Limitless but untappted by Miguel

Limitless but untappted by Miguel - July 2019 Scholarship Essay

Wishing to make our dream a reality, working as hard as possible, getting up after every time we fall down, and blazing through all the obstacles that life throws at us in order to achieve our goal: that’s passion. But passion will only take us part of the way. He who knows nothing will understand nothing, and there for, will never create something great. To create something that can truly be considered exceptional, you need a passion for learning. A thirst for knowledge that doesn’t just extend to the basic of the profession we’re entering, but of other fields that could prove useful in the future. Sadly, most students find this to be quite difficult, since they see everything outside of their profession as unnecessary. These people lack a passion for learning, which will hamper their growth, and prevent them from reaping the benefits that are ripe for the taking.

The thing about professions is that they are all grouped into separate categories to separate them from not only other fields, but other professions in the same field. For example, art has many fields of expertise, from still lives, to abstracts, to landscapes, to even cartoons. While someone aspiring to become an animator might just focus on the learning about creating cartoons and moving them around, without the other aspects of art that animation isn’t so special. If the animator explored other styles of art outside of just animation then their little animation can be so much more. The character in the animation could get a background, and as such get his own little world. Both the character and the background could be drawn in their own distinct way to make them unique. And the back ground could also look very surreal, in order to draw people into the world. Why limit the possibilities of your work by restraining yourself from learning skills from other professions in your field.

However, we shouldn’t limit ourselves from learning skills from other fields, since while they can seem useless, they may actually come in handy in the future. Sadly we are often barred from this due to a simple lack of interest in that particular subject. We’ve all had those classes; the ones where we sit with our first to our cheek, tuning out the teacher’s voice as our thoughts scream: just end already! We usually see these classes as nothing more than an inevitable waste of time, since we feel that it won’t help us in our quest to enter our field. But that is simply untrue, since while it may not offer an immediate benefit to us, it may actually prove help fill in the future. Let’s go back to the example of the cartoonist. Let’s say the cartoonist was asked to create a long-running story. A cartoonist who only knew how to create animation wouldn’t understand how to write a good character or how to create a flowing narrative, and as such would create what would amount to a lackluster experience. But a cartoonist who read well-known literary works, and learned about character archetypes and the inner machinations of those archetypes in his literature class can get a better model of what his characters could be like. He could also learn about story models like the hero’s journey, and use that as a model for his own story. Literature isn’t the only thing the animator could draw from though: they can use their knowledge of basic biology to create a race of living plants that have a society that feels alien to us, they could use their knowledge of history to model events in the narrative, they could even use a rare equation that most people wouldn’t know as the answer to a booby trap. The possibilities are literally endless, but there is no way to see them if we remain ignorant.

While some people say that ignorance is bliss, I believe that that life bears no fruit. Had we lacked curiosity, we would have never know the power of stone, the growth of the plants, and the value of fire. Had we not prayed for our loved one’s longevity, we would have never gotten to where we stand today. Yet we didn’t stop. Because we wanted to know more, to cure even more people, and create even more tools to help with our survival, we have come a long way. We did this because we understood the basics of our fields. We did this because we incorporated things that seemed meaningless into our field, and it worked. We did this because we wanted to grow and improve our work, our lives, and ourselves. We did this because we had a thirst for knowledge and passion for learning, that lead them to creating things that could truly be called spectacular.