An Open Letter to the Graduating Seniors of 2026
To the graduating class of 2026.
Whether you’re a keen sports follower that bleeds maroon and gold or couldn’t pick Will Ashcroft out of a line-up, you’d have struggled to miss the Brisbane Lions winning their third premiership in a row on 26 September, coming from 17 points down with four minutes left (something I’ve watched 2,343 times). What most people didn’t see, and what I’d like you to see, is everything that came before it. You didn’t watch 2017, when the same club finished last and lost 17 of its games. Or 2016, when it won three matches from 22. Or the 2023 grand final, lost by four points, which plenty of people assumed would be the thing that broke them.
Three flags in a row may have made the headlines, but the story behind it is 9+ years in the making. Chris Fagan, who stepped away from the job a fortnight ago, had his own way of describing how they got there. He talked about failing their way to the top.
I want to put that in front of you now, because these next few weeks are when everyone starts handing you headlines. Your results will arrive. Someone will ask what you got, then what you’re doing next, and you will start to believe that the number and the plan are the whole story. Seniors of 2026, just in case it wasn’t obvious: you are more than the outcome of 2026.
What is that “more”? Three things from someone who has spent a long time watching cohorts leave and then finding out, years later, how they turned out.
Be a good person first, and be specific about it (the career will come)
I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of young people, and the students I would later hear good things about were almost never the ones with the just the highest results or the most badges on the blazer. They were the ones who had been kind, courageous and caring at a moment when that choice came at a cost to their status, ego or reputation. In short, they were afraid to stand up for what they believed in. They had substance.
That’s the part I’d ask you to think about, because “be a good person” is useless advice until you make it specific. Being a good person is a set of small, unglamorous, repeatable acts. It’s checking on the mate who has gone off the radar and driving over rather than sending a quick DM “thinking of you” or “hope all is good”. It’s apologising properly when needed, without the sentence that starts “yeah, but”. It’s treating the person who can do nothing for you exactly as you treat the person who can.
In relationships it’s narrower still. Respect shows up in what you do when you want something and the other person doesn’t. If you remember one line from a bloke who talks to teenagers about this for a living, that might be worth a re-read.
That part doesn’t happen by accident either. Good people are made the same way premierships are, in the unremarkable, mundane weeks that don’t make the highlight reel.
Lead yourself before you try to lead anyone else
You’ve just spent a year being led, timetabled and reminded. From February, most of that stops. Nobody will text you about the assignment, drive you to training, or notice that you’ve stopped doing the things that keep you well. Leadership of self sounds like a corporate phrase, and all it really means is this: deciding who you are when there is no one left to perform for.
Decide it now, while you have time to think. Pick two or three standards you will hold when nobody is checking, write them somewhere you’ll see them, and then don’t let go of them the moment it becomes inconvenient, which is the only time a standard begins having worth.
I would also encourage you to get your expectations right about the next few years, because this is where most of the disappointment comes from. You will have a season like the Lions had in 2017. Possibly two. A course you chose and then hated (hello past me!) A job you were good at that still made you miserable. A friendship group that doesn’t survive post school. A year where you’re not the best at anything, having come from a school where a lot of you were the best at something.
That down year is not the system failing you. Fagan said grand final losses don’t have to define you or destroy you, that they can make you instead, and he said it with the credibility of a man who had just lost. Your low years are where the capability gets built. Nobody enjoys them, but I’ve yet to meet anyone worth admiring who hasn’t had them.
Name the difficulty when it comes, ask for help earlier than you want to, and keep going. In my experience, that’s the secret sauce.
There is good to be done, and some of it is yours
You will have influence from here whether you asked for it or not. Whether it be in a share house, a workplace, a sports team, a family. People will take their cues from you about what is normal and what is acceptable, and most of the time you won’t even notice it happening.
I’d encourage you to use this influence for good in our world, because gee we need it. Be the person in the group who says “that’s not on” when a line is crossed, because, a lot of the time, four others were thinking it, but don’t have the courage to say it. Volunteer for the thing that has no profile attached to it. Learn someone’s name and use it. Each of these starts off small, but this is how you stack the good.
Some of you will come to think of this as a calling, or a vocation, and some of you will just think of it as the work in front of you. You are being sent out of school into a world that has an enormous amount of good available to be done, almost none of which is glamorous and most of which is local. There will be a person within one degree of separation next year who needs someone to be decent to them. Why not make that person you. Grace, in my experience, is mostly just people turning up for each other.
One more thing about that premiership
The photos from the MCG show players holding a cup, but what they talked about afterwards was each other. Lachie Neale, in his last game for the club, called his time there the best eight years of his life. He has since confirmed he’s moving on, and Chris Fagan has stepped away too. Two blokes at the very top of their game are walking out the gate into whatever comes next, which is exactly where you are right now.
You will keep almost nothing from the next decade except the people you were good to and the person you decided to be. The results arrive, get photographed, and go in a drawer.
So if you take one thing from this letter, make it the lesson the Lions spent nine years learning. Those three flags didn’t happen by accident, and neither will the person you become. They were built in 2017 when nobody was watching, in a four-point loss that should have broken them, and in a lot of unremarkable sessions that never made the highlight reel. Yours will be built the same way: in the low years, in small decent choices, and in the moments you decide who you are when nobody is checking. You will fail at things along the way. Let those failures make you, the way Fagan said a grand final loss can. Fail your way to the top, and take good people with you.
Thirteen years of school is a long build. You’ve done the work. Now go and be useful, be kind, and be the sort of person someone else is lucky to have around.
As you move into the next part of your journey, it is my hope that you come to know and love yourself for all that you are, all that you are not, and most importantly, all that you can be – that beautiful thing called potential. Perhaps then you’ll start to see what the people around you already see: how good, genuine and caring you truly are.
Go well, Class of 2026.