


SPEECH BY MR. ANDREW CINO
Your Excellency, Mr. James Dauris, British Ambassador to Peru, Dr. Victor Lazo, President of the Williamson Educational Association, Mrs. Fiorella Marquez, National Director, graduating class of 2011, colleagues, parents and guests:
Promotion 24, today we celebrate your success at graduating from school and I would like to dedicate this short speech to one of the most important ingredients of success, failure.
This evening I would like to address you on the positive power of failure.
Before continuing, I will ask you to close your eyes for just 30 seconds and think of at least one failure in your life from which you have learned a valuable lesson. Are you ready? Please close your eyes and think of one positive failure. Was it difficult? I hope not.
Whenever I think of my positive failures, I remember my first competitive football match. We were 10 years old and we had been waiting for this match for a long time. We were keen and confident. We played the match and we lost 14-0! The following week we trained twice as hard and lost the next match 10-0. All of a sudden, we realized we were not potential George Bests and our self-esteem was very low. We headed for our third game totally lacking in confidence and motivation. We lost 7-0! At that point our coach pointed out to us that we were actually improving (from 14-0 to 7-0) and that you only really fail when you quit.
He explained to us that defeats in sport were simply another opportunity to train harder and more intelligently.
He gave us some extra homework: he asked us to find a wall near our homes and to practise kicking a football against it for 30 minutes a day. He took it in turns to come to our walls and check that we were doing our homework. It wasn't exactly fun but it taught us self-discipline and it did improve our skills.
That season we lost all our games except for our last one which we won 3-2. We celebrated that victory as if we had won the World Cup and once again we believed that we were going to become professional footballers. That year was one of the turning points in my life. It taught me the importance of not quitting and of learning from failure. This year I have played in the teachers' and parents' football teams and I've been on the winning side just once, in our last match. I sometimes think it's time to hang up my boots but then I remember that first coach I had and I think, "No, I've just got to find a good wall and practise harder."
I am sure that all of us present here today have suffered the low self-esteem that comes with failure. If you have not, it's probably because you are not alive. Remember the French proverb: "Only he who does nothing, makes no mistakes."
Failure is a very important lesson in life. No doubt a few of you will fail in some of your university courses, others will lose their jobs, and as statistics show, some of you will have a failed marriage. But do not be discouraged! The most successful personalities of our generation have suffered the most unforeseen failures.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was one of these. He came from a working class family who saved all the money they could to send him to one of the finest colleges in the USA. After 6 months he withdrew from the course he was enrolled on. He couldn't see the value in it. However, he didn't quit college. He slept on the floor of his friends' rooms and returned coke bottles for the 5 cents deposit so that he could buy food.
He had dropped out of his registered course but he started dropping in on classes that interested him. He loved going to the calligraphy class and learnt about different writing fonts. Ten years later he designed the first computer with beautiful typography, the Mac, and revolutionized the capacity of computers.
Given the sacrifices his family had made to pay for his university studies, dropping out of his chosen course could not be considered anything but a failure, yet it was one of the best decisions in his life.
It had allowed him to discover his true professional vocation. And there were more important failures that positively influenced his life.
At the age of 20, Steve Jobs started Apple in his parents' garage with his friend, Woz. Ten years later Apple had become a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. And then the unimaginable happened - he was fired from the company he had dedicated all his adult life to! He and the board of directors had a difference of vision and so he was dismissed, and it was a very public dismissal which dominated global media.
It was a very humbling experience but he did not quit doing what he loved best. In the next five years he created the companies NeXT and Pixar. Pixar produced the world's first animated feature film, "The Toy Story", and NeXT was bought by Apple. Steve Jobs was back at the company he had helped to build.
In his famous graduation speech at Stanford University in 2005 he reminded us of the positive power of failure. He publicly confessed:
Andrew Cino
Headmaster
Newton College
SPEECH BY HIS EXCELLENCY,
THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR,
Mr. JAMES DAURIS
Congratulations! It's the end of term. And it's not just the end of term; it's the end of the school year. And, for many of you, it's not just the end of the school year; it's the end of school!
I can remember the day I left school – the mixture of excitement, that feeling of turning the page at the start of a new adventure. I also remember that strong sense of leaving something behind that came with saying goodbye to people I had known for so much of my life.
The end of school is a special time. It is a special time to celebrate. It is also a special time for each of us – pupils, parents, staff and friends – to take a few moments to reflect.
I want you all to use your imagination for a couple of minutes. Imagine you have spent all your school days on a journey, a journey across the Andes. You have spent twelve long years climbing all the way up to the top of those high mountains and all the way down again. You have grown up with the friends you have made along the way. You have met metaphorical dragons along the way – exams and inter-house competitions and much more. How slowly those days and weeks and terms often seemed to pass. But how quickly the years seem to have gone now that your journey is finishing and you are looking back.
Imagine now that you are standing on the sea shore. The Andes are behind you, the waves are rolling in and crashing onto the beach, and you are looking out across the huge Pacific Ocean. You and your school friends are about to get into boats. But you aren't getting into one boat. Each of you is getting into a different boat. You are about to hoist your sails and start to sail away. Many of your boats will stay close together for a while. A few of your boats will stay close together for the rest of your lives. But over time, depending in part on where you choose to sail to, and in part on where the wind and the sea carry you, the boats you are about to travel in will take you all to many different places and you will have many different voyages.
But you're in luck. Each of you has been given a magic gift for the journey you are about to make – it is that however far you sail and however many years you sail for, when you look back you will always be able to see the mountains of your school days behind you. And when you do look back, I hope each of you will look back with fond memories – of your teachers, of your friends, of all that you learned together and all the fun you had as you grew up together.
Our school days are mountains. Writing early in the nineteenth century the English poet and writer Robert Southey commented:
"Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life."
Perhaps that sounds rather unlikely to you, but I have found as time has gone by that in a way Southey was right.
I left school when I was still just seventeen and I took a year off before I went to read law at the University of Cambridge. In Britain quite a number of school leavers take a year between school and university to get a job somewhere, to go abroad, to do something different and to learn a bit about the real world. Three weeks after the end of my last term at school I set off for India to teach English at a big boys' school in one of the hottest parts of a hot country. It was a huge adventure for me, to set off to live in and explore a far-away land of strange languages, strange customs, and strange religions. Remember that we didn't have email or the internet or mobile phones twenty five years ago – the world was a bigger place than it is today.
The school I was teaching in was on top of a fort and from the cliffs at night time I could look down and see clouds of sparks coming out of the funnels of the great steam trains that still pulled express trains across the Sub-Continent. India was (and still is) a land of temples and palaces, tigers and elephants, rich men and beggars.
It was India of course that inspired Kipling to write "The Jungle Book" and lots of other books, including his wonderful novel "Kim". And Kipling was also a prodigious writer of poetry. Perhaps you have come across one of his most famous poems: "If". Here's an extract from it:
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
If you're still awake (and I hope you are) you will have noticed that Kipling's points aren't about what sort of job you do, or about how you do your job. Rather his points are about who you are, what sort of person you are and how you use your time.
I'd like to read you one other very short poem about time by a nineteenth century English poet, Henry Twells.
When as a child, I laughed and wept, Time crept. When as a youth, I dreamt and talked, Time walked. When I became a full-grown man, Time ran. When older still I daily grew, Time flew. Soon I shall find on travelling on, Time gone. O Christ, wilt Thou have saved me then? Amen.
In the first poem Kipling offers us advice about self-confidence, about using our talents, about making the most of life, about taking opportunities when they come to us. In the second poem Twells warns us that the older we get the faster time will go.
So, school has finished and time will soon start running. It's time for you to get moving. Well, where do you plan to go to? Perhaps you know, perhaps you aren't yet certain. And what sort of person do you want to be?
On where to go to, my only bit of advice is: be adventurous, think boldly. There's no better time to do so than when you're young.
And what sort of person will you want to try to be?
If you haven't done so for a while, have a look at your school website. You'll find a list of your school's values. They include commitment, audacity and innovation. They are a good set of values to have.
Whatever each of you ends up doing, whatever career you choose, follow Kipling's advice, think about and use your talents, strive to make the most of life and to help others to make the most of their lives too, stick by your school's values – be committed, audacious and innovative – and aim to enjoy yourself as you're doing all this, and I'm confident each of you will do really well, building on the wonderful education you have been fortunate to enjoy here at Newton.
Happy Christmas, enjoy your well-earned holidays and good luck to each of you with the journeys that you are about to begin!
Mr. James Dauris
Her Majesty's Ambassador to Peru
Andrew Cino
Headmaster
Newton College
James Dauris
Embajador Británico en el Perú