Thank you all for being here on this especially important occasion. Before addressing a few words to you, students of Prom 2022, I would like to mention your parents. With their wisdom, guidance, and love, they have given you the constant support that you needed to reach today’s milestone. With their words of encouragement, their hugs of affection and their timely reproaches, they have helped you to construct the foundations of your future. Prom 2022, please put your hands together and give your parents a very loud and rapturous round of applause.
You are on a long journey, Prom 2022, and in a few minutes, you will complete the first major stage of it. Like any tall building, your future needs very solid foundations and during the last 17 years your home and your school have helped you to construct such strong foundations.
In a few minutes you will leave behind the security and protection of CPB and you will venture into a new world of exciting opportunities and daunting challenges. You are living in times of very rapid change, and it is difficult to predict what life will be like next year, not to say in five years’ time when you will probably graduate from university.
In March 2020, when COVID struck Peru, and schools had to close, your lives were turned upside down. You had to adapt to new realities, live and learn in ways with which you were not familiar, dig deep into your bank of resilience and perseverance. You made it and you are now better prepared for the new challenges that the future will undoubtedly bring.
Around 50 years ago, another young man was in your shoes. His name was Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. Steve was raised by a lower middle-class family in Silicon Valley where he developed an interest in engineering. On leaving school, he decided he wanted to enrol at Reed College, an expensive university which his parents could not really afford. They sacrificed all their savings and Steve enrolled. After 6 months Steve withdrew from the course he was enrolled on. He could not see the value in it. However, he did not 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 calligraphy class and learning 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 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 - Steve had to leave 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.
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:
“…getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything…. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”
At times, life can be an extremely complicated journey, we have learnt that from the pandemic, but we must not lose faith.
Like Steve Jobs, JK Rowling, author of the famous Harry Potter series, also came from a poor family who had saved hard to send her to university. They did not want her to suffer the same poverty that they had endured and so they encouraged her to study a career that would ensure her a decent salary. However, she wanted to be a writer and was desperate to study English Literature. They reached a compromise, and she studied Modern Languages. A few months later she abandoned this course and began to study Classics, that is Latin and Greek. You can imagine her parents’ fears – their daughter was going to become an unemployed expert on Greek mythology!
In her commencement speech at Harvard University in 2008, Miss Rowling recalls that what she feared most as an undergraduate was not poverty but failure. Seven years after her graduation ceremony she admits that she had failed on an epic scale: her marriage had lasted just a few years, she was unemployed, a lone parent and poor. She was a loser by all definitions, with little light at the end of the tunnel!
However, as in the life of Steve Jobs, her failure became the liberating experience she needed to succeed. At Harvard she explained this very articulately:
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I …. began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that really mattered to me…. I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not live at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
Prom 2022 do not live so cautiously and fail by default.
In one of my favourite films, The Dead Poets’ Society, Professor Keating tells his new English class to “Seize the day” (“Carpe diem”) and make their lives extraordinary. This is my main message to you today, Promotion 2022, MAKE YOUR LIVES EXTRAORDINARY. You are young and therefore, you have not been tamed by caution yet. Be bold and attempt the impossible, like generations of young people have done before you, and you will be astounded by what you are capable of. Maintain the enthusiasm of your youth and do not allow the heaviness of advancing years to make you complacent. Sometimes the road ahead is full of obstacles and will obscure sight of your goals. But do not worry and keep believing in yourselves. As one of the greatest Americans of all time, Martin Luther King, said:
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
One of my favourite poems is by the Uruguayan author, Mario Benedetti. It is about not losing faith and it is called “No te rindas”. There is an English translation of the poem, but the original Spanish version is much more beautiful. Allow me to read it to you in Spanish.
No te rindas, aun estas a tiempo
de alcanzar y comenzar de nuevo,
aceptar tus sombras, enterrar tus miedos,
liberar el lastre, retomar el vuelo.
No te rindas que la vida es eso,
continuar el viaje,
perseguir tus sueños,
destrabar el tiempo,
correr los escombros y destapar el cielo.
No te rindas, por favor no cedas,
aunque el frio queme,
aunque el miedo muerda,
aunque el sol se esconda y se calle el viento,
aún hay fuego en tu alma,
aún hay vida en tus sueños,
porque la vida es tuya y tuyo también el deseo,
porque lo has querido y porque te quiero.
Porque existe el vino y el amor, es cierto,
porque no hay heridas que no cure el tiempo,
abrir las puertas, quitar los cerrojos,
abandonar las murallas que te protegieron.
Vivir la vida y aceptar el reto,
recuperar la risa, ensayar el canto,
bajar la guardia y extender las manos,
desplegar las alas e intentar de nuevo,
celebrar la vida y retomar los cielos,
No te rindas, por favor no cedas,
aunque el frio queme,
aunque el miedo muerda,
aunque el sol se ponga y se calle el viento,
aún hay fuego en tu alma,
aún hay vida en tus sueños,
porque cada día es un comienzo,
porque esta es la hora y el mejor momento,
porque no estás sola,
porque yo te quiero.
As the poem says, Prom 2022, never give up pursuing your dreams. Every day is a new beginning. Spread your wings and celebrate life.
I hope the friends you are sitting next to today, remain your friends for life. Remember your school, it is part of your roots.
And finally, I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone here a very Merry Xmas and a peaceful and fulfilling 2023.
As the Scottish people like to say, “Enjoy life whilst you are alive, because you are a long time dead.”
Thank you for your attention and enjoy the rest of this ceremony.