"To Give Anything Less Than Your Best is To Sacrifice The Gift" by Ryan

"To Give Anything Less Than Your Best is To Sacrifice The Gift" by Ryan - November 2018 Scholarship Essay

Fellow students have thrown pencils at me in class, put me in trash cans during recess, and I've always been the demoralizing last pick in pickup basketball. This has been because I have always been known as the small guy who wouldn't retaliate. After all this bullying, I went on to achieve my dream of playing Division I tennis for UC Berkeley my freshman year. How did I achieve this goal? My inner-drive to surpass expectations.
I love proving people wrong and playing above my 5 foot 5-inch stature; I have used every ounce of negativity as motivation to beat people a foot taller than me on the tennis court. To help make my dream of playing Division I tennis a reality, I chose early on in my tennis career to live by Steve Prefontaine's famous quote: "To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift."
I knew I would have to outwork my competition to make the most out of my slim frame. While others could rely on their height to deliver punishing shots, I had to spend extra time in the gym to make sure I could retrieve these powerful shots while generating my own power. As I continued to spend infinite hours on the tennis court, I earned the nickname "The Machine"; I was known as the first person to show up to the training facility and the last one to leave. Seeing all of my hard work pay off first hand was extremely rewarding as I noticed the harder I worked the better results I earned. This constant progression caught the eyes of the tennis coaches at UC Berkeley, and I immediately grabbed the opportunity to compete for UC Berkeley when the coaches offered me a spot on the team during my senior year of high school.
My freshman season on the team was tough at first; college tennis was a step up from the juniors as I was know competing against the cream of the crop on a daily basis. However, I stuck to my motto of giving my best every day and experienced some great results near the end of my freshman season.
In one of the last matches of my freshman year, I was playing on the stadium court against a professionally ranked player. Not only was this player professionally ranked, but he was 1 foot taller and about 80 pounds heavier than I. However, this did not scare me one bit because I knew that all the hard work I had put in would pay off. Sure enough, it did. I proved every spectator wrong; the high school-looking freshman from UC Berkeley defeated the professionally ranked Stanford player.
While I no longer compete for the varsity team at UC Berkeley, I continue to live by Prefontaine's quote. This quote has taught me the importance of giving your best effort to anything you do; even if you are not the most talented individual, you are still given the gift to maximize your potential, and you should never give less than your best effort in anything you set your mind to. I have been motivated by this quote to earn a 3.95 GPA in the classroom and to complete world-class projects for the finance department at First Republic Bank over this past summer. This quote shows that I can be counted on to give the best effort in anything that I do. I believe this will serve me well as I continue along my professional journey. Managers will notice the outstanding effort I put in and this will help me earn leadership positions in whichever profession I choose. I am excited to continue to live by this quote and see where it takes me down the road.
Thank you in advance for your consideration for this scholarship. You can be sure that I will use this scholarship to further give my best effort on a daily basis.