Leadership Wisdom for Graduates: 6 Habits to Ditch for Success
It's graduation season, and Vonda is fresh off her granddaughter's eighth-grade graduation in West Des Moines, Iowa — complete with grandma-made flowers. The school orders boutonnieres and corsages for its graduates every year, but this year the girls carried little hand-tied bouquets of three roses with baby's breath, and the boys wore spray roses with hypericum on magnets. The teachers had worried handhelds would get abandoned everywhere; instead, not a single flower was left behind. From there, Vonda and Lori turn graduation wisdom into business wisdom: six habits, pulled from an article on leadership, that flower shop owners — and humans generally — should let go of.
The best graduation gift isn't luggage
Before the list, the gift idea worth stealing: Vonda made her granddaughter a memory box labeled 2028 (her future high school graduation year), containing vision-board supplies, journaling materials, and instructions to write a sealed letter to her eighteen-year-old self, to be opened at graduation. Best of all, Vonda collected audio messages of advice and congratulations from grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles, and edited them into a private little podcast on a flash drive. As Lori puts it: school friends come and go, but the people speaking into your life on that recording will be there forever. (Compare that to the era when a graduation haul meant a wheel-less suitcase and dorm sheets — or Lori's dad's all-purpose encouragement, "keep your end gate up.")
Habits one and two: needing to be understood, and explaining yourself
The first habit to ditch is expecting other people to always understand you. Everyone perceives information through the window of their own beliefs, so when you try something new — a process change in the shop, a trendy design your customers haven't seen before — anticipate that you'll irritate people. The hosts loved that phrase so much they're claiming it as a slogan: anticipate, you'll irritate. If your dream is opening a flower shop and your family thinks you're crazy, that's fine. You don't need their comprehension. Get your head down, work your plan, and deliver results you can be proud of.
The second — the one Lori admits she had to write down for herself — is over-explaining. If people's brains don't work like yours, no amount of extra explanation makes them understand; it just steals time from execution. Explanations get in the way of execution, and as the article's companion line goes: those who matter won't mind, and those who mind don't matter.
Habits three and four: credit and fitting in
Caring about credit gets the sharpest treatment: credit is a currency that corrupts, tied to validation — "fast food for the mind" that feels great briefly and leaves you craving more. Credit should be a byproduct, not a goal, and it should flow to the team. That's why, when a member emails after a holiday to thank the web team, it gets forwarded to every single person who touched the work. The hosts land on the Harry Truman line: it's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit — and as Lori notes from experience, the pressure drops enormously when you stop caring.
Fourth: trying to fit in. You don't need to be popular to be effective — people can think you're an oddball and you can still succeed. In the flower industry, a little eccentricity might even help. The one caveat from the article: don't be a jerk.
Habits five and six: ideal scenarios and waiting for perfect
Leading anything means accepting that most factors for success are outside your control. You cannot control who clicks "buy." Vonda and Lori see new shop owners spin out on this constantly — one recent conversation involved a brand-new everyday-flowers shop wanting to try a dozen paid fixes at once, before revenue could support any of them and with no way to measure what worked. The advice: try the free things first, one at a time, and focus on what you can control — your COGS, your labor, and above all how you act and respond.
Which leads to the last habit: waiting for everything to align. If Flower Clique had waited for perfect, there'd be no web program and no podcast. Deal with things as they come, because on a long enough timeline you either win or you learn — either way, you're moving forward.
Key takeaways
- Anticipate, you'll irritate: new ideas always have to overcome old thinking, so don't expect instant understanding.
- Stop over-explaining — those who matter won't mind, and explaining steals time from executing.
- Treat credit as a byproduct, not a goal, and pass it to your team every chance you get.
- Effectiveness beats popularity; be as eccentric as you like, just don't be a jerk.
- Control your costs, your labor, and your reactions — then let go of what you can't control, because you'll either win or you'll learn.