EP232: The Leadership Wisdom 18-Year-Olds Didn't Know They Had
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I've been to a lot of events where someone says something that sticks with me. This one was different — because I wasn't expecting it at all.
I was at my daughter's high school graduation. Nearly 500 students. A ceremony full of the kind of joy and bittersweetness that only graduation can produce. I was fully in it — watching every student walk across the stage, soaking in every moment.
And then the student speakers took the mic.
Three seniors were selected to address the class. I was ready for the usual messages — the future is bright, dream big, reach for the stars. What I got instead was one of the most honest, human leadership conversations I've heard in a long time.
Here's what I've come to know about my work: leadership isn't reserved for adults, or for people with decades of experience, or for those who've sat through the right trainings. The concepts I talk about all the time are deeply, innately human. And sometimes the truth lands differently when it comes from someone who hasn't had time to dress it up yet.
These three teenagers haven't had time to overcomplicate things. And that, it turns out, is a gift.
Lesson One: Try New Things
The first speaker opened by telling the crowd that her freshman year, she tried swimming. Then she paused and said, "Usually when people try a sport like swimming, they first know how to swim." She didn't.
She was learning to swim and competing at the same time. She was scared. She barely knew what she was doing. She showed up anyway.
Then she tried wrestling — "the hardest sport in the world," as she put it — with the same outcome. Scared. Uncertain. Showed up anyway.
From those experiences, she drew her first lesson: try new things.
This is something I see constantly in my coaching work. Leaders wait. They wait until they feel ready, until they have more information, more certainty, better timing. They wait until someone gives them permission or until they're sure they won't fail. And they call it being strategic. Being responsible.
But if I'm being honest, a lot of the time it's fear. We just dress it up in something else.
Readiness is largely a myth. You build the skill by doing the thing — not by waiting until you've already done it. The leaders I work with who grow the fastest aren't the ones who had everything lined up perfectly. They're the ones who got in the pool.
In my Three Keys to Leadership Magic™ framework, this connects directly to Character — not just who you are on a good day, but who you choose to become. And becoming requires doing. It requires moving before you feel fully qualified, often before you feel ready, and almost always when you're at least a little bit scared.
What's the thing you know you need to try — and keep finding reasons to wait?
Lesson Two: Success Is Not a Solo Sport
The second speaker introduced herself as a middle child — and said that if you know any middle children, you already know this is going to be a whole thing.
She described spending years chasing test scores and awards because she thought that was how you got noticed. That success was something you won by yourself.
Then she was in a serious car accident. Out of school for a stretch of time. A self-described extreme extrovert — alone, concussed, unable to do any of the things she had rooted her identity in.
When she returned, she noticed something. All those individual accomplishments she'd been so proud of — the grades, the awards — most people had already forgotten about them. They didn't matter the way she thought they did.
That was her wake-up call.
She said, "Success cannot be rooted in yourself alone." And then she said something that I thought was genuinely beautiful: "If I wanted a support system, I had to start by being one for someone else."
So much of the cultural narrative around leadership is still about individual achievement — the heroic leader, the person at the top who figured it all out. We celebrate solo wins. We track individual metrics. But that's not actually how leadership works at its finest.
I've worked with leaders who are incredibly talented, highly skilled — and completely alone. They've optimized for performance and forgotten about people. And the higher they climb, the lonelier it gets, because they never built the thing that actually sustains you: community.
This student figured it out at seventeen or eighteen. Some leaders don't figure it out until much later, if ever.
This is Connection — one of the keys in my Three Keys to Leadership Magic™ framework. And I want to be clear: connection is not the soft, nice-to-have thing. It is the key that holds everything else together. Leaders who build real trust, real safety, real community — those are the leaders people remember and want to follow.
And I love the flip side of what she said. If you want a support system, you have to be one first. That is not weakness. That is how trust works. You go first. Especially when you're in the leadership role.
Where in your leadership are you trying to do everything alone? And who in your world needs you to show up for them first?
Lesson Three: Love the Process Even When You're Not Listening
The third speaker opened with a line that made the whole crowd laugh. She said, "If I had to summarize the last four years in one sentence, it would be this: people tried to warn us, and we did not listen."
She went through the classics. "Your grades don't define your worth." Sure, sure — as they refreshed their grade portal 400 times. "High school goes fast. Enjoy it." Yeah, okay — as they spent four years racing toward the next thing.
It was funny. And underneath the humor was something really honest.
Some lessons just have to be lived. You can't truly understand that time moves fast until you're standing at a graduation wondering how you got there. You can't truly understand that your worth isn't your GPA until you've tied your whole identity to it and watched it fall apart.
And then she said this: "Slow down, look up, and value every single day. Even the boring ones. Even the hard ones. Even the in-between ones. Because those are the ones that add up to your life."
In leadership, we do exactly what she described. We race to the next promotion, the next initiative, the next goal. We treat the in-between as something to get through rather than something to be present for. And then we look up one day wondering why it doesn't feel the way we thought it would.
Love the process — not just when it's working, not just when you're hitting your numbers and everything feels like momentum. Love it when you're stuck, when you're tired, when you fell short and have to decide whether to get back up.
This connects to Confidence — the third key in my framework. Specifically, the kind of confidence that isn't contingent on outcomes. The leaders who sustain themselves over the long haul are not the ones who win every time. They're the ones who trust themselves through the in-between. Who find meaning in the growth, not just the results.
And she closed with something that genuinely gave me chills: "We can't understand certain things until we've lived them. Apparently, that's what it's like to be human."
That's true for your team too. The people you're leading right now are in the middle of living their lessons. They're figuring things out the hard way — the same way you did. The same way you still are. One of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is hold space for that. Stop expecting people to already know what they haven't had the chance to learn yet. And give yourself that same grace.
What's happening in the in-between right now that deserves more of your attention?
The Takeaway
Three lessons by three 18-year-olds on a Saturday afternoon.
➡️Try new things. Get in the pool.
➡️Success is not a solo sport. Build community. Go first.
➡️Love the process. Slow down. Look up. Value the in-between.
I sat there as a very proud mom, watching my daughter walk across that stage, hoping my son sitting next to me was catching some of it too. And I kept thinking: these kids get it. Not because someone handed them a framework or they listened to a podcast — but because they lived something. They paid attention. And they're learning from the lessons.
That's what I want for you too. Not just to hear these lessons, but to actually live them.
Because leadership - and honestly, life - isn't just about where you end up. It's about who you're becoming along the way. That's where the magic is!
What Do You Think?
Which of these lessons resonates the most with you?
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