Have you ever thought about what your eulogy might say? It’s kind of a macabre thought, but it’s actually a pretty important question. And it’s the topic of conversation on this podcast between Barry-Wehmiller CEO, Bob Chapman, and Garrett Potts, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida.
As you’ve heard over several episodes of this podcast, Barry-Wehmiller is working with a number of universities to try and instill principles of Truly Human Leadership into business schools, so future leaders are not only taught the hard skills you’d expect they need in their career, but also the essential skills of how to be a caring leader. Bob met Garrett through those efforts and he came up with the idea of having students write their own eulogy. Bob challenged Garrett to impress upon his students to live their lives with intention and ask them, “When your life comes to its end, which eventually it will, what do you want people to say about your life?”
On this podcast, you’ll hear why Bob and Garrett think this is an appropriate challenge for students at this point in their career, but you’ll also hear a broader discussion on the purpose of education and how better leaders can be created through it.
Transcript
Garrett Potts:
So, my name is Garrett Potts. I'm an assistant professor at the University of South Florida where my coursework is really focused on responsible leadership and spirituality. So, what I emphasize in my coursework is a wholehearted way of leading and stewarding within one sphere of influence, using that totalizing conception of your ultimate framework, your spiritual framework, what you believe to be true in terms of ultimate reality. On the side, I also do some executive leadership coaching. That takes place just down the road here at a place called Eckerd College where I'm a part of their Center for Creative Leadership.
So, we work with managers and CEOs to maximize their leadership potential, really find areas of weakness in their leadership style where maybe they're not super attuned to what it's like to be on the other side of them. So, we get to have some really interesting conversations in that domain as well.
Brent Stewart:
Bob, why don't you talk a little bit about how Garrett came into our orbit and how we met Garrett?
Bob Chapman:
Our team, our outreach initiative has been working with collegiate professors to try to, if you will, transform, evolve education to give people human skills along with academic skills. So, we create leaders who will have the skills encouraged to care for the people at work, at home, and in our communities. Because to us, that is the foundational issues we face, creating the conflict we all feel in this country. We don't know how to live together. So, we've been working with a group of professors around the country to share our blessing to try to bring this to education.
That's how we met Garrett as one of these cohort professors that we were working with to again, try to transform education one professor at a time, parallel with also working with institutions. Garrett stood out to our team in the professor group and said, "You got to meet this guy, Bob. You got to meet this guy." So we got on a call to meet this professor that our team wanted me to meet. Garrett was mentioning that he teaches these leadership classes and it strikes me that a question I would love to see college people address is, "What do they want their life to be? When your life comes to its end, which eventually it will, what do you want people to say about your life?"
And then go make it true. Live life with intention. Because I find most people live life, I'm going to get a degree and then I'm going to get a job, then I'm going to get married, then I'm going to buy a house, buy a vacation home, have grandkids. We live life driven by a series of events. To me, just like in our business, I think you should live life inspired by a vision of what you want your life to be. I think we owe that to kids to get them to think about that. So, in this conversation of meeting Garrett, we just threw that idea out at the end of the conversation when Garrett was going to be teaching the class and Garrett took it to a higher level than we even envisioned and gave us some feedback in terms of the richness of the conversation he had with these young people.
That was really a very unique experience, because in my opinion, our education system needs to embrace how do we help these kids in our care not just get academic skills, but get human skills and that they can go live life with intention, not driven by success, money, power, and position. So, Garrett gave us hope and so much so that we wanted to capture that in this podcast.
Brent:
So let's talk about what came out of that, Garrett , what did you do when you went back to your students or how did you process that?
Garrett:
Yeah. Well, to me, Brent, I think in my own words, what Bob's challenge was, was a question about education's ultimate end. What is education's ultimate end? That really resonated with me as someone who believes that, as Bob's been saying, I think that education is rather compartmentalized today. What is a good education if it doesn't prepare someone for a life that's worth living? The eulogy exercise that Bob presented was one that was going to prompt students not to merely think about life and their success in terms of short-term goals and achievement metrics, but how they actually want to be remembered. That kind of tension between what do I want to do and how do I want to be remembered is something that I wanted to wrestle with my students.
As the conversation evolved with Bob that morning when we were joined together on a call, I also thought, just a gut reaction, if you will, that it's going to be really interesting to see if there's any tension between these aspirations that my students have. If I were to phrase the question first, for example, in terms of, "Hey, tell me about your biggest aspirations right now. Tell me about your five biggest goals on the horizon of your life," just as an opening exercise, what kind of data or what kind of feedback would I get back? And then how might that be different if I asked as a follow-up, "Okay, tell me how you want to be remembered"? The observed outcomes of this were really striking to me.
So, when I first asked my students to share their biggest aspirations, all of this was couched in terms of professional success and material acquisition. So, like half of my students expressed desires for lucrative careers, while others emphasized importance of things like travel, further education, passing exams for licensure, buying a house in a nice neighborhood. All good things, but as Bob said already, things that we typically understand success in terms of things like money, power, and position. One of the things that was missing was really any idea of how these students wanted to touch the lives of other people, how they wanted to be remembered.
When I phrased the question in terms of how they wanted to be remembered, this was the most striking part of the class because instead of focusing on material achievements or career milestones, the students started to articulate desires to be remembered for things like their integrity, their kindness, their humility, their servant-heartedness, their ability to inspire others. Immediately, the contrast was really apparent and I thought to myself, "Oh, my gosh. My students are planning to succeed, but they may fail to flourish in their own terms." Because as we're understanding success today, flourishing isn't something that just naturally happens by emphasizing the kinds of things that we believe will make us successful today.
So, when I started to see this tension evolving for the students, I asked them to observe for themselves this disparity between what they want to do, what they want to achieve, and how they want to be remembered. What my students said was many of them expressed how our society often favors in rewards the worldly and ambitious mentality while neglecting the cultivation of deeper traits of character that are ultimately going to shape our lasting legacy. They really started to describe the own way in which success and the need to achieve is gripping them as a product of a toxic achievement culture that's actually maybe hindering the creation of caring environments because it's actually prioritizing things like competition and external validation and individual success over cooperation.
One of my favorite authors that I use in another class would describe these values as junk values from a culture that stuck on materialistic autopilot. As I was speaking with my students, having this eulogy conversation, that was the kind of language that they were using. Hey, these things that we're aspiring for are like junk values that have been habituated in us to pursue, and yet we're starting to realize that maybe we need to think a little bit more in depth about how we actually want to be remembered. The sense that I got when we walked out of the room that day of class was that all of us agreed there's no fuller definite or more final testament to our leadership than how we're remembered in our eulogy.
We're going to have to start thinking differently about what success means if our eulogy is going to be something that we believe is worth hearing, if our life is going to become something that we believe is worth living for.
Brent:
Tell me a little bit more about why the concept of a eulogy is a fitting exercise for the students to have this reflection.
Garrett:
Yeah, I mean I think it's a fitting exercise because it reveals that disconnect for so many of us between our current goals and our desired legacy. As Bob has often said, what the exercise helps to reveal is that indeed many of us do see our lives as a series of events, rather than a journey with an end. In my world and my background of philosophy, we talk about having an end in life using the Greek word telos, the sense of finality about what our life is for, what we believe everything in our life is amounting to or adding up to. This process of becoming though is often hampered by the short-term urge to succeed in terms of career milestones or things that materially speaking we think we should be acquiring at this age or stage in our life.
For my students, that was what was most impactful about this exercise that they didn't realize there was a disconnect between how they wanted to be remembered and who they were becoming until this was articulated in their own words and they could see that gap and they could feel that tension of needing to bridge that gap somehow. How am I going to change my vision of success so that it's not actually intention with who I want to be and how I want to lead my life?
Bob:
So Garrett, that's really beautiful insights seriously. Let me ask you from that experience again, the feedback you just gave us is what I remember. I thought, "What a powerful thing. If you had one of my kids in your class, I can't imagine a more meaningful conversation in your collegiate education than what you want your life to be." Okay. Why? If you think of the purpose of education, because I had a chance to speak at Brown University some years ago, and I went up to Harvard and I said, "Well, what's the purpose of education?" I'm speaking to presidents of universities. What is the purpose of education? They said, "Well, the Founding Fathers felt the purpose of education was to have an informed citizenry so we can have a democracy." I said, "Okay, that makes sense."
But then I said, "The Industrial Revolution came along and great entrepreneurs and leaders said, 'I need skills. I'm going to build factories. We're going to ship product around the world. I need architects, I need engineers, I need financial people. We will pay them well and give them good benefits and we'll take them off the farms.'" We see this in other countries as the Industrial Revolution improves income, education, healthcare of people. So, along came the Industrial Revolution. But these major powers said to the universities, "Give me these skills to fill my offices and my plants." So our universities became skills factories and we got the best raw material we could, people with the potential in education through testing to do well in secondary education, and then we sold them to the market.
If the market liked it, they'd pay us well and we get good demand and we must be doing a good job. So, the lens through which I see it, our universities became skills factory, which the market wanted. I once asked the dean of a business school, I said, "What is your vision for the two years you have in MBA programs of these students?" They said, "We don't have a vision. We have beliefs that are on the wall." I said, "Well, how do you know what to do if you don't have a vision?" He said, "We teach what the market wants." I said, "That's sad because what we need is to teach what the market needs, what people need," which is exactly what you talked about.
So, question from that exercise, to me, the discussion you just had with those students, it should be foundational to a first course. As we bring these young men and women into our care for two or four years, whatever the length of your program, let's start by saying, "What is your life purpose?" It will probably evolve over your two or four-year program, but let's start with a document you all keep in your briefcase about what success looks like, what you want your life to look like, and share that with us because I think we learn from each other. We're going to take you on a journey in the two or four years we have you to give you the skills to be a leader at work and healthcare and government and military and business and nonprofits and at home and in our communities.
We're going to give you the human skills aligned with your academic skills. So, by the time I hand you the graduation document, I can look you in the eye and say, "You are ready to go out and be a leader in every part of society that you'll be a part of because you have the skills and the courage to care for the people. You have the privilege of leading." So, Garrett, I'm just curious, as part of our educational system, from your years of experience, my view is the purpose of education should be to prepare us to be leaders because we lead in all facets of our life, which is to care for others. What is your view of the purpose of education responding to that idea I just shared with you?
Garrett:
Yeah, absolutely, Bob. So, first, I would say that I think that your analysis of the shift in terms of education and its perceived end is right on point. Education used to be about human formation and now it has become a mentalized endeavor where we are equipping people for degrees to take jobs in fields that they're not even getting their degrees in a lot of times. So, there's a lot of reasons to question the compartmentalization of our education today. I think where we have really gone wrong is by prioritizing skills over virtues.
So, I'll answer your question in just a minute, but just to say that I believe that when we focus on skills, we're targeting a particular practice or a particular activity and we are trying to promote effectiveness in every possible way in this narrow pursuit in this industry or in that particular place of employment or something like that. When we transition from the language of virtue to the language of skill, that compartmentalizing effect happens. I have called for a return to the language of virtue because when we talk about virtue, we're talking about habits of the heart that are impactful in every possible area of one's life, right? So things like honesty and integrity and humility.
If we prioritize those things above these compartmentalized skills in the workplace, if we make any necessary skills subservient to these virtues, then I believe we'll be on a better path to help individuals see how their whole life fits together. I mean, for Barry-Wehmiller, as I understand it, you all have strived to establish a long-term vision to foster a people-centric culture, to develop leaders from within, and to send people home fulfilled. What you've realized in the process is that a lot of what you're offering them is the opportunity to deepen their virtues alongside other people who are supporting them and encouraging them and empowering them and developing them.
I believe that that's what education should be doing, just like I believe that that's great that Barry-Wehmiller is doing that. So, to directly answer your question, what I would say is I believe that education should be empowering people to develop the virtues that are necessary to lead excellent lives, to contribute to excellence in delivering a product or a service to their future employer, and also to become mindful of what it means to contribute to one's sphere of influence in a way that results in tangible change and impact. We talk about this language a lot of times in terms of the language of the common good.
So, if education can do those three things, create the habits of the heart that are necessary for someone to lead a good life while also exercising those same habits of the heart, so individuals have the discipline to contribute to excellence in practice at work, then I believe that the third is going to follow, this idea of contributing positively to the common good within our sphere of influence, whatever that looks like for us based on our gifts or our abilities or the kind of people that our organization reaches in the process. To have that mindset I think is a mindset that resists that contemporary compartmentalization that so often happens in our educational culture today.
It concerns me that on day one of my classes, when I teach management students, very often the first thing that they say is that my management degree is helping me to become effective at maximizing revenue at any cost. That seems to suggest to me that we have not completed the work that I'm setting out to accomplish to help individuals understand how profitable organizations need to be compatible with these other aspects of our life vision, such as who we want to become and how we're impacting individuals in our organization, individuals who are on the receiving end of our products or our services and so on. So, I think we have a lot more work to do to push beyond this tendency towards compartmentalizing our roles and our lives and open ourselves up to this fuller idea of really what it looks like to flourish in all of the domains of our life and to support that and for others within our sphere of influence as well.
Bob:
So, Garrett, you said something in terms of virtues, which I think is great because I think we believe that people should get virtues from our families and that in education, we teach accounting, finance, management, marketing, economics, academic skills. But I don't ever remember in either my formal undergraduate and graduate education or programs I've involved through Young Presidents, ever, ever, ever hearing that the way I would lead Barry-Wehmiller would have an impact on the health of our people and the way they went home and treated their families.
It is just fascinating to me, Garrett, that when our team designed Barry-Wehmiller University to convert managers into leaders with human skills, that 95% of the feedback that we got was how it affected their marriage and their relationship with their kids. So, when you hear people say today, "What's wrong with kids today? What's wrong with kids today?", I said, "Where did they come from?" They came from our families and they came probably from parents who work in organizations that did use them to achieve their goals and discard them when they don't need them, coming home not feeling very good. Remember, 88% of all people feel they work for an organization that doesn't care about them. So, when we have that environment, we're using people to achieve goals.
So, two questions, one question, then one statement, I ask educators, people like you all the time, I understand why we teach speech, the ability to articulate your thoughts with proper language, et cetera. I understand why we teach debate, which is critical thinking. Why don't we teach the greatest of all human skills that we've learned, which is empathetic listening? The answer I get consistently in education is we don't. I said, "I know you don't. Why don't you?" Because we don't. When you look at political parties, you look at people in conflict, Israelis and Jewish and Palestinians and Russians and Americans and Chinese, I'm right and you're wrong. That's what we taught him. Critical thinking, debate, convince people that you are right with the skills of critical thinking.
But as Bill Ury said, he's realized he's gone to global peace talks for 30 years around the world on various issues, and he now realizes having experienced our leadership model where we teach empathetic listening, that global peace talks are exactly what they are. They're global peace talks. The problem is nobody knows how to listen. It's a debate. So, I would say to you, in terms of you being a thought leader in education, what is the purpose of education?
If we're going to teach human skills, when the students arrive on your campus for the journey you're going to take them on, how do you share with them the journey that they're about to embark on and the reason that they're going to take the classes they're going to take, so when you hand them that diploma, you can look them in the eye as an institution, as a professor, say, "You are ready to go out and live life with the tools to have a life of meaning and purpose aligned with your faith"? So again, it astounds me the number of thoughtful people that cannot answer the question, why don't we teach listening, the greatest of all human skills we have learned? How would you answer that question from your educational experience?
Garrett:
Bob, I think the reason that we don't teach listening in a higher education environment is not because we don't think that we should. It's just that we think it's someone else's job or responsibility to do that for these students. That's really a shame because if there's one thing that I've learned about the moment in time that we have these students in a higher education environment, for many of them, it's the first time they've really left the nest and they've encountered people who are so different than them that their worldview is opening up. There's this vast expanse now where they're not just around people who look like them, talk like them, believe like them. They have this opportunity to be surrounded by individuals from all over the world.
I mean, University of South Florida is one of the most diverse college campuses in the United States. For me, I use that as an opportunity in my course to implement really two priorities. Bob, as you know, a lot of my work is done in conjunction with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and a project that we've been working on is really to help students grow in this empathetic listening skill. We refer to this as the value of truth-seeking pluralism in our class. What we mean by that is, look, you may be a White Southern Baptist from Alabama sitting next to a Palestinian Muslim in my class. The wall of difference between you as the media would have it would seem to be so impenetrable that you could hardly even look at one another.
But in my class today, I want us to consider what it looks like to respectfully seek to understand someone across these enduring lines of religious difference. I can tell you from my experiences that it is really inspiring to see literally a student who is a Southern Baptist speaking with the Palestinian Muslim can come to understand one another when they actually just lean in and ask questions about what that person believes, instead of saying, "I know what you think and that's why I want nothing to do with you." That slight subtle transformation of just leaning in and seeking to understand what someone's perspective of reality and truth and meaning and purpose looks like in their own terms instead of putting words in their mouth is so powerful, so impactful.
So many conversations have happened in my classes where students say, "I actually think that we can be friends. I'm so surprised because everything the media has told me about you would make me feel like there's no way that we could even be in the same room together." So that value of truth seeking pluralism, I've already hinted at the second, is met with this pursuit of ultimate meaning and that's where things get messy. Bob, I think part of the reason we don't teach listening in classes because we think it's other people's jobs, but also because we're scared of what's going to happen if we give people the opportunity to talk and everyone else has to listen to them. But in my class, it's different.
I say, "Hey, we are going to have conversations about the things that we're not supposed to talk about. I want to know what you believe and I want to give other people the opportunity to ask you questions respectfully about what they believe." Then I want you to do the same thing with them. The initial reaction in my classes is fear and terror. But as individuals enter into this practice, they realize much more often than not that it's actually a sacred opportunity to come to know someone on a deeper level than they're typically able to get to know students and peers on their campus and in their classrooms around them.
Bob:
So that's the point. Our nonprofit Chapman Foundation for Caring Communities, we've taught 13,000 people around the United States. As I've sat in graduating days where these people have been through this empathetic listening, not listening to judge, not listening to debate, but listening to understand and validate, they always, always, always say, "I met the most wonderful group of people." They didn't say Jewish or Black or old or fat. They said, "I met the most wonderful..." Because we tend to debate the superficial, you're Jewish or you're a communist or you're Palestinian. When you see the conflict we've had in our streets among all these students between Jewish students and Palestinian students, you think they're yelling at each other, protesting.
We're right and you're wrong. You see the fact that our education system, even in our education system, we can't sit down with civil discourse and understand the uniqueness of each individual and the beauty in each individual. Therefore, we have the conflict in our communities, our campuses. I mean, look at the conflict in our campuses this year. Why? Well, because we don't know how to listen. So, we try as educational to deal with this conflict, which is very difficult, but it's because we didn't teach these people to listen. That's what we've been blessed with. So, I would say to you that I don't think our education thinks it's somebody else's. I think it's like turning the Titanic around. We have a tradition of economics and math and biology and science. Where is the human piece of that?
When we look at our society today and the brokenness we're experiencing and the tension within families, with ethnic groups, within communities, we say, "What's wrong?" What's wrong is we never gave those people the skills to live together with people with unique differences and unique beliefs. Again, just for the benefit of this podcast, my biggest transformation, Garrett, was I was always a nice guy from North St. Louis who ran a nice company, but I saw people as functions, engineers, accountants, people I needed for my success. The revelation that I was blessed with was the lens was reversed and I saw people not as functions, but as somebody's precious child.
Whether I was at work or in a taxicab driver or in a grocery store or in another event, the lens through which we see people, if we see people as black or white or old or young or beautiful or not so beautiful, that shapes the way we treat them and view them. So, what we have found, when you learn to listen without judgment, you listen with empathy, and there's skills. You can't just tell people to do that. You have to give people the tools to do that. They don't look at the superficial aspects. They look at the beauty, the virtues. The one virtue I want you to expand the list. I want you to expand it with one more word. Caring is a virtue. It's not dignity and respect. That's me. We need to move to we. When you learned caring is a skill, the bad news about COVID, it was highly contagious.
The good news about caring, it's even more contagious than COVID. We have learned that when you genuinely care for the people and you give them the skills to care, it spreads. They naturally begin caring for others. So, I think, Garrett, in terms of education, I believe the heart of the issues we face in this country is because our education system is founded on the wrong principles. It's about giving people academic skills so they can get good jobs and make money and be happy. We judge it based upon their success in their careers, how far they go, instead of living life fully with the gifts they have. So, until we change education, all the things that concern us are not going to change, are going to get worse.
So, we look at people like you, thoughtful professors in major educational institutions. You are our hope. If we can just get you all to embrace, "What is the purpose? How can we serve society?", we can serve society by integrating human skills with academic skills so we can create tomorrow's leaders at home, at work, in our communities. An attribute is that we have the skills to care for others, moving from it's all about me to it's all about we.
Garrett:
I couldn't agree more with you, Bob, and I have to say, as your friend, Simon Sinek, or as I call him, the why guy often says about you, we need people like you as well to remind us that we're not utopian idealists. We need people and leaders in positions such as yours, Bob, to remind us that it is possible to pursue a profitable organizational agenda while also prioritizing the way that you touch the lives of other people and how individuals leave work feeling fulfilled, feeling inspired, feeling like they can go home being wonderful parents because of something that has formed within them in the workplace as well. I mean, one of the things that I often emphasize with my students is...
Really, if there's one lie that I want to root out more than anything else in my management students' minds today, it would be that you can go to work and you can treat people like functionaries and then you can go home and that way of treating someone won't follow you there. The way that we are wired as human beings is such that how we treat others at work spills over into other areas of our life, other social roles such as the way that we parent and the way that we treat our friends. That can be for good or for bad, unfortunately.
So, when I look at organizations like Barry-Wehmiller, I'm encouraged because I see how individuals are inspired to live out these virtues of caring and compassion and integrity and humility and listening and a culture of we and how that inspires a servant leadership, a servant first mentality in their marriage and the way they make sacrifices for their friends and their children. It's really an inspiring thing. So, I'm grateful for that.
Bob:
Yeah, I think so. So, Garrett, I'll end this piece of it subject to some additional questions from Brent, but it still amazes me that when our empowerment team came up with the educational content at BW University to convert managers into leaders, to give people the skills to care for the people who have the privilege of leading, they foundationally said, "We need to teach empathetic listening," which I thought was crazy. We need to teach people the skills of recognition and celebration because it's not like attaboy, you've been here 10 years award. How do you let people know they matter, which is recognition and celebration, and then culture of service, the opportunity to serve others. Those three eclectic classes, it amazes many.
When I look back on our 20-year journey that those human skills we gave at work, 95% of the feedback we get from graduates is how it affected their marriage and their relationship with their kids. So, business could be the most powerful force for good in the world. If we had leaders who genuinely had the skills and courage to care, so people felt valued and they went home at night inspired by the fact that they feel valued and they treated their spouse, their children, and behaved in our communities consistent what they experienced for 40 hours a week.
So, again, it's amazing to me as I sit here today, 20 years into this journey, that we were blessed with this vision of how education can create truly human leaders who have the skills and courage to care and the impact that can make on marriages and therefore on children. We can begin addressing issues in every part of our society, healthy marriages, people who work together that care for each other, and that we see the differences in our community as beauty, not as conflict. So, that's our goal in education. I think working with this cohort professor group, I think we're teaching virtually 27 professors today on many of these virtues.
But our goal is the key to solving the world issues is to transform, elevate education to a higher calling, to give us human and academic skills, not one at the expense of the other, but in harmony, weave it into a journey, two-year, four-year program, high school program, beginning kindergarten all the way through graduate school to integrate human skills. So, the people leave our educational institution ready to make a positive impact on people's lives and society.
So, that's our goal. Brent, in terms of some of the questions you have, I know maybe you want to add a couple, but you see why I thought Garrett would be a great podcast because he's a very deep thinker. He's of an age. He's got some years ahead of him to really make a difference in education. So, any additional thoughts, Brent, that you feel we ought to touch on?
Brent:
Garrett, the benefit of having Bob as a co-host is that it makes my job really easy. I don't have to ask a lot of questions because he has all of them. Garrett, was there anything else that you wanted to talk about in terms of the eulogy exercise? Is there anything that we didn't go over that you wanted to talk about?
Garrett:
Brent, there's one thing. There's one thing that we haven't covered yet that I would really like to touch on with Bob briefly while we have him still. Bob, we've talked a lot about the eulogy exercise. You've inspired me to think about my own eulogy quite a bit since our conversation. I'm just wondering, what does it look like for you to think about this exercise? As you consider your own eulogy, how would you like to be remembered, if I may ask?
Bob:
Thank you for asking that, Garrett. The way I would answer that is, number one, I came to a vision for a company that I think reflects my life, that I want to measure success by the way I touch the lives of people, my family, the people I work with, people like you that I influence. So, I want to look back on my life with people whose life I have touched that caused them to rise to a higher level of purpose in life, and that we create a movement of caring that will live well beyond our time. Okay? So that's my purpose, to make sure that I'm totally focused in my calling today to make sure that this blessing we've been given of empathetic listening and caring becomes foundational to society.
Because there is not one ounce of doubt in my mind that that is the key to the society where we have civil discourse, we can live in harmony with the unique differences and beauties, but until we teach these skills that we were blessed with, we will not live that society. We'll continue to blame others, blame government. It's everybody's fault but ours. That's not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Until we individualize caring, until we institutionalize the skills, we have learned that you can teach people... I'll give you an example.
When Bernie Sanders was a possible presidential candidate, he talked a lot about socialistic and young people surveyed had an interest in socialism compared to free enterprise. The CEO of Roundtable came out with a podcast or with a statement in the Wall Street Journal that said, "We believe we need to think about more than just the shareholders." A beautiful statement, I'm sure, crafted by some very gifted public relations people, but it was around, if you will, we need to think about more than just the shareholders. I know some of these gentlemen. They're incredibly fine gentlemen, deep faith, good values, good education. The problem is they have no idea how to care for people because we have learned through this journey we've been on, it is a skill that you can teach.
So, again, our goal inspired by Bill Ury was to bring our educational blessings for adults in age appropriate ways beginning in kindergarten to help people learn to live together with the beauty of our differences, not the conflict of our differences. So, my eulogy will say he genuinely cared for the people whose lives he had the privilege of touching.
Garrett Potts:
Thanks, Bob. It's an honor to get to hear a little bit about how you think about this question, and I'm certainly grateful for our friendship that's formed over the last several months and these common areas of interest or passion that we have around helping to shape the leaders of tomorrow and today.
Bob:
Well, we hope to shape your eulogy statement also, Garrett, because we need alignment. We need to march together. As Simon said, when Martin Luther King walked over the bridge, he didn't say, "Come on, everybody. Follow me." They marched together. What we are trying to do is this is not Bob's view, this is not Brent's view. It's our view of the way the world was intended to be, where people genuinely care for each other and you can't ask them to care. You have to teach them how to care. One other statement I have that I think for this relative to this group is in our society, we value people who've had financial success as they write checks to these wonderful charities, tribute to the family for what they do.
My statement to you and to others is the greatest of charity is not the checks we write. The greatest act of charity is how every one of us treat the people that we interact with every day and to look at each individual we deal with as somebody's precious child who simply wants to know they matter, whether you're a policeman, you're a receptionist, you're a professor, because what we have learned is you can teach those skills. You can't ask people to care. You have to teach them how. You can't ask people to live as God intended us to. We have to teach them how to do that. So, I think that is our goal, and people like you give us hope that we can elevate the purpose of education to create tomorrow's leaders who have the skills and courage to care, and that students, when they leave your care, know what they want their life to be.