TanenbaumCHAT Grad Inspires Today's Students at South Campus Academic Award Ceremony
Caroline Libman Mandell ('96), hit the nail on the head in the message she gave to current TCHATniks, making it clear that there are many ways to excel and to make a contribution and that it was up to each person to find the best way for him or her to make good things happen.
Toronto - November 2006
You may be asking why I was invited to address you today, and to be perfectly honest, I asked myself the same thing. After all, there are piles of CHAT grads who have done far more interesting and impressive things with themselves than just becoming lawyers. And I’ll let you in on a little secret that perhaps Mrs. Klompas didn’t know when she invited me to be here: if I was a student at CHAT today, I wouldn’t be sitting up front with the award winners. I’d be sitting at the back with all of the rest of you non-award winners who don’t really understand what the point of this is but are just grateful not to be in Ivrit right now. And another thing: I actually know less now than I did 10 years ago when I graduated from CHAT. Back then, I knew something about almost everything, or at least it seemed that way when I look back at it now. I knew the atomic weight of nitrogen and how to solve a quadratic equation, I could read Rashi and I could read Aramaic and I could conjugate the verb avoir, I knew the rules of badminton and tennis and basketball and the dinim shel kashrut, Succot, and Shabbat.
I knew more then, but I’m smarter now. And that’s why I’m here today – to share with you three of the lessons I’ve learned since I stopped knowing so much.
The first lesson is that academic success in high school is important, but it isn’t everything. Now, when I say that, I’m not trying to take anything away from those of you who’ve received an award today – you should be really, really proud of yourselves. The curriculum at CHAT is as demanding as anything I or most people have encountered, and to have performed so well is really exceptional. I ran a non-profit organization and got a law degree and a master’s degree all at the same time, and I still never worked as hard as I did in grade 11 at CHAT. So I’m not trying to say that your grades don’t matter, because they do. What I am saying is that they’re not all that matters, now or in the future.
Of course, good grades open doors, and the better your grades are the more doors are open to you. But you may find that the subject or idea or career that excites you most is one you haven’t been exposed to yet, and that won’t ever be presented to you on a test or in an assignment. Real success is finding something that makes you fulfilled and happy, not just that looks good on a report card, and you can’t always find that something in a high school textbook.
The second lesson is it’s great to celebrate success and achievement and excellence as we’re doing here today, but we really ought to give more credit to their overlooked cousins: disappointment, rejection and failure. Because those things that feel like major defeats when they first happen to us are often the triggering events that lead to our next successes. I’ll give you a couple examples. Post-It Notes. Post-It Notes are one of the truly great innovations of the past 50 years. You know how they were invented? An engineer at 3M was trying to develop a super-strong glue, but the glue he came up with would just peel right off whatever surface he put it on. The engineer was about to trash the whole experiment as a complete, un-patentable failure when he realized that, if he put the glue on the bookmarks in his choir book, he wouldn’t keep losing his place in church on Sundays. And speaking of great innovations of the last few years, do you know why Jon Stewart is the host of the Daily Show? Because he was turned down to host the Late Late Show – you know, the program that comes on after Letterman that no one watches. I think it turned out okay for him.
So the next time something happens to you that feels like an enormous disappointment, take a moment, step back from it, and say to yourself, “Well thank God for that.” The achievement lurking behind it will be there, if you take the time and effort to find it.
The third and final lesson is that being smart doesn’t get you nearly as far as being kind, and being great isn’t nearly as important as being good. My friends and I have studied with and worked for some of the brightest minds in the country, in law, in medicine, in all sorts of areas, and I can tell you that no one is impressed by the judge who knows the entire Criminal Code but applies it with no compassion, or the doctor who can operate with her eyes closed but has no bedside manner. What we are impressed by is people at the tops of their chosen fields who use their gifts to mentor people and their influence to raise awareness, and who will tell you in all sincerity that their relationships with their families and friends are their greatest achievements.
This last lesson is something you probably already know, and that you’re reminded of today when we celebrate awards not just for academic excellence, but also for derech eretz and tikkun olam. That’s one of the great benefits of a Jewish education, by the way. So much of what you learn, directly and indirectly, is about how to make ethical decisions and how to lead a good life. So just by virtue of being here, you are already ahead of the game.
So those are just a few of the things I’ve learned since I left this place. I want to thank you again for inviting me to celebrate with you today, and to wish all of you a mazal tov and a yasher koach for your successes, and for your failures.
