It’s my late grandfather’s birthday on February 3 and my aunt and I are busy preparing for the celebration. She shared with me this speech that my grandfather would make during commencement (graduation) ceremonies and it really made an impact on me. It’s amazing how much wisdom and insights you can draw from the writings of modern-day sages. I’ve already shared this speech through e-mail to my co-workers, and I also had it posted on the official Level Up website to share it with the gaming community. I’ve decided to re-publish it here as well and maybe even have it up on Filipino Voices.

Read the Seven Keys to Success by the late Senator Blas F. Ople after the jump.

The seven keys to success
Blas F. Ople

No public figure escapes the demands of the commencement season, which is the dominant event for millions of graduating students and their parents during March and April. The choice of guest speakers is based on their ability to inspire the graduates with their own successful careers. Most of the time, these would be public officials who are the symbols of upwardly mobile success and the power they wield in their communities. (There are few instances when losing candidates are invited to be commencement speakers.)

The speakers, most of them claiming to come from deprived backgrounds, are themselves supposed to be living proof that education can change the lives of the poor. Nor are they likely to miss the opportunity of extolling themselves by pointing out their humble origins. A commencement is not is not the place to condemn the iniquitous social order. It is about the talisman of learning and hard work, which transforms lives.

As one who has been to scores of commencement exercises throughout a long public career, I have learned to sum up the secrets of success for my believing audiences. The truth, however, is that such sweeping generalizations are not likely to penetrate the core of a graduate’s own convictions. An ambitious young man or young woman must first internalize these secrets in their own lives, often through harrowing experiences, before they can understand the keys to success in the real world.

The first key to success, worldly or otherwise, is to set a goal for one’s self. Most of mankind get born and die without ever knowing what they really want.

The second key is to develop a positive outlook in life. Problems are often opportunities in disguise. As someone has said, pessimism is just a state of mind but optimism is a strategy for living.

The third key is to develop an active, rather than a passive, view of one’s environment. Successful men do not merely wait for things to happen to them. They try to make things happen. They create their own challenges and opportunities.

The fourth key is to stand by one’s principles when life’s crises must be faced. The test of character, in the phrase of William James, is not in choosing the path of least resistance but the path of the greatest traction. The temptation to make the easy choice must be resisted. This merely means that most times, the harder choice is the correct one.

The fifth key is to be absolutely dependable and trustworthy, so that your own colleagues know that they can trust your integrity even in the most difficult moments. The trust of colleagues and subordinates is what can propel you to success.

The sixth key is a commitment to continuing personal and professional growth. Most people stop growing after leaving school. Education is for life.

The seventh and last key is to live a frugal and disciplined life, shunning all forms of waste, whether of time, talent, money or other resources. Life itself is a finite and most precious gift, and wasting it through frivolity and self-indulgence must be offensive to the giver of life.

For most of us who speak at commencement exercises, of course, these formulas for success represent wisdom after the fact. I have never really sat down at any point of in my life to analyze the secrets of success. Most of those who are acclaimed for their success were too busy answering the challenges of the moment, which very likely they have themselves created, to bother about large and sweeping principles. But what else can you tell these young and impressionable audiences who hang by every word as a symbol of authority on the subject of success?

I still vividly recall my own graduation night in the plaza of my hometown, Hagonoy, Bulacan, on March 23, 1941. It was the first time ever that I gave my formal speech, as valedictorian of the graduating class, which I had composed with great care and committed to memory. It must have been a flawless delivery. But what the audience, including my classmates, did not know, was that I was wearing ill-fitting leather shoes borrowed for the occasion from an affluent uncle, and my aching feet nearly ruined my performance. I was left with little disposition to listen to the advise of our distinguished guest speaker, Venancio Trinidad, who was the Bulacan Superintendent of Schools.

Few of us will ever have the leisure that afforded Lord Chesterfield the opportunity to write the letters to his sons that, until today, represent the best advice on how to navigate the frail craft of one’s life through the shoals of a dangerous and treacherous world. But the commencement exercises do afford such an opportunity. The commencement speaker is a surrogate parent giving frank but sympathetic advice to his own children who are about to leave on an exciting but dangerous journey – the journey of life.

Unfortunately or not, the advice will mean nothing until the principles of success are internalized in the convictions of a young man or woman setting-out on that all-important journey. He or she will have to weigh the counsels of fear and hope contending inside the heart. In the end, we are most answerable to ourselves and not to any jury. And that is the eighth key to success. To thine own self be true.

Happy birthday lolo!

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Tags: Blas F. Ople, Keys to Success

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