It's Time for My 3 Rules to My Graduating Seniors

It's been an extraordinary semester at Tufts!!!

• 12 projects spread over my Marketing and Science of Sales courses.
• 6 students, mostly seniors, assigned to each project: all very complex.
• The last of the 90-minute final presentations took place this Wednesday night.
• I spent yesterday talking to the company managers who provide 40% of the final grades.

This coming Monday night is our graduation exercise with our seniors who are receiving their certificates acknowledging that they have received a degree from The Derby Entrepreneurship Center.   Different from most of the universities where you probably went to school, Tufts does not have a business school, so our Center provides its 1,000+ students who take our courses every year with a wide variety of business, leadership and innovation courses that become the largest minor at Tufts.   

This graduation event is always a wonderful occasion with lots of accolades, special awards, the noting of unique achievements and an overwhelming expression of positivity with handshakes and hugs all around.  There's also the reality that everyone is moving on to open new chapters and too often connections are lost, misplaced or simply not kept up, which is why I always deliver "The 3 Rules of Jack", which Monday night will go something like the still-work-in-progress outline below.

Rule #1: Always Be Connected!

Always connect on two levels. Take a look around you. Some of you have known one another for four years and others of you just met tonight.  I am asking you to always connect with everyone you meet and want to continue to know and potentially to work with. Don’t lose anyone! In fact, don’t just connect, cherish and protect every single relationship-maybe it’s a casual friendship and maybe it’s relationship with a lifelong friend or a partner. Maintain it! Grow it where you can. Just never let it go! Your personal responsibility is to connect and reconnect repeatedly.

On another level of always being connected, have a voice, take a stand, and be heard. Maybe it’s a soft voice simply among you and your friends. Maybe it’s a bit louder voice in your social media posts with your friends, or in your blogs like my alum, Ramiro Sarabia, with tens of thousands of followers, or just maybe it’s a very loud and authoritative voice like Rosie Xia, one of my alums, who is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a star reporter on the environment for the LA Times and a highly vocal author in her celebrated book California Against the Sea.   The bottom line is that you want to continue to connect by having a very vocal voice that says who you are and what you believe in.

Rule #2: Always COMMIT to more Learning!

You’re graduating from one of the top universities in the world, so my second rule is to always continue to learn and to stretch yourself from who and where you are today to that person that you will be when you’re 30. And when you’re 30, stretch yourself again to be your future self of 40.

If you’re going to get advanced degrees, plan for it now. If for reasons of practicality, money, jobs, partners and ultimately kids, you don’t plan on more degrees, then voraciously read couple of books every month, or take a course in cooking or photography or learn to speak French or Spanish or become a wine connoisseur or build a kayak. Do anything and everything to continue to stretch your mind, your ability to think and move beyond where and who you are today since your learning does not stop with your graduation from Tufts. In fact, it has only begun. You will find that this personal commitment to continuous learning will set you free. It will make you an interesting and fun person, and most importantly, it will keep you alive.

Rule #3:  Break the Rules…just not the big ones!

When I graduated from BC, the perfectly laid out plan was to go on to graduate school. I had been admitted and that summer after graduating, I threw out the rule book and decided instead to go into the Peace Corps, which for me, a very naive, middle class kid moving into the unknowns of a very different culture with immediate language and job skills challenges was stepping way outside "The Rule".   That two-year experience changed my life forever.     

My experiences with many of my alums who have become close friends have been the same in their pursuit of their careers.  I've had a finance major who took the perfect job with IBM. Nick today is a very well-known social media influencer, has been on the cover of Vanity Fair and is known for his skills and reputation with plants and urban farming.  One of my alums was a Miss America finalist and today runs a subsistence farm for her community in the Northwest.  I've followed my videographer alum, Arthur, for years as he rode camels in the Sahara and paddled canoes up the Mekong, and Arthur today continues his love of travel and entrepreneurship in running a thriving business building custom travel vans in Brooklyn.  Another alum and close friend, James Stone, runs a very successful sales organization of hundreds of people although when he left Tufts, he only wanted to work in a marketing agency, which was his first job. 

I have another 100 plus similar stories, all of which are about taking a step outside carefully planned career path.  I know from my own 1,200 alums many of whom I continue to connect with, which goes back to Rule #1, that very few have taken a straight line in their expected career paths from when they were here at Tufts as seniors just like you.

Now is the time to experiment and break a few rules...again, just not the big ones!

Have a great Friday selling today!

It's time to update your 2025 business & Sales plans for what lies ahead

Think about taking a day out this month to tune up your business and sales plans.  Here's our free how-to ebooks for a few ideas:

"Writing the Winning Sales Plan"
"Writing the Winning Business Plan"
"Writing the Winning Marketing Plan"
"The Marketing of Me"

We outline ideas on structure, models, process funnels, productivity tools and how to recruit, hire and onboard the best people.  A few hands-on guides for real managers written by real managers with their fingers in the dirt.  

Connect with me any time at jack@derbymanagement.com and let's discuss your own Q2 plans!