My Message to My YouthBuilders at Graduation

I went a little off the cuff during the speech but the written version tells the same story.  Enjoy and please share this message with any 2012 graduate that you may know.

YouthBuild Class of 2012 from Lyle Silverman on Vimeo.

Good evening students, family members, friends, NJCDC family, and our YouthBuild supporters.

It is such a great pleasure of mine to reflect on how much these young people in front of you have accomplished this year and it is with indescribable pride, that I congratulate them and wish them the best on their next challenges in life.

Recently there was a commencement speech on the news from the son of a well-known author recently.  The high school teacher, David McCullough, told graduates, “You’re not special.”  Essentially because everyone is special and something like that.

Mr. McCullough’s speech prompted me to narrow the whole year down and leave you all with three messages today. 

The first is that it is so important for you to follow your dreams, whatever they may be and whatever they turn into.  This guy was correct.  Everyone is special, everyone has their own set of skills and no one else can lay claim to that exact same skillset.  You will always have something unique in your arsenal that makes you different. 

So with that unique skillset, you need to find your niche in this world and just try be the very best that you can be at whatever you do.  And even more than that, find enjoyment from that work and ensure that you are doing what is best for your health and your happiness in this world.

Follow your dreams and know that if you put in the effort, you can get exactly what you always want in life.  It may not always look exactly as you imagined it but in the end, it will be what you wanted all along because you will have chased down your goals and reaped any and all of the rewards just from putting in the effort.

My next message, which I’m sure you students will love, is about reading…  Just do it.  I already told you the secret that so as long as you choose to read what you want, you WILL benefit from it.  You will become smarter.  You will develop useful skills as a result.  30 minutes a day.  Just read something.  Anything.  And reflect on it.  Reflect on the world around you and reflect on how you are living in it.

Simply thinking will make you smarter.  So read, think, write…  Do anything that puts your brain to work and I promise that you WILL reap the benefits.

My last message refers to what Mr. Smith keeps in the back of our minds every day, and that is the message of service.  Do not forget it.  Service to the community.  Service to those who you can assist.  To Family and friends.  And to those that you don’t even know.

Do not forget how important service can be in your lives.  Remember the feelings you had when you finished building that playground and then got to watch the young kids play any day you walked down Slater St. 

And remember the looks on the kids faces at the Family Center whenever you up and see them here at 32 Spruce.  Think about the people whose apartments you will have built.  Now I want you to just reflect on the appreciation, the kindness, and the support shown toward you from all those who you have assisted in some way over the course of the year.  You cannot buy those feelings; those feelings come from a sense of knowing you’re doing something that’s bigger than you.  You are making someone else’s life so much better, and you do so because you have already made yourselves become great. 

Bill Gates once said in his commencement speech to Harvard Students that his mother had left him one last bit of wisdom by sharing this with Bill’s soon to be wife before their wedding.  His mother was ill from cancer at the time.

“From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

Now it is true that you all of you were not given much for the better part of your lives.  And that was obviously unfortunate and some might say unfair.  But that is true no longer.  You now have been given an entire arsenal of tools and life lessons that you can use to achieve the success that YOU want.

I am going to issue you the same challenge Mr. Gates issued to that Harvard graduating class.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it.

 If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal.  But you don’t have to do that to make an impact.  For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don’t let complexity stop you.  Be activists.  Take on the big inequities.  It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You owe it to everyone that has supported you along the way to do your best to share your new wealth of knowledge with others so that they, and you, may deploy those tools and lessons in worthy causes.

This city, this country, and this world needs game-changers and you each have developed the potential to be just that, thanks to the commitment that you made to yourselves and others over this past year.  Keep being leaders.  Keep being game-changers.  And Keep being success stories, just as you have done so here today.

Congratulations ladies and gentleman, this is one of the proudest moments of my life because of you.  You should all be so proud of yourselves.

Thank you.