I hope many of today’s high school and university graduates will wander off the beaten career path and help redefine success in our culture, asking not “How much can I get?” but “How much can I do without and share?” Asking not “How can I find myself?” but “How can I lose myself in service to others and leave our nation and world better than I found it?”
I’m sharing some lessons for life I offered my own children and many of the extraordinary young graduates I’ve had the privilege of meeting over the years. The pace of change in the world young people are inheriting continues to accelerate exponentially, but there are some enduring values and advice older people can share.
I agree with Archibald MacLeish that “there is only one thing more powerful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.”
Here are a few of those lessons:
- Don’t feel entitled to anything you don’t sweat and struggle for. Take the initiative in creating your own opportunity, and don’t wait for other people to discover you or do you a favor. Don’t ever stop learning and improving your mind.
- Set thoughtful goals and work quietly and systematically toward them. Resist quick fixes, simplistic answers, and easy gains. They often disappear just as quickly as they come.
- Assign yourself. My daddy used to ask us whether the teacher gave us any homework. If we said no, he’d say, “Well, assign yourself.” Don’t wait around for your boss or your friends or spouse to direct you to do what you are able to figure out and do for yourself.
- Never work just for money. Money alone won’t save your soul or build a decent family or help you sleep at night. Don’t confuse wealth or fame with character. Don’t tolerate or condone moral corruption, whether it’s found in high or low places, whatever its color or class.
- Don’t be afraid of taking risks or of being criticized. If you don’t want to be criticized, don’t say anything, do anything, or be anything. Don’t be afraid of failing.
- Always listen for the genuine within yourself. “Small,” Einstein said, “is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” Try to be one of them.
And a final lesson: Never think life is not worth living or that you cannot make a difference. Never give up — no matter how hard it gets, and it will get hard sometimes. An old proverb says that when you get to your wit’s end, that’s where God lives.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” said when you get into a “tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn.”
The tide will turn — if you dream it, if you believe in it, if you have faith in it, struggle for it, and never give up.
Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund.