December 5th, 2013

Morning Gentlemen,

I hope the day finds you healthy, enthusiastic, and ready for action. If you do not feel like all three of those things, I will try my utmost to rekindle that fire in you. It is my desire to prepare you all to succeed today. It is my desire to prepare you all for greatness today. It is my DUTY to ensure I put my best effort into bringing forth your talent and abilities to conquer the challenges that dare to face you today. So let's get started. (Note: this will be a longer driver, read it early in the day, but wait till you have about 20 minutes to read it in its entirety.)

Inspiration: Detroit yesterday was given the legal right to cut the pensions of thousands of retired individuals to deal with their current debt crisis. Due to the mismanagement of money on the executive level, and the eventual bankruptcy of a major city, many people will spend the rest of their lives cheated out of what they worked for...In other news the Yankees just signed Jacoby Ellsbury just last night. I am not much of a baseball guy, but this man is obviously a commodity because he was able to garner up a 7 year deal world $153 million. Why juxtapose these two issues, or talk about baseball in a daily driver? For two major reasons actually. 

The most obvious one is that one man last night got assurance that for the next 7 years (and many years after that) he will be living well off. He will be rich for many years to come, his kids, his spouse, his family and friends, basically anyone connected to him will benefit from the work he has put towards "beating at his craft". On the other side of the coin is the thousands of old, retired individuals who figured out yesterday that they will have to cut back. They will not live their last days in comfort or peace, they now have to change their budgets, possibly how they shop, what they do, etc. all because of some executive mismanagement. I'm not here to talk about social justice or the morality of this I am here giving you guys a choice. 

We are newborns basically in the professional world. Like a fetus that looks gender-less we have no profession yet, no job, no serious responsibilities. Our possibilities are endless, we have not faced true rejection or failure yet. The next 10 years of our lives will set us up for success or failure. Our decisions NOW will determine if we work for someone else, and leave our pensions and futures in the hands of others, or if we ultimately run our own lives. Whether we work for someone else's dream, or if we profit pursuing our own. The pensioners worked for someone else for years and left their future and retirement out of their control...they paid for it, and Ellsbury pursued his passion in baseball and is now making hundreds of millions of dollars doing what he loves. Like I said, the choice is yours. 

My second point is a more abstract one. As the League we want to someday control the precipices of society. With that role will come responsibility. We will someday have the power to give away millions of dollars, as the owner of the Yankees does, to people to simply play and entertain us, and we will also be in charge of the welfare of thousands of people, as the Detroit government was. NOW is the time to begin building your moral character, so you can be a just and honorable leader. Gentlemen we want to lead society, but we must lead it in the right direction.

Encouragement: You woke up (blessing 1). You are alive and well (blessing 2). Your family is still supporting you, and you have the opportunity today to make your future dreams a reality (blessing 3). You have surrounded yourself with like-minded forward thinking individuals who will push you to your limits, and who will accept nothing but the best from you (blessing 4). You could learn something today that could change the rest of your life forever, or you could sleep for 12 hours and do nothing...you have the freedom of choice (blessing 5). You see the day has barely begun and you are already being bathed in blessings left and right. We live in the land of opportunity, in the Golden Age of our race, with unlimited resources and a multitude of knowledge available to us at anytime. We have the ability to leave a legacy that people will talk about for years to come, or we could destroy our planet and leave future generations denouncing us for ages. You see, just as we learn about the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans someday people will learn of the United States of America, The Peoples Republic of China, and Great Britain. Generations will talk about the birth of the internet as if it were as important as the invention of fire (which it very well might live up to be). We live in a time where change, growth, and accomplishments are highly possible, and will forever be remembered. There has been no better time to be a human being on Earth. So, if you just plan to make it through the day, or survive...you not only waste the chances you've been given, you waste opportunities that other humans would have killed to have. This is our time, our world, our age...let's ensure it is admired in the history books.

Testimonial: One of my mentors here on campus was talking to me during my advising meeting a couple weeks back, and he reminded me of this today. You see, we all know we are succeeding, people are noticing and telling us "Wow you're smart", "You're going places", "You're a leader", and letting you realize "Hey I do stand out from the crowd, I am a special breed!" However, my counselor has chosen a different way of talking to me. 

You see he knows I work hard, he see my grades, the clubs I participate in, how I carry myself etc., and he knows that I am already receiving a lot of praise from other people. However the most important thing is he sees the potential I have in myself, something I feel we all possess. What he told me was simple. "Don't start feeling yourself now." What does that mean "Don't start feeling yourself..."? It means we are in college, if we dropped out today we would be nothing. It means we've almost completed a semester, cool we have 7+ to go. It means yeah we are leaders among our peers, amazing, but if we died today what greatness would our obituary talk about. You see we are just bundles of potential, and I'm sorry to let you guys know that potential is often wasted. We must remain positive, we must strive for success, we must stay committed to the cause, but we can't start slipping now, you know why? Because we aren't competing with our peers who are content with graduating with a 2.0, we are competing with the guy who is trying to start a company while acing all his tests over at Oregon State. We aren't competing with the kids who will drop out from Cal Tech this term, we are competing with the ones who have started creating the next Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. We are not competing with the kids who decided "Oh well, college is not for me back to working at Wal-Mart." Hell no! We are striving to catch up with the guy who just landed an internship at Google. You see the fact of the matter is even if we are in the top 5% of the students in college, we are still only 6/140,000. That is less than a 1000th of a percent. That's not noticeable or even mentionable, and that is considering we are better than sophomores, juniors, and senior, ignoring recent graduates all together.

What's the point in all this. Well humans work for rewards. A's on tests, money, and praise are some of the top rewards we as humans get. So everytime we get a positive comment from someone, we unconsciously congratulate ourselves. Each positive comment makes us feel like we have reached a minor goal or accomplishment, and what does that do, it breeds laziness. It breeds inefficiency, it breeds lack of effort. "Why the extra lap? I'm already fast. Why study more? I'm naturally smart. Why put in the work, I'm smarter than the average kid, I'll catch up when I have time. This is the reason that so much potential remains untapped and eventually wasted. People feel they have reached they have accomplished a lot prematurely, and settle before they actually reach their goals. How do you keep yourself from falling into this trap? How do we ensure that we get to use all the potential we have at this point in life? Don't tell yourself you've made it. Don't tell yourself it is getting easier, pray it gets harder so as my dad always says "The system can weed out more competition, while I remain." Don't get complacent, start cutting corners, or doing stuff the easy way. We can't afford that. So the next time you get a compliment about your work ethic, or academic success, thank the person, smile, and then remind yourself you are successful on their scale, but according to you: well you've yet to graduate, you don't own a company, no one in the League is a millionaire so...your still where you started. Your still working towards a greater goal, and an A isn't good enough. Leading a club isn't good enough. College grad isn't good enough! You have succeeded in their eyes not yours and you will not stop till you have accomplished every single objective you have in life. If you properly follow this, you will never be satisfied. You will always want to work towards something else, and you will be able to work towards it with a focus and drive like no other. I have begun to try and practice this method and way of thinking. I won't lie it's hard, some times I fail, and it is easy to compare yourself with others not working as hard, but I am getting better. I will reach the point where my drive is infinite, where I cannot be stopped, where compliments won't please me because the only thing that matters is reaching my goals and not the "protocol" or minor success in between. Potential is not success, though they are easily confused. I hope you guys can take away from this mindset I am trying to form, and practice it as well. 

Furthermore: Gentlemen I am not just saying these things just to say them. If you look around you can see untapped talent wasted all around us, from star high school athletes turned restaurant employee, to intelligent college kids now living in their parents basement. Also in the workforce, imagine the number of Bill Gates and Elon Musks who said to themselves "I'm pretty smart, I won't work hard and I'll make 6 figures as an engineer." Do not accept compliments and risk settling, stay hungry and unsatisfied. I wish you all the best of luck as you strive to complete you first term in college, and I hope you have gained something to use through your day from my words. Tomorrow we will here from Kris.

Don't accept average...not today,

Chukwuemeka K. Ukaga