Bill Hogue, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, University of South Carolina
The satirist Stephen Colbert is a popular commencement speaker. He’s a funny guy, and his speeches draw lots of laughs, just as we would expect. But commencement tradition also demands that the speaker dispense advice to the graduates. So, what wisdom does Colbert offer to the next generation of leaders seated before him?
Follow your dreams.
Service is love made visible.
Life is an improv.
We’ll explore Colbert’s observations about service and improvisation (improv) in later blog posts. Today, let’s look a little more closely at what he says about “Follow your dreams.”
Colbert addressed the graduating class at Northwestern University, his alma mater, in 2011. His remarks are transcribed and captured online. His first piece of advice arrives about fifteen minutes into his speech, and he brings down the house: “You have been told to follow your dreams. But . . . what if it’s a stupid dream?”
He goes on to recount his own youthful dreams of cultivating a distinguished beard, drinking tea from a samovar, and reciting Shakespeare on the street. He concludes by reminding his audience: “Thankfully, dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses.”
Everybody I know has dreams—publicly stated or privately held, personal or professional, for themselves or for others. Like Colbert, many of us are grateful that dreams can change. I was a twenty-year-old private in the U.S. Army when Frank Shorter stunned the world by capturing the gold medal for the United States in the Olympic Marathon. I had run track and cross-country in high school. Yes, my performances were undistinguished, but I had done well enough to earn my athletic letter. In the afterglow of Shorter’s momentous triumph, I convinced myself that I had shown sufficient athletic promise to begin my own pursuit of Olympic glory. That was my new dream.
Check my resume. You’ll notice that there’s no Olympic medal listed. That’s not due to false modesty. Over a period of years I trained sufficiently to compete in a 26.2-mile race. Alas, during that first marathon I lost twelve pounds, hit the wall at mile 20, and finished over an hour behind the winner. I thought I was gonna die. My second marathon was about the same. I was forced to confront the cold, hard reality: I had neither the talent nor the intense and sustained focus needed to compete at the top levels of regional races. The athletic gifts and commitment required to compete nationally or internationally were light years beyond my reach. I had to relinquish my dream.
Colbert is wise enough to know that many dreams are relinquished over time. He said as much to the graduating class at Northwestern: “Whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed, and you’re not some loser. But just as importantly . . . if you do get your dream, you are not a winner.”
I doubt that I would have understood Colbert’s point at age twenty. In my view at the time, falling short of achieving my dreams was failure, and failure did mean that I was a loser. Colbert seems to know the twenty-year-old mind pretty well. He went on to tell the graduates: “You cannot win improv. And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next, and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life – even when it might look like you’re winning.”
I understand now. With age has come at least a thimble’s worth of wisdom and acceptance. My dream was to stand before the world on the top step of the victory stand and clutch hard-won gold to my heart, eyes brimming as I faced my country’s flag and heard the stirring sounds of the anthem. That will never happen. But in its place was left a lifelong love of distance running and the ability, forty-something years later, to do a 5K run with my son at my side and to dream anew that my little grandsons might join us some day. I challenge anyone to suggest that this outcome makes me a loser. And to Colbert’s point, neither does it make me a winner over others just because circumstances of good health and good fortune and a good son allow me, at sixty-three years old, to jog through the streets of my neighborhood.
So, what about you? What were your dreams in days gone by? What has become of them? What are your dreams today, and what might they be tomorrow? And how can our personal dreams help us realize our professional dreams too?
We’d love for you to come back in a couple of weeks. Please join us in The Professional Development Commons as we take a look at Colbert’s contention that service is love made visible and life is an improv.