Success is in hands of grads

With tassels turning and mortarboards flying this past week and this, marking another graduation season for everyone from kindergartners to doctoral students, it’s time to exhort those graduates — particularly those completing their high school education — to go out and make a difference in the world.

It is a familiar appeal.

No matter the speaker, no matter the colors of the caps and gowns, high school graduation is a time for young women and men to grasp the reins of their lives in their hands and gallop into the future. We picture them, in this metaphor, as graceful riders charging over mountains and through valleys to high ground on the other side.

The fact is, some of them won’t even get on the horse, letting the race of life just go on without them. Some will fall off when they try to mount the horse named Success. Some will get knocked off by a branch on a tree called Adversity before traveling very far. Others will turn off established paths and find fulfillment in areas they had not considered when they clasped that new diploma in hand.

Such is life.

So why do we exhort, even though we know many will fall short of the lofty goals to which they aspire as new graduates? Because without those goals, there will be no successes, no mountains climbed, no achievement to be found on the higher ground.

In 1973, a computer nerd named Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside School and entered Harvard. He might have been just another Harvard dropout when he left college in 1975 to start Microsoft. He wasn’t. Gates had lofty goals. The path he took to achieve them was no doubt different from when he donned the lion-crested robes of Lakeside, but achieve he did.

Wasilla’s own Gov. Sarah Palin wore the red and white of Wasilla High School when she graduated from WHS in 1982. Her degree in communications and journalism five years later and a stint working in that field gave no indication that she would be the executive officer of the 49th state. But she had goals that marriage and a family didn’t displace.

As we exhort the Class of 2008, we would remind them that life is an ever-changing adventure, where our success need not be measured by our wealth or our status, but by our own sense of accomplishment.

We wish for each of the graduates great success.