As John F. Kennedy famously once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Zzzzzzzzzz. I know, you’re snoring.

Any conversation about leadership in America seems to have that catch phrase at its core, and in that redundancy it has likewise lost its punch, its ability to call us into positive action and out of our negative stupor.

While this call for leadership may seem clichCB) and unwanted to your otherwise aspiring college mind, it is that very attitude of complacency and apathy against which we must wage war. And as our generation inevitably moves on from college to the helm of power in this nation, the fate of America-and perhaps even the world-relies upon winning that war.

It is time for us to either wake up and do something with our lives or hit the snooze button again and submit to our own laziness. Or rather, as American revolutionary writer and martyr Thomas Paine put it, it is time for us to “lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

Mohandas Gandhi, perhaps the greatest leader of the 20th century, gave us the formula for leadership when he declared, “Be the change in the world you wish to see.” He suggests that we can all, in a universal and continuous way, be leaders to each other right now. Furthermore, in that model, we are all leaders and followers of each other.

This begs the question: what kind of leader are you? Also, what kind of ideas and people do you follow?

Surely we all have leaders in our lives, whether they are parents, siblings, teachers, professors, mentors, colleagues, coaches, or friends. But now more than ever in our lives, we choose whom we follow; in essence, we choose what kind of leaders we, ourselves, are, and what kind of leaders we will someday be. Realizing that fact is half the battle.

So really, the question of leadership is inherently ambiguous. We are concurrently both leaders and followers.

Ask anyone who is part of a successful business or sports team about the reasons for that group’s high achievements and he or she may offer that it is the combination of homogenous individual leadership and those individuals’s ability to follow the leadership of the group as a whole in his or her defined role.

In both instances, the key to success is service. The individual, whether at the top of the organization or somewhere within it, must serve that organization if the individual and the group is to be successful. And you know what the best part of all of this is? Service feels good. Having a purpose in life and working toward it is the cornerstone to happiness.

Ultimately, as graduation day inches toward us all, the members of your class who will find the greatest success and happiness in life are those who consciously choose to serve others and lead and follow accordingly.

I congratulate and salute DU’s graduating class of 2007. Taking a loan from JFK, I offer this: Ask not what others can do to serve you, but what you can do to serve others.

Welcome to your life. Will you languish in bed, forgetting yourself and the planet at large? Or will you rise to meet the challenges of the coming day, serve valiantly, and save yourself and this wonderful world?

Good luck on your way… It’s up to you.