Rethinking Talent, Opportunity, and What We Call “Merit”
What are our operating assumptions about excellent leaders? What if no one is special, OR what if everyone is special? What if excellent leaders are not exceptional? There was quite a buzz a few years ago during commencement season when an English teacher at Wellesley High School, David McCullough, Jr., gave the commencement address to the graduating class. His point—this theme—You are not special! His entire address is instructive. You can find it here. You can imagine the shock—student and their families all there for this special day— and what does the guy do—he proclaims, over and over, “None of you is special. You are not special. You are not exceptional.” This address calls forth another thought-provoking commencement address.
Hearing about this speech brought to mind the speech of a young man named Justin Hudson. In 2010, he gave the commencement address to his classmates at Hunter College High School in Manhattan. Hunter College High School is a public school in New York City and is ranked as one of the best; it is highly selective. In the fifth grade, students across the city take their regular standardized tests. Somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 of these students score high enough on these standardized tests to take the entrance exam for Hunter College High. Of those, fewer than 200 are admitted to the school. The school has noted famous graduates like Bobby Darin, Ruby Dee, Audre Lorde, Chris Hayes, Cynthia Nixon, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Elena Kagan. The school receives input from students, faculty, and alumnae/i in order to select their commencement speaker.
In 2010, they selected graduating senior Justin Hudson. He began his speech as most would have expected with thanks and reminiscing. But then things changed. He said, “More than happiness, relief, fear, or sadness, I feel a very strong emotion that I cannot ignore today. More than anything else, today I feel guilty. I feel guilty because I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do any of you. We received an outstanding education at no charge based solely on our performance on a test we took when we were eleven-years-olds, or four year olds. We received superior teachers and additional resources based on our status as “gifted,” while kids who naturally needed those resources much more than us wallowed in the mire of a broken system. And now, we stand on the precipice of our lives, in control of our lives, based purely and simply on luck and circumstances. If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside, and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that….We are talking about eleven-year-olds. Four year-olds. We are deciding children’s fates before they even had a chance. We are playing God, and we are losing. Kids are losing the opportunity to go to college or obtain a career, because no one taught them long division or colors. Hunter is perpetuating a system in which children, who contain unbridled and untapped intellect and creativity, are discarded like refuse. And we have the audacity to say they deserved it, because we’re smarter than them. As students, we throw around empty platitudes like ‘deserve’ and ‘earn’, most likely because it makes us feel better about ourselves. However, it simply isn’t the case…I apologize if this is not the speech you wanted to hear…”
This is probably not the speech that people expected to hear that day. The speech does go on a deep level to what we think about ourselves in relation to our world—it calls us to think deeply about what we count as good and right. It calls us to some self-reflection—maybe even some reflection that might change how we think and do and be in the world. It encourages us to think about how we think, do, and be in the world. It invites us to consider where we first get involved with leadership development, and how we lead.
The question is: “How long will you keep pulling people from the river before you go upstream to find out why they are falling in?”
This question is not only moral—it is organizational.
From a leadership vantage point, excellence has always involved engaging diverse perspectives. Today, however, that is no longer sufficient. The deeper question is this: Who actually has access to development, opportunity, and investment before they fall behind? Who gets a seat at the table early enough for their voice to matter? And who never even gets invited into the room because their potential does not arrive packaged in ways we immediately recognize or value?
Excellent leaders understand that leadership development is not primarily a rescue operation. It is a systems challenge. If organizations focus only on downstream interventions—selecting, polishing, and promoting those who already know how to navigate dominant norms—they perpetuate inequity while convincing themselves they are rewarding merit.
Going upstream means investing earlier, broader, and differently. It means examining how talent is identified, how readiness is defined, and how opportunity is distributed. It means asking not only “Who has experience?” but “Who has insight, perspective, adaptability, and impact?”—even if those qualities were developed outside the pathways we ourselves traveled.
As Scott Sonenshein notes in conversation with Brené Brown, meaningful progress requires us to challenge narrow definitions of value and success and to recognize that growth and contribution often come from places we are not accustomed to looking (Sonenshein, Unlocking Us, April 13, 2022). When leaders expand what they notice, reward, and cultivate, organizations become more innovative, resilient, and human.
This is where excellent leadership becomes visible.
Excellent leaders can recognize skill before it is polished. They can see impact before it is credentialed. They can value people whose thinking, background, and lived experience differ from their own. They understand that some of the most transformative contributions will come from those who were never told they were “special,” never selected early, and never given the benefit of the doubt.
Going downstream—educationally, developmentally, organizationally—is not charity. It is strategy. And it is one of the clearest indicators of leadership maturity.
Because the leaders who change systems are not the ones who save the most people from the river.
They are the ones who quietly, persistently, and courageously redesign the landscape upstream—so fewer people fall in at all.
