The Disparity Between Giving Your Best and Decieving Yourself To Thinking That You Are by Tyler

The Disparity Between Giving Your Best and Decieving Yourself To Thinking That You Are by Tyler - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

Early in my junior year I was awaiting my grade on an essay that the class had written the previous week in Advanced Placement Language and Composition, the teacher was going around the room handing back the papers without compliment... Until she reached me. Ms. Rosa handed my paper back to me, flipped open to the back page and pointed to the bottom of my essay and then proceeded to walk away wordlessly. I received a pretty good score of a six, but when I looked where she pointed I saw that she had written “It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re giving your best, but much harder to actually give your best” in the purple pen she loved to use.

I spent the rest of the week trying to figure out why she had written what she had on my paper; I had gotten a six! That was good right? I brought this exact train of thought to her a week after she had perplexed me with that statement. She proceeded to sit me down and teach me more in half an hour than I learned in all of my previous years of schooling.

She informed me that I only got a six due to the College Board guidelines of grading, and if she weren’t following it she would’ve given me a three just because she knew I could do better than I had shown. She told me to read my essay over again with as little bias as possible and to consider that day and then tell her whether I actually did my best or not. I sat in her classroom reading my essay and slowly came to realize that she was right: I hadn’t at all done my best work on the essay.

This taught me two lessons at the same time. Number one; Grades don’t always reflect the quality of somebody’s work, nor do they reflect the amount of time spent working on an assignment. I had written the essay in about twenty five minutes, and the College Board gives forty minutes to write an essay expecting THAT essay to have flaws. So, with the twenty five minutes it took me to write there were a decent number of grammatical errors and misspelled words, which would have been minimized if I was more meticulous and applying myself more than I had.

Number two; It truly is easy to convince yourself that you tried your best when you didn’t even come close. There are two big factors to this that I consider the large components: fatigue and hubris. Fatigue is what causes people to say “Good enough” or “I did the best that I could” most of the time, and hubris causes us to believe that our work is much better than it is.

This small lesson has had a huge impact on my life. I have made less excuses for when I don’t try my hardest, and I spend more time reviewing my work for mistakes and small flaws than I ever would have previously. Also, the outcome doesn’t always reflect the amount of effort I put it, sometimes it comes down to luck. Now I spend less time believing that I did my best and more time actually doing my best.