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People and Pop Culture

Words of wisdom, advice for the next generation

Finding your passion. Influencing others. Learning from your failures on your way to success.

These were among the themes hit upon by speakers from the sports industry at college and university graduation ceremonies this year.

And they didn’t limit their advice to their own experiences. They referenced a host of others from across sports and business in their remarks, as well, sharing thoughts from the likes of Oscar Wilde and Bill Gates, Mike Tyson and Mike Tomlin. (Yes, graduation season can draw from all corners of the quotation archives.)

Here are excerpts from their presentations.

— Compiled by Drew Nantais
Photo by: GERALD H. GASKIN
    “Lou Brock once said, ‘Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy I can beat every day.’ As Lou correctly points out, life is a risk-reward business. If you’re not willing to take the occasional and well-thought-out risk, you will never reach your full potential. Be smart, be analytical, use good judgement, but don’t forget to be bold. Think big thoughts and set high goals. If you follow this advice, you’ll have far fewer regrets when you reach my age than if you don’t.
    “Joe Torre is, of course, the Hall of Fame manager of the New York Yankees. I’m also proud to say he’s a colleague and a friend. Joe once said, ‘Hitting home runs and all that other good stuff is not enough. It is how you handle yourself in all the good times and the bad times that matters.’ In that one short sentence, there are two great messages. First, it is a skill to handle success with grace. You all have received the gift of a great education and you’ll enjoy many successes in your lives. With each success, take a moment, draw a breath and think about humility. If you take quiet pride in your accomplishments and project a sense of humility, others will welcome the opportunity to celebrate your success, making that success all the sweeter. The second lesson relates to the bad times. People often say that one of the great virtues of baseball is it teaches young people important lessons, the most important of which is the ability to overcome failure. Think about it: Even the best major league player fails two out of three times when he comes to the plate. Yet those players over and over again regroup, learn from their failures, and figure out a way to be successful in the next at-bat. When you fail, and all of us do, embrace the failure, figure out why it happened, learn from your mistakes, and recommit yourself to finding success.”

ROB MANFRED
MLB commissioner
Colgate University


    “Make every day a masterpiece. Let what you do be an expression of who you are. Each day, you possess 86,400 seconds of opportunity to be a little better person than you were the day before. Face every precious moment with your best contributions to grow, to learn, to prosper, and ultimately recognizing this: If it is to be, it’s up to me. …
    “Be accountable to yourself. Hold yourself to only one standard: the very best version of yourself. Start by being accountable to yourself. The toughest battle a person has to fight is to live in a world where every single day someone’s trying to make you be someone you don’t want to be. If you work toward being normal, you will never know how amazing you can be. Oscar Wilde once said, ‘Be yourself; everyone else is taken.’ …
    “Create a lasting legacy for yourself. How do you want to be remembered? You have to create a reputation that will follow you through your life. Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. Make your life an awesome story of love, of courage, of perseverance. Just imagine if tomorrow was your last day on Earth. How would you want to be remembered? Leave behind shoes that no person can fill.”

GEORGE RAVELING
Basketball hall of famer
Villanova University


Photo by: LYNN UNIVERSITY
    “What is success? Success, to me, is simply defined as ‘happy.’ And it isn’t what society tells you it is. Success is what makes you happy; you. If you’re genuinely gratified, you’re living an admirable level of success that many only strive to achieve seemingly forever. My message today is simple: live and leverage your happy. … I’m talking about in your quiet, reflective moments. Who you want to be, the legacy you want to build. That success can only be defined by your contentment. In the words of my amazing, legendary, late colleague Stuart Scott, he told us ‘Do you. Be you.’ And your happy isn’t my happy or his happy or her happy or your mom and dad’s happy. Your happy is solely, uniquely yours. There is something so organically special about that. But it’s also a massive intrinsic responsibility. It’s your job to find it, live it, love it and leverage it.”
 
LISA KERNEY
ESPN anchor
Lynn University

    “The first step toward happiness, dear graduates, is to ignore the hype about you being ‘the hope of the future.’ Yes, you’re technically ‘the future,’ but that’s a default setting, not a spiritual calling. Taking on the responsibility of trying to fix everything that’s wrong with the world leads to either hipster cynicism about how everything is too corrupt to fix, or depression at achieving only incremental gains….
    “Each generation must customize the American Dream to fit their own circumstances and the realities of the world around them. Instead of promoting a generic dream, we need to encourage each new generation to prioritize their own values. … That is an American Dream worth dreaming.”

KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR
Basketball hall of famer
Drew University


Photo by: MIKE PETERS / MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY
   “So what have I learned in these three-plus decades between [when I graduated] and now? … First, and here’s some good news: You don’t need to know now where it is that you’re going to end up. It almost sounds too basic, too corny to say, but it really is about the journey that you’re about to take — with all those twists and unexpected turns, the screw-ups, the dead ends, then the regrouping and picking yourself up again and again and again. Second, find something that you really, really care about, and then go out and doggedly pursue it. Because here’s the truth folks: Life’s a long time, and I think about that a lot. I’m totally convinced that you can’t be happy in life unless you’re doing some work that in some way really feeds your soul. … I’ve never met anyone who loved their job just because it was cool or just because they made a lot of money. It’s a lot more than that. It’s about what you do. It’s about what you work for. It’s about who you work with. It’s about whether you’re inspired, and yes, are you on the right path to do more and, hopefully, to do better?
   “And third, and I think this is the most important one, you’ve got to aim to be fearless. It’s a really complicated and [a] scary world out there. I get that and I think all of your families do. … But do not let fear of failure overshadow your desire to succeed.”

DON GARBER
MLS commissioner
Montclair State University


    “I recognize that there might be some expectation that I share some thoughts with you on how you might succeed in business. I’m going to do better than that. I’m going to provide you with the secret key to success in business. Are you ready? The almighty key to success is to watch more sports. You cannot succeed in business if you do not know who won the game last night. And if you want to be really certain of good fortune, watch more highlights on ‘SportsCenter.’ Studies show that the amount of money you will make is most closely correlated to the number of Top 10 plays you consume. …
   “It is much more important that you are open to new experiences and that you adapt than it is that you have a set plan right now. As Mike Tyson famously said, ‘Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.’ … I suspect that many of you graduates envy the position I am in. Well, let me reciprocate: I envy the position that you are in today. Great days lie ahead. Great accomplishments, great contributions, great achievements.”

JOHN SKIPPER
ESPN president
University of Central Florida, College of Business Administration


Photo by: YESHIVA UNIVERSITY
    “What is your big dream? Think big. Make it a wildly improbable dream that motivates you, one that wakes you up in the morning ready to attack your day, to persevere and persist until you accomplish it. Dream a big dream, a bold dream. Don’t play conservatively between the 40-yard lines. Don’t just play it safe. …
“My father left me an ethical will. In that will, he told me something that I think about literally every day of my life. He said, ‘At the end of every day, as we lay our head on our pillow, we should ask ourselves this simple question: Are the people you touched today richer and better for having known you?’ Go forward from here my friends and make people’s lives richer and better because they have known all of you.”

ROBERT KRAFT
New England Patriots owner
Yeshiva University


Photo by: THOMAS M. KOJCSICH / VCU UNIVERSITY MARKETING
   “You now get to find your passion and use it to let your ‘little light’ shine. … Find something great that only you can do and go do it. Showcase your passion to the world. And when you find yourself in the thick of things — it’s going to be hard, it’s going to get harder, you’re going to find your back up against the wall — but I double-dare you: When you find yourself in that place, hum a few bars of ‘This Little Light of Mine.’”

PAMELA EL
NBA chief marketing officer
Virginia Commonwealth University


Photo by: G FIUME / GETTY IMAGES
   “What I want to talk about today is a single word. But it’s more than that really. It’s an entity. It’s a force. What I want to talk about with you today is one very simple word: passion. … Passion’s the reason that a dorm room idea became a company and, at least equally as important, ultimately became a brand called Under Armour. Now I want to make one thing clear: Passion is not emotion. And please don’t confuse the two. Emotions control us, but we control passion. Passion is not a hashtag; it’s defined by conviction. Passion is the single most important thing you can have in your life going forward. Passion for your religion. Passion for your family and friends. Passion for your country and beliefs. Passion for your career or your job. It doesn’t matter what you majored in. … You’re going to need passion for whatever you decide you’re going to do next. …
   “You’re gonna be told ... you’re entering an uncertain world, that jobs are scarce, there’s little chance you’re going to attain the livelihoods of the generation that preceded you, that there’s ominous threats overseas and that there’s civil unrest here at home. But let me leave you with this: Ignore the noise, have faith in yourself, recognize that you are an entrepreneur. … Go out into the world and make it a better place. Go make yourselves proud, and in doing that, you’re going to go make us proud. Let your passion lead the way for all of it.”

KEVIN PLANK
Under Armour founder, chairman and CEO
University of Maryland


    “Today is just the beginning of the foundation to making your dreams come true. … You will go through tough, cruel, competitive times in this world. They’re waiting for you. There’ll be highs, there’ll be lows. You’ll need to take that ride not alone, but with those who have been here to support you; your support system. … One thing I think you also need to do is envision yourself landing that [dream] job and what it feels like. For me, it was being a general manager or a president of an NBA team, so I had to envision myself at a press conference being introduced — what it would feel like, what I would say — just so I could have that vision to look forward to.”

FRED WHITFIELD
Charlotte Hornets president and COO
Shaw University


Photo by: GRAD IMAGES
    “‘I will never work at ESPN.’ That is what is written on this Post-it note, in this beat-up frame. It sits on my desk at home. I signed it April 30th, 1996. It was part of a bet with a co-worker I had at the Golf Channel. Cost me $100. I keep it on my desk at home as a daily reminder to be open to whatever might come down the road. …
   “For years, I always said I didn’t want to work at ESPN because I didn’t want to be the next guy that had to come up with 10 clever ways to say ‘slam dunk’ and ‘home run’ and all this and that. And there’s a little bit of truth to that. But I want to tell you this morning the whole truth. I said I’d never work at ESPN because I didn’t think I’d be good enough. I didn’t imagine in my mind how it would be possible that I could ever work at the same place as Chris Berman, Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann, Robin Roberts and all these greats. I just couldn’t imagine that. Fear and doubt: They’re similar. I wasn’t afraid, but I had doubt. I had real doubt. … Don’t doubt yourself. … This business is difficult enough without doubting yourself. You’ve got to trust that you are enough, and then you’ve got to prove yourself right.”

SCOTT VAN PELT
ESPN anchor
University of Maryland,
Merrill College of Journalism


Photo by: DUKE UNIVERSITY
  “There are three things I’d like to pass along to you. The very first thing I learned [as a student at West Point] is to find my heart. I saw, I listened, I learned. But when I was there, I found out that it doesn’t become yours, you don’t own your knowledge, you don’t own what you do unless it hits your heart. … The two other things I learned was that you weren’t going to do it alone. Great things usually don’t happen to one person; they happen to a group of people. And so I learned that in order to do something, you want to be on good teams; you form teams. And the final thing that I learned is that failure, or any type of setback, was not a destination. How could it be a destination if you expect great things? So when you get knocked back, that’s not where you were gonna be. There was something good about getting knocked down as long as it wasn’t your destination. …
   “Whatever you’re gonna be doing, you’re gonna get knocked on your butt. If you’re not knocked on your butt at times, it means that you’re not really extending yourself to really try to do it at the best of your ability. What I’ve found, because you expect great things, when you do get knocked down, that’s not where you’re gonna stay. And so how do you get up? … [With] great attitudes, great beliefs, great preparation and great execution.”

MIKE KRZYZEWSKI
Duke University basketball coach
Duke University


Photo by: STEVE COHN / USC
    “Your generation will change the world as every generation does. You will invent new technologies and create new types of art. Impossibilities will be transformed into possibilities. And unexpected opportunities will present themselves. You will change the world, and the world will change you, as you learn and grow and discover more about yourself. ... Don’t be afraid to experiment and try lots of different things. And don’t let the experts discourage you when you challenge the status quo. Like Mark Twain says, ‘What’s an expert anyway? Just some guy from out of town.’
   “Each of you has a chance to discover who you are rather than who you should be. A chance to live your dreams, not the dreams of others. Each of you has an obligation to commit to a righteous cause, one that elevates you and improves the conditions of humanity and the planet. Soon, many of you will begin a new job. I hope it interests you, and challenges you, and rewards you with a sense of purpose and satisfaction. But if it doesn’t, keep searching; it’s out there. It might take a while, but keep searching until you find a job that ignites your passions.”

LARRY ELLISON
Oracle Corp. founder
University of Southern California


    “I always thought it odd, that as we celebrate the end of something that we’ve worked on most of our lives, we call it a beginning. It clearly marks the end of a very long chapter, but as much as it is the end, it really is the start of the rest of your life. … You will run into people that will try to kill your dreams either through laughter or mockery. People will tell you ‘You want to do what? No one actually does that.’ But everyone can. For every friend or family member that stands behind you in encouragement, many more will try to stand between you and what it is that you dream of; what it is that you want the most. They’ll tell you why you can’t instead of encouraging you to achieve your dreams. Hear those voices, but let them fuel you and don’t listen to them. … I challenge you to take your best shot. What’s your dream? What’s your passion? You all came here with one. Maybe it changed during the course of your time here, but you still have a dream and a passion today. Can you be so naïve as to chase it? Can you catch it? Can you live it? I hope the collective answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ I believe you can.”

JAY CRAWFORD
ESPN anchor
Bowling Green State University


Photo by: BRUCE LYNDES
    “I think you should be ready for anything and open to anything. Don’t script life. I think you need to be versatile; that’s a necessity. You know what I tell young journalists? Don’t just think of being a writer. Think of TV, think of video, a blog, a podcast, think of social media. You’re fooling yourself if you think you can be good at one thing and one thing only and be a success. I think — no, I know — that employers care what you can do, not who you are. …
    “I think you should be prepared for failures in this self-esteem world. Bill Gates had a great line for this: ‘Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not.’ I think you must not live in a cocoon. Help people. You’re going to feel a lot better about yourself and about your world if you spend three hours a week doing something for someone who isn’t you. I think you should heed the advice of … Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. He says, ‘When we’re kids, we dream wildly. As we grow up, we dream realistically. We shouldn’t. I got where I am today by being a ridiculous dreamer.’”

PETER KING
The MMQB/Sports Illustrated writer
Plymouth State University


  “You’re going to go through a series of journeys again. Going forward through these journeys, you’re going to have ups and you’re going to have downs; you’re going to have good days and you’re going to have bad days. But wherever you are in that journey, be enthusiastic, optimistic and enjoy the ride. … Build relationships inside and outside the workplace. It’s those relationships that are going to get you through the tough times you’re going to have, and it is those relationships that you are going to want to celebrate the good times with. … As you go through your career and go through the balance of your life, never burn a bridge. Never get involved in water-cooler politics. Remember: Nothing ever good comes from trashing somebody else.”

ED STACK
Dick’s Sporting Goods chairman and CEO
St. John Fisher College


Photo by: NEW ENGLAND INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
   “We have the greatest opportunity in the world to be alive today, in this country, in this period of time, because if you can think it, you can do it. If I can do this, what’s to keep you from doing anything that you want to do? And your ultimate challenge is to take your greatest failures, take your biggest disappointments, take your worst losses, the things that you believe at the time are the worst things that could possibly ever happen to you, and with whatever it takes and however long it takes, make those failures the greatest successes in your life.”

BILL WALTON
Basketball hall of famer
New England Institute of Technology


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