037. The CCSL Part II: Don’t drive forward looking in the rearview mirror

These updates were meant to be much speedier, but you know how life (the flu, really) just intervenes in all your plans…

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Friday was our first full day of  the conference and perhaps the day I found the least stimulating. We attended five sessions of workshops (one during which I presented a workshop with Kelvin and Wendy) and our first keynote speaker W. Brett Wilson.

To be honest, when Brett Wilson first began his presentation I thought two things: 1) he’s a great public speaker and 2) there is nothing that he is saying that has any relevance to my life. For the first third of his speech he referred a lot to money and profits, topics that I find as interesting as watching paint dry. After the first three presentations, I was worried that this day was going to be a complete write off. But then he started talking about leadership in a way that I could wrap my non-Commerce-like brain around.

He said one very simple phrase and it was all I could think about for the rest of the day, and it found its way in and out of my mind for the rest of the conference: passion without priorities is just wandering and you can’t wander your entire life. He was talking about how his passion and his ambition interfered with his focus on his priorities in life. Brett very candidly talked about the loss of his marriage and the loss of his health (he battled cancer and now sees himself as a “graduate” rather than a survivor) and how they led to a major renovation of his priorities. He places his health (physical, mental and emotional) at the top of his list. It makes sense (I unfortunately spent a week in bed recovering from the flu) as you can’t do much if you aren’t alive to see it happen. His family and friends come in as a close second and third, for obvious reasons. These relationships are the essence of life: they are your support system, your cheerleaders and most often, your mirror, reflecting back to your images of yourself that you either can’t stand or feel very proud of. Next? Education. I’m sure he was focusing more on formal education (post-secondary and the like), but I took this to mean a wide range of things. I always bristle when someone believes that the only way to be truly educated is to sit behind a desk and be lectured at by a professor. Often the most important lessons you learn do not come from your academics (gasp! I know, the blasphemy of that statement). I find it important to allow every moment to teach you something about yourself, the people around you and the world you live in. Be educated in a way that proves both valuable and useful to you. And to round off the list, a career and community/philanthropy (because you have to be able to afford to be charitable). Struggling to figure out what your priorities are? Try finding your own defintion of success and then form and shape your priorities to suit that vision. For me, success includes surrounding myself with people I love and appreciate. So my priority? Invest in the right people.

Brett Wilson stressed the importance of this during his keynote. But because I’m a History/Women’s and Gender Studies double major, and not a BComm student, I took this as not just business advice, but a general anecdote for life. As I’ve gotten older and people have come in and out of my life for various reasons, I found it important to cultivate relationships with people that I felt were worthy of my time, passion, and energy. Life is just too darn short to surround yourself with people who don’t care about you, who aren’t going to inspire you and who aren’t going to challenge you. Relationships should be fulfilling because they’re such an important part of life. Without the people I have in my life, I definitely would not be where I am today (ie. sitting on my bed at 12:40am writing a blog post). I want to always feel lucky to have the people I have in my life, and I can’t feel that way if I don’t believe in those people and have them believe in me as well.

Because it’s high time that I let my head hit a pillow and get a few zzzz, I’m going to leave you with one last thing to think about: great experiences can come from mistakes, but those only come from making decisions. So as you go about your last week of classes with gusto and the utmost zeal, don’t be afraid to make a few mistakes, they might end up being the best experiences of your life.