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Thank you President Boehm.
Chairman Dowling,
President Boehm,
members of the Board of Trustees,
distinguished faculty, friends, guests, and most of all the graduates of the Class
of 2012,
I'm so honored to be with you on this special day.
After four long years of lectures,
debates,
seminars, internships,
and exams now comes the hardest part,
sitting through the commencement address.
Just think out your professors feel right now.
From day one, they told you there are no shortcuts to success,
yet your commencement speaker is a guy who, as President Boehm mentioned,
co-authored The Complete Idiot's Guide to Facebook.
Who says President Boehm doesn’t have a sense of humor?
I promise not to be like the commencement speaker from a few years
ago who decided to use Keystone’s name to sing its virtues.
‘K’ he said is for kindness, and spoke for 20 minutes about the virtues of
kindness.
‘E’ he said is for excellence, and spoke for 20 minutes about excellence.
‘Y’ he said is for youth, and spoke for 20 minutes about youth.
Two hours later, when he finally finished,
the commencement speaker noticed a student saying a prayer.
He went up to the young graduate after the ceremony and he said, “Why were you
praying?”
And the young graduate said,
“I was just giving thanks that I didn't go to the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.”
Well,
I didn’t go to M.I.T. either, but I am a proud graduate of Keystone College,
Class of 1986.
Having said that,
you should know that I'm probably not the best person to give advice to a
graduating class.
Truth be told, my friends will tell you
that I make a really mean twice baked potato.
In tennis, my one-handed backhand generates impressive top spin when it's
working,
and that to this day, 26 years after I graduated from Keystone College,
I still crave hoagies from Dixon's Hoagie Hut.
But as a graduation speaker I'm a bit of a fraud
and, after you hear what happened on my own graduation day,
you might think I'm a little bit of a jerk, too.
But the story has a happy ending and so will yours if you go into it with your
eyes open.
What they tell you here at Keystone is absolutely true.
The College and its faculty and staff have prepared you well,
in your field of study,
to take on the world.
They've given you the tools you need to succeed
to start a career, to start a business,
or to go to M.I.T. if that's what you really want to do.
But what they didn't tell you is that college doesn’t really prepare you for
life.
At least, not your life.
That's because nobody can really tell you what your life is going to bring.
You see, there's a pretty good chance that
who you are today is not who you’re going to be a few years from now.
There's a good chance that the profession you studied for these last four
years
is not the career or field you're going to be working in in five years time,
that your life will be less shaped by what you expect,
and more by what you don't.
I'm here today to speak for the path that you don't see coming,
the road you wander down by mistake
or the detour that opens your life to unimaginable possibilities.
As the people seated to the left and right of you know,
very little in your life is within your control.
The job market,
taxes,
chance encounters, termites, snow storms, floods,
recessed jeans, North Korea.
Trust me, I studied Hotel Management when it was offered here,
and I ended up 18 years later serving as an Acquisitions Editor at
Penguin Publishing
and Alpha Books in Indianapolis, Indiana
working on a book titled,
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding North Korea.
Tell me I could have seen that one coming!
Totally not in your control!
But there are two things that are completely within your control:
How you think,
and how you choose to act.
What I believe in very deeply
is that when we think about ourselves and our lives,
we shouldn’t be limited by other people's ideas about us.
Instead,
we should be motivated by our own sense of possibility.
We should be motivated by what we believe we may become.
Too often
people deny themselves the opportunity to be great.
They become so concerned with what other people think of them
that they never show their true selves,
and they certainly never show their true talent,
ideas, or abilities.
It's sad
because history has shown us
the people who focus on possibilities
achieve more in life
than those who focus on expectations.
This is a lesson I learned the hard way.
As a writer and business consultant who gets to work from home,
which you can imagine I'm pretty comfortable being in a robe in the middle of the day,
but one thing you haven't heard me say yet today is how good it is to be back
at Keystone wearing a cap and gown.
The reason is
because I never made it to my own graduation ceremony and I'm still truly
ashamed of the reason why.
I grew up in Connecticut
and I was ten years old my parents got divorced.
All the sudden
my mother, God bless her,
was a single mom raising three kids.
I used it as an excuse to act up,
I sought out attention in stupid ways,
and I was eventually put into remedial classes in grade school.
After a few years of letting me get my way,
my mom had had enough.
She decided that when I was in high school,
no more remedial classes, and she wanted to be there every day when I got home
so I didn’t have a chance to screw up after school either.
So with the help of a family friend, who was interested in buying a business,
she became the resident manager of a small roadside motel in northeastern
Connecticut.
By then it was just the two of us.
Not only would she be there when I got home from school every day,
but I would have no choice but to pour my energies into chores -
like working at the front desk, washing towels,
or cleaning the pool.
And my mom was right there with me,
a one-woman posse surrounding me,
providing me with my first real role model when I needed one most.
Had she not created that opportunity for us,
had she not seen the possibility of that situation,
I wouldn't be having this conversation with you right now.
At the beginning of my senior year in high school, I thought I want to study hotel
management
and I applied to three schools:
Cornell,
where I didn't stand a snowball's chance of getting into,
Keystone,
which was nearly as far from a guarantee as me being asked to deliver this
commencement address,
and Johnson and Wales, my safety school.
I got into two out of the three and I told my mom,
“I’m going to Johnson and Wales.”
My mother,
God bless her, said,
“No you're not.
You're going to Keystone.”
I later found out that mom had begged the Director of Admissions here to take
me,
and for that I'm very grateful.
True story.
Well, I showed up here in the fall of 1984 as this goofy
kid from a roadside motel in rural Connecticut.
I was a fairly decent tennis player, so I made the team here.
While I was here though, aside from buckling down and receiving good grades
for the first time in my life,
I developed a real attitude.
I met kids who appeared to come from wealthy families,
either their cars, or their parents’ cars were really nice,
they had the best gadgets on campus,
and I developed this fantasy life of wanting to be exactly like them, and
for whatever reason, I've felt like I had to impress them.
One of the ways I could portray that lifestyle was to keep my mother at bay.
She didn't dress like the other parents, she didn’t look like the other parents, or
sound like the other parents.
Bottom line, I didn't want her to visit,
and there was a really long stretch where I didn't even call her on the phone.
The worst moment came when I got a message
that she was in Clarks Summit.
She had driven the five hours from northeastern Connecticut,
and checked into a room at a hotel in town.
The most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life was to go into town and see her.
At one point in the conversation my mom said to me,
“Mikal, do I embarrass you?”
And I, like any self-respecting know-it-all,
look down at my tennis shoes in shame and said, “No,
of course not.”
She thought about my half-hearted response for a moment and then said,
“Mikal, you're always going to be my son.
I'm always going to be your mother,
I'm always going to love you,
and there's nothing you can ever do about that.”
You’d think I would have gotten the message,
but by the time graduation rolled around, I had an internship working at a
resort the Poconos,
and while I could've easily gotten the day off from work to see the seats that you
occupy today,
I chose not to.
My work reasoning was that I need to work,
but mostly,
I feared shattering the bubble
for the people I thought I had to impress,
a bubble, of course, that I had created of my own free will.
So here was this incredible woman, who sacrificed her entire existence for me,
who fought unwaveringly to get me into college,
and who helped save to send me here,
and I denied her the opportunity to see me graduate. I know,
what a jerk!
Not only had I denied my mom an opportunity to celebrate what she had
worked so hard to make possible for me,
I denied myself the chance to see all the good that was right in front of me.
After that summer internship in the Poconos,
I went on to the University of Houston, as President Boehm said,
where I continued my studies in Hotel and Restaurant Management,
and had, what can only be described from the outside,
as a pretty successful time there.
I became the president of my dorm, President of the Residence Halls
Association,
and was even elected Student Body President of a University
with 40,000 students.
I even got to go to the White House and present a proclamation from our student
body.
It was there at Houston that I eventually realized I didn't want to get
into hotel or restaurant management.
I had no idea what I was going to do after school,
but one day, a friend
called and told me about an internship,
a leadership internship in education
at Boston University.
If accepted, I'd be working with school kids Monday through Friday
and on weekends with corporate groups facilitating team building activities.
Even though I’d never been on a ropes course a day in my life, and couldn't
spell nokomis is when I was here,
or afterwards,
and knew nothing about outdoor education. I applied, and I got the position.
About a year later, I got a similar job back in Texas,
this time teaching 5th Grade Outdoor Education for the Houston Independent
School District.
After nearly two years of teaching 11 and 12 year-olds,
and facilitating corporate team building activities,
things got really interesting.
I sent a proposal to the Association for Experiential Education in Boulder,
Colorado,
a not-for-profit organization
that assisted in self-regulating the outdoor education
and adventure-based recreation industries.
I thought if I worked there for a few months, I would land an amazing job at
one of their member institutions.
Knowing that the Association didn't have a big budget,
my ingenious proposal was to work for just 25 cents an hour.
Now to be clear parents,
this is not something I'm recommending.
Thankfully though the Association took me on,
and there, I've met a lot of people who changed my life,
including a woman named Babs Baker.
Babs was the Executive Director of the Association,
and she had this big sheet of paper on the wall in her office containing, among
other things, the following four statements:
1. Show up,
2. Be present and listen,
3.
Speak your truth,
and 4.
Let go of the outcome.
For whatever reason, those four statements working in combination with
one another
really hit me like a ton of bricks.
More than anything though,
it was that “let go of the outcome” piece that was really powerful for me.
I had expectations built into every single action I took.
I expected to be successful, and I pouted when I wasn't.
I expected
to be right at the expense of other people being wrong, and
most of all I expected to impress others,
but never
achieved in doing that to myself.
And all along the way I was blind to the opportunities around me because as the
author John Acuff says,
I was caught up in comparing my beginning
to someone else's middle, and
I was focused on all the wrong things.
Babs kept close tabs on me, and at one point she pulled me aside and said,
“Mikal
you spend so much time worrying about what other people think of you, that you
hand them all of your power.
You're so attached to specific outcomes,
that you deny possibilities for yourself.”
Then she said,
“What would you do with your life if the only person you had to impress
was yourself?
If you showed up,
really listened,
if you paid attention in the moment, and not worried what other people were
thinking?
If you spoke the truth and said what needed to be said,
rather than what you thought people wanted to hear? And
kept in mind,
that often it's not what you say,
but it's how you say it, that really matters?
And what if you just let go of the outcome?
What would you accomplish if you weren't afraid to fail, or if you weren't afraid of
disappointing others?”
I've pretty much lived by those questions ever since.
They've helped me to relax and earn my achievements, instead of just expecting
them with little to no work.
As a result, I became the first Executive Director of what has gone on
to become
the country's most powerful adventure travel-based trade association.
I started and then sold an internet company;
I got to work in Acquisitions for two of the world's largest book publishers;
I launched a business management consulting practice that keeps me on my toes to this
day;
and eventually I went on to write a complete idiot's guide of my own,
and to write for Entrepreneur Magazine,
helping other people and other companies take advantage of all the possibilities
around them.
What I've learned along the way,
and as I mentioned earlier is this,
how we think and how we act
are the two things we have complete control over.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that nobody can make you feel inferior without your
consent.
What I really think Mrs. Roosevelt was saying was this,
all there is in life is what happens,
and what you choose to believe about it.
The power is completely within your hands.
Are you going to live by other people's expectations of you,
what you think they want? Or are you going to speak for yourself and think for
yourself,
and define your own way forward based on who you are?
I'll tell you this:
if you travel
down the road of “expectation”
and hit a roadblock,
it's easy to become lost
and that's because there's
only one destination on the other side,
disappointment.
But if you travel down that same road and call it “possibility” instead,
hitting that same roadblock is a lot easier to navigate
because all around it there are countless other possibilities for
success.
To be sure though,
you're going to be met by a lot of people who try to deny you,
but don't deny yourselves.
Don't deny yourself the possibilities that are all around you.
As you work to convince other people of your talent and your ambition,
whatever that ambition may be,
don't make yourself the first person you have to convince.
The truth is there’s never been a better time to create the future that you want.
If you want to be a writer, and you can't find a job right away,
don't just sit there.
Seize the power to brand yourself using technology and social media,
and create a blog and start writing.
If you plan on opening an art gallery, volunteer and help out at a gallery
event,
and blog about your passion for art - and in doing so,
show off your expertise on the topic.
If you want to be a television executive, a college professor, print shop manager,
or a regional manager for micro-cap paper and office supply distributor named Dunder-
Mifflan,
start a blog and write about your experience in getting there.
Write about industry trends and developments,
and your insights on what would make your chosen industry stronger and more
responsive to its customers, investors, and other stakeholders.
Tell people what you think and show people how you think.
It doesn't matter what you aspire to be -
the owner of a door and window installation company;
a registered nurse operating out of your own wellness office;
the innkeeper of the bed and breakfast;
or an expert on the type of food that should be served to cardiac patients in
hospitals,
or stay-at-home mom who eventually publishes the book about raising a
family.
Sharing knowledge is power
and I say put yours to work.
Moreover,
don't deny yourself the opportunity to be as experiential and entrepreneurial
as you can be.
Don't deny yourself possibilities.
I gave up the denial business for good in
1999.
I called my mother one day and I said “Mom,
I just want to say I'm sorry,”
and she said, “For what?”
and I said, “For everything – for judging you instead of loving you,
for thinking only of myself and what others thought of me.”
You know what she said?
“I've been waiting nearly 20 years for you to say that.”
It breaks my heart to this day that I broke hers so many times over.
We all have big ah-ha! moments in life,
I say make yours count.
What I've learned in my journey, since coming to Keystone College, is that life
is about setting and correcting course, and honoring those who help along the
way.
I want to thank all of you for the chance you've given me to make one of
those wrongs, right.
My mom never got a chance to see her son wear a cap and gown 26 years ago,
but she’s here today
and I'm ridiculously honored to point her out to you.
I love you, mom. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Class of 2012,
I look forward to seeing what you make of your future,
and I hope I have a chance to write great things about you.
Each one of you has a copy of Entrepreneur Magazine on your chair
today,
and inside is a graduation gift from me.
If you fill out the form that’s on the bottom of that flyer,
I personally will pay for a year’s subscription for you for Entrepreneur,
and I honestly hope you'll take me up on that offer.
But more important,
if you show up,
be present,
speak your truth, and let go of the outcome,
and if you give yourself time to make your dreams happen,
and don't do what I do,
namely, comparing your beginning to someone else's middle,
I have no doubt that future is going to be extraordinary.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much and I've asked that Chair Harry Dowling
and Dean
Thea Harrington.
Your mother might have missed that time so many years ago, but you know what’s
happened to you right now?
With the help of the Chair and the help of the Dean, you're going to receive an
honorary Doctorate Degree from Keystone College.
Thank you very much for that.
Now,
we want to give him this degree so he can safely take it home,
and
we're going to,
everybody take a deep breath, it's been a phenomenal -
don’t, please don't start throwing those magazines out until you get home, but
make sure you send them in, I want him to have one in 24 hours.
He will personally escort is mother to
the platform where he received his degree.
yes