Graduation Address

DANILO M. SAMPAGA, LLB.

Good afternoon, graduates, parents, distinguished guest, friends ladies and gentlemen.... Thank you for inviting me to be a part of your celebrationa celebration of an ending and a beginning. To the graduates, congratulations on your academic achievements and on the friendships youve built while here at the university. Both will continue to enrich your lives through the years. To the parents, congratulations also. You, too, feel a sense of accomplishment and pride in your graduates completion of formal schooling. To the faculty, you should pat yourselves on the back. Who knows what great minds youve helped shape these past few years. In thinking of what to say to you today, I talked to a friend of mine whos often called upon to address graduating classes, and I asked him for his suggestions. He responded with, My advice to young people who are going out in the world today? Dont go! I decided, however, to be a little more upbeat. In fact, Ive chosen a Biblical patternthe Ten Commandments. No, Im not trying to play God, but I have put together a list of dos and donts. First, I want to give you the basis of these rulesthe theory, if you will. Then the rules themselves. Heres the theory part: Life isnt fair.... Theres no such thing as a free lunch.... Some good deals arent.... Money wont buy happiness.... No pain, no gain.... Talk is cheap.... Victory goes to the swift.... Pride goes before a fall.... No man is an island. Whats the matter, youve heard those theories before? Well, never mind. Theyre still true. So upon those theories, Ive built my list of dos and donts. Youve probably been hearing several of those lately alsohow to dress for an interview, what to say when they ask you

what kind of salary you want, and so forth. But here are the things that you really need to know after you land the jobthe things we look for in people we will hire and promote, in people who will achieve much over their lifetime. Heres my listof things Ive learned and am still learning, the things that may help you in the years to come: Commandment #1: Be willing to pay the price. Todays preparation determines tomorrows achievement. No one has cornered the market on family and career success. Anybody who walks into the store and pays the price can walk away with it. Someone once approached the great violinist Fritz Kreisler and offered this praise after a concert: Id give my life to play as beautifully as you do. The musician responded, I did. You graduates have already invested four or more years as a down payment, while some former high school classmates decided to spend these last four years elsewheremost of them out already earning the living they will be earning for the rest of their lives. Dont throw that down payment away. If you want to be successful in your chosen field, find out what it takes to be the best of the best. Time.... Practice.... Commitment.... Sacrifice.... There is a price. Success is never on sale; its just a matter of deciding how much you want to pay. Commandment #2: Be self-disciplined. Emerson said that our primary need in life is somebody who will make us do what we can. Weve all had that somebody at some time or other. A parent.... A friend.... A teacher.... But from now on, you yourself will have to be that somebody. You will have to have the wherewithal to make yourself do what youre capable of. Discipline to put in the necessary hours.... Discipline to stay up to date in your field.... Discipline to read.... Discipline to use your time well.... Discipline to eat right and stay healthy.... Discipline to stay with a task. Whether its gluing a model plane together or researching marketing trends in retail clothing, follow-through marks success. Self-discipline is simply control. If you dont control yourself, someone else will. Or no one else will. Either case will be less desirable than self-control.

Commandment #3: Set some goals. Thats not the same as being disciplined. Discipline is setting your alarm at 5:00 a.m. and making yourself get up when it goes off. Goal-setting is knowing why you set the alarm at 5:00 a.m. in the first place.... What did you plan to achieve? How did you plan to achieve it? If youve ever done any sailing, you know that finding the wind isnt always easy. If you dont have any plans to go any place special, then any wind is the right wind. But if you have a certain water-side restaurant that you want to make by noon, then you need to pick a specific direction and find the right wind. Winners expect to win in advance. Life, for them, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Choice, not chance, determines destiny. Make some choices; set some goals. Commandment #4: Learn to get along well with others. HRD studies reconfirm over and over again that people do not lose their jobs because they dont have the technical know-how or skills. More frequently, the difficulty is that they cant get along with other people. You may not please all the people all the time, but you can please most of the people most of the timeif in no other way but by being open to their criticism. Weigh it against others considerations. People seldom improve when they only have their own yardstick to measure themselves by. I can assure you Ive made more improvements in my own life and in my own business as a result of others criticism than their praise. Measure yourself with someone elses yardstick occasionally. If on your first job, your boss comments that you lose your temper too easily, and your parent or your spouse comments that you lose your temper too easily, and your friend comments you lose your temper too easily, it stands to reason that probably,... you lose your temper too easily. When you hear such feedback, listen before you deny it. Evaluate it. Weigh it. Do you think changes are in order? Regardless of criticism, to get along with other people, you have to care about them genuinely. Live the Golden Rule and youll get the gold. The gold medal of love.... The gold medal of satisfaction.... The gold medal of peace of mind.... Friends are some of Gods best gifts to us. We dont have friends in our lives until we make room. Until we

learn to get outside ourselves and care about whats happening in another persons life and in the community at large. Commandment #5: Be a dreamer. Weve often heard George Bernard Shaws distinction of men: Some men see things as they are and say Why? I dream things that never were, and say, Why not? We need men and women like you entering the workforce to say Why not? We need solutions to air pollution, disease, racial violence, poor product quality, impersonal customer service. Dare to dream up some ways to resolve these problems and address these issues. Humanist James Allen says, You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration. In other words, to succeed beyond your wildest expectations, you have to have some wild expectations. I say, keep your head in the clouds. Dream. Commandment #6: Take risks; dont be afraid to fail. Obstacles are those things you see when you take your eyes off your goals. And, believe me, if you ever get so cockeyed sure of something that you never see obstacles, you had better question whether the task is worth doing at all. So taking risks means evaluating the obstacles and determining that the chance for payoff is worth the risk. The world is full of people who follow wherever the path leads; but we need people in the business world who will strike out where there is no path and then leave a trail. Commandment #7: Stay informed. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, Mans mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. I hope thats truethat after your years here, your mind has been stretched so that you will never be satisfied to stop learning about whats going on around you. Use every resource available to learn how business operates. One of the biggest realizations in going through school is that knowledge is out thereeven if you havent learned it all. You just have to have the want to to retrieve it and use it. You dont have to know everything about everything to hold a new job. You just have to have the drive and the enthusiasm to find out. Keep your eyes and your ears open for how people around you make decisions, act,

refuse to act, make a profit, lose a profit. Analyze future trends as you put two and two together around you. Someone has said of us knowledge-workers, Wealth was once measured in gold. Now its measured in what we know. Stay alert, informed. Commandment #8: Be ethical. Know when to compromise and when to stick to your convictions. What you once knew to be right and wrong... is still right and wrong. The corporate world has to learn all over again that being ethical is whats best for business and the bottom line in the long run. Compromise may come in many forms insurance coverage, expense reports, toxic-waste decisions. Right has been and always will be right. Commandment #9: Have some fun. You want to know how to have some fun every day of your life? Confucius said, Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. For the most part, he was right. My job is funmost days. And youll find that every job has its days of drudgery. So on those days, you learn to play at something else. Keep other interests and other friends in your life. You need to laugh. Commandment #10: Define success in your own terms. Someone has aptly observed, Many people spend their lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, when they get to the top, the ladder is leaning against the wrong building. I want to read you several definitions of success Ive collected through the years. Listen to them. Pick one you like: Happiness is a way station between too little and too much. The good life is a process, not a state of being. Its a direction, not a destination. Winning isnt everythingits the only thing, according to Coach Vince Lombardi. If a man has a talent and learns how to use it,... he has gloriously succeeded and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know, claimed author Thomas Wolfe.

 Mack Douglas, a Baptist minister, defined success this way: When a man has done his best, has given his all, and in the process supplied the needs of his family and his society, that man has succeeded. Success is having something to be enthusiastic about. Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between ones origins and ones final achievement, according to author Michael Korda. And with this one Ill focus on success in a reverse wayheres how John Charles Salak defines failure: Failures are divided into two classesthose who thought and never did,... and those who did and never thought. As I said at the beginning, you have to select the way youll measure success for yourself. The axiom you want to live by. Write it down. Repeat it to yourself often. Thatll help you translate success into specific job decisions. Should you accept a job traveling most of the time? Well, that depends. Is your idea of success adventure and learning about the world around you? Or is it being home with your family every night? Should you join a certain professional organization and devote ten hours a week to it? Well, that depends. Is your idea of success to keep at it 10, 12, 14 hours a day to get that promotion? Or is your idea of success to network with friends more often? To join hands on community projects? Your personal definition of successif you have a firm grasp on it will make many seemingly difficult decisions much easier through the years. Here they are againmy Ten Commandments upon reaching graduation and entering the corporate world: Be willing to pay the price. Be self-disciplined. Set some goals. Learn to get along well with others. Be a dreamer.

Take risks; dont be afraid to fail. Stay informed. Be ethical. Have some fun. Define success in your own terms.

Because I noticed some of you werent taking notes on that list, Ill be briefer by deferring to writer Robert Fulghum to wrap this up for me: In one of his bestselling books, he wrote, Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Now, he tells usafter youve just finished college. Anyway, Fulghum continues: Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned: Share everything. Play fair. Dont hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own messes. Dont take things that arent yours. Say youre sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced lifeLearn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. And when you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. So when you get out there in the worldand you see the expectations and the problems, the challenges and the temptations, the discouragements and the opportunitiesand you forget your professors lectures, just try to remember kindergarten. The rest will take care of itself. My personal congratulations to each of you. I wish you success as you improve the world. MABUHAY!!!!!!