Wow. It's been a minute since I last posted, no? Life sure gets in the way sometimes!
The above video is from last night's commencement ceremonies at Huntingdon Area High School, my alma mater. The commencement speaker is Dylan Lane, a fellow alum from my graduating class of 1995. I wasn't able to be there in-person, but I live-streamed the ceremony, and got to watch his speech in real-time. T'was fantastic! He kicked it all off with a quote from Alice Cooper's "School's Out". What a great moment.
The over-arching theme was rooted in the famous quote largely attributed to Winston Churchill (but likely should be attributed to a 1930s Budweiser beer advert), "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Dylan kept coming back to that theme by saying, "Success is never stable, but neither is failure fatal." - or some minor variant.
Dylan asked the audience - and the graduates in particular - what they envisioned when thinking about success. He asked each student to look around at each other and picture what success will look like for each of their classmates.
Do you think of fame? Fortune? Good health? Longevity? A decent house? A nice truck? Or do you think of maybe somebody who just has a happy family life and gives back to their community?
A very interesting proposition since success is different for each person.
He profiled three of our fellow classmates from '95, and - though he changed names to protect the "innocent" - I knew who he was referencing. He highlighted the different paths that students take after graduation, and how success can look very different for each graduate. It was a speech that really resonated with me, as I have long held the belief that college is not necessarily for everyone.
Dylan featured one of our classmates who didn't go to college after graduating from high school. Rather, he tried his hand at professional motor-cross. When that didn't work out, he took a job in construction. One thing led to another, and he found himself owning his own business. Eventually, he sold that business and made a PILE of money. Moral: he found financial success (through lots of hard work, and some failures along the way), but he did it in a way that was counter to the route that many of our classmates took.
Anyway, if you've got 10 minutes please do check out my pal Dylan. It's a great speech, and I think that he may have found (yet another) talent on which he can capitalize!
Oh, and congrats to all of you high school seniors out there that are graduating!