273. B Average- Kate Kennedy

This week we are sharing advice for graduates from some of our friends. Today, Kate Kennedy from the Be There In Five podcast shares a piece of wisdom that is hard to grasp when you’re in school: grades don’t always matter, what teachers tell you is success isn’t always right, and you should spend your adult life defining your own definition of success.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Kate Kennedy:  Hi, this is Kate Kennedy from the Be There in Five podcast, and it’s going to be okay. I’d like to start by saying welcome to the graduating class, faculty members, parents, and esteemed guests.  What an honor it is to look out at a sea of pupils and polyester sackcloth regalia eligible for gospel choirs, light wizardry, or future Halloween costumes because you were forced to spend 60 on your single use plastic of an ensemble by non monopoly Jossens.

whose existence 20 years after my graduation still bothers every synthetic fiber of my being. Occasions like this are a joyous one, meant for reflecting upon and honoring your accomplishments over the past four years. While it’s important to acknowledge and award those of you who have showcased your excellence in various subjects or extracurriculars, and I value and salute the valedictorian and salutatorian, I’m actually here to speak on behalf of the normals, if you will.

I remember sitting in your position, whether at baccalaureate or awards assemblies, or here at graduation, and kind of going through the motions, feeling like it wasn’t really for me. The events leading up to graduation felt more like occasions to celebrate a handful of main characters, and I kind of felt like an extra, or a seat filler, a provider of head count to provide optics and insulation for the students that actually count.

Throughout high school and college, I feared my okay grades and lack of accolades meant I was destined for a mediocre existence. If I’m honest, I think I’ve had it out for overemphasizing academic achievement ever since the second my fourth grade class was divided into two groups. Talented and gifted, in the way I interpreted it at age 10.

Untalented and ungifted. I fell on the ladder and I just kind of had to shrug it off and focus on other things. And it was a fair, if not harsh assessment. Most of my life I had pretty average grades. I was a B student, an OK athlete, terribly bad at math and science. I would have loved to find success in grades or standardized tests, but even when I tried my hardest outside of English and spelling, it was pretty hard for me to get A’s.

And because of this, I spent my entire life assuming I wasn’t very smart. I was quite literally told before I ever really had a chance to build any self esteem that I wasn’t talented or gifted. But the gift of being ungifted is that when you can’t rely on grades as a source of your self esteem, you’re forced to find it in other places.

And I may not have been at the top of my class, but I was at the top of my game when it came to things like the arts, culture, Interpersonal relationships. Whether writing poems and short stories or doodling and practicing my handwriting, storytelling and daydreaming and consuming all of the pop culture I could find and extracting its meaning, feeding my own curiosity was my North Star.

I developed deep friendships and learned I was a good conversationalist and a supportive friend. But I never saw these as skills, and as a result, I didn’t have a ton of hope or energy for my future. But now I see how this didn’t dictate that I had no future, it actually set me up for success later in life.

When you’re young, there’s a ton of focus on institutional metrics that can provide you validation. Grades, athletic achievements, awards, these things serve as a barometer for how well you’re doing as a person when school is the focal point of your life.  But I’m here to tell you at this function that symbolizes your completion of everything in high school.

That grades actually aren’t everything in real life.  I’m here to tell you that it’s just as important to continue to find your strengths and to foster your talents outside of institutional metrics that allegedly gauge your potential. Honor the personality traits and soft skills and side interests you have.

Do more of the things that make you lose track of time and less of the things that make you count the minutes. Whether in the arts, in working with your hands, in service, in coding, computer science, in community, in becoming a decent human and citizen of the world, your contributions are not only welcome, they’re desperately needed in this world.

If you aren’t at the top of your class, or you haven’t found your footing, and you maybe don’t know where you’re going, it’s the farthest thing from a signifier that you don’t have potential. It’s quite the opposite. You’ve yet to find yourself in an environment, where you thrive because the environment you’ve been in thus far is constrained to only validating excellence in an incredibly finite set of subjects.

And I cannot wait until you get out in the world and realize life is about so much more than bio and U. S. history and calculus and English lit. One of the most confusing things that everyone experiences in adulthood is the loss of guardrails that tell you you’re on the right track. When you finish the academic pipeline, whether that’s now or later in college or grad school and beyond, you’re You realize life doesn’t really tell you how well you’re doing relative to everyone else.

And I remember watching a lot of incredibly brilliant people crumble when there wasn’t a clear formula to tell them how they were doing. They weren’t comfortable being good enough and always disappointed in themselves if they weren’t the best. Like their contribution to the team only mattered if they were the ones that scored the winning goal. 

When I got into the entrepreneurial space, I had never been around more alumni from prestigious institutions, prep school to private liberal arts school pipelines, and Ivy League goers and beyond. And I quickly noticed that many entrepreneurs are people that have been validated in life at every turn by status and stamps of approval from esteemed third parties.

But the thing about being your own boss is that no one’s ever going to tell you you’re doing a good job. And it’s incredibly hard to quantify your own success relative to others when you’re the architect of your own career. And the more I networked and moved through these spaces, the more I realized everyone was obsessed with vanity metrics.

Like making who’s who type 30 under 30 lists, attending conferences, doing speaking gigs, networking events, and pursuing press write ups to bolster their personal brands as an entrepreneur regardless of the status of their startup or the viability of its business model. Because almost like Watching people chase straight A’s in visibility and public approval, like if TechCrunch had a prom king and queen.

When they wouldn’t make the list or get the gig or be able to change their LinkedIn bios, they were absolutely devastated. Talking about how the others weren’t deserving, hyperfixated not on the work but on the optics. This fascinated me because here they were in these positions of power with full jurisdiction over their careers, but Without someone telling them that they were important, they didn’t believe it.

But not me. If I had found my value as a human in the way school valued me, I would have gone through life genuinely believing I wasn’t talented nor gifted. The truth is, we all are. We just aren’t always existing in the context that allows us to feel that way. I got an insanely good job out of college despite my allegedly average existence.

Nobody was more shocked than I was. I’ll never forget asking the woman who hired me why she took a chance on me. She told me that the reason she hired me was all the qualities I possessed that I never thought to value because I didn’t get graded on them. They loved my verbal skills, my creativity, my curiosity, my ability to hold a conversation and deliver a presentation.

They felt confident putting me in front of clients. I also learned that I actually am smart, just not necessarily in the ways the school system reinforced. And that, in life, in some fields, an EQ will get you way farther than an IQ. And I had endless gifts to contribute to the world. So please don’t worry if this wasn’t the best time of your life, or you weren’t the best at anything, or if you don’t feel this pomp and circumstance is really about pomping up your circumstances.

Clearly, I don’t know what pomp means. Again, I’m a B student. So, I’ll tell you what I wish I could tell myself when I was younger, that your environment the next ten years and beyond may not always lend itself to your strengths, but that doesn’t mean you’re not strong, you’re not smart, you’re weird, or you’re doomed, it just means your time is coming. 

Everyone has the time of their life at different times of their life, and when you don’t feel like your strengths are useful or that you can trade on what people value in a particular context, you can genuinely convince yourself that it will be that way forever. But it won’t. Today, I want to raise a metaphorical glass to the whole graduating class, of course, but being bestowed upon the honor of being put in this place, I’d be remiss not to dedicate my speech to anyone in this room feeling a little out of place. 

Never being the best is the thing that changed me for the better, and my success now is a function of my willingness to try anything and everything, and remained unashamed if I don’t get the A. It’s the effort that counts, not the effortlessness. In your youth, you think that your future will be formulaic because the way success is measured right now makes your life feel like more of a science.

But as an adult, you learn to love that life is, and always was, more of an art. In life and in school, we just have to trust that it’s going to turn out the same way we average people often perform. Maybe it’ll just be  okay. 

Nora McInerny: It’s Going to be OK is a production of Feelings Co. We are an independent podcast and feelings and co is an independent podcast production company. So you being here is Amazing a great way to support our show is to share it share it with whoever you think would like it Share it as much as you can rate and review it on Apple podcasts.

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