Your Not Special.....and Neither Am I

A couple of weeks ago at a commencement exercise in Massachusets a popular teacher spoke to the graduates. Unlike most speakers at such events he told the students something you can rest assured that they are not used to hearing.

He told them that they were not special. He explained that while of course they were the pride of their parents eyes, and grandparents too, that the sheer volume of children that graduated each spring, had big dreams, went to college and moved on with their lives made them not special.

This is a conversation I have had with my own son, due to be a senior next year. It is not that I am not proud of him. I am. It is not that I do not think he works hard and should be commended for it. I do. It is simply this. My son is currently ranked 12th in a class of 340 kids. This is excellent. Far better than I ever did. That said all over the country there are kids that are ranked in the top ten percent of their schools. Are all of these students special. Perhaps? The question becomes however that if everyone is special than why are so many young people and frankly older people struggling.

Arguments can be made about the economy and our financial system and those from the right or left would have arguments that they feel strongly about. However the bottom line is this. Talent does not make you special. We all know someone who is very smart, super intelligent, who never gets to a level of success that we would equate with their gifts. Conversely we also know people who are in positions of success and power that we would struggle to ever identify how they reached that position.

Success in the world is made up of many factors. Talent, intelligence, attitude, social I Q, these are all factors but no one or even two of these will guarantee you success. Should we stand and tell our graduates that success is a crapshoot. No of course not. There are skills that translate well to success. Strangely some of our modern parenting techniques do not always help develop those talents. The ability to deal with adversity and disappointment is missing in many of our children. We do them no favors. In fact I would go so far that until a person has experienced such times we cannot really consider them special. The world is not, for most of us, easy.

Life is wonderful and I am blessed. If I could tell twenty year old me something though I would tell him, you are not special. Everyone has bad times, things go wrong. It is truly how you conduct yourself through these things that become the starting point for future success. Rarely does the roadmap we start on get us to our destination.

Graduates you are not special. You can be special. You, hopefully, will be special. As parents of young children we have to remember that learning to deal with disappointment, heartache, adversity and failure is a part of life. As a parent if you remove all the sharp edges of life, if you take away the consequences of mistakes that become teachable moments you need ask yourself what your goal is.

My son had a teachable moment the other day. In the end he was taught that you have to communicate and you have to communicate respectfully. Or....it could be that you walk to work. One and a half miles to work seems to me and some of my friends like a joke, heck we might have walked that to work every day. For my son however it was something he had a hard time fathoming that I had gone and left him without transportation and no way to get to work. This is a minor consequence of an action, he had ample time to get to work.

Our kids are not special to the world. We owe them that lesson. Trust me it is better heard and learned from us than from the mean old world.