Part III: Being Passionate About Our Work & Striving To Be the Best

I have spent much of my life – as a child and as an educator – thinking about what it means to be the best. Having been told by society throughout my childhood, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that I was second-class, I am convinced that one of the greatest challenges we face in this country today is to help our children know that they are special and to help them to want to be smart and to want to achieve at the highest levels.

My colleagues and I have completed two books in recent years on raising high-achieving African American young men and women in science. In the process, we also have learned much about what it takes for all of America’s children to succeed. It’s really not rocket science. What it takes is precisely what it took for many of us in this room to succeed – families, educators, and communities that set high expectations while pushing, loving, and supporting us.

It also takes passionate leadership among those of us who care deeply about families and children. Each of us has an opportunity each day to choose what kind of person we want to be. We have all encountered people who uplift us; we also have met people who tend to drain us of our strength. We should ask ourselves each day which category best describes us. I know that each of us wants to be the kind of person who emits positive energy, and we can do that by communicating a sense of hope, by working to empower others, and by striving to create a pervasive sense of excitement about our work.

In our work and in our lives, we know that our attitudes are critical to our success. In this connection, I recommend that you read Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders. The “geeks” are outstanding American leaders under 25, and the “geezers” are leaders 70 years of age and older. What the authors discover is that,

…everyone of the geezers who continues to play a leadership role has one quality of overriding importance: neoteny. The dictionary defines neoteny as “the retention of youthful qualities by adults.” Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy…Our geezers have remained much like our geeks – open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings…Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality – the gift – that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all the marvelous undiscovered things to come.

I want you to keep in mind this vision of each of us as a leader who is open and willing to take risks, focused on “all the marvelous sand undiscovered things to come.” I also think we need to envision just how we want our society to be. I see a nation in which all of our children are striving to be the best, working hard, and strongly supported by their families, schools, and communities. I see a country in which any little girl growing up – whether black, brown, or white –has opportunities – as my mother did growing up in rural Alabama – to learn to love to read and to aspire to be a teacher or anything else she dreams to become.

Several years ago, when my mother knew she was close to the end of her life, I asked her, “What is important to you?” And though she had Alzheimer’s and did not realize I was her only son, she simply responded, “My relationships with God, with my husband [she forgot he had died 20 years earlier], and with my son.” And looking straight at me, she said, “He’s such a sweet boy!” which was such a gift. She then said, “Teachers touch eternity through their students. I will always live through my son and students because I have given them all that I have of worth to give.”

And through our relationships with those we serve, we, too, can give all that we have to give – and touch eternity. I close with words from Oswald McCall’s The Hand of God, the essence of which is that whatever we value most, both as individuals and as a society, will define us.

Be under no illusion, you shall gather to yourself the images that you love. As you go, the shapes, the lights, the shadows of the things you have preferred will come to you, yes, inveterately, inevitably as bees to their hive. And there in your mind and spirit they will leave with you their distilled essence, sweet as honey or bitter as gall, and you will grow unto their likeness because their nature will be in you.

As men see the color in the wave so shall men see in you the things you have loved most. Out of your eyes will look the spirit you have chosen. In your smile and in your frown the years will speak.

You will not walk nor stand nor sit, nor will your hand move, but you will confess the one you serve, and upon your forehead will be written his name as by a revealing pen.

Cleverness may select skillful words to cast a veil about you, and circumspection may never sleep, yet will you not be hid. No.

As year adds to year, that face of yours, which once like an unwritten page, lay smooth in your baby crib, will take to itself lines, and still more lines, as the parchment of an old historian who jealously sets down all the story. And there, more deep than acids etch the steel, will grow the inscribed narrative of your mental habits, the emotions of your heart, your sense of conscience, your response to duty, what you think of your God and of your fellow men and of yourself. It will all be there. For men and women, boys and girls, become like that which they love, and the name thereof is written on their brow.

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