Great stuff -- Chris Matthews' commencement address.
"I've come here today with five bits of advice on how to get where you want to get, follow your dreams, keep your values and make good on the best hunch you ever had about yourself. William Butler Yeats once said "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." I'm here to light your fire.
Rule One: Get yourself in the game.
Ever watch a little kid standing along courtside while the big kids play basketball? When a ball goes out of bounds, he or she runs for it and passes it back in. As time goes on, when an older kid has to get home for dinner, somebody yells "Hey! Wanna play?"
That's it, the heart of it really: the first rule of building a life and a career. Whatever your ambitions, whatever the field you want to enter, if you want to play a game go to where it's played. If you want to be a lawyer, go to law school. If you can't get into the best law school, get into the best one you can. Same with medical or business school or whatever. If you want to get into TV, get yourself a job, any job in the business. The important thing is to get your seat at the table. Newspapers, same deal. Name your dream; there's a place people are pursuing it.
Three things happen when you get in the door:
You learn how the game is played but also how the players act with each other. You learn the game's manner, its cadence, its culture.
Second, you meet people. Let's face it, it's not who you know, it's who you get to know.
Third, and this is the big one, you're there when the lightning strikes! ..
Rule Two: If you want something, ask for it! Some people aren't going to like the cut of your jib. But those who do will change your life. They will open doors for you. If nine people will say "No" to you, then ask ten.
It's like dating.
But just as it takes only one strike to transform a prospector into a gold miner, it only takes one "Yes" to turn a proposal into a marriage.
There is magic that results when a person invests in you. He becomes a big-time investor in your success, a stockholder in your dreams.
Because, when you ask someone for help, you are implicitly asking him to place a bet on you. The more people you get to bet on you, the larger your network of investors and the shorter the odds.
This isn't Pollyanna I'm talking. It comes from the smartest man who ever wrote about politics, or human nature for that matter, Niccol� Machiavelli. "Men are by nature as much bound by the benefits they confer as by those they receive."
"If you want to make a friend," said Benjamin Franklin, a fellow who grows wiser the older I get, "let someone do you a favor."
Know that and you know an awful lot about life.
How did I get to be a Presidential speechwriter? First I got a no-big-deal job at the White House. I got the tip on that from someone I worked with in the Senate, an ex-girlfriend actually.
As for the speechwriting job? I had met a guy while working in a Congressional campaign in Brooklyn. We've been friends ever since. He introduced me to a Presidential speechwriter. When that fellow moved up to chief speechwriter, he put me up for his job.
There's a false assumption out there that talent will surely be recognized. Just get good at something and the world will beat a path to your door.
Don't believe it. The world is not checking in with us to see what skills we've picked up, what idea we've concocted, what dreams we carry in our hearts.
When a job opens up, whether it's in the chorus line or on the assembly line, it goes to the person standing there. It goes to the eager beaver the boss sees when he looks up from his work: the pint-sized kid standing at the basketball court in the playground waiting for one of the older boys to head home for supper. "Hey, kid, wanna play?" That's life .. ".
MORE -- Chris Matthews 2004 Commencement Address -- Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Posted by Greg Ransom
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