You Pick Your Destiny by Maddison

You Pick Your Destiny by Maddison - March 2017 Scholarship Essay

Imagine you could look ahead into your future as it is right now, with the path you are heading down and the decisions you are currently making. What do you think you would see? Would you be disappointed?
Thomas S. Monson frequently has said throughout his lifetime "Decisions Determine Destiny", as every small choice you make narrows the path you tread on toward what you hope will be a bright and prosperous lifetime a little more every day, until you arrive at your future and can look back on what you've chosen. There are things that keep your path more open so that you have more freedom to make your life whatever it will be. These choices can include making good, uplifting friends, staying away from addictions, and overall just deciding to have ambition and a happy attitude. It's been proven that those choices lead to a more successful adult, such as the great Michael Leatham, a successful engraving business owner. He chose in high school to have good friends and to work hard in what he was passionate in, and now he owns the most successful engraving businesses in the United States, with clients such as the U.S. Government and the BSA.
On the flip side, however, there are decisions you can make that will cause your pathway to the future to become more and more narrow, until you are trapped and being crushed between the two walls. It's terrifying, but the decisions that lead to that are becoming more and more common among youth. These decisions include drugs, alcohol, apathy, lack of ambition, and no drive to succeed. Each one of these things limits your options more and more until you have none, and you're left struggling to escape the crushing walls of the path you allowed to close in upon yourself. A very close friend of mine allowed that to happen to him. He began as an extraordinarily talented theatre and music students, and one of the few people who want to go into the entertainment industry that you can look at and actually see him making it there. My friend began attending an accredited University in a musical theatre major, while playing for the soccer team at the same time. Then came his decisions that have now ruined him. One night after a particularly rough day in his classes, my friend gave in to the pressure from his roommates to "forget his fears" and drank copious amounts of alcohol. The results were instantaneous. He became as regular drinker at age eighteen, and sank into deep depression. He could feel the walls of his pathway closing in on him but couldn't stop that which was making it happen, eventually turning to attempting suicide as an ultimate solution.
Fortunately, his roommates stopped him and rushed him to the hospital, thus saving his life, but a few short weeks later he was arrested for underage drinking and had his soccer and theatre scholarship taken away. My dear, talented, wonderful friend is now fighting to make it in an expensive school and is only falling deeper into depression, and it is truly heartbreaking to see.
How can such decisions ruin your life so swiftly? The answer is simple: taking the easy way is allowing an external source control your destiny. You give your future over to the people that drag you down, the substance you abuse, or the negative emotions you allow yourself to feel. When you take control of your own destiny, you decide what you will turn out to be because you want a brighter future than what anyone else in the world wants for you.
My challenge I extend to everyone is to decide right here, right now, that you will decide that your destiny is yours, and you want your pathway to stay wide open. Choose to take that hard class, smile at everyone you meet, have the courage to stand up for what you believe in, and I promise you that you will be a successful, happy adult, the master of your life.