I bet you don’t expect to hear words of motivation and challenge from the Teen Choice Awards, do you?
This week, someone shared a link to Ashton Kutcher’s acceptance speech at the 2013 Teen Choice Awards. The speech has gone viral on the Internet since Sunday night. Surprising many, Kutcher took this opportunity to laud the importance of hard work, perseverance, and a different kind of popular appeal. (Contains mild obscenities.)
“I believe opportunity looks a lot like hard work,” Kutcher began. “I’ve never had a job that I’ve been better than.” He went on to tell the audience of teenagers, “The sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart. And being thoughtful. And being generous.”
The shock and awe that have greeted Kutcher’s simple message sent my thoughts in a different direction. I thought instead about the power these words can have when they come from a teenager’s parents and close family mentors.
Oh, I know some of my readers may laugh, thinking that a celebrity has far more persuasive power in the mind of a teenager. But let me remind you that next week, the same celebrity who promotes hard work may be caught up in scandal. At the very least, our teenagers will probably never meet that celebrity, never see him deal with financial hardship or make tough decisions about honesty and paying bills.
Only when the speaker is someone near to them do our teenagers have an ethos–built on ten-plus years of experience watching the speaker live out his or her principles–to test against the speaker’s words.
I am glad Mr. Kutcher made good use of the platform he was given and the fame he has earned on Sunday night. I hope some of the teenagers who heard him speak will be moved by his rhetoric to make hard choices and do challenging things. But I pray even more that those teenagers will go home to parents and mentors who will daily live out the message that hard work is more important than fame or fortune, and that strength of character is more lasting than popularity and sex appeal.
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Source:
http://leighbortins.com/teen-choices/