Graduation Achievement Quotes

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.

The most important thing is this: to sacrifice what you are now for what you can become tomorrow.

Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some get it as a graduation gift.

When you graduate from "Being In Love" to "Loving Someone" you understand - Love is not about owning, Love is about wanting the best for them, It's about seeing or Helping them achieve great heights, with or without you. Love is not what you say, it's what you do.

And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too,...perhaps better than we actually are.

Stand tall on the summit after a tedious climb. Take in the remarkable scenery and the exhilaration of accomplishment. But don't pause for long; there are greater mountains to climb while you still possess the drive and capacity to do so.

Is that all?” he blurted out. Crowley and Halt exchanged slightly puzzled glances. Then Crowley pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Um…it seems to be…Listed your trainging, mentioned a few achievements, made sure you know which end of an arrow is the sharp part…decided your new name…I think that’s…” Then it seemed that understanding dawned on him and his eyes opened wide. “Of course! You have to have you Silver…whatsis, don ‘t you?” He took hold of the chain that held his own Silver Oakleaf around his throat and shook it lightly. It was a badge of a Graduate Ranger. Then he began to search through his pockets, frowning. “Had it here! Had it here! Where the devil is it…wait. I heard something fall on the boards as I came in! Must have dropped it. Just check outside the front door, will you, Will?” Too stunned to talk, Will rose and went to the door. As he set his hand on the latch, he looked back at the two Rangers, still seated at the table. Crowley made a small shooing motion with the back of his hand, urging him to go outside. Will was still looking back at them when he opened the door and stepped through on the verandah. “Congratulations!” The massive cry went up from at least forty throats. He swung around in shock to find all his friends gathered in the clearing outside around the table laid for a feast, their faces beaming with smiles. Baron Arald, Sir Rodney, Lady Pauline and Master Chubb were all there. So were Jenny and George, his former wardmates. There were a dozen others in the Ranger uniform – men he had met worked with over the past five years. And wonder of wonders, there were Erak and Svengal , bellowing his name and waving their huge axes overhead in his praise. Close by them stood Horace and Gilan, both brandishing their swords overhead as well. It looked like a dangerous section of the crowd to be in, Will thought. After the first concerted shout, people began cheering and calling his name, laughing and waving to him. Halt and Crowley joined him on the verandah. The Commandant was doubled over with laughter. “Oh, if you could have seen yourself!” he wheezed. “Your face! Your face! It was priceless! ‘Is that all?’” He mimicked Will’s plaintive tones and doubled over again. Will tuned to Halt accusingly. His teacher grinned at him. “Your face was a study,” he said. “Do you so that to all apprentices?” Will asked. Halt nodded vigorously. “Every one. Stops them getting a swelled head at the last minute. You have to swear never to let an apprentice in on the secret.

If want to succeed, you must work to overcome the obstacles on your path.

Most people who have achieved a modicum of success right after they graduated did it by being brave and laughing at anyone who told them no.

The journey of unknown is life journey of graduate students. There are many mountains to be overcome. With hope, patient and courage you can soar high above the mountains and achieve your goals.

If I don’t succeed, I will try again and never stop trying. When I succeed, I will again explore new opportunities.

But for an individual human being, moments are the thing. Moments are what we remember and what we cherish. Certainly we might celebrate achieving a goal, such as completing a marathon or landing a significant client—but the achievement is embedded in a moment. Every culture has its prescribed set of big moments: birthdays and weddings and graduations, of course, but also holiday celebrations and funeral rites and political traditions. They seem “natural” to us. But notice that every last one of them was invented, dreamed up by anonymous authors who wanted to give shape to time. This is what we mean by “thinking in moments”: to recognize where the prose of life needs punctuation.

In the school of greatness, it is the persevering who graduate.

To the accomplishment-oriented mother, what you achieve in life is paramount. Success depends on what you do, not who you are. She expects you to perform at the highest possible level. This mom is very proud of her children’s good grades, tournament wins, admission into the right college, and graduation with the pertinent degrees. She loves to brag about them too. But if you do not become what your accomplishment-oriented mother thinks you should, and accomplish what she thinks is important, she is deeply embarrassed, and may even respond with a rampage of fury and rage. A confusing dynamic is at play here. Often, while the daughter is trying to achieve a given goal, the mother is not supportive because it takes away from her and the time the daughter has to spend on her. Yet if the daughter achieves what she set out to do, the mother beams with pride at the awards banquet or performance. What a mixed message. The daughter learns not to expect much support unless she becomes a great hit, which sets her up for low self-esteem and an accomplishment-oriented lifestyle.

When you graduate from "Being In Love" to "Loving Someone" you understand - Love is not about owning, Love is about wanting the best for them, It's about seeing or Helping them achieve great heights, with or without you. Love is not what you say, it's what you do.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard. You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement.

I believe that a proper education in grade school would achieve much more for the general public than getting an M.A. in the best college today ever would. You do not need millions of courses across decades and decades. That is a modern absurdity. It is the result of a worthless, self-perpetuating educational bureaucracy. Even with the explosion of knowledge, you can give people a proper, thorough education by the time they are a normal high school graduate.

I run Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits dozens of our country’s top graduates each year and places them in startups and growth companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Providence, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new US jobs by 2025. We supply talent to early-stage companies so that they can expand and hire more people. And we train a critical mass of our best and brightest graduates to build enterprises and create new opportunities for themselves and others.

...[I]t doesn't take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it. To attribute economic results to school years finished and SAT scores achieved is to remove matters from the realm of, well, economics and to relocate them to the provinces of personal striving and individual intelligence. From this perspective, wages aren't what they are because one party (management) has a certain amount of power over the other (workers); wages are like that because the god of the market, being surpassingly fair, rewards those who show talent and gumption. Good people are those who get a gold star from their teacher in elementary school, a fat acceptance letter from a good college, and a good life when they graduate. All because they are the best. Those who don't pay attention in high school get to spend their days picking up discarded cans by the side of the road. Both outcomes are our own doing.

Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you. First, it will enslave you. Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow. That means that if anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself. But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected. Let me give you an eloquent contemporary expression of what Jesus is saying. Nobody put this better than the American writer David Foster Wallace. He got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, bestselling postmodern novelist known around the world for his boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. A few years before the end of his life, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He said to the graduating class, Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.4 Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this nonreligious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.” Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshipping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, “Unless you’re worshipping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end.

In China, women who are single past the age of twenty-seven are stigmatized as sheng nu, or “leftover women.” They face severe pressure from their families to marry, stemming from the widespread belief that regardless of education and professional achievement, a woman is “absolutely nothing until she is married.” One thirty-six-year-old economics professor was rejected by fifteen men because she had an advanced degree; her father then forbade her younger sister from going to graduate school.

You see twenty-six years ago, when I was in high school, my goal and mission in life was to win a New York State Wrestling Championship. I committed myself to a lifestyle, made the sacrifices, put in the time, starved myself, shaved my head, had the hunger, desire and determination, but I came up short. For many years, after I graduated it seemed like I got nothing out of my six years of total dedication to the sport. That the trade off of what I gave and what I got in return to this sport was way out of whack. I hated wrestling for it. To put every ounce of your soul into achieving something and to get nothing out of it in return was beyond my comprehension and could not be justified in my head. Until I had adversity in my life. And slowly but surely I started realizing how much the sport of wrestling actually has given back to me. Much more than I ever knew. When life throws you to your back, you need to know how not to get pinned, get off of your back and do enough to make up the difference in order to win.

What I’m about to tell you,” Elliott told me, “ninety-nine percent of people in the world will never understand.” For the first time all week, it was just the two of us. Elliott had told Austin he wanted to talk to me one-on-one. We were standing on a rooftop lounge during sunset, looking out at the Manhattan skyline. “You see, most people live a linear life,” he continued. “They go to college, get an internship, graduate, land a job, get a promotion, save up for a vacation each year, work toward their next promotion, and they just do that their whole lives. Their lives move step by step, slowly and predictably. “But successful people don’t buy into that model. They opt into an exponential life. Rather than going step by step, they skip steps. People say that you first need to ‘pay your dues’ and get years of experience before you can go out on your own and get what you truly want. Society feeds us this lie that you need to do x, y, and z before you can achieve your dream. It’s bullshit. The only person whose permission you need to live an exponential life is your own. “Sometimes an exponential life lands in your lap, like with a child prodigy. But most of the time, for people like you and me, we have to seize it for ourselves. If you actually want to make a difference in the world, if you want to live a life of inspiration, adventure, and wild success—you need to grab on to that exponential life—and hold on to it with all you’ve got.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

Most of the white kids in my classes had grown up in stable neighborhoods and had graduated from good schools. They came to Pitt with a natural confidence and expectations of high achievement, and it was clear to me from the very start that they had been prepared, in ways that were beyond me, to make their dreams come true.

It is hard," I admitted, my eyes still closed. "But graduating from high school continues to be considered one of life's important achievements. I mean, I've heard that without a high school diploma, one doesn't have a hope of acquiring one of those high-powered service positions at Starbucks that I know I'll be angling for upon graduation.

We live in a day of superheroes and superstars, in a world of the haves and the have-nots. In our culture being somebody really matters: being smart, good looking, educated, athletic or musical – the pressure is on to be somebody. This thinking has seeped into the church as well. The mindset that God only uses the “special” people, those who are ordained or have graduated from seminary, is pervasive. As a result, many are left feeling that they are simply not good enough to be used by God. The world pushes us to be “somebody” and get recognized for our achievements. But God’s Kingdom – a Kingdom made up of the weak, the broken, the pushed-aside, the ordinary – is opposed to the world’s obsession with the superstar.

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. —Susan B. Anthony

Whether the elite public high schools of New York were overwhelmingly Jewish in one era or overwhelmingly Asian in a later era, their lack of demographic “diversity” seems not to have adversely affected their educational performances or their graduates’ achievements in later life. And that is what such schools are there for, not to present a tableau that matches fashionable preconceptions.

certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it. The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something thirteen-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous. But about two hundred people do the same thing every year, and trust me, you don’t want to read about most of their lives. I am not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary. I haven’t started a billion-dollar company or a world-changing nonprofit. I have a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home, and two lively dogs. So I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary. I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me. You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio

Rather, part of the argument is that with so much graduate unemployment, juvenile delinquency and high-school absenteeism, there could be practical alternatives to what we have now. A case could be made for a return to apprenticeships in trades such as car mechanics. Another would be to rearrange our priorities during workplace hiring. Less dependency might be placed on easily-achieved academic certificates - and more public recognition be given to hard-won experience. Other possibilities include early entry into the armed forces or police - via military finishing schools or junior police academies, instead of book-obsessed senior high schools and colleges of the woolly-minded humanities. But, for sure, a campaign of objections to this broader model would be publicly raised by the very groups who stand to lose financially from the decrease in municipal funding. That is, well-heeled academics and comfortably-off teaching unions.

When a brilliant critic and a beautiful woman (that’s my order of priorities, not necessarily those of the men who teach her) puts on black suede spike heels and a ruby mouth before asking an influential professor to be her thesis advisor, is she a slut? Or is she doing her duty to herself, in a clear-eyed appraisal of a hostile or indifferent milieu, by taking care to nourish her real gift under the protection of her incidental one? Does her hand shape the lipstick into a cupid’s bow in a gesture of free will? She doesn’t have to do it. That is the response the beauty myth would like a woman to have, because then the Other Woman is the enemy. Does she in fact have to do it? The aspiring woman does not have to do it if she has a choice. She will have a choice when a plethora of faculties in her field, headed by women and endowed by generations of female magnates and robber baronesses, open their gates to her; when multinational corporations led by women clamor for the skills of young female graduates; when there are other universities, with bronze busts of the heroines of half a millennium’s classical learning; when there are other research-funding boards maintained by the deep coffers provided by the revenues of female inventors, where half the chairs are held by women scientists. She’ll have a choice when her application is evaluated blind. Women will have the choice never to stoop, and will deserve the full censure for stooping, to consider what the demands on their “beauty” of a board of power might be, the minute they know they can count on their fair share: that 52 percent of the seats of the highest achievement are open to them. They will deserve the blame that they now get anyway only when they know that the best dream of their one life will not be forcibly compressed into an inverted pyramid, slammed up against a glass ceiling, shunted off into a stifling pink-collar ghetto, shoved back dead down a dead-end street.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

Rip ran a hand through his dusty brown hair and tried to imagine what Larsen had found. Larsen’s words “a Cosega find” had been playing over in his mind almost constantly since he’d heard them. Cosega was the reason that Rip became an archaeologist. The Jeep’s motor whined as it pushed over the unmaintained road. Rip’s thoughts drifted to the past. They always did when he was in the mountains. Fifteen years earlier he had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with honors after publishing a series of papers on the prehistory of man. His first break came when billionaire Booker Lipton, a Penn alumnus who had amassed a fortune through brutal corporate takeovers and a variety of other business dealings, immediately offered him funding. Rip had skipped the “cap and gown nonsense,” as he called it, and was already in Africa when his degree caught up with him. His first human origins digs were featured in an eight-page layout for National Geographic. Within a few years Archaeology Magazine had twice detailed his findings for cover stories. He taught courses at three different universities, and often shared his expertise on news and talk shows. Then, four years ago, he published a paper on the creation stories of all known Native American tribes entitled: Cosega. The controversy that erupted after had almost ended his career. Not yet forty, Ripley had already achieved more than the greats

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

Keep Your Ego at Bay; Stay Humble   Have you felt that urgent desire to feel important, to feel special and to feel way above over other people? As a graduate, do you think you have the best education and do you think you deserve that job opening more over the other guy? Do you think you have accomplished so much in life that you deserve better than your peers? If so, maybe your ego is getting the best of you. When you act based on your ego, there is a great chance that you will be at odds with the world and the people around you. You feel that you are more special than others because of your accomplishments, your education, your work and your possession. Because of that, you are failing to see others’ worth and importance. You only act based on what you think, because your opinion is the only one that matters. You barely admit mistakes; hence, you are depriving yourself of the opportunity to grow because you believe that you got everything you need. You are tarnishing your relationship with others by alienating them with your attitude. Ultimately, you are missing a lot in life! Dr. Dryer preaches about a life of humility and respect for one’s self and others. He always reminds his readers, students and followers to keep their ego at bay and stay humble. He believes in the universal truth that individuals are more common than different with each other; that no one is above someone or more special than others. He believes in the perfect being, the invisible force that created all of us, and so we are one and the same, just performing our own duty in this universe. Our ego stems from our desire to gain recognition from our achievements and hard work. There is nothing wrong with that. Humans crave to be recognized because it is one of the best feelings in the world. However, when you become overly attached to that idea and your entitlement, that is where ego comes in and it does more bad than good to you. The best way to be recognized is to stay humble and modest of your accomplishments. Your achievements sound the loudest when you are not telling it to everyone. You can only earn the highest of respect when you give the same amount of respect to others and to yourself. You can only feel truly special when you are not trying to be over someone else’s head, but rather carry others on your back to lift them up. That is what matters the most.

It is not only in childhood that people of high potential can be encouraged or held back and their promise subverted or sustained. The year before I went to Amherst, a group of women had declined to stand for tenure. One of them simply said that after six years she was used up, too weary and too eroded by constant belittlement to accept tenure if it were offered to her. Women were worn down or burnt out. During the three years I spent as dean of the faculty, as I watched some young faculty members flourish and others falter, I gradually realized that the principal instrument of sexism was not the refusal to appoint women or even the refusal to promote (though both occurred, for minorities as well as women), but the habit of hiring women and then dealing with them in such a way that when the time came for promotion it would be reasonable to deny it. It was not hard to show that a particular individual who was a star in graduate school had somehow belied her promise, had proved unable to achieve up to her potential. This subversion was accomplished by taking advantage of two kinds of vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have. The first is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and be used and even used up by the community. Many women at Amherst ended up investing vast amounts of time in needed public-service activities, committee work, and teaching nondepartmental courses. Since these activities were not weighed significantly in promotion decisions, they were self-destructive. The second kind of vulnerability trained into women is a readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation. Even women who arrived at Amherst full of confidence gradually became vulnerable to distorted visions of themselves, no longer secure that their sense of who they were matched the perceptions of others. When a new president, appointed in 1983, told me before coming and without previous discussion with me that he had heard I was “consistently confrontational,” that I had made Amherst “a tense, unhappy place,” and that he would want to select a new dean, I should have reacted to his picture of me as bizarre, and indeed confronted its inaccuracy, but instead I was shattered. It took me a year to understand that he was simply accepting the semantics of senior men who expected a female dean to be easily disparaged and bullied, like so many of the young women they had managed to dislodge. It took me a year to recover a sense of myself as worth defending and to learn to be angry both for myself and for the college as I watched a tranquil campus turned into one that was truly tense and unhappy.

Knowing what you’re aiming for is essential. In a famous study of Yale University students, researchers found that only 3% had written goals with plans for their achievement. Twenty years later researchers interviewed the surviving graduates and found that those 3% were worth more financially than the other 97% combined.

The governors of Oklahoma and South Carolina signed bills within the past week repealing the Common Core state standards, guidelines for children’s achievement in reading and math between kindergarten and high school graduation.

In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he can not conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Once you have developed a powerful showcase, you are ready to answer the fourth question that your résumé must address: can you provide specific results (achievements) that you produced in the past that would indicate that you can produce them in the future? In most cases, the employment section will answer this final question. However, if you are a graduating student or one who has little or no direct work experience, your internships, academic highlights, and extracurricular activities, including volunteer work and community service, will be emphasized.

Can you remember when you finished primary, how about when you passed matric, graduation day, your learner's & license, getting your first salary slip and the most valuable of them all; having your first child, walking down the isle and even buying your first car:-) These are the common feelings from all those achievements: Gratitude, Fulfillment, Joy, Appreciation, Pride & your Worthiness. Now go achieve more

you’ll be stuck in sucky classes! Through conversations with friends, your own research, and an understanding of the teaching and learning styles that work for you, select the classes that suit you best. If you are interested in a particular field in which you don’t have any connections, do not be afraid to reach out. Research the people in that field before approaching them and make sure you ask intelligent questions that will help you decide if you want to pursue further study. Non-academic pursuits in college can be just as important or even more important than classes and grades. College grades matter less than high school grades (except when applying to highly competitive graduate and medical

focus (and change majors) in college to account for newfound interests, even graduate students can venture into uncharted territory. Students can sometimes achieve a sharper focus of academic interests and career goals while discovering postgraduate options. Internships, jobs, and careers Creating a “storyline” of your interests and how they are linked together can be a great tool when writing out job applications in college. Demonstrate your knowledge of how you fit into the role you’re seeking. Be prepared for a rigorous job application process: spending hours preparing for interviews, going through several rounds of interviews, and

remaining calm under pressure were what helped someone land a coveted consulting job. In some fields, employers value practical experience much more than graduate education, so if it comes down to choosing between graduate school and an entry-level job, weigh your decision carefully. Determination and passion are the drivers of great entrepreneurs, politicians, and leaders. An A+ combination of head, heart, spirit, and network can make you a beloved and creative leader and entrepreneur running a well-backed and inspired company and team. An entrepreneur’s life is thrilling but very demanding. If you are of an

And for all the progress, there is still societal pressure for women to keep an eye on marriage from a young age. When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a “good man” before they are all taken. I followed their advice and throughout college, I vetted every date as a potential husband (which, trust me, is a sure way to ruin a date at age nineteen).

Less headway is being made in figuring out how to improve teacher quality, an undertaking more complex than simply recruiting new teachers with better academic credentials or offering higher salaries. In high-achieving countries, such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, teachers come from the top of their high school graduating classes, teaching schools have a high bar for acceptance, and teachers’ salaries are competitive with those of lawyers and scientists. It is generally the opposite in the United States.

The goal of a successful negotiation is to achieve our objectives and continue to have people like us.

I am still enjoying the success.

Every great achiever overcame the greatest obstacles.

The plan that was set up by GOD and the Godforce to remedy this descent into forgetfulness and Spiritual sleep was “Reincarnation”! GOD and the Godforce created five races on the five continents on the Earth! A white, black, brown, yellow and red race! The different skin colors were not because one was better than another, but was because of the different climate conditions! The plan that was created was that all those souls who had fallen asleep would reincarnate over and over again until the seven levels of initiation were completed in a balanced and integrated manner so liberation from the wheel of rebirth and/or graduation would be achieved! The idea was that having time on the inner plane between lives would give souls time to remember who they were, and give them time to introspect and reflect before incarnating again!

But virtually all aspects of underperformance—lower standardized test scores, lower college grades, lower graduation rates—persist among students from the African-American middle class. This situation forces on us an uncomfortable recognition: that beyond class, something racial is depressing the academic performance of these students.

Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who made waves as an activist against sexual assault, ended her school year as she began it: carrying a mattress. Ms. Sulkowicz carried her mattress around campus throughout her senior year to raise awareness to her school’s handling of sexual assault. On Tuesday, she brought it with her to her graduation ceremony, and walked with it during the processional. Four fellow female graduates helped her carry the mattress as she walked across the stage to cheers from the audience. Ms. Sulkowicz has said she was raped in her dorm by a classmate who was later cleared of the crime in what she said was a flawed university disciplinary proceeding. She has spent approximately the past nine months carrying her mattress on campus as part of a school-sanctioned art project, “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” vowing to carry it as long as she and the accused student attend the same school. The project sparked debate on and off campus. In January, Ms. Sulkowicz was the guest of New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. The accused student, Paul Nungesser, and Ms. Sulkowicz both graduated Tuesday. Mr. Nungesser has said he didn’t rape Ms. Sulkowicz and last month filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against Columbia for allowing what he says is sustained harassment against him. As part of the lawsuit, his attorney requested that Columbia bar Ms. Sulkowicz from carrying the mattress at graduation. The school almost did. On Monday, it sent out graduation guidelines that said: “Graduates should not bring into the ceremonial area large objects which could interfere with the proceedings or create discomfort to others in close, crowded spaces shared by thousands of people.” Students saw the guidelines as a reference to Ms. Sulkowicz, they said. But she showed up on Tuesday, mattress in hand. Some students wore red tape on their graduation caps in solidarity with Ms. Sulkowicz, referencing No Red Tape, Columbia’s anti-sexual-assault activist group. Mr. Nungesser’s attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, criticized Columbia. “Once again, Columbia has irresponsibly allowed Ms. Sulkowicz to create a spectacle, the purpose of which is to vilify and humiliate Mr. Nungesser,” Mr. Miltenberg said. “Shame on Columbia for forcing the entire class of 2015 to bear silent witness to the victimization of Mr. Nungesser, on a day set aside to celebrate their academic achievements.” Ms. Sulkowicz, who graduated magna cum laude, and her

Do you want to be safe, or do you really want to change the world? The conflict is that we want to be brave, we want to take risks . . .but we also want to be safe. The problem is, we can't have it both ways. We want the American dream: to graduate from high school, go college, get a degree, and then what? Find the love of your life and get married. Then what? Get a job. Then what? Buy a car, buy a house, buy life insurance. Then what? Grow old and retire. Then what? ls that it? ls that all there is? In fact, couldn't we just sum up the entire American dream in the single word "safety"? That's what it's all about. No matter what you want out of life, you can achieve it in America in comfort, style, and in the end, safety. But there is a problem. We cannot be safe and take risks at the same time. Eleanor Roosevelt said, 'You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do' and 'Do something every day that scares you.' This can get messy. It gets uncomfortable. It means touching people who are dying of diseases. It means going to the filthy slums, the garbage dumps, the places we would never normally go . . . just to reach that one hurting person. So we must answer the question: Do we want to stay safe, or do we want to change the world? We can't have it both ways.

Bruce Mesnekoff Discussing About Refinancing Student Loan and Consolidation Loan repayment is a major goal for any graduate after college. According to our Expert from Student Loan Help Center, Mr.Bruce Mesnekoff, Every individual dreams of a loan free future and having some financial stability. To achieve this, there are options available to help with loan repayment. In our earlier article we spoke about consolidating student loans. In this article, we will discuss refinancing student loans and its associated advantages. So Bruce Mesnekoff, how consolidation and refinancing are different in terms? These two terms are used interchangeably by most people but there is substantial difference between the two. Understanding the difference is critical to know when can each be used and whether it will solve your purpose or not. Consolidation lets you combine all your student loans into one loan and pay interest at a weighted average. Refinancing is taking a new loan to pay off all your student loans. Refinancing is not available for federal loans but only for private loans.Also only private loan lenders provide the option of refinancing, though a few might provide you with the option of refinancing private and federal loans. Why Refinancing and Bruce Mesnekoff tells us what are the Advantages of it? Refinancing has certain benefits if you get good pay. You will have to pay lesser interest rate. This helps you save monthly and eventually a bigger bank balance down the years. Your credit score is high which will help you gain multiple offers from lenders with lesser interest rate. Offers you variable loan interest which come handy if you took loan when interest rates were too high. You also have the option of decreasing your loan repayment cycle, This will increase monthly repayment amount but you will be loan free in shorter time and will save on even more interest money. Disadvantages There is one major disadvantage that comes when you refinance private and federal loans. The benefits offered by federal loans like public loan forgiveness program or income driven repayment will not be transferred to private lenders. So if you are truly confident of your income then you can do away with such options and completely rely on private loans. So Bruce Mesnekoff , Can you tell us Eligibility Criteria, I think its most important for our students. The eligibility is determined by your financial stability, your credit score, employment history etc. If you have poor credit, you can always have a co-signer to make the process feasible. Refinancing is surely a great way to save money, but whether it best fits you or not is completely your decision. Thoroughly analyze all the pros and cons against your goal and then take the first step. Make the best use of the number of lenders available to provide you with the best solution for your areas of concerns. Good Luck! You can also contact Bruce Mesnekoff an author of The ultimate guide to student loans and CEO of Student Loan Help Center Florida.

believing in your own self-worth is essential to achieving your full potential.

Planning Your Courses at the Schools of Experience If you think about McCall’s theory, going through the right courses in the schools of experience can help people in all kinds of situations increase the likelihood of success. One of the CEOs I have most admired, Nolan Archibald, has spoken to my students on this theory. Archibald has had a stellar career, including having been the youngest-ever CEO of a Fortune 500 company—Black & Decker. After he retired, he discussed with my students how he’d managed his career. What he described was not all of the steps on his résumé, but rather why he took them. Though he didn’t use this language, he built his career by registering for specific courses in the schools of experience. Archibald had a clear goal in mind when he graduated from college—he wanted to become CEO of a successful company. But instead of setting out on what most people thought would be the “right,” prestigious stepping-stone jobs to get there, he asked himself: “What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?” That meant Archibald was prepared to make some unconventional moves in the early years of his career—moves his peers at business school might not have understood on the surface. Instead of taking jobs or assignments because they looked like a fast-track to the C-suite, he chose his options very deliberately for the experience they would provide. “I wouldn’t ever make the decision based upon how much it paid or the prestige,” he told my students “Instead, it was always: is it going to give me the experiences I need to wrestle with?” His first job after business school was not a glamorous consulting position. Instead, he worked in Northern Quebec, operating an asbestos mine. He thought that particular experience, of managing and leading people in difficult conditions, would be important to have mastered on his route to the C-suite. It was the first of many such decisions he made. The strategy worked. It wasn’t long before he became CEO of Beatrice Foods. And then, at age forty-two, he achieved an even loftier goal: he was appointed CEO of Black & Decker. He stayed in that position for twenty-four years.

John Patrick “Pat” McInally found fame in his native Usa as a punter and wide receiver for the National Football League’s Cincinnati bengals from 1976 to 1985. a Harvard graduate, he remains the only footballer to have achieved a verified perfect score on the Wonderlic Test, the intelligence test given to prospective players by the NFL.

Electrician Training at NCE Our basic and adaptable Electrical Trainee Program is intended to assist you with achieving your expert and budgetary objectives in only 30 months contrasted and other longer and all the more expensive projects. Our costs and adaptable timetables will assist you with turning into an Electrical Trainee in almost no time.

Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.

Researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently asked ten thousand middle and high school students if their parents cared more about personal achievements or whether they were kind. Eighty percent said their parents cared more about achievements—individual success over relational bonds.

She had graduated from the best Ivy League institutions, in the sequence required to achieve maximum prestige.

In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.

The importance of reading on the part of freedom loving people cannot be underestimated. Well-read people are able to think through issues better than non-readers are. Those who are well read will be able to become leaders in society. Non-readers are often doomed to be nothing more than followers. The dumbed-down graduates of the government schools are unable to think through the issues of day let alone even know what the issues are. They fall prey to specious arguments and deceptive manipulative politicians who promise anything to achieve an agenda or to stay in power.

Because our current educational system now graduates students lacking even minimal historical knowledge, citizens are misled by outlandish charges Modernists make about not only Jefferson but also other Founders as well as traditionally venerated historical events. If rudimentary historical literacy is to be achieved today, it must be individually secured, for it is no longer possible to rely on public schools (and even many private schools) for this once elementary knowledge

One Stanford op-ed in particular was picked up by the national press and inspired a website, Stop the Brain Drain, which protested the flow of talent to Wall Street. The Stanford students wrote, The financial industry’s influence over higher education is deep and multifaceted, including student choice over majors and career tracks, career development resources, faculty and course offerings, and student culture and political activism. In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates. This represented the highest portion of any industry except consulting, and about three times more than previous generations. As the financial industry’s profits have increasingly come from complex financial products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that ignited the 2008 financial meltdown, its demand has steadily grown for graduates with technical degrees. In 2006, the securities and commodity exchange sector employed a larger portion of scientists and engineers than semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. The result has been a major reallocation of top talent into financial sector jobs, many of which are “socially useless,” as the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority put it. This over-allocation reduces the supply of productive entrepreneurs and researchers and damages entrepreneurial capitalism, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report. Many of these finance jobs contribute to volatile and counter-productive financial speculation. Indeed, Wall Street’s activities are largely dominated by speculative security trading and arbitrage instead of investment in new businesses. In 2010, 63 percent of Goldman Sachs’ revenue came from trading, compared to only 13 percent from corporate finance. Why are graduates flocking to Wall Street? Beyond the simple allure of high salaries, investment banks and hedge funds have designed an aggressive, sophisticated, and well-funded recruitment system, which often takes advantage of [a] student’s job insecurity. Moreover, elite university culture somehow still upholds finance as a “prestigious” and “savvy” career track.6

I often get asked these questions from young people who are considering going to law school: “Do you use your law degree in what you do? Has it helped you?” These are difficult questions to answer succinctly. It’s impossible for me to say that it doesn’t play into my day-to-day activities because law school and briefly practicing law rewired my brain. I’m more structured and detail-oriented than I would have been. Having gone to law school years ago still impacts my job performance every day. Plus, people tended to accord me some professional respect in my twenties in part because I had a high-value graduate degree. It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the impact it’s had. On the other hand, it’s not as if I’m editing contracts or figuring out if something is legal on a regular basis. If I were to come across a genuine legal issue I’d call a lawyer who specializes in that sort of thing or look it up online like anyone else. Legal training (and the subsequent indebtedness) would not be my first suggestion to a young person looking to do something enterprising.* I felt I had to unlearn a lot as I embarked down a very different road.

There’s a country that does something a little like this. Its young people, including its very best educational prospects from all different backgrounds, spend two or three years training and solving problems in a nonhierarchical environment and get together every year. Many then collaborate to start companies. This country leads the world in venture capital investments per capita (over $170, versus $75 in the United States in 2010).1 It has more companies on the NASDAQ than any non-US country except for China, despite having a population of less than eight million.2 Its quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate was above 5 percent in 2011 and it’s in the top thirty globally in per capita GDP, above Spain and Saudi Arabia, among others.3 This country is Israel, where eighteen-year-olds complete two- or three-year tours in the military, getting to know each other in highly selective military units. They operate at a high level of autonomy and responsibility and then travel the world for months before heading to college and/or grad school. In Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s book Start-up Nation, this network and training ground is credited as helping give rise to a culture of risk taking and entrepreneurship. By the time Israelis graduate from college, they’re in their midtwenties and mature; in many cases, they’ve already been in operating environments and borne life-and-death responsibilities. This cocktail of experience gives rise to a mixture of both courage and impatience. As one entrepreneur put it, “When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. . . . Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.”4 Another observer commented, “Israelis . . .  don’t care about the social price of failure and they develop their projects regardless of the economic . . . situation.”5

Let’s take the case of US law schools as an example. If you were to say to someone educated, “There are too many law schools producing too many lawyers in the US,” she would probably agree, in part because there have been dozens of articles over the past several years about the precipitous drop in positions at law firms and the many unemployed law school graduates.9 The general response to this problem is, “Well, people will figure it out and eventually stop applying to law school,” the suggestion being that the market will clear and self-correct if given enough time. On the surface it looks like this market magic is now happening. In 2013, law school applications are projected to be down to about 54,000 from a high of 98,700 in 2004.10 That’s a dramatic decrease of 45 percent. However, a closer look shows that the number of students who started law school in 2011 and are set to graduate in 2014 was 48,697, about 43,000 of whom will graduate, based on historical graduation rates.11 We’ll still be producing 36,000–43,000 newly minted law school grads a year, not far from the peak of 44,495 set in 2012, from now until the current entering class graduates in 2016. Meanwhile, in 2011, only 65.4 percent of law school graduates got jobs for which they needed to pass the bar exam, and estimates of the number of new legal jobs available run as low as 2,180 per year.12 Bloomberg Businessweek has projected a surplus of 176,000 unemployed or underemployed law school graduates by 2020.13 So even as applications plummet, there will not be dramatically fewer law school graduates produced in the coming several years, though it will have been easier to get in as acceptance rates rise due to the diminished applicant pool.14 We’ll still be producing many more lawyers than the market requires, but now they’ll be less talented. If anything, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Human capital markets don’t self-correct very quickly, if at all. At a minimum there’s a massive time lag that spans years, for several reasons.

Known as "Ike,” Eisenhower was born prior to the Spanish American War on October 14, 1890. Graduating from West Point Military Academy in 1915, he served under a number of talented generals including John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall. Although for the greatest time he held the rank of Major, he was quickly promoted to the rank of a five star general during World War II. During this war he served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. Eisenhower was responsible for organizing the invasion of North Africa and later in 1944, the invasion of Normandy, France and Germany. Following World War II, influential citizens and politicians from both political parties urged Eisenhower to run for president. Becoming a Republican, the popular general was elected and became the 34th President of the United States. Using the slogan “I like Ike!” he served as the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. Having witnessed the construction of the German Autobahn, one of lasting achievements we still use is the Interstate Highway System, authorized in 1956. ] He reasoned that our cities would be targets in a future war; therefore the Interstate highways would help evacuate them and allow the military greater flexibility in their maneuvers. Along with many other accomplishments during his administration, on January 3, 1959 Alaska became the 49th state and on August 21, 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state. On March 28, 1969, at 79 years of age, Eisenhower died of congestive heart failure at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington D.C. He was laid to rest on the grounds of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. Eisenhower is buried alongside his son Doud, who died at age 3 in 1921. His wife Mamie was later buried next to him after her death on November 1, 1979.

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “In 1880, I was graduated from Harvard University and then my education began.

Women—and only women—lowered their intellectual self-esteem between high school graduation and sophomore year of college.

A college degree is not a magic wand. The idea that hard work and educational achievement alone will completely reverse the socioeconomic conditions of young families and communities of color is both damaging and inaccurate. A 2015 study will show that White college graduates have more than seven times the wealth of Black college graduates and four times the wealth of Hispanic and Latinx college graduates. Even the households of White single parent graduates have twice the wealth of Black and Hispanic or Latinx college graduate households with two parents.1 A degree cannot completely disrupt legacies of oppression. This type of intervention will require intentional policy changes across every system—financial, educational, correctional, human services, and so much more—as well as investments to address the gaps. As opposed to calling a degree a magic wand, my team and I will describe it as a “leveler” in the effort to overcome these disparities.

recounted an early childhood memory of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders and waving a tiny American flag in a crowd gathered to greet the astronauts from one of the Apollo space missions after a successful splashdown in the waters off Hawaii. And now, more than forty years later, I told the graduates, I’d just had a chance to watch my own daughters hear from a new generation of space explorers. It had caused me to reflect on all that America had achieved since my own childhood; it offered a case of life coming full circle—and proof, just as their diplomas were proof, just as my having been elected president was proof, that the American idea endures. The students and their parents had cheered, many of them waving American flags of their own. I thought about the country I’d just described to them—a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone. At about the same age as the graduates were now, I’d seized on that idea and clung to it for dear life. For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.

The Superior College Lahore is known for its ever-evolving, unique, and quality education initiatives for educational facilities, fastest expansion, and focuses on innovation for student success. Advertisement This continued legacy of excellence has led Superior College Lahore to achieve “University Status” granted by a gazette notification. The amendment bill of university status for the chartered institute ‘Superior College Lahore’ was presented in the Punjab Assembly on March 09, 2021, which was approved by the Governor Punjab, Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar on July 23, 2021, while the approved amendment status notification was handed over to the Chairman Superior Group, Prof. Dr. Ch. Abdul Rehman by the Speaker Punjab Assembly, Chaudhry Parvez Elahi on July 26, 2021. Superior University is now Pakistan’s leading university with its core focus on promoting entrepreneurship, Research & innovation ensuring student success to contribute economically Superior Pakistan. The unique program for entrepreneurship development among the youngsters “Entrepreneurship Teaching & Training Development” (ETTP) at Superior University has made a significant difference in students’ career orientation. Focus on developing future job creators instead of job seekers through the power of entrepreneurship has earned great success for the university. The market-ready graduates are prepared through the “3U1M Program” where they spend three years of education in university and one year in the market to seek practical exposure to professional careers. Three indigenous streams for specialization in the final year of the 3U1M Program offer ideal options of Startup, Scaleup, and Design Thinking which ensures 100% job placement. Chairman Superior Group, Prof. Dr. Ch. Abdul Rehman and Rector Superior University, Dr. Sumaira Rehman also share the vision of promoting education in the country and prepare students equipped with attributes of the 21st century. Superior University is taking part in improving the literacy rate to create a socio-economic impact in the country by increasing access to quality education even in all the farfetched areas.

In the following days, the first opposition party was founded and my parents revealed the truth, their truth. They said that my country had been an open-air prison for almost half a century. That the universities which had haunted my family were, yes, educational institutions, but of a peculiar kind. That when my family spoke of the graduation of relatives, what they really meant was their recent release from prison. That completing a degree was coded language for completing a sentence. That what had been referred to as the initials of university towns were actually the initials of various prisons and deportation sites: B. for Burrel, M. for Maliq, S. for Spaç. That the different subjects of study corresponded to different official charges: to study international relations meant to be charged with treason; literature stood for 'agitation and propaganda'; and a degree in economics entailed a more minor crime, such as 'hiding gold'. That students who become teachers were former prisoners who converted to being spies, like our cousin Ahmet and his late wife. Sonia. That a harsh professor was an official at whose hands many people had lost their lives, like Haki, with whom my grandfather had shaken hands after serving his sentence. That f someone had achieved excellent results, it meant the stint had been brief and straightforward; but being expelled meant a death sentence; and dropping out voluntarily meant committing suicide.

This is why we are rewarded with parties, presents, ceremonies, celebrations, and positive feedback from our friends and family when we “achieve” certain milestones that affirm this so-called progression (i.e., birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, retirements). The illusion of linear time was created as a way to make sure that humans stay in line, and follow the rules, and keep to the system’s prefab formulas. The problem is that when we operate from the distorted perspective of linear time, we cut ourselves off from the quantum realm of limitless possibility.

Compared to all this, Ronstadt and Browne were still trying to graduate from the kids' table. Ronstadt had released her first album for Geffen, Don't Cry Now, in September 1973. Browne followed a few weeks later, in October, with his second album, For Everyman. Both albums sold respectably, but neither cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard album chart. And while Geffen had great expectations for both artists, in early 1974 each was still building an audience. Their tour itinerary reflected their transitional position. It brought them to big venues in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, but also took them far from the bright lights to small community theaters and college campuses in Oxnard, San Luis Obispo, New Haven, and Cortland, New York. At either end, there wasn't much glamour in the experience. They had moved up from the lowest rung on the touring ladder, when they had lugged their gear in and out of station wagons, but had progressed only to a Continental Trailways bus without beds that both bands crammed into for the late-night drives between shows. "The first thing that happened is we were driving all night, and the next morning we were exhausted," Browne remembered. "Like, no one slept a wink. We were sitting up all night on a bus."' "Touring was misery," Ronstadt said, looking back. "Touring is just hard. You don't get to meet anybody. You are always in a bubble . . . You saw the world outside the bus window, and you did the sound check every day."9 The performances were uneven, too. "While Browne is much more assured and confident on stage than he was a year or two ago, he's still very much like a smart kid with a grown-up gift for songwriting," sniffed Judith Sims of Rolling Stone. She treated Ronstadt even more dismissively, describing her as peddling "country schmaltz."' The young rock journalist Cameron Crowe, catching the tour a few days later in Berkeley, described Browne's set as "painfully mediocre."" But Ronstadt and Browne found their footing as they progressed, each alternating lead billing depending on who had sold more records in each market. By the time the cavalcade rolled into Carnegie Hall, the reception for Browne and Ronstadt was strong enough that the promoters added a second show. In February 1974, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt were still at the edge of the stardom they would soon achieve.

Trained Obstetrician and Gynaecologist in Dubai Dr Elsa de Menezes Fernandes is a UK trained Obstetrician and Gynaecologist. She completed her basic training in Goa, India, graduating from Goa University in 1993. After Residency, she moved to the UK, where she worked as a Senior House Officer in London at the Homerton, Southend General, Royal London and St. Bartholomew’s Hospitals in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She completed five years of Registrar and Senior Registrar training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in London at The Whittington, University College, Hammersmith, Ealing and Lister Hospitals and Gynaecological Oncology at the Hammersmith and The Royal Marsden Hospitals. During her post-graduate training in London she completed Membership from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. In 2008 Dr Elsa moved to Dubai where she worked as a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at Mediclinic City Hospital until establishing her own clinic in Dubai Healthcare City in March 2015. She has over 20 years specialist experience. Dr Elsa has focused her clinical work on maternal medicine and successfully achieved the RCOG Maternal Medicine Special Skills Module. She has acquired a vast amount of experience working with high risk obstetric patients and has worked jointly with other specialists to treat patients who have complex medical problems during pregnancy. During her training she gained experience in Gynaecological Oncology from her time working at St Bartholomew’s, Hammersmith and The Royal Marsden Hospitals in London. Dr Elsa is experienced in both open and laparoscopic surgery and has considerable clinical and operative experience in performing abdominal and vaginal hysterectomies and myomectomies. She is also proficient in the technique of hysteroscopy, both diagnostic and operative for resection of fibroids and the endometrium. The birth of your baby, whether it is your first or a happy addition to your family, is always a very personal experience and Dr Elsa has built a reputation on providing an experience that is positive and warmly remembered. She supports women’s choices surrounding birth and defines her role in the management of labour and delivery as the clinician who endeavours to achieve safe motherhood. She is a great supporter of vaginal delivery. Dr Elsa’s work has been published in medical journals and she is a member of the British Maternal and Fetal Medicine Society. She was awarded CCT (on the Specialist Register) in the UK. Dr Elsa strives to continue her professional development and has participated in a wide variety of courses in specialist areas, including renal diseases in pregnancy and medical complications in pregnancy.

In the early grades, being in positive classroom climates with friendly, considerate teachers is linked to greater self-regulation, less disruptive behavior, and higher teacher-rated social competence among elementary and middle school students. Middle school teachers whose classrooms support increasing student autonomy and competence can build personal relationships in which students feel known, valued, and respected. Gains in middle grade achievement and reduced levels of disruptive behavior are evidence in classrooms in which expectations are clear, time is used well and productively, and teachers respond effectively to variations in students’ motivation and focus. Similarly, strong, positive, and cooperative relationships with teachers increase high school students’ likelihood of graduating.

Fellow-graduates: Duty bids us go forth into active life. Let us go cheerfully, hopefully, and earnestly, and set ourselves to find our especial part. When we have found it, willingly and faithfully perform it; for every obstacle we overcome, every success we achieve tends to bring man closer to God and make life more as He would have it.

You can achieve anything you want, only if you have the guts to believe you can do it!

Having a Degree is a good achievement but don't expect the world to bow to your Degree. That's entitlement and delusion

The relationships you forge in college can be a lifeline for you through your life and career. Forging relationships during college is as important as academic achievement. Relationships that survive graduation will have a profound impact on your life equal to or as great as your academic achievement.

The book, The Holy Longing, resulted from that conversation. And Eric Major’s instincts were correct; there was a crying niche for that kind of book. The book found a huge audience, inside of all Christian denominations. But while The Holy Longing is a solid book, one that offers a certain basic foundation in Christian spirituality, it remains precisely that, a foundational book, a needed Spirituality 101 course, but not a graduate or final course. The Holy Longing is a book that is intended to help us “get our lives together,” to help us achieve an essential discipleship. But where do we go from there? What lies beyond the essentials, the basics? Where do we go once some of the basic questions in our lives have been answered, or at least brought to enough peace that our focus can shift away from ourselves to others? Where do we go once the basic questions in our lives are no longer the restless questions of youthful insecurity and loneliness? “Who am I?” “Who loves me?” “How will my life turn out?” Where do we go once the basic questions in life become: “How can I give my life away more purely, and more meaningfully?” “How do I live beyond my own heartaches, headaches, and obsessions so as to help make other peoples’ lives more meaningful?” The intent of this book is to try to address exactly those questions: How can we live less self-centered, more mature lives? What constitutes deep maturity and how do we reach that place? And, not unimportantly, what constitutes a more adult, Christian discipleship? What constitutes a truly mature following of Jesus? This book will try to answer those questions. It will try to be true to what its subtitle promises: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity.

For all the attacks against meritocracy, there is no other way of organising society than through meritocratic means. And if you’re inclined to disagree, think for a moment about your personal life. Ultimately, when your back is up against the wall, you will want to be operated on by a surgeon or flown by a pilot who graduated at the top of their class and achieved renown in their field through genuine merit – not through a lottery or connections. At some point, particularly when it is a matter of life and death, the buck always stops, and meritocracy always triumphs.

After graduating from college, Walton started in sales at J. C. Penney in 1940, then enlisted for the war in 1942. In 1945, he started managing a franchise Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas (where the population was then seven thousand). By 1950 he was running two stores in Newport and had achieved reasonable success by experimenting and innovating. One of his innovative ideas that had been a massive hit with his customers was an ice cream machine. As he writes in his autobiography, “Every crazy thing we tried hadn’t turned out as well as the ice cream machine, of course, but we hadn’t made any mistakes we couldn’t correct quickly, none so big that they threatened the business.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

He held his head in the manner of one who takes his beauty for granted, but knows that others do not. He was Peter Keating, star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, voted the most popular man on the campus. The crowd was there, thought Peter Keating, to see him graduate, and he tried to estimate the capacity of the hall. They knew of his scholastic record and no one would beat his record today. Oh, well, there was Shlinker. Shlinker had given him stiff competition, but he had beaten Shlinker this last year. He had worked like a dog, because he had wanted to beat Shlinker. He had no rivals today.... Then he felt suddenly as if something had fallen down, inside his throat, to his stomach, something cold and empty, a blank hole rolling down and leaving that feeling on its way: not a thought, just the hint of a question asking him whether he was really as great as this day would proclaim him to be. He looked for Shlinker in the crowd; he saw his yellow face and gold-rimmed glasses. He stared at Shlinker warmly, in relief, in reassurance, in gratitude. It was obvious that Shlinker could never hope to equal his own appearance or ability; he had nothing to doubt; he would always beat Shlinker and all the Shlinkers of the world; he would let no one achieve what he could not achieve. Let them all watch him. He would give them good reason to stare. He felt the hot breaths about him and the expectation, like a tonic. It was wonderful, thought Peter Keating, to be alive.

The crowd was there, thought Peter Keating, to see him graduate, and he tried to estimate the capacity of the hall. They knew of his scholastic record and no one would beat his record today. Oh, well, there was Shlinker. Shlinker had given him stiff competition, but he had beaten Shlinker this last year. He had worked like a dog, because he had wanted to beat Shlinker. He had no rivals today.... Then he felt suddenly as if something had fallen down, inside his throat, to his stomach, something cold and empty, a blank hole rolling down and leaving that feeling on its way: not a thought, just the hint of a question asking him whether he was really as great as this day would proclaim him to be. He looked for Shlinker in the crowd; he saw his yellow face and gold-rimmed glasses. He stared at Shlinker warmly, in relief, in reassurance, in gratitude. It was obvious that Shlinker could never hope to equal his own appearance or ability; he had nothing to doubt; he would always beat Shlinker and all the Shlinkers of the world; he would let no one achieve what he could not achieve. Let them all watch him. He would give them good reason to stare. He felt the hot breaths about him and the expectation, like a tonic. It was wonderful, thought Peter Keating, to be alive.

In those days, I believed that proficiency in English and success in business were the direct result of high academic achievements and I assumed as a matter of course that Sisulu was a university graduate. I was greatly surprised to learn from my cousin after I left the office that Walter Sisulu had never gone beyond Standard VI. It was another lesson from Fort Hare that I had to unlearn in Johannesburg. I had been taught that to have a BA meant to be a leader, and to be a leader one needed a BA. But in Johannesburg I found that many of the most outstanding leaders had never been to university at all. Even though I had done all the courses in English that were required for a BA, my English was neither as fluent nor as eloquent as that of many of the men I met in Johannesburg who had not even received a school certificate

Achieving excellence in school often requires mastering old ways of thinking. Building an influential career demands new ways of thinking. In a classic study of highly accomplished architects, the most creative ones graduated with a B average. Their straight-A counterparts were so determined to be right that they often failed to take the risk of rethinking the orthodoxy. A similar pattern emerged in a study of students who graduated at the top of their class. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” education researcher Karen Arnold explains. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.” That’s

People will say, yeh nahin ho sakta, woh nahin ho sakta. But anything is possible. If your mind can conceive it, your heart can believe it, you can achieve it… Try kar ke toh dekho!

CUBBY ORDERED an express food delivery in the morning.  It cost extra, but he wasn’t worried about money.  His parents had left him well-off.  How well-off he didn’t know, never having inquired into the matter.  Month by month, year by year, a firm of accountants took his money to clubs on Wall Street where investments of easy virtue lounged.  At least that was how Cubby understood it.  It was a kind of escort service for money, though how the escorts reproduced was a mystery to him.  The same accountants handled his insurance, his tax and now his senior security.  His parents had set up the system when he was in college because they wanted him to concentrate on his studies. And Cubby had concentrated.  He graduated summa cum laude at Harvard, achieving a Ph.D. with a dissertation on synchronized flashing in fireflies. (This little-known phenomenon occurs in the mountains of Tennessee.  It is the insect equivalent of a rock concert.  The male fireflies show up around 8:30 p.m., flashing on and off, watching one another to get the tempo right.  The females, hot little groupies that they are, observe from the ground.  By 9 p.m. the males are flashing in unison and the females go wild.)

The other component was to build cadres through political education. Republicans sought out wealthy donors to set up foundations and think tanks as safe spaces outside the university for elaborating the Republican catechism, a document that grew from a cocktail napkin to a vast library of popular books and academic policy studies. They set up summer camps where college students could read Aristotle and Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich von Hayek, and learn to connect them. They set up reading groups for professors, who got paid to attend. They funded graduate students and apprenticed them under movement-approved professors. They also funded campus newspapers and national organizations like the Federalist Society, which introduces students to the "originalist" interpretation of constitutional law and acts as an an employment agency for young lawyers looking for clerkships and teaching positions. This one organization has revolutionized the way law is taught and interpreted in this country, and therefore how we are governed. It is the fruit of the conservatives' pedagogical strategy. The movement's fathers and godfathers, some of whom had once been Trotskyites, understood intuitively that to make lasting change the movement would have to build and sustain cadres, and send them out with full backpacks on the long march through the institutions. Marching with the aim of dismantling government by first seizing control of it, thus achieving anti-political ends by political means.

If you’re a student struggling to stay disciplined in school, think about how you can be of service to the world once you graduate.

Action Steps 1. Audit your current skill set. You have more areas of competence than you think. Throughout your life, you have amassed knowledge and specialized skills in a wide range of disciplines. That knowledge and those skills can prove useful to you in future endeavors. For example, I have a degree in Finance and Investments. Upon graduating from college, I accepted an accounting position with one of the top automakers. I then became a stockbroker. Then, I moved into a career in IT. For the past 20 years, I’ve been a writer in numerous capacities. Along the way, I learned about server management, Wordpress development and search engine optimization. All of these ventures imbued me with skills I use every day - in my business and personal life. Your experience has likewise instilled within you a raft of specialized skills. Many of them will help you to tackle unfamiliar tasks and projects, even if they seem unrelated to your current and previous jobs. 2. Focus on your desired outcomes rather than the things that might go wrong along the way. One of our survival instincts is to plan for things that might go wrong. In some circumstances, that’s a valuable quality that protects us from harm. It prevents us from strolling down dark alleys in unpopulated locales. It discourages us from petting strange dogs. In other circumstances, however, it can hold us back. The instinct prevents us from pursuing opportunities that can lead to improved aptitude as well as personal and professional growth. By focusing on your desire outcomes, you’ll find it easier to ignore your inborn fear of the unknown. You’ll be able to dismiss the voice in your head constantly whispering “What if XYZ happens?” 3. Look for opportunities to learn new skills. The self-confidence you’ll gain will make you less fearful of tackling unfamiliar tasks. Achieving a high level of competency in any discipline requires repeated exposure and application. There’s no other way to attain proficiency. The problem is a lack of courage. It’s normal to feel hesitant, or even intimidated, when we’re given a new responsibility.

If you take care of yourself, if you have a vision of what you want for the future, if you’re kind, and attentive, and responsible, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll live an interesting and successful life. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll reach every goal you set out to achieve. Fifty-nine years ago, I set out to graduate from Annandale High, and I didn’t reach that goal. I never got the chance to wear a red Annandale robe and mortarboard until tonight.