The Road to Growth by Josiah

The Road to Growth by Josiah - August 2014 Scholarship Essay

In life, failure often comes before success. C.S Lewis once said that “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement”. Many great men had failed hundreds of times before they succeeded. Failure can happen at any time in a person’s lifespan, and when it does, he is confronted with two choices: Giving up or learning from the failure, and striving on-wards. I had fortunately had my experience with academic failure in middle school, and from that point, I strove to be a better student, and graduated in the top 5% of my class.

I went into middle school with a very lackadaisical view on education. I treated school as if it was just some hoops I had to jump through, in order to get on with my life. I would consistently procrastinate my homework, if I did it at all, and I chose a bad group of friends. All I wanted to do was have fun, and at that time, school seemed like the antithesis of entertainment. Eventually, my poor academic performance, the consistent teasing from my so-called “friends”, the stress that shadowed my procrastination, and the pressure put on me by my parents and teachers to work harder, all cascaded on me and I made a major change to the way that I treated my education.

I had suddenly decided to stop hanging out with the friends that were so mean to me. I started spending more time by myself, reading and doing my homework that I had made a habit of putting off. I got fed up of continuously doing poorly on tests and projects, and started putting work into everything I did. It was when I made this decision that every aspect of my life began to change. I did better in sports, made actual friends, but most predominantly, my academic performance went 180 degrees in the opposite direction than it had been going before. What shocked me the most in all of this was that the extra work had the exact opposite effect than I had suspected it would have. Instead of being more stressed, I actually felt very much relieved of the consistent pressure. Not procrastinating projects and assignments alleviated much of the stress that I used to have. I left middle school, and entered high school with this exact same philosophy. It was with this attitude that helped me traverse the highs and lows of high school life, and achieve more than I had thought was possible.

As I sit here, getting ready to leave on the next mile of my life. I am prepared to tackle all of the challenges that life can throw at me. I know that I may not, and will not, succeed at every one of these challenges that I face, but that is okay. It is these failures that shape who we are as people. It is through the lessons learned in these situations (the “trial-by-error”), that we as a people move on to bigger and better things. Failure, as they say, is not the opposite of success, it is merely part of it.