If You’re Going To Shoot For The Moon, Make Sure You Have A Working Parachute

Ever since my freshman year, heck, even middle school, I have been a ‘planner’. I plan out my days meticulously, down to the minute, to the point that if a person were to follow the schedule, they would either be insane or extremely productive and insane…and the thing is that I was neither. Well, the insane part can be debated, but no matter how much I wrote in my planner, nothing would every really go as I planned.

For the longest time, I thought this was a flaw in my own self, I was lacking self-control and the motivation to just get up and do it. And perhaps this was true, I always did have trouble with self-control. However, as the years went on and my schedules became more spontaneous and haphazardly changed, I realized there was a flaw in my attempt at organization, but it wasn’t what I thought it was. In my mind, I had trouble following the standards I set for myself, but in reality, it was the standards that were setting me up for failure.

Everyone says that if you work hard enough, the days of success in the past will set you up for a great future; but in my experience, this isn’t true. I’m not saying that working hard won’t help you, but the thing about growth is that it is an ongoing experience. If you don’t keep developing yourself, you will start to slowly decline. So, you have to set your standards higher and higher with each step up you take.

However, this can be difficult. A feeling I came to know too well, especially during my entry into college, is the feeling of wondering when everything got so hard. As a ‘smart’ child growing up, I have never had to experience any real difficulty in my schoolwork and so I set these impossible standards for myself, thinking they would be just about as difficult as everything else had been. But of course, I was wrong. It has taken me over a year to realize this, but you can’t shoot for the moon and hope you land amongst the stars (which is terribly scientifically impossible), you have to climb up there with every painstaking step and just hope you can make it to the next one.

So, here I go into my second year of college, a little scared, but with a little more understanding of my self and the steps I need to take to get to the moon and beyond.