TOADTalk by Elizabeth Reynolds Mahoney CdeP 1988

Over the course of a year at Thacher, students and faculty members learn about each other in a thousand different ways, times, and contexts: around the breakfast or formal dinner table, in a sunshiny moment on the Pergola or a sunset shared on a trail, at the whiteboard in a classroom, lab, studio or seminar circle, at practices and games and rehearsals, at coffeehouses and Open Houses, in dorm common rooms, and in Suburbans on highways or back roads on the way to community service projects, field trips, cultural excursions, or athletic events. Then there’s each faculty member’s TOADTalk. Monday morning’s all-School Assembly launches with whatever the Teacher On Active Duty wishes to share—a reflection, a story or song, a demonstration of some sort, or a simple poem. In this way, every week of the school year, the community gains a new window into the mind or heart or spirit of one of our own. Liz Mahoney, whose TOADTalk is featured below, called Thacher "home" as a student in the 1980s and returned several years back to teach studio art and photography and to coach English riding. She lives in Lower School with her husband, Bert, and her three sons, Aidan, Declan, and Darragh.

I recently read a story by Dr. Marc Lewis (a professor of psychology) who spoke of making a bet when he was young with his two best friends. They decided they would meet up 38 years from that day and see who had become the most successful in life. Simply put - who have the most fame, fortune and happiness. On the agreed upon date, they would tell each other their life’s stories and the person among them who they deemed most successful would have the honor of humiliating the others by buying their dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town.

When they finally met again in Feb, 2000, they realized that although at the time of the bet they had known what success meant, they now had no easy way of defining it. Simply having fame, happiness and wealth didn’t seem to be a realistic measure of success. Among them fortunes had been gained and lost, marriages come and gone - “They all had experienced the best and worst that life had to offer.”

Shortly thereafter, I read a transcript of a speech given by Doris Kearns -- a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and historian. She worked as an intern for Lyndon Johnson during his presidency and later helped him write his memoirs during his retirement. She was saddened to see him in his lasts months of life so alone and believing his life’s work to have been fruitless. Here was a man who achieved great success and power, who had everything at his disposal in his retirement and could enjoy none of it.

In the past I have spoken about failure. I love failure and the opportunity it can bring, but I haven’t thought much about how to define success and how ideas of success change during one’s life.

So many students that I have worked with over the years, feel inadequate or simply not good enough. Many of my peers felt the same way when I was a student here. This school asks a lot of you in many areas and certainly you can’t be equally proficient in each area. I would bet most of you define success as getting “A’s”, playing Varsity level sports, getting the lead in the play, 5’s on AP’s and acceptance to one or two of the colleges labeled “top tier” schools. It kind of makes sense - you will certainly receive outside validation for all these things. But when you don’t meet those goals you feel like you did something wrong or you are quite good enough. You don’t feel successful.

Maybe a broader and more personal definition of success is needed.

Success may be more complex and not so black and white as it sometimes seems. When you are older, your grades won’t be very important. Any college, top tier or not, only has to offer what you make of it. And though your choices in school will certainly guide the direction of your future they are no guarantee for the right path to attaining a perfect job, a great salary or a happy life.

Money, fame, and climbing the rungs of any given ladder - will these define success? Maybe on some level, yes. But will they be enough? I would suspect not. Start now to define and measure your success on your own terms because what will you have when the grades, trophies and athleticism are gone?

As journalist Anna Quindlen puts it: “You better have you. The real you, the authentic examined self, not some patchwork collection of affectations and expectations, mores and mannerisms, some treadmill set to the prevailing speed of universal acceptability, the tyranny of homogeny, whether the homogeny of the straight world of the suits or the spiky world of the avant-garde.

People will tell you what you ought to study and how you ought to feel. They will tell you what to read and how to live. They will urge you to take jobs they themselves loathe and to follow safe paths they themselves find tedious.

Don’t listen.”

It always saddens me when a student shares his or her hurt or frustration with feeling inadequate here. . . But each of you brings something much more important to the table than any grade or acceptance letter. Your true self and what you have to offer the community is immeasurable and can’t be so neatly summed up.

As Dr. Marc Lewis learned from his bet with his friends about becoming the most successful: “There are times when you are going to do well and times when you are going to fail. But neither the doing well, or the failure is the measure of success. “

My advice to you is this:

Follow your heart, follow your passions and make your measure of success personal and unique to you: “Your life belongs to you and you alone. Do not cede it to anyone else, no matter how loving or well intentioned.”- Anna Quinlan