My buddy’s dad (Dan) is a high school guidance counselor at my alma mater. He reached out to me to see whether I’d be interested in participating in a career workshop that he’s conducting with a handful of students. It sounded like a super-interesting opportunity, so I said “Yes.”
…and then I spent a week fretting about it. Someone once told me that overthinking things was my “superpower”, and this is a prime example of that. In addition to the standard public speaking jitters I thought about my audience. I’m old enough that I can call Mr. R “Dan”. I graduated from high school before these kids were born. What do I have to offer these kids? What would have wanted/needed at that age? Oh, man, and what if I say “fuck” too much? (A I friend pointed out that “they probably say ‘fuck’ just as much as you do, Cliff.” It was a fair point.)
Dan gave me a few ideas for potential talking points (guidance counselor gave guidance, natch) and I spent a little time writing, putting together some notes. I decided to open with the standard LinkedIn intro - special talent, something that’s not on my LinkedIn profile - and then talk about my education and career path from the time I graduated high school up to the present day. Heavily-abridged, just the high points…I needed to cover 20 years in 5-10 minutes.
My sole criterion for success: if one individual asks one question.
I did two separate 40-minute sessions with two different groups of students. Just a few observations about these kids:
They were all super-bright They were all fairly shy They asked some really insightful questions (success!) They seemed to be trying to decide for themselves whether they were genuinely interested in what I had to say or supremely bored by it
In short, they were the very picture of what I can recall about being 16 years old.
I thought it went well and I left the high school pretty jazzed up - super high-energy. I raced home, took a desperate piss, and spent the next 5 hours in meetings. I spent some time with my girls, had something to eat, put the girls to bed…and then I had a little time to decompress, to think about the day, to write down some of the things we had talked about. I’m not going to dive into that here; maybe I’ll save it for a future post. But for my part, not only was this a chance to “pay it forward”, it was also an opportunity to look back on the past two decades, to take time to marvel about how I had no idea what I was doing (and still don’t)…and despite all of that I’ve still made a pretty good run of it.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, I guess my tl;dr would be this: Give Back. You might get more out of it than you think.