Tag Archives: speech

Ego in the way

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This is one of the most enjoyable graduation addresses that I’ve ever heard. Rick Rigsby’s “Lessons from a third grade dropout” shares some wonderful insights with a delivery that leaves you wanting more.

Two ‘truth bombs’ that he delivers are the following quotes:

“Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity.”

And,

“Pride is the burden of a foolish person.”

I see it more and more, people’s egos and their pride get in the way of many things ranging from being a lifelong learner, to being a decent human being. Rick got to experience the wisdom of a 3rd grade dropout who was one of the smartest people he knew. That’s a gift, an opportunity for insight.

We often see social media posts where someone mistreats or underestimates a person with lower social stature, and then learns the errors of their ways when this person is smarter or more helpful than expected… or that ‘lowly’ person outwits the more affluent or pompous person.

This ‘underdog as hero’ message is prevalent in movies too.

The other message in these stories is ‘don’t be a jerk’.

Despite all these social media and movie ‘lessons’ we see shared, there seems to be no shortage of egotistical and pride filled people in the world. In fact many people think you need this to be great. Where would some of the most noted (and notorious) athletes, movie stars, and politicians be without there inflated egos? You don’t get attention when you are selfless. Maybe you can, and maybe if more people did, this would trend more, and the big egos would get less attention. Maybe.

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But there’s a lot more to this speech than just those two quotes. There are also valuable lessons on failure.

“Wisdom will come to you from the unlikeliest of sources. A lot of times from failure. When you hit rock-bottom, remember this: while you’re struggling, rock-bottom can also be a great foundation on which to build, and on which to grow.

I’m not worried that you’ll be successful, I’m worried that you won’t fail from time to time. The person that gets up off the canvas and keeps growing, that’s the person that will continue to grow their influence.”

Truth.

Watch the video and enjoy this inspirational speech.

Idiots, cruelty, and kindness

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Sometimes I hear something and I think, ‘I wish I said that’. This video ends that way. It doesn’t start that way, I almost stopped listening, but I’m glad I waited past the comedy to get to the real message.

“Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being.”

And so,

“…the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”

Prove your intelligence. Be kind.

Grad Commencement Speech 2023

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This was my speech at our Inquiry Hub Secondary Grad. As I mentioned a couple days ago, there were unexpected technical issue, and so I can’t share the video, and I’m just sharing text with slides below. The 4th and 5ht slides were gifs, but I’ve just included still photos. I enjoy writing a new speech each year, and this is my 8th one. While I didn’t share a title for it, it did have a title in my notes. Here is “Technology and Community”, shared Wednesday June 21, 2023 at Inlet Theatre in Port Moody, with the grads and families of Inquiry Hub Secondary School:

It was the summer of 1985.

I was 17, and I got to see a movie called Back to the Future when it was in the theatre, not streaming on Netflix. It’s a story about a boy named Marty who was the same age as me… and about the same age as our grads now. Marty went 30 years into the past and had all kinds of adventures and misadventures.

Then a few years later Back to the Future 2 came out, and this time Marty went 30 years into the future… all the way to October of 2015. That future he supposedly went to was almost 8 years ago now.

In Marty’s version of 2015 Nike had shoes with power laces that tightened themselves. There were 3D hologram advertisements, hoverboards, and of course, flying cars. While Nike has made a version of the power laces, we still have a way to go before any of these technologies are as accessible and pervasive as in Back to the Future 2’s version of 2015, and I’m not sure we’ll even get there by 2045?

It’s hard to imagine these things when personally, I’m still waiting for a phone battery that will last me a whole day.

I remember reading that we tend to overestimate the changes that will happen in the short term and underestimate the changes that will occur in the long term. That may be so, but what we define as short and long term now tends to be shrinking. I’m not sure we are going to see hovercrafts and flying cars circulating in our communities any time soon, but…

I do marvel at how fast technology is moving, and the world of Artificial Intelligence is quickly advancing from being good at playing board games and doing math, to doing some really interesting things.

We have AI tools that create amazing art,

write computer code,

and even write grad speeches… and while I wrote these words myself, ((really)), many of the visuals I’m sharing are the product of AI. My point though is that if I told you just 4 years ago, when our grads were in Grade 9, that we would have this technology before they graduated, you probably wouldn’t have believed me.

Our grads are headed into a world where, just in the last few months, job descriptions that have been the same for years are now being redefined. A world where they will probably get into automated cars that drive themselves. And a world where living to be 100 could be as common as living to 65 years old today.

I’ve worked for the same company for 25 years now… I am not sure many, if any, of our grads are headed on that same path. Times change. Technologies change. Jobs change. How we interact with the world changes.

But I hope one thing stays the same. I hope that our grads remain as kind, accepting, and caring as they are today. I hope that they find a community of people to grow old with that is as wonderful as they are… and remember, you are going to grow really, really old! One of the pleasures of working at a small school is getting to know students well, and getting to really see how students interact with each other in a quaint, caring environment. Our grads are fun, quirky, and unique. They want to do well in school and they are willing to work hard. For some of them this came easy. For others, they were initially dragged along by their peers and teachers, but they are ‘there’ now.

That’s the amazing thing about the journey through high school, it’s a hero’s journey. It’s not an easy path, it’s not supposed to be.

On an Inquiry Hub student’s journey through school, we ask them to do really challenging things… from Mr. Soiseth’s Philosophy classes, to cross-grade Shakespearian acting and filmmaking, to designing their own year-long courses. It’s not unusual for a student to spend significantly more time on an inquiry than they are expected to. And our students leave school doing more presentations in a year than most students do in their entire high school career. Even here we see the respect and kindness of our students, who make an excellent audience and provide considerate and thoughtful feedback to each other.

Technology can change us. It can change our careers. It can change our lifespan. It doesn’t have to change what kind of people we are, and how we treat one another. I’m proud of who our grads are today, and you should be too.

It doesn’t matter what job they end up with, if they will be driving flying cars, or buying their kids hoverboards in the future. What matters is that they will be a positive influence on their community. They will be thoughtful, kind, and considerate of others. They will be the kind of people you want to be around. And that, that is the highest compliment I can give them.

Honoured guests, parents, teachers, and students, I present to you Inquiry Hub’s esteemed and wonderful graduating class of 2023!

Grad speech

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For our small school we invite the entire community to watch our grad. So since our first grad in 2016, I’ve written a completely different grad speech each year. I have a former student who has seen at least the last 5, and he is very honest about what he thinks of them… and I value his feedback.

This year I’m struggling with the topic. I usually have the frame of the speech completed by now, if not the whole thing written. I’m still deciding on my theme. So, tonight I write, tomorrow I rehearse, and Wednesday I am on stage sharing it. I don’t mind a tight timeline, but I do wish I was a little further along right now.

In the end, it’s not about me, it’s about the grads… I just want to share something not too long, and respectful to our grads and our community. And maybe, if I’m lucky, get a small chuckle or two. Wish me luck!

Take 6 minutes to watch

KENYA’S AMBASSADOR TO UN MARTIN KIMANI’S SPEECH ON UKRAINE-RUSSIA CRISIS WOWS THE WORLD!!

https://youtu.be/ZxZlaiuicYM

It is seldom that I hear a world leader who understands that we can not live in the past. There are so many places in the world where a challenging history of strife and unrest cause an unstable future. Disputed borders create unstable societies and civil unrest. Countless people suffer and die unnecessarily.

War and force are not the answer.

“We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new ways of domination and oppression.”

This message by Martin Kimani needs to be shared with all world leaders. It is timeless and will apply to our world for years, even decades to come.

Voices, Ambition, and Action

“Today we need the correct mix of voices, ambition, and action. Do some leaders in this world believe that they can survive and thrive on their own? Have they not learned from the pandemic? Can there be peace and prosperity if one third of the world literally prospers, and the other two thirds of the world live under siege, and face calamitous threats to our well-being? What the world needs now my friends, is that which is in the ambit of less than 200 persons, who are willing and prepared to lead. Leaders must not fail those who elect them to lead.” ~ PM Mia Mottley

Take a few minutes out of your day and listen to Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley’s entire speech, which not only shares the eloquence above, but also an attainable strategy to fight global warming.


Well beyond enjoying the lilt of her Bajan 🇧🇧 accent, reminding me of home, this entire speech is a calling to those in power to take action on climate change.

— — —

I also really appreciate when intelligent people use a word I don’t know, and then I look up the definition to discover that it is indeed a better word than any that I would have used:

ambit

ăm′bĭt

noun
  1. Sphere or scope, as of influence. synonym: range.
  2. An external boundary; a circuit.
  3. Compass or circuit; circumference; boundary: as, the ambit of a fortification or of a country.

Pronouncing words ‘well’

I drew up in Barbados and came to Canada at 9, just before the start of Grade 5. It was challenging because no one understood my accent, and questioned even if I was speaking English. My sister had the same issue, and after 2 notices home, my mom had to go to the school to tell them that she didn’t belong in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes because she only spoke English.

I struggled a lot to be understood, having a ‘I’m not in Kansas’ moment happening in October, after I was moved in a seating plan. I was placed next to the only black kid in the class. This was comforting for me, coming from the Caribbean where most my classmates were black. On the first day sitting together, something happened that I was excited about so I turned to him and blurted out what I wanted to say in my full Bajan accent. He looked back at me, deadpan expression, and said, “I don’t know what the f*** you just said,” and turned to talk to someone else.

I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Oh man, even my brother doesn’t get me. I’m in big trouble!’

That was a big moment, I worked diligently to break my accent after that. I chose a horrible strategy of saying ‘STOP’ in my head after each word I spoke, to prevent me from linking and slurring words together. This did help me say things more clearly, and made it much easier for Canadians to understand me, but it left me in a catatonic state for seconds at a time. My conversation would be so much slower than my mind, that I would literally get lost telling a story.

My mouth would fall 5,6, even 7 sentences behind my mind, behind my regular speech pace, and I’d get lost. I would be saying a sentence and the next sentence in my brain would be 7 sentences later, and I’d forget how I got there, and even why the story was relevant. I’d freeze, on the outside, but inside I was a hot mess as I scrambled to figure out what to say next. I would literally block out everything in this panicked internal state, leaving the external interaction I was having. I can remember my mom saying to me, after a comatose moment, in her Bajan-Trinidadian accent, “Boy, wass-a-matta wit-chu? You on drugs?”

I still sometimes struggle to find words, decades later, and I know it stems from me trying to talk in a way that was completely alien to me. I joke that I am ESL and my second language is also English.

That said, while my parents tell me that my transition to Canada was really challenging and that I struggled a lot. Beyond that not in Kansas moment, my memories of that grade are almost all positive. That’s a testament to the resilience of kids.

Many aren’t as fortunate as me though, and I was not in a situation where I had to try to learn a whole new language. I have so much respect for people who move to another country and have to fully immerse themselves in a language foreign to them, and often they aren’t given the opportunity to engage with many people who are native speakers because those native speakers don’t make half the effort to converse with them that they have to make.

But going back to the idea of English being my first and second language, many people pronounce words ‘wrong’ or ‘not well’ because that’s the way they learned the words. I still have word choices and phrases that I use, that Canadians don’t use. A simple example, I struggle to use the word ‘beer’ without sounding like I’m saying ‘bear’. It makes for a strange offering when a friend comes over.

While that example is just a wrong pronunciation, when an entire group of people say a word a certain way… it’s not wrong. It’s not miss pronounced, it’s an example of how words evolve over time.


We shouldn’t be too quick to make judgements about how different groups use words in different ways than we do. A perfect example would be, imagine going to the southern states and every time someone said, “Y’all” instead of “You all”, you corrected them and told them they were saying it wrong?

There are many words and phrases used today that we should be far more accepting of. Less judgmental of. The words are being pronounced well, just not the way you/we pronounce them.

An Annual Event

Last night we held iHub Annual where we highlighted some student performances, our Ollie Awards, and our grads.

Our Ollie Awards are our awards based on our motto: Dream – Create – Learn, and students from all grades and all levels of academic achievement can receive them.

The show opens at 4:45 with a song co-written and performed by students for the annual. My speech to the grads is at 39:40, and our Valedictorian and Spirit of Inquiry award winner’s speech is at 49:17.

This is a presentation put together with so much student work, and it comes off quite polished. It is a celebration of the year that was, and for a few moments while watching it, I forgot about the challenges this year presented.

I can’t wait for the opportunity to run this event live again, but watching last night from the comfort of my home, I was thrilled to see students in the chat enjoying the show, and I was grateful that I wasn’t in a stuffy theatre on one of the hottest days on record.

It truly is remarkable to work in a school where students know that it’s their job to Dream and Create, as well as to Learn.

Shallow understanding… thoughts from MLK Jr.

Monday was Martin Luther King Day in the US. I took the time on Sunday to reread his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail“, and a specific paragraph keeps coming to mind,

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.“

The last two sentences chill me,

“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.“

I think about how few extremists there are in the world, despite how much media coverage they get. Beyond the news, most people are not exposed to extremists. We are all exposed to moderates. So, in the day to day living of most people, hate is not something we see, however shallow understanding is.

In many places there is tolerance masquerading as acceptance. This to me is what slows down progress. It’s not the wing-nuts on the extremes spewing dogmatism… Although their stance plays a role in allowing others to justify their tolerance as acceptance, since that tolerance can be justified as moderate. But it’s the complacent, shallow, (lukewarm) moderates that hinder genuine acceptance… because this population is huge. This population is blind or ignorant to their own prejudice; this population performs daily interactions that infringe on the true acceptance of ‘others’, without knowing it.

Prejudice sits within all of us. We discern differences with different weights, but we can not pretend we don’t see differences. We can decide what value we put on those differences. We can not pretend the differences don’t exist, or that we don’t see them.

“Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.“

Cassie and Katie – Public Speaking 2011

Both of my girls did a great job with their speeches! 

Katie was a finalist in our non-judged Junior Public Speaking Celebration, on the morning of June 9th, 2011.
Cassie was 2nd in the Grade 5/6 category of the Senior Public Speaking Finals, later that afternoon.

‘My Day with Boon the Elephant’ by Katie Truss

‘Procrastination’ by Cassie Truss