Congratulations to the Harvard Class of 2012 (especially Alexa Stern)! While today’s Commencement is the conventional day for words of wisdom, Harvard tradition precedes it with ‘Class Day’ which is a chance for a bit of fun and perhaps ‘unconventional’ wisdom. Yesterday’s speakers included Andy Samberg as well as a humorous and insightful ‘Alumini Speaker’ Barney Frank.
Barney Frank shares his own failure which led not only led to him dropping out of graduate school and abandoning his career as an academic, but led to his stellar career as a politician. He puts it all down to the following “We all have characteristics. They can be strengths in one context and a weakness in another…I had one characteristic that was a drawback in an academic, but a great advantage in a politician. I have a very short attention span.”
Charles Wheelan’s “10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You” has a few very unconventional gems of his own to share with any graduating class…
- Your time in fraternity basements was well spent.
- Some of your worst days lie ahead.
- Don’t make the world worse
- Marry someone smarter than you are
- Help stop the Little League arms race.
- Read obituaries
- Your parents don’t want what is best for you.
- Don’t model your life after a circus animal.
- It’s all borrowed time.
- Don’t try to be great.
#2 is the most dramatic embrace of failure (but you have to give a nods ‘Don’t try to be great’ as well as ‘Marry someone smarter than you are’)…
- “2. Some of your worst days lie ahead. Graduation is a happy day. But my job is to tell you that if you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them. I’ll spare you my personal details, other than to say that one year after college graduation I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today is that now no one can afford to retire.”
I thougth two things stood out in Frank’s speech. 1) “We all have characteristics. They can be strengths in one context and a weakness in another.” 2) America has to decide if we want to spend 100 Billion per year projecting our strength around the world, or use some of that money on America’s internal problems like education and healthcare.
By the way, thanks for the call out to my daughter, Alexa.
Reblogged this on Todd's Perspective and commented:
I disagree that Frank had a ‘stellar career’, however, his perspective on characteristics is a keeper despite how I feel about the man; “We all have characteristics. They can be strengths in one context and a weakness in another…I had one characteristic that was a drawback in an academic, but a great advantage in a politician. I have a very short attention span.”
Well, everyone has one’s views on someone’s politics. I’ve been always applauded the stands that Frank took and how he led as a politician (which is an appropriate comment for a blog on Leadership and Management). I often decried in this blog the how good ‘Management’ (aversion of downside) is often overridden by the grandiose promises of aspirational ‘Leadership’. A great case study of that dynamic was Frank’s resistance to the Republican’s restructuring of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The Bush initiative was a major catalyst to the Credit Crunch and the crisis we find ourselves in and had Frank’s words been heeded sooner (than the current Dodd-Frank legislation attempt to put the horse crap back in the barns), one could argue that the USA and the world would have been a better place.