National Honor Society Induction Speech

Congratulations to the newest members of the Belmont High School National Honor Society. You’ve truly worked hard to earn this distinction. Tonight is an opportunity to relax, reflect on your successes, and feel proud of yourselves and your accomplishments. Congratulations are also in order for you families, friends, and teachers without whom, many of those accomplishments may not have been possible.

I am honored to be asked to speak to you all tonight. Mr. Loosmann informed me that I am supposed to talk to you about the four pillars of the National Honor Society: Scholarship, Character, Leadership, and Service. But having been witness to the selection process, I know you all are here because you have accomplished something in each of these areas already. You already understand what it takes to be recognized by the National Honor Society.

Instead, I want you to think for a moment about what has motivated you to lead a life based on scholarship, character, leadership, and service. Is it your family? Your friends? The prospect of making gobs of money after graduating from a prestigious university? Hold that thought, while I go off on a science digression for a moment. I promise, I’ll come back. As most of you know, I teach Astronomy, so I thought that would be an appropriate topic for my speech….

Let’s talk for a minute about our place in the universe. Astronomers discovered an interesting thing: each one of you can correctly say that you are the center of the universe. So next time your parents ask if you think the world revolves around you, you can safely answer, “No, the entire universe does!” But how big is this universe that revolves around you? The universe is very big and very empty. It’s so big that it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles every second about 14 billion years to reach us from the edge. To understand such large sizes, it’s best to use a model. If we shrink the earth down to the size of this tennis ball, then our closest neighbor, the moon, would be the size of this quarter and it would be 10 feet away. Between them? Nothing. The biggest thing in our solar system, the sun, is really big. It loses 5 million tons of matter every second! Lost, gone, never to return. It’s so big that in doing that every second of every day for the past 5 billion years it has lost less than 1/10 of 1% of its total mass so far. In our model the sun would be 33 feet across, (roughly the volume of this stage I’m standing on). But it would have to be placed almost 1 mile away! And between the earth and the sun? Nothing. To take a wider view we have to shrink the model even further. Let’s make the entire sun the size of a grain of sand. At this scale the earth essentially disappears: a tiny speck. The nearest star, Proxima centauri, would be another grain of sand 2 miles away. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, which contains hundreds of billions of stars like our sun would, on this scale stretch a fifth of the way to the moon. And this is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies spread throughout our universe, a universe that, on this scale, would extend beyond the orbit of Pluto, 4 billions miles away! Like I said, the universe is a very big place.
Now let’s look at our place in time. Evidence suggests that life began on earth about 4 billion years ago. If we squash that 4 billion years down into a 24 hour day, starting at midnight, then the dinosaurs didn’t come to the party until 20 hours had passed, some time around 10 pm. Mammals showed up at around 11 pm, after the dinosaurs left. Humans got there at 11:59:58 and didn’t start writing things down about it until ¼ of a second before midnight. In the 24 hour existence of life, humans have only been around for 2 seconds!

So back to my original question: What motivates you to achieve? Your family, your peers, and all that money you could earn are external sources of motivation. These external motivators may be fine in the short term. But to live an entire life based on scholarship, character, leadership, and service requires that your motivations come from within. So I’d like to share this advice on how to continue to live up to the 4 pillars of NHS.

First, be a SCHOLAR for the sheer joy of learning. Be in awe of the fact the human brain can figure out and can even contemplate the size of the universe. Take advantage of that ¼ second of the written language. Read voraciously. Don’t think for a second that you can sit back because humans have it all figured out. Take a lesson from my 3-year-old daughter. She learns something new every day and is constantly amazed as she continually discovers how the world works. Maintain that child’s sense of wonder as you move through life. Let the size of our world inspire you to dig deeper, look farther, and learn more than your predecessors.

Next, have the CHARACTER to use our ¼ second-old ability to write to send thank you notes to your parents, friends, and teachers for the help they’ve given you along the way.

Third, instead of being overwhelmed by the scale of the universe and earth’s apparent insignificance, be a LEADER in preserving this tiny, watery, rock for future generations to enjoy, as you have. It may be a tiny speck in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the only tiny speck we have.

And lastly, spend your time figuring out what you are good at. Then use your skills to SERVE your community and make our small world a better place.

In conclusion, I’m asking you to think about your place in space and time. Let that perspective motivate you to be a scholar and leader, and to live a life of high character and service. When that motivation comes from within, you will be able to sustain those activities that got you to this point for the rest of your lives.

Thank you for listening, and congratulations again.