I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of hard work and striving towards what you want. I recently received an assignment back for Introduction to Journalism that I worked my ass off to ensure that it was the best I could produce. I have honestly never worked so hard on a university assignment to date. I followed every part of the criteria to the tee, I wrote it days before it was due and continued to edit it, I found source after source, I did so much. As confident as I was in my assignment, I didn't want to 'count my chickens before they hatched', I didn't want to automatically assume that it was as fantastic as I believed it to be. But it turns out that it was all that I thought it was, I received a distinction and a mark of 82%. As I discussed it in detail with my tutor, one thing that she said to me as she smiled and looked me in the eyes was "I know that you're working so hard and it's wonderful that I'm able to reward it".
So later I got to thinking about the significance of hard work and what it means in our lives. The reason that I worked hard on this particular assignment, apart from the fact that I enjoy succeeding, is this is what I want to do. I want to be a journalist, so doing exceptionally well in my journalism subjects is incredibly important for me. So it makes sense to say that I work hard because I'm desperately trying to achieve my goal, my dream. I guess this is why I find it so hard to understand it when people seem to be motivation-less, when they screw around with their time and don't appear to want to do anything except get trashed.
Life without determination and without hard work seems to me to be rather pointless. If we don't have something that we want, if we only live in the moment then it seems that we're missing something big. Living in the present and without regrets is one thing, but taking those steps towards that goal makes the success even that much sweeter.
Until next time fellow humans....
