PERFECT FAILURE

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO GRADUATING CLASS OF
THE BUCKLEY SCHOOL

June 10, 2009

When I was asked to give the commencement address to a
graduating class of 9th graders, I jumped at the chance. You see, I
have four teenagers of my own and I feel like this is the point in
my life when I am supposed to tell them something profound. So
thank you Buckley community for giving me this opportunity. I
tried this speech out on them last night and am happy to report that
none of them fell asleep until I was three quarters done.

When composing this message I searched my memory for my
same experience back in 1969 when I was sitting right where you
are. I realized that I could hardly remember one single speaker
from my junior high or high school days. Now that could be my
age. I’m old enough now that some days I can’t remember how old
I am. But it could also have been a sign of the times. Remember, I
was part of the student rebellion, and we did not listen to anything
that someone over 30 said because they were just too clueless. Or
so we thought.

Anyway, as I sat there considering this speech further, I
suddenly had a flashback of the one speaker who I actually did
remember from youthful days. He was a Shakespearean actor who
came to our school to extol the virtues of Shakespeare. He started
out by telling us that Shakespeare was not about poetry or romance
or love, but instead, was all about battle, and fighting and death
and war. Then he pulled out a huge sword which he began waving
over the top of his head as he described various bloody conflicts
that were all part and parcel of Shakespeare’s plays. Now being a
15-year old testosterone laden student at an all boys school, I
thought this was pretty cool. I remember thinking, “Yea, this guy
gets it. Forget about the deep meaning and messages in the words,
let’s talk about who’s getting the blade.”

As you can see, I have a similar sword which I am going to
stop waving over my head now, because A) I think you are
permanently scarred, and B) the headmaster looks like he is about
to tackle me and C) some of you, I can tell, are way too excited
about this sword, and you’re scaring me a little.

I’m here with you young men today because your parents
wanted me to speak to you about service—that is, serving others
and giving back to the broader community for the blessings that
you have received in your life. But that is a speech for a later time
in your life. Don’t get me wrong, serving others is really, really
important. It truly is the secret to happiness in life. I swear to God.
Money won’t do it. Fame won’t do it. Nor will sex, drugs,
homeruns or high achievement. But now I am getting preachy.

Today, I want to talk to you about the dirtiest word that any
of you 9th graders know. It’s a word that is so terrible that your
parents won’t talk about it; your teachers won’t talk about it; and
you certainly don’t ever want to dwell on it. But this is a
preparatory school, and you need to be prepared to deal with this
phenomenon because you will experience it. That is a guarantee.
Every single one of you will experience it not once but multiple
times, and every adult in this room has had to deal with this in its
many forms and manifestations. It’s the “F” word.

FAILURE. Failure that is so mortifying and so devastating
that it makes you try to become invisible. It makes you want to
hide your face, your soul, your being from everyone else because
of the shame. Trust me, boys—if you haven’t already tasted that,
you will. I am sure most of you here already have. AND IT IS
HARD. I know this firsthand, but I also know that failure was a
key element to my life’s journey.

My first real failure was in 1966 in the 6th grade. I played on
our basketball team, and I was the smallest and youngest kid on the
team. It was the last game of the season and I was the only player
on the squad that had not scored a point all season. So in the
second half the coach directed all the kids to throw me the ball
when I went in, and for me to shoot so that I would score. The
problem was that Coach Clark said it loud enough that every
person in the stands could hear it as well as every member of the
opposing team. Going into the fourth quarter, our team was well
ahead, Coach Clark inserted me and thus, began the worst eight
minutes of my life up until that point. Every time I got the ball, the
entire other team would rush towards me, and on top of that, that
afternoon I was the greatest brick layer the world had ever seen.
The game ended. I had missed five shots, and the other team
erupted in jubilation that I had not scored. I ran out of the gym as
fast as I could only to bump into two of the opposing team’s
players who proceeded to laugh and tease and ridicule me. I cried
and hid in the bathroom. Well, that passed, and I kept trying team
sports, but I was just too small to really compete. So in the 10th
grade, I took up boxing where suddenly everyone was my size and
weight. I nearly won the Memphis Golden Gloves my senior year
in high school and did win the collegiate championship when I was
19. Standing in the middle of that ring and getting that trophy, I
still remember looking around for those two little kids who had run
me into that bathroom back in the 6th grade, because I was going to
knock their blocks off. That’s one problem with failure. It can
stay with you for a very long time.

The next time the dragon of failure reared his ugly head was
in 1978. I was working in New Orleans for one of the greatest
cotton traders of all time, Eli Tullis. Now, New Orleans is an
unbelievable city. It has the Strawberry Festival, the Jazz Festival,
the Sugar Bowl, Mardi Gras, and just about every other excuse for
a party that you can ever imagine. Heck, in that town, waking up
was an excuse to party. I was still pretty fresh out of college, and
my mentality, unfortunately, was still firmly set on fraternity row.
It was a Friday morning in June, and I had been out literally all
night with a bunch of my friends. My job was to man the phone all
day during trading hours and call cotton prices quotes from New
York into Mr. Tullis’ office. Around noon, things got quiet on the
New York floor, and I got overly drowsy. The next thing I
remember was a ruler prying my chin off my chest, and Mr. Tullis
calling to me, “Paul. Paul.” My eyes fluttered opened and as I
came to my senses, he said to me, “Son, you are fired.” I’d never
been so shocked or hurt in my life. I literally thought I was going
to die for I had just been sacked by an iconic figure in my business.

My shame turned into anger. I was not angry at Mr. Tullis for
he was right. I was angry at myself. But I knew I was not a
failure, and I swore that I was going to prove to myself that I could
be a success. I called a friend and secured a job on the floor of the
New York Cotton Exchange and moved to the City. Today, I will
put my work ethic up against anybody’s on Wall Street. Failure
will give you a tattoo that will stay with you your whole life, and
sometimes it’s a really good thing. One other side note, to this day,
I’ve never told my parents that I got fired. I told them I just
wanted to try something different. Shame can be a lifetime
companion for which you better prepare yourself.

Now, there are two types of failure you will experience in
life. The first type is what I just described and comes from things
you can control. That is the worst kind. But there is another form
of failure that will be equally devastating to you, and that is the
kind beyond your control. This happened to me in 1982. I had met
a very lovely young Harvard student from Connecticut, dated her
for two years then asked her to marry me right after she graduated
from college. We set a date; we sent out the invitations; and all
was fantastic until one month before the wedding when her father
called me. He said, “Paul, my daughter sat me down this
afternoon, and she doesn’t know how to tell you this, but she is
really unhappy and thinks it’s time for you two to take a break.”
At first I thought he was joking because he was a very funny guy.
Then he said, “No, she is serious about this.” I thought to myself,
“Oh, my God, I am being dumped at the altar.” I’m from
Tennessee. Getting dumped at the altar was the supreme social
embarrassment of that time. It was a big deal. When all my family
and friends found out, they were ready to re-start the Civil War on
the spot. I had to remind them that the last Civil War didn’t go so
well for our side, and I didn’t like our chances in a rematch. The
reality was that I was a 26-year old knucklehead, and since all my
friends were getting married, I kind of felt it was time for me to do
the same thing. And that was the worst reason in the world to get
married. I actually think she understood that and to a certain
extent spared me what would have been a very tough marriage.
Instead, I’ve had an incredible marriage for twenty years to a
wonderful wife, and we have four kids that I love more than
anything on Earth. Some things happen to you that at the time will
make you feel like the world is coming to an end, but in actuality,
there is a very good reason for it. You just can’t see it and don’t
know it. When one door closes, another will open, but standing in
that hallway can be hell. You just have to persevere. Quite often
that dragon of failure is really chasing you off the wrong road and
on to the right one.

By now you are thinking, how much longer is this loser
going to keep on talking. My kids are all teenagers, and whenever
I’m telling them something I think is important, they often wonder
the same thing. But the main point I want you to take away today
is that some of your greatest successes are going to be the children
of failure. This touches upon the original reason I was invited
here today. In 1986, I adopted a class of Bedford Stuyvesant 6th
graders and promised them if they graduated from high school, I
would pay for their college. For those of you who don’t know,
Bed-Stuy is one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Even
the rats are scared to go there at night. Statistically about 8% of
the class I adopted would graduate from high school, so my
intervention was designed to get them all into college. For the next
six years, I did everything I could for them. I spent about $5,000
annually per student taking them on ski trips, taking them to
Africa, taking them to my home in Virginia on the weekends,
having report card night, hiring a counselor to help coordinate
afternoon activities and doing my heartfelt best to get them ready
for college. Six years later, a researcher from Harvard contacted
me and asked if he could study my kids as part of an overall
assessment of what then was called the “I Have a Dream”
Program. I said sure. He came back to me a few months later
and shared some really disturbing statistics. 86 kids that I had
poured my heart and soul into for six years were statistically no
different than kids from a nearby school that did not have the
services our afterschool program provided. There was no
difference in graduation rates, dropout rates, academic scores,
teenage pregnancies, and the list went on. The only thing that we
managed to do was get three times as many of our kids into college
because we were offering scholarships whereas the other schools
were not. But in terms of preparing these kids for college, we
completely and totally failed. Boy, did this open my eyes. That
was the first real-time example for me of how intellectual capital
will always trump financial capital. In other words, I had the
money to help these kids, but it was useless because I didn’t have
the brains to help them. I had tried to succeed with sheer force of
will and energy and financial resources. I learned that this was not
enough. What I needed were better defined goals, better metrics,
and most importantly, more efficient technologies that would
enable me to achieve those goals. What that whole experience
taught me was that starting with kids at age 12 was 12 years too
late. An afterschool program was actually putting a band-aid on a
much deeper structural issue, and that was that our public
education system was failing us. So in 2000, along with the
greatest educator I knew, a young man named Norman Atkins, we
started the Excellence Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant for
boys. We set the explicit goal of hiring the best teachers with the
greatest set of skills to be the top performing school in the city.
Now that was an ambitious goal but last year in 2008, Excellence
ranked #1 out of 543 public schools in New York City for reading
and math proficiency for any third and fourth grade cohort, and our
school was 98% African American boys. We never would have
done that had I not failed almost 15 years earlier.

So here is the point: you are going to meet the dragon of
failure in your life. You may not get into the school you want or
you may get kicked out of the school you are in. You may get your
heart broken by the girl of your dreams or God forbid, get into an
accident beyond your control. But the point is that everything
happens for a reason. At the time it may not be clear. And
certainly the pain and the shame are going to be overwhelming and
devastating. But just as sure as the sun comes up, there will come
a time on the next day or the next week or the next year, when you
will grab that sword and point it at that dragon and tell him, “Be
gone, dragon. Tarry with me and I will cut your head off. For I
must find the destination God and life hold in store for me!”
Young men of Buckley, good luck on your journey…..