Americans throw the best birthday parties. I know. I showed up to one uninvited and never left.
I came to this country as a young man with no money and limited knowledge of the language. What I lacked in material substance, I made up for with conviction. I had a half-formed but fierce belief that this was the place. Not a place. The place.
So I did what you do when you want to belong somewhere officially. I sat down with the citizenship paperwork and began working through the questions one by one.
The first questions were simple.
What is your name?
Where were you born?
The final question was much bigger.
Are you willing to pledge your allegiance to the United States of America?
Somewhere between the signatures and the small print, I realized I was doing more than making a choice. I was making a commitment.
I was committing to a country.
As I look back on my life in this country, I know that America also made a commitment to me.
That reciprocity, that mutual love, is what I find myself thinking about as this nation turns 250.
An Immigrant’s Perspective
Most of the people writing about this milestone were born in America. They inherited it the way you inherit a last name.
I had to earn it. And there is something clarifying about that process.
What came next surprised even me. Opportunities appeared where none had existed before. I built a career in banking, real estate, publishing and retail, and became an internationally known author and consultant. I was asked to serve on the boards of Truist, La-Z-Boy and Savista, and was appointed executive chairman of Great Harvest Bread Company.
When you choose a country deliberately, moving thousands of miles from your family and with full awareness of what you are walking into, you do not take the birthday for granted.
Two hundred and fifty years is not without its flaws and blemishes. But it is long enough to see that America offers plenty of opportunity to those who are willing to be persistent and take some calculated risks.
This year, our nation marks two and a half centuries since a group of imperfect men in a small room in Philadelphia wrote down something that had never quite been written before: that ordinary people possessed the right to govern themselves, to pursue their own happiness, to build a life according to their own ambition and conscience.
That idea was radical then. It remains powerful now.
America did not hand me success. It showed me a limitless pathway lined with doors of opportunity.
Some doors led to dead ends. Some doors were hidden behind hard work and heartache. Other doors were guarded by doubters and critics.
What happened after that was always up to me. Instead of obstacles, I always tried to see opportunity.
That is the promise of America. And I have never stopped being grateful for it.
America is a Choice
One of the things I admire most about America, and I say this as someone who chose this country intentionally, who studied it before I arrived and has crisscrossed it for decades since, is its capacity for honest reckoning.
Great nations do not pretend their failures did not happen. They look at them squarely. They debate them fiercely. And then, at their best, they do something about them.
America has not always lived up to its founding ideals. But the ideals themselves have proven remarkably durable. The Declaration of Independence did not just describe a nation. It issued a standing challenge: live up to this.
And every day, we must choose to live up to it. It is not a finish line, but rather, a daily choice we must make.
Americans have been debating about how to do that ever since. That debate is itself a sign of health. A country that has stopped examining its values has stopped caring about them.
Excellence Over Perfection
In 2005, the High Point University Board of Trustees asked me to become president of this fine university. Since that time, our enrollment has grown nearly 260% and net assets from $56 million to more than $1 billion.
When I became president, I wanted to ensure we openly talked about what it means to be an American. We are a God, family, and country school. Every year we host one of the largest Veterans Day celebrations in the region. Thousands of students, faculty, and community members gather to shake the hands of the men and women who chose to defend the freedoms that the rest of us sometimes take for granted.
Those moments matter. Not because they are ceremonies, but because they are reminders. Freedom is not a given. It is a gift, one that was purchased at considerable cost and must be renewed by each generation.
Walk across the HPU campus today and you will pass sculptures of people who understood this.
Abraham Lincoln, who held a fractured union together and expanded the meaning of freedom at the cost of everything.
Rosa Parks, who demonstrated that a single act of quiet courage can change the arc of history.
Harriet Tubman, who risked her life so that others could have what she herself deserved.
Teddy Roosevelt. Thurgood Marshall. Amelia Earhart.
These were not perfect people. They lived in an imperfect country. They knew it. Some of them spent their entire lives fighting to make it better.
And that is precisely the point. Perfection is not an attainable goal.
But excellence is, and it is worth pursuing.
The Demands of Democracy Are Worthwhile
As I think about the students at High Point University, the young men and women who walk these halls and pass those sculptures every day, I see the next chapter of the American story being written in real time.
They are preparing to build companies, advance science, lead communities, treat patients, teach children and raise families. They are inheriting a country that is complicated and sometimes contradictory and absolutely worth their best efforts.
We tell them this every chance we get.
In fact, our call to action at HPU is this: Choose to be extraordinary!
It’s hard work to make that choice every day. It’s demanding.
But few qualities define America more powerfully than our relentless hope, tireless determination and unwavering conviction to preserve the independence we inherited.
The spirit that filled that room in Philadelphia 250 years ago was not a spirit of certainty. Those founders were not sure it would work.
They were taking a risk on something, on the proposition that human beings, given freedom and responsibility, would rise to the occasion more often than they would fall.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the bet has held.
Not without cost.
Not without struggle.
Not without hard work and improvement.
Not without moments when it seemed the whole experiment might collapse.
But it has held.
I am an American by conviction, as I have often said. By deliberate and grateful choice.
And on this 250th anniversary, I find myself thinking not about what this country has offered me, though it has offered me everything, but about what each of us owes it in return for its generosity.
We owe it our participation.
We owe it our honesty.
We owe it our willingness to do the work of self-governance even when that work is hard and the results are uncertain.
We owe it to the next generation. Young people educated not just for careers but for citizenship, equipped not just with skills, but with character.
America began as an idea. After 250 years, it remains one.
The most powerful ideas do not retire. They demand something from the people who inherit them.
They demand courage.
They require responsibility.
They call for participation.
I am still answering that call.
I hope you are too.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
