Nobody Ever Asked a Leader to Do Just One Thing
Nobody Ever Asked a Leader to Do Just One Thing
Them's the facts, buckaroo.
You will have too much to do and you won’t get it all done. Just accept it and push that boulder.
I’ve been reflecting more on the nature of work recently and how to feel good about I’m producing in a universe where no one cares about my thing, I continue to fail, and my winning sometimes feels like losing.
ngl it’s pretty hard sometimes.
So I was looking through some old documents to see if past Cameron had any thoughts that might be useful or interesting or relevant to what I’m thinking through.
And he did!
I found my Valedictory speech I gave at my alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute, where I spoke to 5,000 people alongside General Martin Dempsey (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time) about the relationship between leadership, stress management, and confidence.
It was a nice jolt back to the reality of performance in high stress environments. Here’s the text in full to bring you back to a simpler time (jk 2014 was also a dumpster fire - all existence and all timelines are chaos i guess).
Read the full text of the speech here or scroll to the bottom to watch the video!
“
First things first. George C. Marshall**.
There, I said it, that's the first and last time you'll hear him in this speech. So Brother Rats, you can stop counting now and maybe pay a little attention.
Now that that's out of the way, I want to thank some people before I get to the heart of what I want to say.
Thank you General Dempsey for being here. I know I can speak for my classmates when I say that we appreciate the time you've taken out for your day to give us words and guidance for the future. I want to thank any members of the Board of Visitors that are here, General Peay and General Schneiter, and I also want to thank Colonel Trumps and Colonel Levenson for all of the guidance and... tough love over the past year. Of course I want to thank all the professors that helped my classmates and I along the way, as well as all of the families here, mine especially. I wouldn't be half the person I am today without them. Most importantly, I want to thank my Brother Rats, for giving me this unique opportunity to represent them and their feelings on this special day.
So ever since I got that abrupt, little congratulatory text from Weston, I've been thinking about what the heck I would say.
I thought to myself what could I possibly teach anybody in my class? We're classmates, friends, we've shared the same experiences, endured the same cadetship. It weighed on me.
After examining this thought over and over again, I came to a decision.
I decided that I wasn't going to do that. I decided that it would feel forced and, more importantly, I know for a fact that nobody in my class wants to hear me lecture when they're 2 speeches and a walk across the stage away from freedom!
But what I am going to do is share what's been inside my cover for the past three years.
For those of you in the audience that don't know, our “covers” are our hats we wear with our daily uniform and its very common for cadets to put pictures of girlfriends or quotes or what have you, inside them just like you would decorate your desk or your room.
So my story all starts at the beginning of third class, my sophomore, year.
I had just broken up with (Well if I'm being honest, gotten broken up with) my girlfriend of two and half years over the summer and there was a glaringly empty spot in my cover where her picture had been.
As you can imagine, to third class Cameron, filling in that empty space was at the forefront of my mind.
But I couldn't think of what to put in there.
So days went by, then weeks, I saw this blank spot in my hat every time I went to put it on. It was driving me crazy...
and then it happened.
I was in an Army ROTC class when I heard a classmate venting, as cadets sometimes do, about all of the schoolwork he had to do that night. To the amusement of everyone around, the professor, an Army officer, responded very characteristically of military personnel.
He responded very sarcastically.
He said
“Nobody ever asked a Lieutenant to do just one thing”
And I froze
“Nobody ever asked a Lieutenant to do just one thing”
I wrote it down immediately. I couldn't get it out of my head.
As soon as I got back to my room, I got a sharpie, scratched it out on a sheet of paper and threw that sucker inside my cover. I even used motivating Army camo pattern duct tape to hold it in there!
“Nobody ever asked a Lieutenant to do just one thing”
As I lived with it on top of my head, and saw it every day, the phrase expanded its meaning to me, it grew and changed and became this big idea that meant so much more than what those 10 words put together on paper could express.
I realized that it wasn’t just about being an officer.
“Nobody who has ever been successful in anything has had to do only just one thing”
Take CEO's. They don't just crunch numbers; they communicate, they make connections, they lead people and organizations.
Or politicians. They don't just make laws; they discuss issues, they make decisions, they represent others, and collaborate.
Doctors, Lawyers, Authors, Athletes, you name it. The hallmark of a good one is that they have a varied skill set.
When this reality check hit me I tried to make it fit into the world that I was living…that VMI universe. And it matched.
The thought of handling a wide variety of different challenges is such a simple, but profound idea and it aligns perfectly with the challenges of this place.
For all of the things you can say about the Institute, no one can deny that every single person here, cadet or otherwise, has had way too much on their plate on one point.
And it’s that very experience that I think is so unbelievably valuable. We have all had the chance to do something that many people do not really understand until they are deep in the thick of their adult lives and careers. The balancing act of duties and time management never stops here.
So we get it. We've lived it. We've jumped in that fire, ignored our burns, and powered through it.
By the end of it, we truly know that we can handle that kind of stress.
And you can't really overvalue that confidence.
But it’s not just confidence.
It’s a skill. It’s an expertise. It’s a mastery of an intangible quality that is so very desirable to organizations from people today but so very hard to accurately describe.
It’s that projection, that image, that self-assurance that comes with being completely squared away, being utterly capable of whatever is coming your way...
Or at least feeling like you do, especially against challenges you have never experienced before.
Now, of course, all of this should probably be tempered with a healthy dose of optimistic realism, but it really does feel good knowing that we have done something that most people couldn't or just wouldn't do.
So after keeping that idea on top of my head for the past three years and enduring with each other the last four
I honestly think it is very much a good thing that “Nobody ever asked a cadet to do just one thing”
Because nobody ever asked a Leader to do just one thing either.
Thank all y'all for your time. It’s been a honor.
”
Author’s Notes:
** It’s a running inside joke at VMI to count how many times speakers say his name because everybody that comes to speak does a speech about George C. Marshall as he’s the most famous alumni of the school
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