College experience by Jeremiah

College experience by Jeremiah - November 2016 Scholarship Essay

Does wisdom come with aging or does it come from experience? Everyone is not fortunate to have grandparents in their lives, but I am blessed with a grandmother who is a very strong and independent woman. She often says “in this family, failure is not an option”. When I was younger I never understood what she meant. It was not until my teenage years when I encountered a situation in high school that I completely grasped her advice. The most important life lesson I learned from my grandmother is to always strive for success and never accept failure as the end result.
Failure has the potential to propel an individual into striving harder. My personal experience with failure involved a true passion I felt for the game of basketball. Sports offer a platform to simulate life lessons. I noticed a decrease in the amount of playing time I received during my junior year basketball season. In contrast to starting every game as I had my sophomore season, the coach only allowed me to play a scarce amount of time throughout the games. This began to affect my confidence. My emotions went from a love and utter joy of playing basketball every opportunity I had to just wanting to finish practice so I could go home. These feelings continued for several weeks until I became extremely dissatisfied. By remembering my grandmother’s advice “failure is not an option” I built up enough confidence to walk into the coach’s office and respectfully ask “Why am I not playing as much as I did last season?” The response cut deep and was shocking; my high school coach informed me that I did not “shoot the ball well enough.” As much as it hurt to hear this, I knew I could no longer be upset about the situation now that I knew the problem. Fear of asking the coach who was knowledgeable regarding what I was trying to achieve would have made it impossible to know how to improve. I was determined not to accept failure as the end result therefore I had to find a solution. The solution was to practice more and become better at shooting the ball. Shooting a basketball is similar to other tasks in life; the more you practice, the better you become. I began waking at 4:45 A.M. to insure that I had enough time to practice shooting at least 1000 shots and still arrive at school in class by 8:15 A.M. This was very challenging the first two weeks, however remembering “failure is not an option” served as great motivation the mornings when getting out of bed was tough.
Experiencing the possibility of failure in my teenage years was tough to cope with initially; however it was vital for long-lasting success in my life. First and most important is understanding the meaning of continuing to work hard to succeed once faced with the possibility of failure. I believe this shows character and humility even though it is painful. Second it gave me the courage to try to walk on the men’s basketball team at a collegiate level. My grandmother’s words “failure is not an option” is the best advice I have ever receive because it defines the person I am and if I had never heard that advice I would have allowed failure to win. Failure did not win, I am now a part of the men’s basketball team at Louisiana Tech University.