Amateur

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone starts out as an amateur, right? No one can start out being a professional in any career.  There are certain qualities that a person must obtain for specific careers.  Sometimes a person can get lucky. But, in geek speak, you cannot go from being a ‘noob’ to mastering the game within a short amount of time.  Unlike video games, where you can use cheat codes, life is pretty hard to "master."

Life would be much easier if it operated like the game The Sims. In the game, teenagers become adults and move effortlessly into the work force. Sadly, this could never be possible.  But would we really want it to be possible? I think not.  Although real life isn’t as addicting to play, the Sims is a computer game and you don’t get enjoyment or praises from your achievements there.
“Your sim got a promotion? Congrats. But still not as impressing as you getting a promotion!” Hint, hint; nudge, nudge. Take that as a way of them saying, "you haven't bathed/slept in days, get off the couch and go to work."

You’re naive if you believe that life is going to be easy; life is never going to be easy.  You can’t jump straight into a career once you graduate and get consistent promotions until you’re at the top of the food-chain.  You have to work hard to achieve greatness.  Think it's going to be handed to you on a silver platter? It’s not happening, buddy.  You’re not going to operate on your first day after you’ve just graduated from medical school, you have to work up to it. When you’re starting a career, you’re starting at the bottom.

As the quote at the top says, “every artist was first an amateur,” meaning that no one is going to start as a professional.  I am going to be starting my career as an amateur who has been practicing writing for a few years prior.  Will I have a novel published within a few days of having finished it? No. Will I be given a novel to edit within the first few days? Doubtful. We all start out as amateurs but we will work up to where we want to be in life.  Today I’m blogging but within the next ten years I may have a novel published.  What goals will you set for yourself?

"Success doesn't come to you, you go to it."

-Marva Collins

Failure

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“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” - Theodore Roosevelt.

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“Failing will eventually result in more failure,” is what a concerned parent would tell their child while growing up.  We were taught from day one that failure is bad, that it would ruin our chances for a good future.  I see things differently now; I have learned that it is okay to fail. Without failure no one would succeed.  The path to success is not always as happy and clear as people would like to imagine, there are mistakes that must be made to lead us to where we want to be.

Imagine if someone has their life planned out:  what classes they’ll take in high school, where they’re going to college, what they’ll do for a living, etc.  They’ll see failure as the worst possible thing to happen to them, so they avoid it at all costs.  But really, they’re setting themselves up for failure.  Their plan would go accordingly until something would happen to throw them off.  Where would they go from there? They had never taken failure into consideration and so this small setback would ruin everything.

Failing can send us back on the right path if we want it to.  If you were never really sure about what career you want and end up failing in the one you pick, you know that it wasn’t the right one for you.  It’s the same with certain ways you choose to study for school; if your current technique isn’t working, you know to change it.  That’s what brought me onto the topic of failure:  my studying techniques.

My whole life I’ve been a ‘poor studier,’ avoiding it at all costs as if it were the plague; but I’ve always seemed to do fine on my exams... until now.  This failure, instead of being a setback for me, is pushing me to do better.  I now know that what I was doing before is not what I should have been doing.  Studying is a major part of classes and I had been lacking a lot in that department.  This failure has given me the motivation to change that part of myself and become a better student.  Sometimes it’s better to embrace the failure; after all, failure is what makes us human.