Dream Big, Work Hard, Be Kind

Author: Brendan Leonard (Semi-Rad) · Published: June 2018 · URL: https://semi-rad.com/2018/06/dream-big-work-hard-be-kind-a-message-for-2018/

One-line: A commencement address built on the claim that talent is mostly an excuse — six pieces of advice, three of which take zero talent and three of which are deliberately impractical.

Summary

Leonard gave this at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning’s 2018 commencement and published the full text on Semi-Rad. He introduces himself as an author, magazine writer, illustrator, filmmaker and speaker who “was not voted Most Likely to Succeed in my high school graduating class. I was voted Class Clown.” He also notes he drove to the ceremony in a $2,500 car with 200,000 miles on it — “just so we’re clear that the word ‘successful’ can mean a lot of different things.”

On the dream-job cliché. He is self-employed, does what he loves, and says the saying is a load of crap. “Work is work. If it wasn’t work, it would be called fun. Even your dream job is still a job. If you enjoy about 30 percent of your work, and you can tolerate the other 70 percent, I think you’ve beaten the game.” He only likes about 30 percent of the job he invented for himself. The correction: instead of doing what we love, love what we do — and loving is different from liking, the way your parents love you without liking you all the time.

On talent. His CV before writing — dishwasher, busboy, assembly line, day laborer, bartender, janitor, newspaper reporter, picking rocks out of cornfields, retrieving golf balls from a water hazard — is the evidence for the position: “talent… is an idea I think we’ve mostly invented to give ourselves an excuse to be lazy.” Calling someone talented makes them special and discounts the work. His formulation: “There are no special people, just people who put in enough hard work until something special happens.” With the honest caveat that the special things may arrive late and may not be the ones you imagined.

The three that take zero talent. Be kind. Show up on time. Do what you said you were going to do. His proof is professional: magazine editors told him about brilliant writers who missed deadlines and were impossible to work with, and that they’d take a reliable writer over a brilliant one any day. “Since no one had accused me of being brilliant, I decided to be reliable.” The airline analogy makes the point stick — you leave an airline that is late, loses your bag, or is rude to you, so “if you expect these things from a business, shouldn’t you expect them from yourself?”

The three impractical ones, offered on the grounds that “impracticality is the principal element of a fulfilling life.” Dream big — the odds of becoming an astronaut are bad, “but the odds of you becoming an astronaut are much better if you don’t listen to people who tell you how hard it is to become an astronaut.” Learn to persist — “getting inspired will get you about five percent of the way to your goal. The other 95 percent comes from grinding it out.” His illustration is running 100 miles: 226,000 steps by his watch, of which roughly 10,000 are fun and the rest are blisters, chafing, sleep deprivation and mild hallucinations. “You start because of a dream, but you finish because you become good at talking yourself out of giving up… Stubborn is just a dirty word for driven, and driven people get things done.” Practice gratitude — with his own definition of wealth: “I’m rich only because I think that if you can afford to pay someone else to make you a cup of coffee, you’re rich,” and a warning about social-media comparison in a job that puts him next to people who hopscotch the world full-time.

The close reframes the timescale: “don’t try to be a success in 20 years, or 10 years, or even 5 years. Try to be a success tomorrow, and the day after that… I wish you not luck, but whatever it’s called when your dreams, work, and persistence add up to something that looks like good luck.”

Full text

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Connections

• Hard Work — the essay’s core claim stated as strongly as anyone states it: talent is an excuse, and the three habits that beat it require none of it.
• Persistence and Grit — the 226,000-step account of a hundred-mile race is the most concrete description of persistence as a learnable skill rather than a trait.
• Gratitude — the redefinition of wealth, and the social-comparison problem it is meant to solve.