Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Ivana Korom
I want to start by asking everyone in the audience a question,
how many of you are completely comfortable
with calling yourselves a leader?
I've asked that question all the way across the country,
and no matter where I ask it,
there's always a huge portion of the audience
that won't put up their hand.
And I've come to realize that we have made leadership
into something bigger than us.
Something beyond us.
We've made it about changing the world.
And we've taken this title of leader, and we treat it as if it's something
that one day we're going to deserve,
but to give it to ourselves right now
means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we're not comfortable with.
And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time
celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do
that we've convinced ourselves
those are the only things worth celebrating,
and we start to devalue the things that we can do every day,
and we start to take moments where we truly are a leader
and we don't let ourselves take credit for it,
and feel good about it.
And I've been lucky enough over the last 10 years
to work with some amazing people
who have helped me redefine leadership in a way
that I think has made me happier.
Today, I want to share with you
the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition.
I went to school in a little school called
Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick,
and on my last day there, a girl came up to me
and said, "I remember the first time that I met you."
And then she told me a story that had happened four years earlier.
She said, "On the day before I started university,
I was in the hotel room with my mom and dad,
and I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn't do this,
that I wasn't ready for university, that I burst into tears.
My mom and dad were amazing. They were like,
'Look, we know you're scared, but let's just go tomorrow.
Let's go to the first day, and if at any point you feel
as if you can't do this, that's fine, just tell us, we will take you home.
We love you no matter what.'"
She says, "I went the next day,
I was standing in line getting ready for registration,
and I looked around and I just knew I couldn't do it.
I knew I wasn't ready. I knew I had to quit."
She says, "I made that decision, and as soon as I did,
this incredible feeling of peace came over me.
I turned to my mom and dad to tell them we needed to go home,
and at that moment, you came out of the Student Union building
wearing the stupidest hat I have ever seen in my life." (Laughter)
"It was awesome.
And you had a big sign promoting Shinerama,
which is Students Fighting Cystic Fibrosis,"
- a charity I've worked with for years -
"and you had a bucketful of lollipops.
You were walking along and handing them out
to people in line and talking about Shinerama.
And all of a sudden, you got to me, and you just stopped, and stared.
It was creepy." (Laughter)
This girl right here knows exactly what I'm talking about. (Laughter)
"And then you looked at the guy next to me,
you smiled, reached in your bucket, pulled out a lollipop,
held it out to him, and you said,
'You need to give a lollipop
to the beautiful woman standing next to you.'"
And she said, "I have never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life.
He turned beet red, and he wouldn't even look at me.
He just kind of held the lollipop out like this." (Laughter)
"And I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop,
and as soon as I did, you got this incredibly severe look
on your face and you looked at my mom and dad,
and you said, 'Look at that.
First day away from home, and already she's taking candy
from a stranger?!'" (Laughter)
And she said, "Everybody lost it. Twenty feet in every direction,
everyone started to howl.
I know this is cheesy, and I don't know why I'm telling you this,
but in that moment when everyone was laughing,
I knew that I shouldn't quit.
I knew that I was where I was supposed to be,
I knew that I was home, and I haven't spoken to you once
in the four years since that day,
but I heard that you were leaving,
and I had to come up and tell you that you've been
an incredibly important person in my life, and I'm going to miss you. Good luck."
And she walks away, and I'm flattened.
She gets about six feet away, turns around and smiles, and goes,
"You should probably know this, too.
I'm still dating that guy four years later." (Laughter)
A year and a half after I moved to Toronto,
I got an invitation to their wedding.
Here's the kicker. I don't remember that.
I have no recollection of that moment,
and I've searched my memory banks, because that is funny
and I should remember doing it, and I don't remember it.
And that was such an eye-opening, transformative moment for me
to think that maybe the biggest impact I'd ever had on anyone's life,
a moment that had a woman walk up
to a stranger four years later and say,
"You've been an incredibly important person in my life,"
was a moment that I didn't even remember.
How many of you guys have a lollipop moment,
a moment where someone said something or did something
that you feel fundamentally made your life better?
All right. How many of you have told that person they did it?
See, why not? We celebrate birthdays,
where all you have to do is not die for 365 days - (Laughter) -
and yet we let people who have made our lives better
walk around without knowing it.
And every single one of you,
has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment.
You have made someone's life better by something that you said or did,
and if you think you haven't, think about all the hands
that didn't go back up when I asked that question.
You're just one of the people who hasn't been told.
But it is so scary to think of ourselves as that powerful.
It can be frightening to think we can matter that much to other people,
because as long as we make leadership something bigger than us,
as long as we keep it something beyond us,
make it about changing the world,
we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it
every day from ourselves and from each other.
Marianne Williamson said,
"Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate.
It is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, and not our darkness, that frightens us."
My call to action today is that we need to get over that.
We need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful
we can be in each other's lives.
We need to get over it so we can move beyond it,
and our little brothers and sisters,
and our kids right now - can watch and start to value
the impact we can have on each other's lives
more than money and power and titles and influence.
We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments,
how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge,
how many we pay forward, and how many we say thank you for.
Because we've made leadership about changing the world,
and there is no world.
There's only six billion understandings of it,
and if you change one person's understanding of it,
one person's understanding of what they're capable of,
one person's understanding of how much people care about them,
one person's understanding of how powerful an agent for change
they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing.
And if we can understand and redefine leadership like that,
I think we can change everything.
And it's a simple idea, but I don't think it's a small one,
and I want to thank you all so much for letting me share it with you today.
Have a great day. (Applause)