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A Column of personal opinion by John Rinaldi, Founder and Owner of Real Time Automation.
No, not Harvard, MIT or Stanford. Not my alma maters, Connecticut or Marquette. Not even my Brother-in-law’s plumbing school invited me to make a commencement address. So I stand here, all dressed, address in hand with no place to go. But if I had been asked, here’s what I would have said.
Class of 2017, faculty, parents and honored guests, I am grateful for this invitation to speak to you today. I will endeavor to say something that might be remembered tomorrow morning even as the results of tonight’s revelry manifest themselves.
I come here today with two purposes in mind. One to make this speech short and succinct so you can begin that revelry, and two, to welcome you to the real world and provide you with some rules of the road so that you have a better chance of staying on course.
Today is obviously an end, but it’s more of a beginning. It’s now a time in which you will have to fend for yourself. Starting today there won’t be folks around to protect you from disappointment, to cheer your every action, to ease your pain, cater to your happiness and plan for your future. Today you begin to walk the difficult road of life.
I’ll be honest with you. It’s a road filled with disappointments. You may unfairly lose a job, a business or a home. You may be devastated by a lost love. It’s pretty much guaranteed that illness and death will strike those close to you. And many other tragedies may befall you. But on that road, you also find laughter, passion, beauty, happiness, and, if you’re lucky, love. In other words, starting today you’re going to experience life and its wondrous variety of disappointments and delights.
Let me introduce you to a woman by the name of Lauren Prezioso. A woman on a beach, on a fine Monday afternoon in New South Wales, Australia. When a mother screamed that her two sons were drowning in the strong current, Lauren Prezioso fearlessly rushed into the water to battle the dangerous undertow. And she saved those two young lives. All the more extraordinary as, 22 days later, she brought her own son into the world. Yes, she was nine months pregnant!
A hero. No doubt about it. Fearless as Alvin York in the Meuse-Argonne or Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg. But heroes today are something unfashionable, something that’s been diminished in our culture. It’s common today to denigrate our heroes. The founding fathers? Slave owners. That preacher over there? Had an affair. That soldier? Well, there was this other soldier that committed an awful crime.
The truth is that all our heroes are real people, and real people have feet of clay. But when we focus on that, we rob ourselves of the wisdom, inspiration, example and call to action that heroes like Lauren Prezioso provide. These heroes are ordinary people that in a critical moment do extraordinary things. But what led to these acts of heroism? Were these people just born to be heroes? Are they somehow different from those of us in this room today?
David Brooks, the famous New York Times columnist, coined the term “eulogy virtues” – the virtues that we want to be spoken about us at our wake; courage, faith, friendship, compassion, and more. But often we instead focus on our resume virtues— what we bring to the marketplace. Unlike resume virtues, eulogy virtues are built slowly, over time, with moral and spiritual decisions.
And that’s the secret. The secret of heroism. Know your values and live them. Live with integrity every day. Start with simple decisions. A simple decision to return a lost wallet. A simple decision to tell the truth. A simple decision to honor your marital vows. Simple decisions build the self-control muscle that strengthens and fortifies you for the really hard ones. And if you do that, and you ever have an Alvin York or a Joshua Chamberlain moment when you have to charge ahead under fire, you’ll be ready, and you just might change the world.
Thank You. Good Luck and Godspeed.
- John
     
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