As students get ready to decide whether or not to go off to college I remembered this essay I wrote a while ago. ..........
I frequently ask prospective students what area of study they’re interested in. There are all kinds of responses back as you might imagine, but sometimes there seems to be more anguish than necessary, more uncertainty, more worry or a nervous blank look and no answer at all. Here’s a small hypothetical "welcome speech" to first-year students to help them think about how to stake out personal and intellectual turf. It posses that there is an important question that they will eventually confront.
Some time from now you will be asked a question. It may be eight years or fourteen months or two decades, but it will come. It will be the most important question you will ever answer. You may have studied it in school or you may never have thought about it at all. Either way you'll think, why are they asking me, but they are and you'll need to answer, because there'll be no one else.
Your response will save the life of your friend, your lover, your next door neighbor, the person at work you hate. Your answer will save the company you work for, the neighborhood you live in, your daughters school, the little park just down the street, New England.
The person who asks you the question will be your younger sister, the guy in the elevator, your best friend, the CEO of the company you work for, the woman in the car across the street, the governor of Massachusetts. They'll be depressed, crying, fearful, in pain, desperate, stoic, angry, or simply have a blank look on their face. You won't have time to look it up, ask someone else, talk it over, think it through or read about it on-line. Everything will stop. People will turn to hear your answer. Faces will lift. It will get a little quiet. Suddenly it will be now.
The question you will be asked is, "what should we do?" Your answer will change the course of your life and the lives of others for better or for worse. Will you be able to give that answer?
Is this actually going to happen? Maybe. But here's the "really scary" version – perhaps more likely is that no one will ask at all. People will just stand there frozen, uncertain, bewildered, baffled, trapped in the middle of a horrible, desperate situation and simply wait for something to happen. That's when you need to lead. Unasked, you have to step forward and say what you think we should do. Answering the unasked desperate question is the hardest thing in the world to do and the most important, but to be able to do it you have to prepare – starting now.
So that's why we're really here, to get you to a point later in life (maybe only weeks from now), where you could answer that question or even more importantly the unasked desperate question. If you want to change the world you need to get ready. You may not think you're up to it, but everyone here is. However, if you're just here to have a good time, later you're not going to be much help to anyone because you won't be able to answer the question – you didn't prepare, you didn’t learn enough, you didn’t grow, you didn’t gain enough confidence. You'll have small ideas and that great desperate question will just hang there – unanswered.
So what is it that you’ll have to learn to be able to answer that question? What is it that you’ll have to develop in yourself to be able to stand up and respond? Who will you have to become to be able to do all of it? There’s your curriculum. There are your learning goals. Find the questions that you want to be responsible for in the future. Don’t pick something trivial, choose to be responsible for ideas and actions that are truly important. Notice it’s not only knowing what the answer is, it’s also being able to convey that information to others in a persuasive way and do that right now.
Yes you could always just follow the crowd. Let them decide. But the crowd is frequently wrong due to lack of understanding or more pessimistically they’re led by hidden actors who don’t have our best interests in mind.
But wait, there’s one more thing. Not only do you have to be able to answer the question, you also have to be there, don’t you. Step forward. Get on the front line. Always be at the head of the crowd. Not only is it a better view, but you’ll understand more and have more influence. One day in the future, right there, right then, it could, you know, all come down to just you.
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