What
does it mean, to be true to yourself? It means knowing who you are. It means you
have to be comfortable in who you are. In order to do this, you’re going to
have to
- Set your definition of Success
- Develop your Character
What is Success?
You’re going to have expectations as you enter your adult
life, some certainly of your own, some expectations from your family’s, your
friends will also have expectations. Everyone has high hopes for you. We all
want you to succeed, but what exactly does that mean? Success
is defined different ways by different people. Let me give you some examples:
To The
General Community: For most people, being successful means being
able to become an productive individual in society. A college or university
education should prepare graduates to think and act for themselves, and to
communicate those thoughts effectively to others. Graduates should be able to
live well with others, and make a contribution to the communities in which they
live: locally, nationally, and globally, and earn a living.
To The
Academic Community: Students should be continually enrolled and
pass their courses with “C”s or better, until they gain enough credits until
they graduate or earn a certification.
To The
Business Community: Graduates who are prepared to work in an
increasingly complex, technologically-driven, and constantly changing global
economy. Employers expect graduates to be able to apply the education they
received in college to the “real-world.” Graduates should be knowledgeable and
informed in their degree fields, possess critical thinking, analytical,
research, and communication skills. They should be team-players, and work
ethically.
By
knowing yourself, and being true to yourself, and understanding of what success
means for you. You have to know your limitations. It means don’t try to sell
yourself as something your not. Abraham Lincoln once stated, “No man has a good
enough memory to be a successful liar.” You have to know what you are capable
of and what your limitations are. At the same time, you have to be comfortable
enough to stretch your self and set higher, yet realistic goals. The book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, examines
characteristics of successful people. Gladwell talks about the “ten-thousand
hour rule” that it takes constant and repeated practices in order to master a
skill. Unfortunately, Gladwell states, most Americans aren’t used to practice.
We don’t want to waste long hours learning the basics; we want to be experts
from the beginning.
Several
years ago, basketball legend Michael Jordan made a commercial where he
mentioned the statistics that marked his career. He didn’t talk about how many
times he was named MVP, his All-Star Game appearances, or his scoring average.
Instead, Jordan said
“I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Success in life, however you
define success, isn’t about always winning, or about having good things happen
to you. It’s about how you face the bad times, it’s about character, and
getting back up after you’ve failed, and trying again.
What is character?
As a
historian I’m very interested in how people meet adversity and difficulty.
History is often written around the challenges, struggles, and tragedies of
life. “War makes rattling good history, but peace poor reading.” People like
stories about how human beings act and react under pressure, and in times of
difficulty. How many books have been written about the Civil War, or any war,
for that matter? History, then, is often the story of human character. It is
who we are in hard times.
In 1956, British Historian R. G. Collingwood in his book,
The Idea of History, wrote:
History is ‘for’ human self-knowledge. It is generally
thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing
himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that
distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means
knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the
kind of man you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you
can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to
what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it
teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
Character is forged in the fires of adversity. But it is not who we are to an audience. It is who we are, not in front of our friends, but it is who we are when we are alone, when no one is watching. President “Teddy” Roosevelt said, “I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!” Character is how you handle defeat.
So, how do you develop character? As I stated earlier, your involvement with AVID has already equipped you with what you need to develop character. In fact, that is exactly what AVID means, Advancement via Individual Determination…success through will…success through “grit”!
- Set Realistic Goals: Don’t
set yourself up for failure, but don’t settle for good enough. You should be
have pride in your efforts. Understand that You cannot please everyone. You
have to make hard decisions. Sometimes you’ll make decisions that no one will
like. Sometimes people will be hurt by your decisions, but you have to make
decisions that will serve the greater good, that will be of the most benefit in
the long run.
- And you have to understand that one of the most
important, yet toughest decision you’ll have to make is to decide who you want
to be, and then surround yourself with those
who are going to help you get there and celebrate your accomplishments. Some
people warn against the crab or crawfish mentality. When one tries to escape
from a boiling pot, the others will pull him back down. Once told “don’t forget
where you came from.” Some people interpret that to mean that you should not
rise above your station in life, but what it really means is that you should
not forget the hard work that got you where you are, and the people who made
sacrifices to help you get there.
As a
professional educator, I get numerous advertisements for new books that come to
my mailbox or email inbox almost on a daily basis. In fact, yesterday, I
learned about a new book that was just published, Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me, by Jerry McGill. When
he was thirteen years old, he was walking home from friends’ house one evening
when, three blocks from home when a bullet stuck him. He doesn’t know why
someone shot him. I’ll never know; why what happened happened.” In the book, he writes, "My life, in a way, has been formed by some
kind of darkness; but not in a way that you would think . . . there is a beauty
in darkness…and there is so much to be learned and gained in darkness, if you
just know how to process it and channel it. . . It’s damaging at times, its
scary, but there is also a great beauty in it.” As McGill’s story illustrates Life
happens. It happens quickly, and its effects are profound and lasting. As I
stated earlier, however, success in life, however you define success, isn’t
about always winning, or about having good things happen to you. It’s about how
you face the bad times, it’s about character, and getting back up after you’ve
failed, and trying again.
In the
introduction to his book, McGill writes that the book isn’t about being shot,
or being angry at the unknown person who changed his life suddenly and
violently. “I didn’t write this book for you, Marcus,” he states. “I wrote this
for a certain population of the world: Those who endure, those who manage,
those who cope, those who get out of bed every morning going on with the
business of their lives knowing what they know, those who look into the eyes of
the storm and step out battered, drenched and unbeaten, those who are
determined to move on. Maybe you’re one of us; now that would truly make for a
great story, wouldn’t it?”
A few
years ago at a conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Freeman A.
Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He grew
up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s and spent a week in jail when he was 12
years old as a result of a civil rights protest. On Sunday morning, September
15, 1963, just as Sunday School was out at the 16th Street Baptist
Church, and church services were about to begin, a box of dynamite exploded
under the steps of the church by the basement. Twenty-two people were injured,
but the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church is remembered for
the four young women who lost their lives as a result of hatred of the Klan
members who planted the bomb. Freeman Hrabowski went to school with those
children. For Dr. Hrabowski, life hasn’t been about the struggles he faced
growing up in a segregated community, about facing discrimination daily, about
being jailed as a child, or about his school friends dying because of racism and
hatred. For him, it’s about setting achievable goals, about surrounding
yourself with people who help you, not hinder you, and keeping your sights on
your goals.
As Jerry McGill says, “just getting up and going on with the
business of living, and appreciating what you have.” As a result of his efforts,
Hrabowski was named one of America’s Best Leaders by US News and World Report in 2008, and one of the Top Ten College
Presidents by Time Magazine in
2009.This year Time Magazine named
him one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” The Time write up on Dr. Hrabowski states
that as president of the institution, he turned “a humble commuter school into
one of the nation’s leading sources of African Americans who get PhDs in
science and engineering.” Dr. Hrabowski ended his presentation at the
conference with a statement that I thought was profound, and inspirational. And
in conclusion, I’d like to pass it along to you today:
“Watch
your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
