so if someone had said to me when I was
a teenager unsure that I had a future
Bernice Wayne you’re gonna spend much of
your life with leaders and great
achievers of all kinds well if I had the
words to put together I would have
questioned their sanity but the events
of my life unfolded I learned something
very special about life our lives
yours and mine are comprised of turning
points and these turning points define
our success and accomplishment in life
work hard dream big I mean how many
times have we heard that said and we
expect somebody to go out and succeed in
life but success an accomplishment I’ve
discovered requires much more successful
and accomplished people do work hard and
they look to the future to dream big
things but most important successful and
accomplished people remain in the moment
successful and accomplished people have
recognized the turning points in their
lives
these are the opportunities that life
itself gives us to reach our full
potential these turning points are
actually Forks in the road where we have
a choice to go in one direction or
another these choices these
opportunities are simply given to us by
the people in our lives and the moments
in time we experience our success and
accomplishment requires us to recognize
these turning points make good and wise
decisions and then
MIT ourselves fully if you’ve ever seen
that new hit television show this is us
well you know what I mean the characters
on this show face choices forks in the
road that alter their lives consciously
or subconsciously we see ourselves in
these choices back in the 1950s and 60s
there was a baseball catcher who played
for the New York Yankees named Yogi
Berra when yogi was told that the first
female had just been elected mayor of
Dublin Ireland responded by saying only
in America Yogi Berra was famous for
saying things like this so when I had
discovered that years earlier yogi had
said something about turning points well
it piqued my interest when a reporter
said to yogi yogi you’ve had so many
turning points in your life how do you
navigate them yogi says I get to a fork
in the road and I take it
unfortunately that’s what most of us do
we pay very little attention to the
turning points in our lives those Forks
in the road in reality most of us are
resistant to change but what I’ve
discovered over the years is that
leaders and great achievers of all kinds
do recognize their turning points and
take action I’d like to tell you a
little bit about my life and some of the
examples of my turning points and what
I’ve learned about turning points no one
in my family ever attended college
before my mother and her family were
farmers who grew up in central Virginia
and basically lived off the land my
father grew up with six siblings in a
two room house in the poorest of mining
towns in West Virginia and when my
grandmother couldn’t always take care of
him spent part of his childhood in an
orphanage these were good people but
there was never any conversation in my
home about my going to college I had a
teacher in high school he was also the
athletic director and the football coach
it was one of those teachers like we
heard earlier today that you look up to
I he encouraged me to go to college
in fact he inspired me I wanted to be
just like him and this is one of those
turning points in life I graduated from
college and by the time I was 36 years
old I had my dream job I was being
selected to be the athletic director of
a major university I had really far
exceeded the expectations of that 16
year old boy who may or may not have
ever gone to college around the same
time a friend of mine sent me a copy of
action magazine in the magazine was an
article about what was then the largest
lecture agency in the world in the
article the author recounts how the head
of this agency goes to visit the Gerald
Ford White House to sign Gerald Ford the
president Henry Kissinger and Alexander
Haig as clients to speak after they
leave office near the end of the article
the author quotes Henry Kissinger who
was then the Secretary of State as
complaining about the high commission
rate that this agency wanted to charge
and says why don’t I simply sign with
one of your competitors the head of the
agency’s response
I have no competitors so I just happened
to take the magazine home and I left it
on the coffee table a number of days
later when I came home my wife says have
you read this article he has no
competitors so she sat me down and she
said you know you come home two or three
days a week and you complain to me about
the bureaucracy of university life I
don’t think you’re ever going to be
happy unless you can make decisions on
your own so over a period of weeks she
pushed and she prodded and she convinced
me to walk away from my dream job
I know
it’s a little hard to believe but
sometimes those simple Forks in the road
or u-turns in life in solidarity my wife
quit her job we had no plan we had no
experience and we had no money in order
to start our new company and to have
money to live on we put a second
mortgage on her home now we had $55,000
of mortgages on a $60,000 house and
above 12% interest rate we couldn’t
really spend money on an office can’t
seem kind of silly but a friend of ours
offered to rent us his stationary closet
his name was Chuck Hagel and Chuck would
later become the Secretary of Defense
for Barack Obama now to give you an idea
what it was like to start work and Chuck
Hagel’s stationery closet if we had to
leave that closet for any reason we
would have to wait for one of chucks
meetings to be over because you’ve had
to walk from our closet through Chuck’s
office just to get out now to give you
an idea how you start a lecture agency
with no experience to represent famous
people we would sit in our closet and
think of famous people it seemed logical
we would try to find a telephone number
or an address
none of our telephone calls were ever
returned and our letters returned from
lawyers who said my client this famous
person is under a written contract with
another agency don’t write us again or
will sue you now the thing you got to
remember is in 1980 there was no
internet so for the very first time the
letters from these lawyers showed us
that in addition to that agency that was
in the
News magazine article there were five or
six large agencies up and down the East
Coast of the United States that claim of
no competitors was nothing more than a
strategic boast ice I used to sit in
that closet
late at night and I remember putting my
head in my hand and thinking to myself
what have we done
twelve months passes in our stationery
closet and nothing has changed we don’t
represent anyone we’ve now discovered
there’s five or six large agencies that
we didn’t know existed when we first
started and we were just about out of
our mortgage money another two months
passes and I get a call from a guy named
Steve Bell Steve is the news anchor mode
for a new show that started 1975 called
Good Morning America Steve had been
under one of those written contracts the
contract had just expired and they
hadn’t produced for him
I had briefly met Steve when I was at
the University I’d let him use the
swimming pool
somehow Steve had discovered we started
a lecture agency not knowing we were in
a closet with started a lecture agency
and he called me and invited me over to
his office I got over the office and we
talked and I asked if we could represent
Steve and he agreed I shook his hand on
the drive back to the closet
I suddenly realized I hadn’t signed him
to a piece of paper I hadn’t signed him
to a written contract so when I get back
to the closet I try to justify it to my
wife by saying what good would it do to
hold him to a piece of paper if he’s not
happy that mistake of my part that error
and judgment became a defining moment
for us because Steve then went and told
his friends other Washington journalists
but if you don’t want to sign a written
contract with these agencies you can go
with these new little guys in town shake
their hand and walk
out on them anytime you want suddenly we
felt very popular another few years
passes and I get a call from Alex Haley
the great author of roots alex says
Bernie I’d like to come and see you
I said sure when Alex says well look out
your window I look out my window and
there he is waving to me from a phone
booth below Alex used to come up to my
office often over the years and he would
sit for hours at a time and he would
talk about family in relationships
during these conversations Alex used to
repeat a phrase when an old person dies
it’s like a library burning when an old
person dies it’s like a library burning
at pithy phrase stuck with me and as
time went by I came to understand what
he wanted me to know each life our lives
is a storehouse of wisdom and knowledge
a library he was saying stuffed to the
rafters this wisdom and knowledge he
said comes from the turning points in
our lives these Forks in the road and
the choices we make are what giver gives
us the wisdom the strength our success
and accomplishment in life Alex Haley’s
words had great impact on me but it
wasn’t till a few years later that they
took firm hold in 1988 we get a letter
from the White House asking us to
interview to represent Ronald Reagan
when he leaves office there were 30
agencies invited so it was a big deal
but it wasn’t a big deal the idea was
you would take the 30 agencies Whittle
it down to 15 and then the 7 and the top
two choices would be
Senate President and mrs. Reagan and
they’d make the decision now no one in
Washington DC or anywhere in the world
for that matter thought we would
represent Ronald Reagan but it would be
good practice for us we went through the
interview process and weeks passed after
the last interview and we hadn’t heard
anything now Washington is a very
gossipy town so if you need to find out
something in Washington DC
you can usually call somebody on the
phone and they can find out what’s going
on but we didn’t hear a word then
another two months passes and I finally
get a call from Fred Ryan who was
President Reagan’s chief of staff and
now the publisher of The Washington Post
I envisioned what he was going to say to
me
Bernie you’ve done a great job you
should be proud of what you’ve done and
accomplished in just eight short years
but I hope you understand we must go
with more experienced people so I got on
the phone and Fred got right to the
point
Bernie president mrs. Reagan have
selected you to represent them I had no
idea what to say so I said we’d do a
good job I’ll be in touch Fred and I
hung up the phone
i sat there that day thinking to myself
how totally amazing it was that a
President of the United States would
risk his legacy on a totally
inexperienced group of people but of the
years went by and I got to personally
know him I came to understand how this
happened
personally Ronald Reagan was basically a
small-town boy who believed in and was
committed to entrepreneurism and the
little guy it had been exactly as Alex
Haley had said to me years before Ronald
Reagan was true to and guided by those
turning points those Forks in the road
that formed and shaped his life Alex
Haley and Ronald Reagan were certainly
two very different people but they
shared one thing in common they
recognized the significance of their
turning points now over the years I have
had a number of people come up to me and
say Bernie you know those people you
represent they had opportunities and
choices that aren’t available to the
rest of us but my years of experience
have taught me it’s just the opposite we
all have our turning points in life it
just depends on what we do with them Tom
Brokaw Tom Brokaw has been a journalist
at NBC for over 50 years in high school
Tom Brokaw was voted the most likely to
succeed
and yet in college he flunked out of
college he didn’t flunk out of college
once but he flunked out of college twice
and yet Tom Brokaw’s life changed
exactly how my life changed when that
teacher and my wife came into my life
Robert rice Robert rice was our
Secretary of Labor Robert rice is only
five foot one most of his young life was
bullied and one of the boys who
protected him was tragically murdered in
the civil rights movement in Mississippi
by local sheriff’s Robert rice had two
choices in life Robert rice could be
angry about being bullied and the tragic
murder of his childhood friend or he
could do something about it Robert rice
if you look it up has millions of
followers on Facebook and has become
this nation’s greatest advocate for
economic equality and justice Doris
Kearns Goodwin Doris Kearns Goodwin is
simply a student who writes a letter to
a friend calling for the defeat of the
President of the United States during
the Vietnam War much like a lot of us
did only to have that friend take that
letter and get it published just as
Doris was leaving for Washington DC to
become a White House Fellow and yet that
friendship with that president that
nobody anticipated set her on a path to
become one of this nation’s greatest
historians Liz Murray you don’t know Liz
Murray Liz Murray was a child of
drug-addicted parents who went homeless
on the streets and the subways in New
York City Liz Murray had only enough
change in her pocket to make one subway
ride she could go have pizza with her
friends or she could take one last
interview to try to get back into high
school after all other interviews had
failed
her decision to take that one last
interview led her on a path to
graduating from Harvard we’re not all
gonna be presidents of the United States
we’re not all gonna be journalists or
authors or champions for great causes
but who knows so I would like to invite
you to at least think about the
potential in your life recognize the
turning points in your life pay
attention to what is happening in your
life right now
what are these opportunities that the
people in your life and the moments in
time are giving you and then make good
and wise decisions remember good
judgment even instinct like I had when
my wife told me that I wasn’t prepared
for a future that I thought I was going
to get that good judgment and instinct
or our best friends and then finally
commit ourselves fully we sat in a
stationary closet for 14 months fully
committed to succeeding the significance
of these turning points is valuable for
any of us at any age they were valuable
for me when I was 36 years old but just
think think how valuable they are for
young people who are just starting out
in life today thank you
[Applause]
you
[Applause]
a teenager unsure that I had a future
Bernice Wayne you’re gonna spend much of
your life with leaders and great
achievers of all kinds well if I had the
words to put together I would have
questioned their sanity but the events
of my life unfolded I learned something
very special about life our lives
yours and mine are comprised of turning
points and these turning points define
our success and accomplishment in life
work hard dream big I mean how many
times have we heard that said and we
expect somebody to go out and succeed in
life but success an accomplishment I’ve
discovered requires much more successful
and accomplished people do work hard and
they look to the future to dream big
things but most important successful and
accomplished people remain in the moment
successful and accomplished people have
recognized the turning points in their
lives
these are the opportunities that life
itself gives us to reach our full
potential these turning points are
actually Forks in the road where we have
a choice to go in one direction or
another these choices these
opportunities are simply given to us by
the people in our lives and the moments
in time we experience our success and
accomplishment requires us to recognize
these turning points make good and wise
decisions and then
MIT ourselves fully if you’ve ever seen
that new hit television show this is us
well you know what I mean the characters
on this show face choices forks in the
road that alter their lives consciously
or subconsciously we see ourselves in
these choices back in the 1950s and 60s
there was a baseball catcher who played
for the New York Yankees named Yogi
Berra when yogi was told that the first
female had just been elected mayor of
Dublin Ireland responded by saying only
in America Yogi Berra was famous for
saying things like this so when I had
discovered that years earlier yogi had
said something about turning points well
it piqued my interest when a reporter
said to yogi yogi you’ve had so many
turning points in your life how do you
navigate them yogi says I get to a fork
in the road and I take it
unfortunately that’s what most of us do
we pay very little attention to the
turning points in our lives those Forks
in the road in reality most of us are
resistant to change but what I’ve
discovered over the years is that
leaders and great achievers of all kinds
do recognize their turning points and
take action I’d like to tell you a
little bit about my life and some of the
examples of my turning points and what
I’ve learned about turning points no one
in my family ever attended college
before my mother and her family were
farmers who grew up in central Virginia
and basically lived off the land my
father grew up with six siblings in a
two room house in the poorest of mining
towns in West Virginia and when my
grandmother couldn’t always take care of
him spent part of his childhood in an
orphanage these were good people but
there was never any conversation in my
home about my going to college I had a
teacher in high school he was also the
athletic director and the football coach
it was one of those teachers like we
heard earlier today that you look up to
I he encouraged me to go to college
in fact he inspired me I wanted to be
just like him and this is one of those
turning points in life I graduated from
college and by the time I was 36 years
old I had my dream job I was being
selected to be the athletic director of
a major university I had really far
exceeded the expectations of that 16
year old boy who may or may not have
ever gone to college around the same
time a friend of mine sent me a copy of
action magazine in the magazine was an
article about what was then the largest
lecture agency in the world in the
article the author recounts how the head
of this agency goes to visit the Gerald
Ford White House to sign Gerald Ford the
president Henry Kissinger and Alexander
Haig as clients to speak after they
leave office near the end of the article
the author quotes Henry Kissinger who
was then the Secretary of State as
complaining about the high commission
rate that this agency wanted to charge
and says why don’t I simply sign with
one of your competitors the head of the
agency’s response
I have no competitors so I just happened
to take the magazine home and I left it
on the coffee table a number of days
later when I came home my wife says have
you read this article he has no
competitors so she sat me down and she
said you know you come home two or three
days a week and you complain to me about
the bureaucracy of university life I
don’t think you’re ever going to be
happy unless you can make decisions on
your own so over a period of weeks she
pushed and she prodded and she convinced
me to walk away from my dream job
I know
it’s a little hard to believe but
sometimes those simple Forks in the road
or u-turns in life in solidarity my wife
quit her job we had no plan we had no
experience and we had no money in order
to start our new company and to have
money to live on we put a second
mortgage on her home now we had $55,000
of mortgages on a $60,000 house and
above 12% interest rate we couldn’t
really spend money on an office can’t
seem kind of silly but a friend of ours
offered to rent us his stationary closet
his name was Chuck Hagel and Chuck would
later become the Secretary of Defense
for Barack Obama now to give you an idea
what it was like to start work and Chuck
Hagel’s stationery closet if we had to
leave that closet for any reason we
would have to wait for one of chucks
meetings to be over because you’ve had
to walk from our closet through Chuck’s
office just to get out now to give you
an idea how you start a lecture agency
with no experience to represent famous
people we would sit in our closet and
think of famous people it seemed logical
we would try to find a telephone number
or an address
none of our telephone calls were ever
returned and our letters returned from
lawyers who said my client this famous
person is under a written contract with
another agency don’t write us again or
will sue you now the thing you got to
remember is in 1980 there was no
internet so for the very first time the
letters from these lawyers showed us
that in addition to that agency that was
in the
News magazine article there were five or
six large agencies up and down the East
Coast of the United States that claim of
no competitors was nothing more than a
strategic boast ice I used to sit in
that closet
late at night and I remember putting my
head in my hand and thinking to myself
what have we done
twelve months passes in our stationery
closet and nothing has changed we don’t
represent anyone we’ve now discovered
there’s five or six large agencies that
we didn’t know existed when we first
started and we were just about out of
our mortgage money another two months
passes and I get a call from a guy named
Steve Bell Steve is the news anchor mode
for a new show that started 1975 called
Good Morning America Steve had been
under one of those written contracts the
contract had just expired and they
hadn’t produced for him
I had briefly met Steve when I was at
the University I’d let him use the
swimming pool
somehow Steve had discovered we started
a lecture agency not knowing we were in
a closet with started a lecture agency
and he called me and invited me over to
his office I got over the office and we
talked and I asked if we could represent
Steve and he agreed I shook his hand on
the drive back to the closet
I suddenly realized I hadn’t signed him
to a piece of paper I hadn’t signed him
to a written contract so when I get back
to the closet I try to justify it to my
wife by saying what good would it do to
hold him to a piece of paper if he’s not
happy that mistake of my part that error
and judgment became a defining moment
for us because Steve then went and told
his friends other Washington journalists
but if you don’t want to sign a written
contract with these agencies you can go
with these new little guys in town shake
their hand and walk
out on them anytime you want suddenly we
felt very popular another few years
passes and I get a call from Alex Haley
the great author of roots alex says
Bernie I’d like to come and see you
I said sure when Alex says well look out
your window I look out my window and
there he is waving to me from a phone
booth below Alex used to come up to my
office often over the years and he would
sit for hours at a time and he would
talk about family in relationships
during these conversations Alex used to
repeat a phrase when an old person dies
it’s like a library burning when an old
person dies it’s like a library burning
at pithy phrase stuck with me and as
time went by I came to understand what
he wanted me to know each life our lives
is a storehouse of wisdom and knowledge
a library he was saying stuffed to the
rafters this wisdom and knowledge he
said comes from the turning points in
our lives these Forks in the road and
the choices we make are what giver gives
us the wisdom the strength our success
and accomplishment in life Alex Haley’s
words had great impact on me but it
wasn’t till a few years later that they
took firm hold in 1988 we get a letter
from the White House asking us to
interview to represent Ronald Reagan
when he leaves office there were 30
agencies invited so it was a big deal
but it wasn’t a big deal the idea was
you would take the 30 agencies Whittle
it down to 15 and then the 7 and the top
two choices would be
Senate President and mrs. Reagan and
they’d make the decision now no one in
Washington DC or anywhere in the world
for that matter thought we would
represent Ronald Reagan but it would be
good practice for us we went through the
interview process and weeks passed after
the last interview and we hadn’t heard
anything now Washington is a very
gossipy town so if you need to find out
something in Washington DC
you can usually call somebody on the
phone and they can find out what’s going
on but we didn’t hear a word then
another two months passes and I finally
get a call from Fred Ryan who was
President Reagan’s chief of staff and
now the publisher of The Washington Post
I envisioned what he was going to say to
me
Bernie you’ve done a great job you
should be proud of what you’ve done and
accomplished in just eight short years
but I hope you understand we must go
with more experienced people so I got on
the phone and Fred got right to the
point
Bernie president mrs. Reagan have
selected you to represent them I had no
idea what to say so I said we’d do a
good job I’ll be in touch Fred and I
hung up the phone
i sat there that day thinking to myself
how totally amazing it was that a
President of the United States would
risk his legacy on a totally
inexperienced group of people but of the
years went by and I got to personally
know him I came to understand how this
happened
personally Ronald Reagan was basically a
small-town boy who believed in and was
committed to entrepreneurism and the
little guy it had been exactly as Alex
Haley had said to me years before Ronald
Reagan was true to and guided by those
turning points those Forks in the road
that formed and shaped his life Alex
Haley and Ronald Reagan were certainly
two very different people but they
shared one thing in common they
recognized the significance of their
turning points now over the years I have
had a number of people come up to me and
say Bernie you know those people you
represent they had opportunities and
choices that aren’t available to the
rest of us but my years of experience
have taught me it’s just the opposite we
all have our turning points in life it
just depends on what we do with them Tom
Brokaw Tom Brokaw has been a journalist
at NBC for over 50 years in high school
Tom Brokaw was voted the most likely to
succeed
and yet in college he flunked out of
college he didn’t flunk out of college
once but he flunked out of college twice
and yet Tom Brokaw’s life changed
exactly how my life changed when that
teacher and my wife came into my life
Robert rice Robert rice was our
Secretary of Labor Robert rice is only
five foot one most of his young life was
bullied and one of the boys who
protected him was tragically murdered in
the civil rights movement in Mississippi
by local sheriff’s Robert rice had two
choices in life Robert rice could be
angry about being bullied and the tragic
murder of his childhood friend or he
could do something about it Robert rice
if you look it up has millions of
followers on Facebook and has become
this nation’s greatest advocate for
economic equality and justice Doris
Kearns Goodwin Doris Kearns Goodwin is
simply a student who writes a letter to
a friend calling for the defeat of the
President of the United States during
the Vietnam War much like a lot of us
did only to have that friend take that
letter and get it published just as
Doris was leaving for Washington DC to
become a White House Fellow and yet that
friendship with that president that
nobody anticipated set her on a path to
become one of this nation’s greatest
historians Liz Murray you don’t know Liz
Murray Liz Murray was a child of
drug-addicted parents who went homeless
on the streets and the subways in New
York City Liz Murray had only enough
change in her pocket to make one subway
ride she could go have pizza with her
friends or she could take one last
interview to try to get back into high
school after all other interviews had
failed
her decision to take that one last
interview led her on a path to
graduating from Harvard we’re not all
gonna be presidents of the United States
we’re not all gonna be journalists or
authors or champions for great causes
but who knows so I would like to invite
you to at least think about the
potential in your life recognize the
turning points in your life pay
attention to what is happening in your
life right now
what are these opportunities that the
people in your life and the moments in
time are giving you and then make good
and wise decisions remember good
judgment even instinct like I had when
my wife told me that I wasn’t prepared
for a future that I thought I was going
to get that good judgment and instinct
or our best friends and then finally
commit ourselves fully we sat in a
stationary closet for 14 months fully
committed to succeeding the significance
of these turning points is valuable for
any of us at any age they were valuable
for me when I was 36 years old but just
think think how valuable they are for
young people who are just starting out
in life today thank you
[Applause]
you
[Applause]
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