Principal, Chair of Governors, College staff, parents, friends, partners, siblings, children and most of all graduands.
Thank you for inviting me here today to deliver what in the US is described as a commencement speech.
At the outset let us be clear of my purpose here. I am a man in a wizard’s gown from out of town. I am here to impart wisdom born out of life experience. I will tell you my story to illustrate the twists and turns that life can take. I will tell you tales that emphasise the role of hard work, the application of specialist knowledge, the importance of supportive friends and family, and the need for self-belief laced with big dollops of good luck. My narrative will be made up of a series of episodes. Real and imagined life moments. Part comedy, part tragedy. Meantime, your responsibility as the audience is to listen avidly, hanging on my every word, as you imbibe the relevance of this life told. You will taste the subtleties of my voice, roll with the metaphors, and squeeze every last drop of meaning out of my speech. Finally satiated, with a combination of anecdote, analysis and philosophical insight, you will yell at me to stop. ‘’No more.” The lessons will have been learnt, and you will leave the building better people than when you arrived. Departing into the late summer air, safe in the knowledge that you have indeed witnessed the future through a stranger’s eyes. Of course, it might not quite work out like this.
Let us now jump in the time machine. It is 1981 – almost 35 years ago – and I am you, I am 22 and I am graduating from college. I am clasping tightly to my chest the degree certificate that will tell the world of my worth. I am listening to a man in a wizard’s gown from out of town. See, we are so familiar, you and me. But all of this is a lie – a fabrication, an untruth. A construct to make a point. I’m not like you, you see, because I didn’t turn up for my own graduation. I was too busy with other stuff. I was editing the Students’ Union magazine, which I had started and named after The Jam top 20 hit of that year. I was a journalist in waiting? I had important things to say. In my defence, the young man you can see in front of you is headstrong, opinionated and in love with his life. There are so many new things happening to him that he is tripping up over the possibilities. And he certainly has no time to consider the thoughts of his parents who may well have wished to see him graduate. Sorry, Mom. Sorry Dad. As it turned out the magazine didn’t run for long and certainly was no passport to Fleet Street.
Life Lesson No. 1: YOU CAN LEARN A LOT FROM FAILURE.
I’d already cottoned on to this lesson during my teens. I was brought up in a part of Birmingham where the data (studied in retrospect) suggested I was unlikely to lead a life of consequence. As a kid I was blissfully unaware that I was living in an area with one of the lowest progression rates to university. I dreamed of being really good at something. I dreamed a lot – subconsciously wanting to escape the suburbs. I wanted to be a great cricketer. By practising over and over, hour after hour, in all weathers, I became a very good swing bowler. Cricket for me was a heady mix of science and psychology. I became obsessed with how that small ball would react to changing air pressure, the grass we were playing upon, and be affected by the ritualistic shining of the red leather on my white trousers. The psychology was all about an exploitation of the confidence and fears of batsmen faced with me delivering the ball towards them at speeds approaching 80 mph.
Let’s set the controls of the time machine to June 15th 1978. It’s a day very much like today. Perfect swing bowIing weather.I have been chosen to play for a Warwickshire, Schools Xl, and I am on the brink of breaking into County Cricket.and I am opening the bowling with Gladstone Small, who later went on to open the bowling for Warwickshire and England. At the end of the match however I will bow out. I realise I don’t want to devote the rest of my life to one sport. Also (a major disincentive at the time) professional cricket is so poorly paid with very little sign of today’s opportunities for commercial sponsorship. I also sense a certain unfairness in life. The entire team besides myself and Gladstone have come from prestigious English public schools. Oh, and self-critically, I doubt I am good enough to succeed.
Life lesson No. 2: SELF-KNOWLEDGE GOOD. TOO MUCH SELF-DOUBT, BAD.
At College I went off to study on one of the UK’s first Media courses. No mention of Mickey Mouse degrees back then. Like you, I learnt so much about so many things whilst studying. Most of it not on the curriculum. For me, this extra-curricula activity included getting heavily involved in student politics and getting elected as President of the Students Union. At that time I was consciously choosing the slacker approach to life. I was putting off going to work. I didn’t want to conform. I didn’t want to meet my destiny. Not quite yet. What actually happened though was somewhat different.
Life lesson No.3 : PLAN TO BE IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME. BUT SOMETIMES IT’S JUST A CASE OF LUCK.
The College I was studying at announced it wanted to close down our campus, and I found myself being (reluctantly) thrust into the spotlight as the person who was going to stop the closure. To cut a long story short, I had an intensive period of learning about campaigning and influencing. I learnt how to exploit people’s dreams and people’s fears. I learnt how to distance myself from radicals involved in risky direct action, whilst exploiting the outcomes of their strength of feeling. I learnt to be non-judgmental, so that I could have dialogue with people I didn’t like, and appeared to have little in common with.
My cinematic moment was a packed County Hall for voting on the college closure. As I peered down from the circular balcony, I could see that every county councillor had a copy of the orange briefing document we had delivered by hand to their home address. If the vote was won or lost I had instructed all of our people in the public gallery to silently release torn up council papers into the council gallery below. The vote went our way and a mute ticker tape shower confounded expectations of noisy students behaving badly.
Life lesson No. 4: SURPRISE PEOPLE.
I have since headed up many campaigns and been successful in grouping individuals and groups with different agendas behind one objective. And I have achieved this without being duplicitous. Over the years I’ve heard so many times people around me lamenting that only brash pushy people get on. People who are ruthless in their networking. It’s true, they do, but they also burn spectacularly as they abruptly re-enter our orbit after a fall. My advice (rooted in a belief in karma) is that what goes around comes around. If you’re in it for the long game, treat people as you would like them to treat you.
Life lesson No. 5: BE HONEST, BE TRUTHFUL, BE STRAIGHT WITH PEOPLE. DON’T BE BRASH, NEVER BULLYING. INSTEAD BE GENEROUS AND POLITE.
So, let’s get back in the time machine and shoot over to 1990. As I stare at myself sitting in a room editing a film with a friend, all I can see is the ponytail I am proudly sporting. Why did I grow my hair so long? The young man I am working alngside has convinced me to work for nothing. Quite a feat. By this time I have a career as a television producer/director. I have begun to make a series of documentary films about mental health issues. It’s a fulfilling and well paid career. It’s freelance. It’s my own business, and is in equal parts liberating and daunting. I’ve found a way of not conforming to getting a 9 to 5 job with a regular pay cheque. But here I am working for free and I’m not sure why. I am about to find out why. We are putting the finishing touches to a short feature film which will win all kinds of awards worldwide and kickstart the film directing career of the other man in the room. He is David Yates, and in 2013 he completed production the last of the four Harry Potter films as director.
Life lesson No. 6: SIGNIFICANCE ALWAYS COMES LATER.
When I relate these stories to my eldest daughter she rather cruelly reminds me that these are miserable tales of what might have being, of missed opportunity. ‘You could have opened the bowling for England, and you could have become the wealthiest film director in England. But you didn’t.’ She may have a point.
I have had a career that has moved around. I have in-depth subject knowledge, but I also have knowledge and experience of many other related and unrelated parts of life. In my early years as a TV Producer/Director I was unusual, because I was multi-skilled. I could shoot film and edit it. My peers couldn’t. The Television industry was a heavily unionised closed shop, where there was strict delineation of who was allowed to do what job. My generation changed all that – for better or worse.
Life lesson No. 7: YOU NEED TO NETWORK. AND YOUR APPROACH TO LIFE OUGHT TO BE T-SHAPED.
Depth and breadth. Depth and breadth. Be an expert on something, but ensure you can communicate and get on with people who have different interests, skills and experiences.
Suddenly, it is New Year’s Eve 1999 and the fireworks are going off all around the world to mark the new Millennium. A time of great optimism. A bit like the London 2012 Olympics celebrations writ large. I have missed most of the lead up to the day because I am deeply buried in what will become the last of my television and film projects shot over time. I am completing the final interviews with people who have been incarcerated in secure psychiatric institutions for over 30 years. They are about to be ‘released’ into the community and I’m there to record their stories of life in these buildings. These self-same buildings will be converted over the coming years into gated communities of a different kind. Luxury flats. Gates once used to keep people in, will now be re-purposed to keep people out. As I register the level of fear expressed by these institutionalised patients, I am so so aware of:
Life lesson No. 8: NOTHING STAYS THE SAME AS WE LIVE IN A STATE OF CONSTANT FLUX.
You are I’m sure aware that it’s likely you’ll have over five careers in the course of your lifetime. So, maybe I’m not so dissimilar to you after all? Around this time – in the early 2000s, I am also beginning to film stories with young people serving long custodial sentences for having committed murder. I learnt a lot about myself and humankind in those long days behind bars. I’ll always remember the relief I felt at the end of each day as I made my way out from behind five sets of locked doors and accompanying security checks. I was often asked by friends and colleagues if it was a depressing episode in my life. My response would be the same now as it was then. It was a time of great learning for me. The golden thread woven through all of the stories I recorded was of the importance of education in society. These were young people with poor experiences of school. None of them had progressed into tertiary education, and neither had any of their families.
Life lesson No. 8: EDUCATION IS IMPORTANT. CONTINUING EDUCATION MORE SO.
It’s no great surprise that today I am working in a university. Notice that I purposely don’t use the phrase ‘ended up working in a university’. It’ll also be no surprise that a life viewed through a mirror and magnifying glass is easier to make sense of than it sometimes does whilst you are in the middle of living it. I am marked by the moments I have held up for scrutiny today. You, similarly, will be marked by the events that you make happen, and others that happen to you in the future.
Life lesson No. 9: MAKE YOURSELF OPEN AND READY TO EMBRACE CHANGE.
Your instinct at times will be to clam up and fight against things which take you out of your comfort zone. That way your comfort zone remains small and leaves you poorly equipped to exploit new experiences. Remember, the significance of strength in depth and breadth. What you know and have experience of will be what employers are interested in. But more and more, how you are able to communicate that to others, and involve them in innovating new products, services, processes and networks will be the thing that keeps you in work and enjoying the journey.
What you see here in front of you today is an endlessly positive person. I have found that in all walks of life we want to be around positive people. I love working with friends and colleagues who provide solutions to problems. It’s relatively easy to critique. Less easy to fix things. So the final advice I have to offer is:
Life lesson No. 10: REAPPROPRIATE AND RECYCLE THE NEGATIVE INTO SOMETHING POSITIVE.
POSITIVITY IS A REAL TURN-ON.
It just leaves me to congratulate you all on your achievements to date. Enjoy the moment of graduating in these superb surroundings. Be gracious to acknowledge the efforts of others in this room who have helped you along the way. And most of all, be very Un-British today. Take the compliments and the praise heaped on you, don’t shift around and fidget awkwardly, and say to yourself, “Yeh, I did that. I’m good, me. What’s up next?’
Thank you for listening.
@pinman blogs 