In February, this blog will be celebrating its ten-year anniversary! Leading up to it, I’m re-starting a series I tried to do in the past called “A Look Back.” Each week, I’ll be re-posting a few of my favorite posts from the past ten years.

You might also be interested in:

 A Look Back: Best Posts From 2007 To 2009 

 A Look Back: 2010’s Best Posts From This Blog

A Look Back: 2011’s Best Posts From This Blog

A Look Back: 2012’s Best Posts From This Blog

A Look Back: 2013’s Best Posts From This Blog

A Look Back: 2014’s Best Posts From This Blog

A Look Back: 2015’s Best Posts From This Blog

This post originally appeared in 2016, and I thought reposting it today, on his last day in office, would be good timing:

Regular readers know that I was a community organizer for nineteen years, and a key organizing adage goes something like this: Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?

I’ve written a lot about that perspective at The Best Posts & Articles About Compromise and at The Best Posts & Articles On Building Influence & Creating Change.

Today, President Obama provided that same analysis as the central part of his commencement speech today at Howard University, and it was excellent.

Here’s a short excerpt:

And-democracy-requires

You can read the entire transcript of his remarks here, and it’s worth the time.

Here’s the video of his speech:

In addition to adding this post to the “Best” lists I’ve previously mentioned, I’ll also be putting it on The Best Commencement Speeches list.

Addendum: Here a good NY Times article about his speech.