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Stedman Graham tells students to discover, pursue what they love
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Author and speaker Stedman Graham spent about 90 minutes Wednesday at one of Warren’s four Pre-K to Grade 8 schools helping middle-school students think about who they are and what they love.
Understanding can be the tool that propels them from being among the 99 percent of people who are followers to the 1 percent who are leaders.
“Most people are followers. What do followers do? They have to be told everything to do. And 99 percent of those people have to be told everything to do every single day because they don’t think for themselves,” he said.
He described the life of the 99 percent being a routine Monday through Friday that is always the same.
“If you did the same thing you did yesterday that you did today as you will do tomorrow, what have you done? Nothing. You’re repeating yourself.”
Graham is giving the talk each day this week to a different group of Warren Pre-K to Grade 8 students and to students at Warren G. Harding High School and to adults each night at 6 p.m.
His talk is part of the Live Sonima tour, paid for by the Sonima Foundation, that also includes concerts by performer Caroline Jones. Graham, boyfriend of Oprah Winfrey, will give his talk at about 100 schools this year.
What matters is “Who are you? Do you know who you are?” Most people “don’t think. They react” because they’re followers. “They do what everybody else does. They got to wear these clothes ... because I can’t think for myself. I can’t control myself. I can’t manage myself. I have to do what everybody else wants me to do to feel accepted.”
That’s why it’s necessary to have an identity.
In his case, he grew up with two disabled brothers, Graham said, and it affected the way people treated him.
“Being teased every day. I used to fight every single day. I grew up with low self-esteem, lack of confidence in myself.”
He was a good basketball player, and it gave him opportunities to go to college, but there were still people who told him he could not succeed.
“The only thing that kept me out of prison was I was a pretty good basketball player,” he said.
But when one of the men in town told him he would never succeed because his “family’s too stupid, and you’re too dumb,” he set out to prove that man wrong. “I got mad,” he said.
But even after he graduated from college, he still didn’t know who he was.
“The world defines you when you don’t know who you are,” he said, adding that when you let the world define you, “because whoever you let define you, whether they’re a bully or they call you a name, they make you think you are less than them, whoever defines you will define you how it’s best for them. So you have to take the power back.”
He said one of the most important concepts is to love yourself. And to remember that, he told the students to remember this and tell their parents and friends, “Everyone is equal. Everyone around the world is equal because everyone has 24 hours.”
“The question is what do most people do with their 24 hours? You know what followers do, they waste a lot of time.”
He instructed the kids to “write down all the things you love and use your education to apply to everything you love. If you don’t do that, you will be a follower all your life.”