Some of the schools we’re spending time with this past few months have struggled. They’re in a balancing act that nearly every school plays out nearly every day.
On the one hand students and their parents want to be individually successful. But saying that seems crass.
On the other hand, schools want students to feel that thing you feel when you're "part of something bigger than yourself." Saying that seems trite, a cliché that makes it all feel rather elusive.
Plus, it’s hard to be part of something meaningful unless you’ve got a (good) meaningful contribution to make.
What if we were wrong in trying to seek this impossible balance?
What if there's some other message we could share with young people as they come up to their summer (or winter) break?
Jim Carrey makes me smile.
But he makes me think, too.
A decade ago almost to the day, he gave a commencement speech at Maharishi International University. Here are some words from a clip you might want to watch in full:
When I was 28 after a decade of being a professional comedian, I realised the purpose of my life, something that's worth my time.
I did something that made people present their best selves to me wherever I go.
How will you serve the world?
What do they need that your talent can provide?
That's all you have to figure out.
The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency you have.
All the rest is just smoke and mirrors.
Your need for acceptance can make you invisible to this world.
Risk being seen in all of your glory.
I was concerned about going out into the world and doing something bigger than myself.
Until someone smarter than myself made me realise that there's nothing bigger than myself.
Our eyes are not viewers, they're also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time. Fear is writing that script, and the working title is 'I'll never be enough'.
Psychlogist Phil Stutz’s take on handling fear and pain is core to the first of his ‘five tools’, the “Reversal of Desire”.
Essentially, he says we’ve got to learn to stop seeking pleasure and start to enjoy the pain of meaningful work, to ‘bring it on’, and use the pain or fear of it to get through to unleash our inner potential.
Taylor Swift wrote a whole song about it, and talks about fear and what we should do with it:
“To me, “FEARLESS” is not the absence of fear. It’s not being completely unafraid. To me, FEARLESS is having fears. FEARLESS is having doubts. Lots of them. To me, FEARLESS is living in spite of those things that scare you to death.”
Take your pick of philosophy from Carrey, Stutz or Swift.
Define the thing you’ve been afraid of, embrace it, and start the work of punching through it to the light on the other side.