This past weekend I sat through a long graduation ceremony at one of the region’s universities. It’s a scene played out in hundreds of places this spring. It has been so for eons and will continue for eons in the future.
While being proud of and happy for the graduates, you wonder what the future will hold for every one of them. No doubt some of them have a clear direction and path, others are as clueless as the day they started college, and everybody else is somewhere in between.
Not that any of them asked me for worldly advice, but if they had, I’d point to a short stack of books and say ‘Master the concepts in those books and you’ll be ahead of 95 percent of your peers and 85 percent of everybody else.’
In my fantasy world, the eager padawan learners would pounce on the stack where they would find:
- Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg
- Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, by Todd Henry
- 7 Strategies for Wealth and Happiness, by Jim Rohn
- What is Compound Interest? by Mel Clark
Doing the things described in these books is uncommon. Concepts like individual responsibility, self-development, forming good habits and perseverance are consistently practiced by a small minority of people. And the concept of compounding in relation to money and effort, is magical and something that most people never learn.
So, graduates, congratulations! (And happy reading!)