I don't know why, but I love graduations. "Pomp and Circumstance" brings a lump to my throat every time I hear it. I enjoy the ceremony of it all, the sense of pride that you can feel in the graduates and their families, the feeling that something has been achieved.

The graduation I attended Friday night had no graduation speaker. This is not always a bad thing. Many graduation speeches are cliche-ridden wastes of time as everyone assembled waits for it to just be OVER. I don't remember much about the graduation speeches at my various graduations and you probably don't either. But what is important for someone graduating from high school to know? What pearls of wisdom can you give them as they are literally walking out the door into adulthood? I wrote this post last summer about what I would've wanted to say at my own graduation. What could any of us say to this batch of graduates? What honest advice could we give them? I can't resist giving it a shot.

Good evening and congraulations to the class of 2006. I stand before you looking out at you here on your big night and in many ways I'm envious of you. You have what I don't...youth. I have what you don't....experience and wisdom. Well, I have experience anyway. I'm here tonight to congratulate you on your success. Congratulations once again. There are many your age who are not where you are tonight. For whatever reason they chose, or were unable to, complete high school. You did, and you deserve our respect for that.

Now that we've talked about your success, I'm going to spend the rest of our short time together talking about failure. Oooh, I can see the looks on your faces. Here we are on our big night and he wants to talk about failure? "Hey Brian, why don't you give us a VERY short uplifting speech and send us outta here?" Sorry guys, this is my speech! I'm a lot older than you are and that gives me a lot of experience when it comes to failure.

The power of any one of us is limited by nature. We are all frighteningly mortal, physically fragile, prone to mistakes in judgement, and totally fallible. These things guarantee that we will experience failure in life. YOU will experience failure. Some of you already have. You spent your time in sophomore English gazing at that cute blonde girl and you failed the class. Didn't have much fun in summer school, did you? But you didn't let that failure stop you. Being here tonight is proof of that.

Perhaps there is an athlete among all those funny looking hats that didn't have a perfect game. You missed the free throws late in the game with the score tied. You didn't hang on to the football when you had a chance to win the game. That volleyball was floating tantalizingly up there, but you missed the spike. That fastball was right across the plate, but you swung high. You failed on that particular task, that particular night, in that particular circumstance. Perhaps it was different the next time. Maybe it wasn't.

You will fail at many things many times. This doesn't mean that you aren't intelligent, skilled, accomplished, or fatally flawed. It means that you are human and doing what all the rest of us do.

I'm a firm believer that failure is the best teacher. We don't learn a lot from our successes. We learn a ton of things from our failures. Having a failed romance can teach you a great deal about love, relationships, and compatibility. Getting fired from a job can teach you a lot about the world of work, employers, work habits, and communication. Going bankrupt will open your eyes to the realities of managing your money and the pitfalls of debt. Not getting that job will motivate you to evaluate your resume and interview style. Launching a business and having it fail will certainly teach you the harsh realities of competing in the marketplace. Getting unceremoniously dumped by your husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend is a bitter pill to swallow, but I guarantee that it will inspire self awareness.

So now you know it. You will fail. Sometimes you will fail miserably. I can't offer you any magic advice to keep you from it. Even if I could, I wouldn't. It isn't that I don't want the best for you in your life. Its that you need to fail sometimes. We all do.

We need to fail so that we can learn and grow. We need to fail so that we can do it better the next time. We need to fail because adversity helps us find strength we didn't know we had. We need to fail because it inspires us to reach out to others. We need to fail because it motivates us to seek greater knowledge. We need to fail because the nectar of success tastes so much better when leavened with the remembrance of failure.

So my young friends, get on out there. Experience what the adult life has to offer. Take your failures and use them to build a better life. Your parents tempered your failures until now. They won't be doing that much longer. Now it is up to you to experience failure......and to achieve success.

Congratulations again to the class of 2006!
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