Richard Potok

Chief Executive Officer, Aurora Education Foundation
Ceremony: 17 October 2019, 10:30am - Faculty of Law, UTS Business School

 

Speech

Chancellor, Professor Parfitt, Professor McDaniel, Professor Hitchens, academic staff, distinguished guests, graduates and your families and friends.
I would also like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of Coastal Sydney as the Traditional Owners of the land where we meet today, and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

Thank you, Chancellor. It is such a wonderful honour to be up here.

Congratulations to all of you graduating today on this important milestone in your lives, and congratulations to your proud family members here celebrating with you.
I have been combing the ancient texts to find wisdom to impart to you – things that helped me on my path. It won’t surprise you, I am sure, that the place I keep coming back to is the sage advice of Yoda to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.

Here are 3 lessons I have gleaned:

• The first is to see your early years as an apprenticeship. Like Luke, you need patience to learn the skills that will enable you to go on to do whatever it is you’re passionate about, and to do it well.
• The second involves humility and determination, learning from your mistakes and never hesitating to seek help and guidance.
• The third is about consciously deciding to positively impact the lives of others.

Today, I work in Indigenous education at Aurora. Aurora has a reputation for exceeding expectations: Indigenous postgraduates attending Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. Our high school students graduating at double the completion rates of other Indigenous students. This is the work that excites and fulfils me.
But a lot of the skills I needed to succeed came from my experience before entering Indigenous education. The intellectual rigour of the Master’s at Oxford, the analytical skills I learnt at a consulting firm, and the logical approach and attention to detail needed when working as a lawyer in New York and London – these all provided the fundamental base for what I do now.

In 2005, Steve Jobs advised at a similar ceremony at Stanford: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. ... have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

I agree but would add, “Don’t be in too much of a rush”. Working in large corporate organisations wasn’t the right place for me in the long term. And yet, in hindsight, what I have done in the past was a crucial apprenticeship, equipping me with what I needed to make a difference in the field where I work today.

My corporate experience opened the door to specialising in a subject area that I loved during my studies, namely, Conflict of Laws. This led to setting up my own small law firm in London and to work in 35 countries presenting about the need for legal reform. Most importantly, I found that I enjoyed solving problems experts professed to be unsolvable – I loved the challenge of proving them wrong. We did this with the Hague Securities Convention in 2002.

That work was intellectually stimulating and important, but it didn’t have the individual impact I was really looking for. Where I am now is where I want to be. Being a part of something others believed impossible has been exciting – people cautioned in 2010 that it was unrealistic to hope that two Indigenous postgraduates would get into Oxford and Cambridge each year. Now, nine years later, 44 Indigenous graduates from 24 Australian universities have been accepted to Oxford and Cambridge, all on the basis of their academic merit and achievements. But would they successfully complete at universities currently ranked number one and number two in the world? Absolutely! To date, 27 out of 27 have graduated. This is a testament not only to the students but to the quality of the tertiary education system in Australia.

I am proud of the small part Aurora, the Charlie Perkins Scholarship Trust and the Roberta Sykes Indigenous Education Foundation are playing – we are helping to change the conversation about what is possible academically for Indigenous Australians.

So: be patient. Treat your early days in the workforce as an apprenticeship. You may not find your path immediately, but all your experiences along the way will set you up for success.

The second point is to have the humility to ask others for assistance. But more importantly, have the dogged determination of a Luke Skywalker, to implement what you learn. As lawyers, we sometimes want to pretend that we have all the answers, but often you need others to show you a roadmap of how to succeed.
I remember in my first year of law school, finding that my friends were doing far better than me in exams even though we were all using the same exam summaries – actually, they were the summaries I had prepared and shared with my friends. A pivotal moment for me was when a lecturer who has since passed away, Brian Bromberger, showed me how to answer problem-based law exams. Having that roadmap was crucial for me - without this I may have continued to get mediocre marks.

During my summer clerkship at a law firm in New York, having never done a legal memo before, I had the dubious honour of submitting the worst memo any of them had ever seen. Like young Luke, I scraped my ego up off the floor, sat down and read through memo after memo to find out what they were looking for. I worked until eventually I got it right – it wasn’t that hard, I just needed a roadmap.

You don’t have to get everything right the first time - and you won’t. Be prepared to fail. As Yoda explains to Luke in The Return of the Jedi: “The greatest teacher, failure is.” So, yes, you will fail; but be determined. To me, the most important type of intelligence I look for in the workplace is the ability to learn rapidly from mistakes. If someone you work for marks up the letter you have prepared, there is a temptation, particularly with lots of balls in the air, to just accept the changes and move on to the next task. Resist this temptation if you can! Instead, go through and make sure you understand the changes, even if that means swallowing your pride and asking your supervisor to explain.

We often fear that if we ask others for help, then everybody will know that we’re not good enough. That just isn’t true. No matter what stage we’re at in our career and our lives, whether a first year associate or a budding Jedi Knight, we can all benefit from the guidance of others.

Working in Indigenous affairs has been a steep learning curve. I am constantly learning through mistakes and rely on the support and advice of others. Some of those generous people are in this room today and include your Pro-Vice Chancellor (Indigenous Leadership and Engagement), Professor Michael McDaniel, who has always been there to guide and advise me. It is such a privilege that this honour is being conferred by UTS, which has been a visionary partner in the work we do.
This brings me to Number 3. At some point in your life, you will be in a position to give back some of the guidance and advice you have received. You will have the power to believe in someone and inspire them to realise their potential.

The best part of my work at Aurora has been watching Indigenous students and graduates, who initially believe they have no right to be at places like Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford, put their fears to one side and then shatter everyone’s expectations. We run a Study Tour that visits 6 universities historically ranked in the world’s top 10. 93% of the Study Tour participants who apply to universities visited have been accepted – that’s 54 out of 58 applicants.

And yet, many of these students did not excel academically at high school. Many only gained admission into their undergraduate course with the assistance of alternative entry programs. A few years later, they were receiving First Class Honours and undertaking postgraduate study at the top universities in the world. How did such a dramatic change happen? We have surveyed over 100 high-achieving Indigenous university students and graduates involved in our programs.

Time and again we hear about students blossoming because somebody believed in them. Often a parent (particularly a mother), sometimes a sibling, a university lecturer, those at their university’s Indigenous centre, or sometimes a mentor at their workplace. One such person, mentioned on more than one occasion as the role model and a mentor to young Indigenous law students, has been UTS Law School’s Professor Larissa Behrendt.

There are so many ways you can help others achieve success. Forty years ago, Brian Bromberger taught me how to write a law exam. This is something to this day I pass on to students, including some I have mentored at UTS. One small kindness has the power to inspire and positively impact others – their lives and their futures – and it can ripple further than you ever imagined.

If you believe in those around you and those who look up to you, you can help them believe in themselves. In some ways it’s a daunting responsibility, but it’s an exciting one, too.

John Bunyan once said: “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”

And, of course, who can forget the profound words of Yoda to Luke in The Return of the Jedi: “Always pass on what you have learned.”

So, that’s Number 3 – consciously choose to exercise your power to inspire and support others.

These next few years are an apprenticeship for your future. It’s time to get out there and enjoy the next phase of your life.

May the Force be with you!

About the Speaker

Mr Richard Potok graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce in 1982 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1983 from the University of New South Wales. He was also awarded the university medal in law. Mr Potok holds a Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Mr Potok has had an international career in law, management and finance. He worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company in Sydney. In New York and London, he was employed as a lawyer for leading law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, later setting up his own law firm, Potok & Co in 1998 in London.

Mr Potok was also engaged in law reform, most notably as legal adviser to the Hague Conference on Private International Law. This led to the Hague Securities Convention in 2002, an international multilateral treaty intended to remove legal uncertainties for cross-border securities transactions.

Mr Potok has made an outstanding contribution to both the legal profession and to the advancement of society.

Mr Potok’s broader contribution arises out of his ground-breaking work in the Indigenous sector, initially in relation to native title and then through providing education opportunities for young Indigenous Australians.

Mr Potok started on this path when he gave up his international legal career to found the Aurora Project in 2006. He saw a need to provide support for lawyers working for native title bodies and, more generally, a need to strengthen Indigenous organisations through support for their staff.  One of Aurora’s main programs is a national internship program that places Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and graduates at around 200 organisations working in the Indigenous sector across Australia.  

 Over time, the Aurora Project expanded to include Indigenous education initiatives, which are now undertaken through the Aurora Education Foundation. As CEO, Mr Potok leads programs that support Indigenous students to realise their full academic potential – whether it is completing Year 12 or a PhD from Harvard.  These programs include a high school academic enrichment program, an online scholarship portal and matching service, and the annual Aurora Indigenous Scholars International Study Tour.

Most significantly, Mr Potok has spearheaded an initiative to increase the number of Indigenous students undertaking postgraduate study at leading overseas universities, including Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. Before 2010, there had never been an Indigenous Australian studying for a full-time degree at either Oxford or Cambridge, consistently two of the top five universities in the world. Now 44 Indigenous postgraduates have been accepted into these two universities, including Australia’s first four Indigenous Rhodes Scholars. To date, 27 out of 27 have graduated. Scholarships are provided through the Charlie Perkins Scholarship Trust and the Roberta Sykes Indigenous Education Foundation – Mr Potok is executive director of each of these foundations.

Mr Potok is national adviser on diversity for Rhodes Scholarships in Australia. He has helped UTS students which has led to the Faculty of Law’s first Rhodes Scholar in 2018 and is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law. As well as a career as a practising lawyer, Mr Potok also published academic works in the area of conflict of laws and securities laws. He was general editor and author of a number of chapters in Cross Border Collateral: Legal Risk and the Conflict of Laws and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals.