This is yet another year that I haven’t been invited to give a graduation address. Perhaps I should be grateful for this, but I still wish I had that opportunity. Anyway, I prepared the following presentation I would have provided had I been asked.
My responsibility is to inspire you and send you off charged up and raring to go. You are graduating and going out into the world to make your mark. I think it should be with optimism, excitement and pride and I hope that is the way you feel. I also hope that you carry this feeling with you as you advance up the ladder of your inevitable growth and success. You see, many of you will become tomorrow’s leaders and in those roles you will make differences. I hope it is a difference that you will look back on when you are my age and feel proud of.
Along the way, you will face many pressures and perhaps the strongest will be from your peers. The easiest thing to do will be to go along with the flow, with the crowd, and with the least regard of the consequences of your decisions. However, I hope that your college experience has prepared you to think independently and to weigh options of how your actions can impact your ability to be a great leader.
I put together a few scenarios you may encounter. I challenge you to think about how your response to each could impact others’ perception of whether you are a great leader.
- If you participate in an activity but do not have a clear idea of its purpose and the results you want to achieve, then you will not be a leader.
- If you participate in an activity that includes paid or outside agitators rather than people sincerely committed to the cause and with clear objectives, then you will not be a leader.
- If an activity you participate in has the result of disrupting uninvolved people just trying to go about their business, you will be nothing other than a bully who will be alienating and harassing innocent people happening to be in your path, then you will not be a leader.
- If you participate in an activity and make no effort to consider what a solution would look like and whether it is something the people you are acting against could actually do or accomplish, then you will not be a leader.
- If you participate in an activity where the primary activists are driven by hate rather than by achieving rational, workable and achievable beneficial solutions, then you will not be a leader.
- If you participate in an activity, be careful what you wish for, because you might get it, and it might not turn out to be what you thought it would be, then you will not be a leader.
- If you participate in an activity and the way you do it and present your position fails to persuade undecided decision-makers to agree with your position, then you will not be a leader.
- If you participate in an activity and it appears that it will become unruly, violent or an illegal activity and you remain there subjecting yourself to arrest, then you will not be a leader.
Leaders need to step up, have realistic, explainable, achievable and admirable goals, inspire others to act, and to be responsible for the success or failure of the endeavor. Simply put leaders need to lead. Be the leader we need.
You got the brain power; and you certainly got an excellent education and university credentials. We need leaders and many will come from the graduates in this room. Be a leader and be the leader we will need!
This is the tenth year I have been posting “graduation speeches” with my leadership lessons. If you would like a file with all 10, send an email to [email protected] and just put “Graduation Speeches” as the subject. No message necessary.
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