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Now each of you is in the process of building the structure
of your lives, and the question is whether you have a
proper, a solid and a sound blueprint.
I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your
life’s blueprint. Number one in your life’s blueprint,
should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and
your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you fell
that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel
that you have worth, and always feel that your life has
ultimate significance.
Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the
basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in
your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding
as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life —
what your life’s work will be. Set out to do it well.
And I say to you, my young friends, doors are opening to
you–doors of opportunities that were not open to your
mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing
you is to be ready to face these doors as they open.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture
in 1871, “If a man can write a better book or preach a
better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor,
even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will
make a beaten path to his door.”
This hasn’t always been true — but it will become
increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to
burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don’t drop out of
school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I
urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of
the situation that you’re forced to live in — stay in
school.
And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out
to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular
moment in history to do it. don’t just set out to do a good
job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead
or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets
like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like
Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price
sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like
Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the
hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here
lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you
can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the
valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway,
just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it
isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever
you are.
— From the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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