Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: With the flow, against the flow

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was 6 years old and my father was giving me the garbage man speech. "You can do anything you want in life," he said. "You can be a garbage man, but you have to be the best garbage man."

I didn't know how to break it to him, but I'd taken out the trash a few times and I was pretty sure which career I wasn't going to choose.

This week, I've gotten a lot of leadership advice, though thankfully no garbage man speeches. That's because I went to the James Blanchard Leadership Forum.

Listening to the world-class speakers, I couldn't help but think of their fathers.

For example, would our 43rd president, George W. Bush, have been president if his father hadn't been our 41st president?

Would John Maxwell have become a leadership guru and best-selling author if as a boy his father hadn't paid him to read books like "The Power of Positive Thinking," "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "Think and Grow Rich"?

Would Stanley McChrystal have become a general and would all five of his siblings have served in the military if their father hadn't himself been a general?

Would Doris Kearns Goodwin have been a famous historian and baseball lover if her father hadn't asked her to keep the box score for each Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game and then tell him the story of the game when he returned home from work?

I doubt it. All these leaders are products of their environments.

Sure, they worked hard and took some risks and maybe even got some lucky breaks. But in another sense, they went with the flow -- they found themselves being pushed with the current in a swiftly flowing stream, and they went far.

I don't mean they were necessarily following their peers or doing what's easy for most people. They were doing what came naturally for them and for their ancestors before them.

Most people do this. Most people go with the flow.

I did. I got the best education I could, served in the military, married well, made a few false starts at a career, and almost by accident found something to do that I enjoyed -- just like my father before me and his father before him.

I felt empowered to do these things, and am trying to empower my children to do them.

But it's got to start somewhere. Which makes me think of Dorothy Hyatt, director of Girls Inc.

Hyatt told Alva James-Johnson during last week's Sunday Interview that she was born in Wilson Apartments and moved to Beallwood when she was 4. She was raised by her mother, who worked double shifts in the cotton mill to support Hyatt and her four siblings.

Nobody in her family had ever been to college, so she didn't think she wanted to go either. She was going with the flow.

Then something happened. Her mentor at the

Girls Club said, "It doesn't matter what you want. You're going to college."

Hyatt went to college, and it changed the life she was going to have and the life she thought she wanted.

"I loved being on my own and loved learning," she said, "and I found out I was a social worker."

For many children, going with the flow means living in poverty, being undernourished and underappreciated, and lacking hope. It can also mean gangs, drugs, crime and jail.

These are the children who attend our perpetually failing schools. Do you save these children by fixing the schools? Or do you save the schools by fixing the children?

It's a vicious cycle. The bad news is that so many children are caught in it.

But the good news is that you can save one child at a time from this hopelessness, and that saving one child can mean you save future children and grandchildren.

It can happen.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published August 28, 2015 at 11:48 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: With the flow, against the flow ."