This man stood still on the stage, almost dwarfed behind the pulpit, yet accentuated by the huge wooden and steel organ behind him, and took a second to look around at the rows and rows of pupils in front of him, and then up at the older pupils who looked down at him from the circle. “However,” his pitch lowering with gravity, “my most important advice to you is that you have to decide now, and focus on that. Dream on, dream big, but you have to keep that dream in your head, and never let go.” He turned to walk away, but then remembered to turn back to finish with a “thank you”.
“You can do whatever you want, you can be whoever you want!” The black t-shirt and blazer, the thick black spectacles and medium blond hair swept and sprayed to the side, made this speaker look just soooo generic, but it was the genericness of a successful entrepreneur, and those that had an inkling of a desire for success listened intently.
With that, the front row of teachers started applauding, and the rest of the school followed suit. Some of the students woke up. The others, who were smoking in the emergency stairwell, heard the applause through the walls, and prepared to mingle back into the streams of exiting students, flapping their school blazers into the wind and popping a mint, as the mass of half-bewildered young people left the grand auditorium to proceed to their first lessons of the day.