Some parting words to my daughter as she prepares for college

Posted August 27, 2011 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

This past week my daughter, Hayley, and I hiked up to the Barrier Lake lookout tower in Kananaskis. A consummate teacher, I could not miss the opportunity, in this rare and precious time we had together, to pass along some parting wisdom, some seeds of possibility, as she prepares to leave home and start university. I’ll never know whether any of these seeds take root, but my greatest hope is that the way she sees me live my life will speak louder than the words I attempt to convey to her.

Learn the difference between a successful life and a meaningful life.

Success means to:

  • Define your own success on your terms, not what others tell you it should be;
  • Dream big;
  • Remember that the purpose of a dream is not to achieve it; the purpose of a dream is to inspire you to become the person it will take to achieve it.
  • Learn to handle money: spend less than you make; invest before you spend; start saving now; buy less than you can afford.
  • Remember the five laws of success: 1) Show up on time; 2) Keep your promises; 3) See all blame as a waste of time; 4) Be polite; 5) Give more than you get paid for.

Meaning means to:

  • Know what you value, and don’t lose your values on the path to success.
  • Not miss out on the experience of living while you are making a living.
  • Follow your heart, that part of you that lies beneath your impulses and need for approval, that won’t settle for less than you can become, that knows you are meant to be extraordinary and contribute to the world’s evolution.
  • Learn the true meaning of love and service to others – the true source of happiness.
  • Remember that all joy ultimately comes to you in the present moment; you’ll never find joy in the past or the future.
  • Keep alive the spirit of your youth: your sense of wonder, adventure, and love of life. Maintaining your youth as you grow into the wisdom of your age, is a work of art worth going for.

Hayley was a fan of Jack Layton. I think it’s appropriate to leave you with Jack’s final message to Canada before his death this week. Whether or not you agreed with his political policies, you simply couldn’t argue with his passion, his vision, and his love – for the citizens of this country and those who spend a lifetime serving. A great leader, he always made time for people.

“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

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Walt Disney’s Four C’s To Success

Posted May 28, 2011 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

I heard some great speeches this past weekend at  my daughter, Hayley’s, high school graduation. Wow. My little girl is now a very beautiful young lady that I am so proud of. So many gifts. And she has had some amazing teachers who have impacted her over the years. One talk, given by one of Hayley’s fine teachers, centered on Walt Disney’s four C’s to success:

Walt Disney was viewed by many early in his career to be anything but successful. In fact, some believed him to be a dismal failure. He had a number of business failures, he went bankrupt, and he was even told that as a cartoonist he had no real talent. So did he quit trying? No. Walt Disney was not a quitter. H was a dreamer who dared to think outside the box. Walt Disney spoke of  “Four C’s To Success In Life”: Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy and that the greatest of these is Confidence. He said that when you believe in something, you must believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.

What would you attribute to your success in life? What would you tell a high school graduating class?

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

 

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Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Posted May 11, 2011 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

The title of this blog is a Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller quote.

Working with organizational cultures, the single-most common request we get is how to build more trust and respect in the workplace. It is our experience that this is achieved through personal accountability – the ability to be counted on – which is the basis for personal integrity. Personal integrity leads to self-respect, respect for others who demonstrate integrity, and ultimately a respectful workplace. So in our view, personal integrity is the essence of building a successful culture of trust and respect.

As an engineer and inventor, Bucky understood the importance of strength within a design. Engineers are accountable for designing structures capable of handling conditions up to a certain limit. In the engineering world, the margin between safety and disaster is known as “structural integrity.” Similarly, our success as accountable people depends on our personal structural integrity. As the engineers of our own existence, our choices affect not only our own lives but also the lives of the people who rely on us.

By standing behind our promises and assuming a position of accountability, we begin to design a life of personal structural integrity. With this as our foundation, our work and service in our families, organizations, and communities will be rock solid. However, just as you could never design and build a structure to handle any condition, personal structural integrity will always have its limits. Because it is not rigid, but instead strong and flexible, and adaptable to life’s changing circumstances, it can meet almost any test.

Integrity comes from the word “integer,” which means wholeness, integration, and completeness. Being integrated is a necessary condition for self-respect, and self-respect is the basis for creating a respectful environment. Integrity means having clear, explicit principles and doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s about being honest with yourself and others. Integrity is deeply personal and therefore deeply applicable to all areas of life.

Integrity has everything to do with your success as a leader. Leadership – the capacity to illicit the commitment of others, is about presence, not position. Now more than ever, power, purpose, and privilege no longer reside at the top of an organization. They potentially live at every level. Great leadership cannot be reduced to techniques or tools or titles. While you may promoted to being a boss, you don’t get promoted to being a leader. You have to earn the right to be called a leader. Great leadership comes from the identity and integrity of the leader. Authentic leadership is achieved through the power of presence, which comes from being an integrated human being, a person of integrity. Integrity is, indeed, the essence of everything successful.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

 

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Learning To Lose Is Part Of Learning To Live

Posted July 26, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Chandra, our fourteen-year-old daughter, who plays competitive soccer, pointed out an article to me this past week in Canada’s MacLean’s magazine, entitled “How A Team Loses Actually Matters” (July 26 edition, pp. 48-49). It’s a good article that reflected on the World Cup in South Africa this summer. “The World Cup,” Stephen Marche stated,” produced one winner and 31 losers, many more if you include all the teams that never made it to the tournament. And while Spain will go down in history, the rest will be forgotten. Which is a shame. The losers, after all, make up the bulk of competitors and the way they lose is so much more revealing than the way they win, each defeat a minor insight into national characteristics. To steal from Tolstoy: all victories are alike; every defeat is miserable in it own way.”

The article lead to some thoughtful discussion in our home about the importance of learning how to lose in life, which includes learning how to fail. I’ve heard it said that circumstances don’t determine a person, they reveal them. The way you lose, or stumble, or fail (or whatever you want to call it) provides some insight into your nature. For sports fans, how you deal with the loss of “your” team also reveals aspects of your true character.

To steal from Marche: Anybody can join in a victory parade. Only failure reveals true passion for the game and passion for life. But the lesson goes even beyond winning and losing. True living means that our lasting worth comes from inside. Attachment to external sources (such as a sports team or whether you win, or achievements and whether you “succeed”) for our sense of identity is fruitless. Winning or losing is temporary and will pass. Success and failure teaches us that everything outside of ourselves, including our possessions, our achievements and accomplishments, and our roles, are all temporary. Learning to lose is part of learning to live.

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Authentic Success and the Wisdom of Youth

Posted May 30, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

In my opinion, young people today are, for the most part, wiser than I was at their age. They’re wiser because they have observed the mistakes of their parents and the adults that have raised them and are determined to live life differently.

My daughter’s best friend, an amazing, authentic young woman, was valedictorian at her high school graduation this week. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from her speech:

“I think that sometimes people are too terrified of failure, and they let it stop them,” Janelle told her graduating class. “You are never a loser for trying. Never. To be honest, one of my favourite quotes comes from Little Miss Sunshine, of all places. When the grandpa is questioned on what a loser means, he says, ‘a real loser is someone who’s so afraid of not winning, they don’t even try.’”

“There’s a preconceived notion surrounding us,” Janelle continued, “that condemns one to be a loser simply for not being the best, or being imperfect. Please, never, ever let yourselves be degraded into believing this. I implore you all to have faith in  yourselves; have faith in your dreams; Our goals are unique and deserve respect; we shouldn’t let anyone make  us inferior for holding on to them. Success doesn’t lie in brilliance or being consistently perfect in all your endeavors. You’d never learn anything that way. Success is discovering, growing, breaking, fixing, and all things to do with uncertainty. Success holds holds a different definition for each person, and no definition is inferior to another. There are so many ways to be successful, and it’s something that each one of us is going to discover for ourselves…”

Thank you, Janelle, for the inspiration of your authentic presence, not just in this speech, but in the influence you have had in my life since you first connected  with our family fourteen years ago. I’m a better person for knowing you. May we all be a little more attuned to the wisdom of our amazing youth, that have so much to teach us about living authentically.

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