by a relatively small number of people. In other words, the problem itself could be fixed.

In Denver, this is exactly what they’re trying to do about homelessness. Realizing that they need to get these chronically homeless off the streets (and, subsequently, out of the health care system, which is where they are really costing the rest of us the most), Denver officials have begun giving them apartments. And this approach makes perfect sense economically: it’s far cheaper to pay someone’s rent than to continually pay to for the health care costs associated with them being on the streets. In fact, the article was originally titled “Million Dollar Murray”, a reference to one chronically homeless man in Nevada who cost the state more than a million dollars over ten years of homelessness.

The problem with solving a power law distribution like this is that, while it makes sense economically, it doesn’t seem fair morally. Gladwell says:

“Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand – and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency.”

“There isn’t enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit – to observe the principle of universality – isn’t as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don’t solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are of little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice.”

And then he followed up this argument with the sentence that still has me pondering this whole notion, more than two weeks later:

“We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.”

Related articles of interest:

Steve Jobs tells “how to live before you die”

In June 2005, Steve Jobs delivered the commencement address at Stanford. It was a talk where he promised to tell “only three stories about my life. No big deal. Just three stories…” In these three stories, he encompasses formative moments that helped make him what he is and he outlines several notions these recent graduates would do well to remember. They include:

Find what you love.

“You’ve got to find what you love. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Live each day as if it were your last.

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was you’re last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I’ve looked in the mirror every day and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer is “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things all fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

“No one wants to die. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It’s Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

“Right now, the new is you. But someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”

It’s a very good speech, and I recommend you watch it:

    A White Envelope Christmas

    [Note: I received this e-mail from a friend today and, like so many others, it’s impossible to apply attribution. In this case, however, it doesn’t matter. This is what I want for Christmas…

    It’s just a small white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree. No name, no identification, no inscription. It has peeked through the branches of our tree for the past 10 years or so. It all began because my husband Mike hated Christmas — oh, not the true meaning of Christmas, but the commercial aspects of it — the overspending, the frantic running around at the last minute to get a tie for Uncle Harry and the dusting powder for Grandma — the gifts given in desperation because you couldn’t think of anything else.

    Knowing he felt this way, I decided one year to bypass the usual shirts, sweaters, ties, and so forth. I reached for something special just for Mike. The inspiration came in an unusual way. Our son Kevin, who was 12 that year, was wrestling at the junior level at the school he at tended.

    Shortly before Christmas, there was a non-league match against a team sponsored by an inner-city church.

    These youngsters, dressed in sneakers so ragged that shoestrings seemed to be the only thing holding them together, presented a sharp contrast to our boys in their spiffy blue and gold uniforms and sparkling new wrestling shoes.

    As the match began, I was alarmed to see that the other team was wrestling without headgear, a kind of light helmet designed to protect a wrestler’s ears. It was a luxury the ragtag team obviously could not afford.

    Well, we ended up walloping them. We took every weight class. And as each of their boys got up from the mat, he swaggered around in his tatters with false bravado, a kind of street pride that couldn’t acknowledge defeat.

    Mike, seated beside me, shook his head sadly, “I wish just one of them could have won,” he said. “They have a lot of potential, but losing like this could take the heart right out of them.” Mike loved kids — all kids — and he knew them, having coached little league football, baseball, and lacrosse.

    That’s when the idea for his present came. That afternoon, I went to a local sporting goods store and bought an assortment of wrestling headgear and shoes and sent them anonymously to the inner-city church. On Christmas Eve, I placed the envelope on the tree, the note inside telling Mike what I had done and that this was his gift from me. His smile was the brightest thing about Christmas that year and in succeeding years.

    For each Christmas, I followed the tradition — one year sending a group of mentally handicapped youngsters to a hockey game, another year a check to a pair of elderly brothers whose home had burned to the ground the week before Christmas, and on and on. The envelope became the highlight of our Christmas. It was always the last thing opened on Christmas morning, and our children, ignoring their new toys, would stand with wide-eyed anticipation as their dad lifted the envelope from the tree to reveal its contents.

    As the children grew, the toys gave way to more practical presents, but the envelope never lost its allure. The story doesn’t end there. You see, we lost Mike last year due to cancer. When Christmas rolled around, I was still so wrapped in grief that I barely got the tree up. But Christmas Eve found me placing an envelope on the tree, and in the morning it was joined by three more. Each of our children, unbeknownst to the others, had placed an envelope on the tree for their dad.

    The tradition has grown and someday will expand even further with our grandchildren standing around the tree with wide-eyed anticipation watching as their fathers take down the envelope.

    Mike’s spirit, like the Christmas spirit, will always be with us.

    May we all remember Christ, who is the reason for the season, and the true Christmas spirit this year and always.