The first time I put on the Bear mask, I stood in the hallway outside my classroom and almost walked away. I could hear the students inside. I had “We Are the Champions” cued up on the classroom computer and projector. I was a grown man – a lawyer, a professor – about to walk into a room of twenty-year-olds wearing a bear head and dancing.
They’ll think I’m ridiculous, I thought. This won’t work. And then I thought the thing that has shaped every day since: But what if it does?
I pushed open the door, hit play, and walked in. Some students laughed. Some stared. One pulled out his phone to film me – probably for a group chat I’ll never see. And not one of the consequences I’d been afraid of actually arrived.
That first day, I learned three things that became life lessons I have taught to my college students every semester.
1. It is okay to try and fail. It is not okay to not try.
The fear that froze me in that hallway was never about the mask. It was about being judged. About looking foolish. About a room of strangers deciding I wasn’t enough.
Here is what I’ve learned across fifty years of work – in the military; as the Tin Man at The Land of Oz (Beech Mountain, NC); as a Disney Character traveling to perform in shows across Europe, the United States, and Walt Disney World; as an estate planning attorney, investment adviser, Certified Financial Planner™, and university professor:
The judgment you are afraid of is almost entirely imaginary.
People are not watching you the way you think they are. They are worrying about their own hallways and their own masks. And the few who do judge you for trying and falling short? Their opinion is the cheapest currency on earth. It costs them nothing to spend, and it should not be the kind of currency you want to receive.
The students I worry about are not the ones who fail. They are the ones who never raise their hand. Who never apply for the internship. Who never take up the invitation to go to a gathering, travel to an event, or engage in an activity. Who never start the business, write the book, or take the class outside their major. They protect themselves from a humiliation that was never coming – and pay for that protection with their entire lives. Their world never grows wide. They miss the joys that live one step away – the step outside their comfort zone, where new experiences and new relationships can open up new possibilities.
Try. Fail. Try again. The world belongs to people willing to look foolish on the way to becoming who they are.
2. Show up for people before you know if it counts.
A few years ago, a student missed one of my classes early in the semester. Students miss class – it happens. I sent a short email. Hey, just checking in. Everything okay?
It turned out, everything was not okay. She was sleeping on a friend’s couch. She had no money. She was one bad week away from dropping out of university entirely, and no one knew.
I am not the hero of this story. I sent one email. The heroes are the staff where I teach – at Western Kentucky University: the people whose names you may never learn, who answered my call, who found her a job within days, who found her low-cost housing, and who quietly made it possible for her to stay. She graduated. She is in the early stages of a great career.
I almost didn’t send that email. I thought, It’s not my place. She probably doesn’t want to hear from a professor.
It is always your place. You will never regret the small kindness you offered to someone who was drowning. You will regret the ones you talked yourself out of. Send the text. Send the email. Sit next to the person eating alone. The cost to you is nothing. The cost of not doing something is enormous – and most of the time, you will never even know what that cost was.
3. Build your life around serving others.
When I was a young lawyer, I thought success was something you accumulated. A bigger office. A better car. A name people recognized around the community where I practiced. I chased those things, and I caught some of them – and I will tell you, honestly, none of them ever felt the way I expected them to feel.
What changed my life was a sticky note I placed on a bathroom mirror. Two questions, written in pen, that I have now asked myself every morning for years:
How can I serve others today?
Who can I positively impact?
That’s it. That is the entire secret – to enduring happiness. Purpose is not something you find on a mountaintop, or in a career assessment, or at the end of a five-year plan. Purpose is something you practice – every morning, with two questions and a willingness to mean them.
You will be tempted, your whole life, to make it about you. Your résumé. Your follower count. Your salary. Your wins. The world will reward you, sometimes loudly, for treating yourself as the center of the story.
Don’t. Or rather – try it for a while if you must, but then come back to this. The students I have known who lived the fullest lives, the alumni who come back to visit and still have light in their eyes, are not the ones who won the most. They are the ones who served the most. Who taught a kid to read. Who took care of an aging parent without complaint. Who built a business that paid people fairly. Who gave back to their communities. Who undertook a thousand small kindnesses each year. Who showed up, again and again, for someone other than themselves.
Serve, and the rest of your life will quietly arrange itself around something worth living for.
Your assignment
So here is your assignment – the one assignment that matters the most:
Try the thing you are afraid to try.
Show up for someone before you are sure it counts.
Build your life around serving others.
Do that, and you will be just fine.
Thank you,
Ron A. Rhoades, JD, CFP® (“Dr. Bear”)
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