Greetings to Dr. Hall, Mayor Shirley Franklin, members of the Board of Education, members of the Atlanta City Council, Carver principals and all other distinguished guests.
Most importantly, congratulations to the entire graduating class of 2009 and to your families and teachers whose pride fills this building today. Give yourselves a hand.
I'm honored to be your commencement speaker at this very special occasion.
Four years ago, George Washington Carver High School began a bold experiment to become the New Schools at Carver. In a way, the members of the class of 2009 were the laboratory scientists and the guinea pigs for that experiment. You had the courage to try something new to take a risk to invent.
Today we all bear witness to your success, as you become Carver's legacy graduating class.
My family has been a proud supporter of Atlanta Public Schools through our family foundation. We've been fortunate to be able to collaborate with Dr. Hall, who's been recognized nationally for her achievements at APS most recently as Superintendent of the Year. And we have had the strong support of Mayor Franklin, whose commitment to education has been a hallmark of her administration.
Back in 2004, we began a partnership to help make the New Schools at Carver the model of what a high-performing high school could be. My family and the foundation staff have spent time on your campus, and we've built a special relationship with this graduating class through our Pathways to Success program. Our goal has been to support you, your families, your teachers and your administrators as you planned your individual paths to success after high school.
Now that day has arrived.
You're here tonight because you have been successful. You've worked hard. You've overcome obstacles.
As a class, you have many accomplishments to be proud of:
- Eighty-five percent of you have been accepted into a two- or four-year college;
- Together, you've already earned more than $18 million in scholarships and more than 1,000 college credits;
- Your class has received the largest number of athletic scholarships in Carver's history, but the majority of that $18 million is in academic scholarships;
- And, you've been accepted at some of America's most elite colleges, including Emory, Georgia Tech, Cornell, Morehouse, Spelman and Howard, among many others.
But my message tonight is not about the games you've already won as important as they are. After the Falcons win a game, our coaches have a "24-hour rule" when it comes to bragging rights. After that, players are not permitted to discuss last week's game. They must focus 100 percent on the challenge ahead next week's game.
I want to talk tonight about how you can prepare for all your games ahead how you can compete in the Super Bowl of Life.
This message is for each one of you every graduate here tonight. Families, teachers, administrators you can listen in. But I'm here tonight to talk one-on-one with every graduate and, hopefully, to help you prepare for a successful future.
Whether the next step on your pathway to success is college or career, technical training, a job search or voluntary service, you'll need the same tools in your toolbox.
I want to share with you three of those tools that I think are the secrets to success:
- A curious mind
- A competitive spirit, and
- A compassionate heart
In a world that is changing as rapidly as ours where new knowledge is being created every minute we must all be lifelong learners. That's true whether you're headed to college in the fall or about to enter the workforce.
Walt Disney once said, "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
Believe it or not, most of you will have at least three careers during your lifetime. That doesn't mean three different jobs. That means three completely different pursuits. Some of them will be in fields that haven't yet been invented.
So how will you prepare yourselves to be ready when those new opportunities arrive? How will you keep learning, questioning, investigating the world around you and challenging yourselves intellectually?
When Bernie Marcus and I founded The Home Depot in 1978, the world was a different place. If we had continued to do business the same way in 1998 that we did in 1978, we would have been complete failures.
We had to stay in tune with home ownership trends. With new product development. With the growing diversity of the U.S. population. With the growth of the industry. With supply chain innovations. With our competitors. With the nuances of each market we served in the United States and Canada.
In short, we couldn't be complacent when we were doing well. We had to constantly learn and change.
Trust me, the learning just begins when you leave this building tonight.
Many of you are on the path to college and I hope you'll take full advantage of this precious opportunity. Still others of you will find you don't have to have a formal education to be a continuous learner. When I was at Home Depot, about 75 percent of our store managers and half of our officers didn't have college degrees.
The world is certainly a different place now than when we started Home Depot. But as Yogi Berra once said, "Just because everything is different, doesn't mean that anything has changed."
The character traits we looked for when we were hiring at Home Depot are the same ones I look for today in coaches, players and staff of the Atlanta Falcons. And the same ones I look for in my family foundation staff.
We look at the person.
Is this person trustworthy? Do they have character and integrity? Is he or she a team player? Will they continue to learn and grow?
Do they want to be the best? That's a true sign of a competitive spirit my tool number two to success.
I'm very competitive. I love competing in sports. I love competing in the world of business. And I love to win in both.
A competitive spirit makes you push yourself to be the best you can be. There's even a poster in my office about competition. It says, "There is no finish line."
What does that mean?
It means you push yourself hard, far beyond the limits of what you think you can achieve. That you're never satisfied. That you always look for ways to build on your success.
But competing isn't just about winning or about beating someone else. Competing is about overcoming obstacles and becoming your own personal best.
All of us have obstacles in our pathways to success. I know from where you sit, I seem to have a charmed life. After all, I started a Fortune 50 company and I own a professional football team.
Life must have been pretty easy, right? Not so fast.
My pathway wasn't determined at birth. In fact, some would say that the obstacles in my path might have prevented me from achieving the success I've had.
I didn't attend a fancy private school. I'm a proud graduate of New York City public schools. I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens and my father died when I was very young, so I was raised mostly in a single parent home. And, my partner Bernie Marcus, and I were fired from the company where we worked in California before we started Home Depot.
Now some of you are probably saying to yourselves, "Well that was then, and this is now." But no one's path is ever straight or without challenges.
Success is in understanding that your position at the starting gate doesn't limit where you end up in life's race. The Falcons' 2007 seasons was proof of that. It was a disaster from start to finish. But I never stopped believing that our Atlanta Falcons could be a championship team that fans could be proud of. And the 2008 season was proof that with hard work even the toughest obstacles could be overcome.
Having a competitive spirit doesn't just mean wanting to win. It's being willing to work hard to get there. The famous football coach Vince Lombardi once said, "The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary."
In fact, scientists have actually proven that nobody is great at anything without hard work and practice. There's solid scientific evidence showing that high level performance doesn't occur in any field without experience and practice. Much of what we attribute to innate talent is just plain old hard work.
Tiger Woods is the textbook example of the research. Because his father introduced him to golf at an early age and encouraged him to practice hard, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship at age 18.
Also in line with the findings, Tiger has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.
We have some of our own examples on the Falcons football team. They are even bigger winners because of the obstacles they've overcome. I think you'll agree with me.
David Irons is a third-year cornerback for the Falcons who led the team in special teams tackles in his rookie year. As a week-old infant, David was rushed to the hospital after an allergic reaction to his baby formula. He was close to death and his doctors feared he might have permanent brain damage.
David turned out to be a high school football star, but he was a slow learner and struggled academically. For years he was able to hide his disability until one day a high school teacher made him read aloud in class. When he couldn't read the assignment, she thought he was joking around, so she sent him to the principal.
That was when David began to address his learning disability.
After high school in Georgia, he played football at Butler Community College in Kansas and then Auburn University. At one point, struggling with classes, football and injuries, he wanted to quit. His dad convinced him to keep trying.
When he continued to struggle in college, he got a tutor. He says it seemed like 24 hours a day, but he worked hard and graduated with a degree in sociology.
In 2007, he was drafted by the Atlanta Falcons. Now he reaches out to youngsters with learning disabilities and encourages them to keep trying even when they don't think they can.
That's courage; that's a competitive spirit; that's a winner.
Falcons fullback Jason Snelling was also drafted in 2007. He was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was 15. He remembers as a teenager being afraid that his friends would find out about his condition.
When epilepsy forced Jason to sit out a year of football in college, he did a lot of soul searching and realized that if he wanted to get back on the field and do everything he wanted to do in life, he had to take control and confront his issues openly and vocally. That's why today he speaks out about the disease and helps kids with epilepsy see that they can do all the things they aspire to do in spite of their health issues. That's why he helps raise money for epilepsy programs and a search for a cure.
That's courage; that's a competitive spirit; that's a winner.
Jason Snelling and David Irons both have a competitive spirit that makes them winners on the field, but they have another quality that makes them winners in life:
They have compassionate hearts my third tool for success. Jason and David believe their own accomplishments don't mean a thing if their team doesn't win.
A former gymnastics coach, Dan Millman, wrote a book called "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior." In his book, he says that some of the most competitive athletes and achievers in the world, like Michael Jordan, see what they do from a team perspective.
That's true in sports. It's even truer in life.
Life is not an individual event. Every one of us is part of a "relay team." In our careers, in our families and in our communities we succeed or fail together. There are no age, class, social or ethnic dividers when it comes to working together for success. In fact, there's a danger in setting ourselves apart from, or above, others or of thinking we're entitled to everything we've gotten in life.
The truth is, everything we receive in life is a gift.
The love of our family.
The help of our friends.
Our health.
Our ability to study, to have fun, and to grow.
You've been blessed in ways you may not have thought of. Take this school, for example. You may think of Carver simply as the place you had to take tests or write papers. But this school would look like a palace to almost any child from Africa or Iraq.
You've been blessed, and so have I.
In my case, I was fortunate to have great success in the business world. But the real value of that success lies in what my family and I are able to give back to the community.
When I was growing up, my mother and father taught me that we are called to be our brother's keeper. To demonstrate that, they shared their scarce time and even scarcer dollars with people who had even less than we did. It's our responsibility to give back what we can to the world.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is What are you doing for others?'"
Each one of you members of the Class of 2009 have unique gifts and talents. You have the opportunity to use those gifts in important ways to make our world a better place.
I want to read to you the recent words of our President Barack Obama that express the quality of the compassionate heart.
He said, "You know, there's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us the child who's hungry, the steelworker who's been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help."
As you decide how you will help as you chart your pathway for achieving success in life I'd like to encourage you to carry with you my formula for real success:
A curious mind, a competitive spirit, and a compassionate heart.
Congratulations and best of luck in all you choose to do. In the words of that great Vulcan philosopher Spock, "Live long and prosper."
