It’s hard for me to imagine offering advice to someone graduating high school. Before I’m able to even drop a single word, I quickly double-check the results of my own experiences so far tallied and I find my qualifications lacking. I certainly don’t have all the answers – certainly none of the ones I need in my current station in life – but it seems like just only a moment ago, six years, I was in your shoes.

Although I can’t say I’m an example to be followed, I am familiar with the personal identity and emotional dilemmas that brace the teen to early twenty years.

Having just stepped out of them myself, I wish I could go back. They were the best of times. If only someone had told me.

Now it’s hard to offer good advice because really it just an opinion and everybody’s got a million of them. To avoid that, let me be as honest as I can.

First, congratulations to all of you moving ahead to college; make sure you wish those who are not your condolences before you go. Although other options such as joining the military industrial complex or entering a starving blue collar workforce are before you, nothing trumps the advantages gained by a higher education.

There are of course exceptions to every rule, but unless you’re that remarkable student who’s developed a keen sense of discipline at a young age and an exceptional devotion to the academic, then you’ll fall in to a group that lingers in a gray area of potential – the C + to A- group. I was in this group myself and much relies on our ability to make good decisions. The power of choice will lead to either the light of opportunity and growth or the darkness of necessity and function. My life’s turns have become the latter.

You are at the point in life where you represent pure potential. At 18 you can become anything you apply yourself to be. Each year that now passes will add additional challenges to those options. Potential is only worth something if it is used to seize opportunity. These are the years where the extremes of these two factors come together and depending on how you use the time, your actions now can be exponential in the decades to come.