Keep Trying

So, first I want to say thank you for taking the time to read my article. I realize that you could be doing a number of things other than consuming my content. I also want to thank you, because by participating, you are helping me fulfill my dream to share my message with others.           

            Today I was listening to a speaker talk about taking a positive approach to success. He spoke about how many people say that they want success, but they don’t really want to do what it takes to be successful. He spoke about how much it takes to become successful. He spoke about how many negative experiences happen before you have a positive experience. He went on to talk about how much value there is in earning what you have, because when you earn what you have, it’s yours for life.

            This speech really stuck with me and made me think about the areas in life that I have had success in. It made me think about the many conversations that I have had with people wanting advice about how they can have similar success. The sad part about the conversations is that very rarely are people willing to go to the same lengths that I was willing to go for the success. Many people will hear my story and say “well, was there anything you would have done to make it easier?” I am always disappointed because they miss the moral of the story, which is being persistent.

            The story I tell is how my college roommate and I hustled to make sure that we got as much funding as possible to get our schooling paid. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got an email while I was at the regional convention for my college fraternity. I saw the email, but I could not take the time to read it because I had a full day of activities that I had to complete with very little free time in between activities. Also, I was admittedly nervous about what the email might say. So, instead of reading the email, I just waited. I waited because I didn’t want to risk the possibility of being devastated by learning I was not admitted for the possibility of learning that I did get in and being blissfully excited. Fortunately for me, when day was over, I open the email and found out that I was admitted to the school, which is the number one school in the nation. Upon finding out I was accepted, I immediately broke into tears, because I had finally finished the process of officially bringing my fraternity back to my campus and got accepted to grad-school in the same day. Once I pull myself together, I called my friend and soon to be college roommate, only to find out that he had also been admitted and was already worrying about how we were going to pay for school.

            We applied for every single scholarship that we had heard about and any that we had recently learned about, because there was a caveat in all of them that stated that you had to be admitted to an accredited program to be eligible for consideration. Out of all of the applications that we put in, we received no scholarships. So, we reached out to the school to ask if they had resources that we should be looking into. They gave us a list of opportunities that we could apply for. Although there were many opportunities, we were only qualified for a few. Once we applied for the opportunities, we went on to reach back out to the school to find out what else we could do to get funded. At this point we were told that the school had an open-door policy and we were welcome to talk to all staff and administration. We went to school a few weeks early and began the process of knocking on every single door of every single staff member, and administrator until we had solid leads on how we could get school paid for. We failed so much and dealt with so much rejection before we were able to find success. The key learning for us was the you should never give up. Success will come one day.