[0:10]What if? And that's undoubtedly a question that we have all asked millions of times in our lives, right? But I bet none of you are going to raise your hand if I ask you this. Have you ever really answered one of those questions? We don't too often because it's it's some dream or wish that we know might not come true but what if? As a kindergarten teacher, I posed a what if question to a group of five and six-year-old students in my classroom just to see what if. And that question was this. What if, boys and girls, we could make the world around us at school, a kinder, brighter place just by focusing on something as simple as a color? And as you saw from the background and if you haven't seen me walking around today, that color is yellow. And why yellow? A lot of people ask, well, of course, it's a bright color, but there's a purpose to this color as well. And to get to that and how my kids answered this question and why I want to pose this question to all of you today before we leave, I have to tell you a little story about a friend of mine. This is my friend Honor. She's got the coolest name in the world, right? Honor. And Honor was a kindergarten teacher and she was my unofficial mentor teacher when I started teaching. This woman taught me more about education than I had ever learned before in my life. But more than that, she she did something, I think unintentionally. She took me under her wing as my kind of mom away from home and taught me what it meant to be a good person. And not in any random act of kindness that she did, not any thing specifically that she even meant to do. She just made me feel good about myself by realizing the good that I had inside of me. And Honor is the reason that I sparked that question to these kids. Now I use the the term was with my friend Honor because in 2013 after a very short-lived but hard-fought battle with cancer, Honor passed away. And when she died, I knew that it was up to us and our school to keep this legacy of hers alive, somehow, some way. So a book was written about her. We started these celebrations about her and we just made every day as bright as possible for the people around us in honor of Honor. And then on May 9th, which is Honor's birthday, 2016, we started the first Make Someone's Day Yellow celebration at our school, Saratoga Elementary School in Morris, Illinois. And it was pretty awesome, right? We decorate the entire school yellow. We put streamers up and balloons up. We planted flowers out front that were yellow and we just did things in honor of Honor. We took notes to the secretaries and thanked them for all that they do. My kids were running around the hallways passing out letters of kindness and candy and flowers to random junior high students that they'd never met before in their lives. And we started to see smile after smile after smile spread across people's faces. And I'm happy to report with all of you that thanks to social media, today, as of three years later celebrating Yellow Day, we've seen celebrations pop up in schools, businesses and even whole communities in over 35 states and eight countries around the world. All in the name of Honor. Thank you. And I can't take credit for that. It's our staff, it's our community. It's these kids, it's everybody that knew her. And then another question got proposed to me. Another, believe it or not, what if, Adam? This is great. May 9th is an amazing day, but what if we wanted to see this happen every single day of the year? And I wasn't going to let that go unanswered. So what if? And that's where you come in. What if we made what happens on May 9th happen every single day of the year? And what if I told you it's really not that hard to do? It's a six-step process. And if you thought this far ahead, I'm sure you figured out that those six steps spell out the word Yellow. Y E L L O W. That's all you need to think about. I'm going to make this as easy as possible. I was a kindergarten teacher, okay? I'm going to make it pretty basic, all right? So, why, what does that mean? Well, it starts with all of you. If we want to see what happened in our school happen around the world, then you, and you, and you, and every single one of you watching this today, needs to make the first step. You say hello to someone when you pass them on the sidewalk. You smile at a stranger that you see out in the hallway today. You open the door for someone when you walk outside today. Carry someone's groceries, return a cart to a cart corral, whatever it may be. You need to start that effect that will ripple and ripple and ripple and ripple. You. But why stop at hello? If you're going to take the time to tell someone hello and make that first step, then do the next step. Engage in a conversation with people. A line from one of my favorite movies, the movie Love by the band Angels and Airwaves, there's a line in there that says something along the lines of if the whole world just stopped communicating, people stopped talking, I think it'd be a terrible place to live. I agree with that. Imagine what would happen if we just stopped talking. So don't stop at hello, engage in a conversation. How's it going today, ma'am? What have you been up to lately? How'd that test go that you've been preparing for? I'd love to hear about it. As my career now has taken me from the classroom to I travel nationally as a speaker with teachers and educators and I work in a lot of schools, which means I'm in and out of airports twice a month, sometimes more. And I think we would all agree that airports, if you've been in one before, are not the most yellow of places. People are busy and hurrying from place to place and gate to gate and restaurant and restaurant and it's just not the happiest place in the world. And a few weeks ago, I was going through Midway Airport in Chicago and I I was in the TSA line and and this TSA worker was very routinely going about her job. Taking tickets, stamping passports, signing off, taking tickets, stamping passports, signing off, right? Not even really looking up from her podium except to match that face to the one on the ID. And when she looked up at me, I said, how's it going today, ma'am? And immediately a smile spread across her face because up until that point, I could tell that she wanted to be anywhere than where she was right then. And she smiled at me and she said, it's going much better now. Thank you. And that was it. I mean, when I say simple and easy, that's about as easy as it gets. And I don't know if it's true or not, but I like to think that made her day a little bit brighter. It certainly did for me. Now, that's not a place where you can stop and engage in much of a conversation. So carry that on to the terminal. I get a lot of funny looks when I sit down next to people and try to talk to them in the airport because not everyone wants to. I'm not encouraging all your kids to go do this. As a teacher, I'm going to preach stranger danger, but try it as adults and see what you find out about people. But to make that happen, you need to do the next step. Listen. If you're going to make the attempt to engage in a conversation with someone then listen to what they have to say. And unfortunately, in our society today, that little thing that we keep inside our pockets has taken over that job of ours. We are so involved in social media and our phones and I'm guilty, don't get me wrong, that too often, my wife is here and she would agree. I don't listen as much as I should. But what if we did? There again, what if? What if you listen so intently to your family, your co-workers, your friends, even a stranger that you made their simple story feel valuable?
[8:14]Because unintentionally, that's what we do. When we start with the you and the engagement factor, we've made that person feel visible. And when we listen, we've made that person feel valuable. Honor did that a lot for me. And I know I keep mentioning my friend Honor. Honor Honor wasn't perfect and I think she'd be the first one to admit that. And I am in no way saying that I am either. But I think this is a start in the right direction. So if you're going to listen to someone and take these first three steps, then do the next one and try to learn something about someone. Imagine what can happen if we all just start learning a little bit about each other. I learned a lot last night at the dinner that that Ryan mentioned earlier about the people that I got to share this stage with today. Some pretty phenomenal people that I got to learn about last night. So what if we took that moment to learn so much about people that we would have brought up something about their lives to them that they once told us? Let me explain a little bit easier. We're back to easy, right? Kindergarten. I did this on a daily basis with my five-year-old students. I listened and I learned as much as I could about their lives so that at any given moment, whether happy, sad, concerned, excited, I knew exactly what they were talking about. If a student came to me concerned about something going on at home, I was able to talk to him or her about it because I had listened and learned so much about their lives. Do that with your family, your co-workers, your friends, maybe even someone that you met here today. There's a lot of networking going on. Learn about the people that are here. And that takes us to O, and O stands for offer. There's a saying in the teacher world and if if an educator here knows this thing, we have these t-shirts and people wear them all the time to school that say, throw kindness around like confetti, okay? What a great saying, right? Throw kindness around like confetti. Another easy thing to do, just do it. But what if I made it a little bit harder? What if I asked all of you right now to stand up, take out your wallets, take out any cash you have and just toss that around the room like confetti. No? Okay? That's a little bit harder. But here's why I mentioned cash or money. There was a study done at the National Institute for Physiological Science in Japan that found this. that receiving a compliment is just as much a social reward to our brain as receiving the gift of money. A compliment. So what now if we took out the word kindness and replaced that with compliments? Throw compliments around like confetti. It's a little bit easier than money. I think you'd agree, right? I like the shirt you're wearing today. I can tell you've done something with your hair. It looks fabulous. I heard that you did an awesome job on that test yesterday. Those are easy compliments to give. Compliments, by the way, person, looks, or something we know about them. But what if we did the steps prior to this, listen and learn so much that we were able to offer sincere compliments to people. Compliments like Honor gave me about the type of person I was. Compliments so sincere that you make someone else feel good about themselves just by reminding them how good they are. So I invite you to do that, throw compliments around like confetti. Now, I keep using the word you. You, you, you, you, you. For all of these steps, it starts with you. You engage in the conversation. You listen to people. You learn about them and you offer up the compliments. And that's where it seems easier said than done. Because if all of you do this, you can say you did. But I believe this, it's not up to you or you or you. It's up to we as an entire human race. It's up to we as a society or community to make this happen. Steve Jobs once said that it's the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world or the ones that usually do. And I'm I'm pretty crazy. My entire family's here and they'll admit that. I don't know that I can change the world and I don't really believe that I can by myself. But I'm crazy enough to believe that we as a society, as a people, can do this. That we can make the world a brighter place, a kinder place, a more yellow place. If we follow those steps and get to We. So that's my challenge to you all leave here today and we end this amazing event. Here's the plan. From every single one of you, to we as an entire human population, be nice, be kind, and be the yellow.
