“Our greatest weakness lies in
giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more
time.” – Thomas Alva Edison. “Giving up” is not a phrase that is part of my
lexicon: it just doesn’t sit right with me. Whenever I see that phrase, I shudder.
Whenever I hear someone say that phrase, I cringe. And whenever I feel like
saying that phrase, I look at myself with pity, wondering how I could even
think about going against something I so devoutly reject. My dad raised me to
never run away from my problems, and instead, to confront them and look them in
the eye. In other words, he told to never give up, and I have lived by that
advice for my entire life. To me, there is no tangible or perceptible point in
giving up – what are you going to get out of it other than remorse over the
fact that you did not give it your all when you had the chance to? Looking back
over the experiences in my life, I realized that you really only get one shot,
and what you do to make the most out of this opportunity defines who you are.
Giving up is the last resort for many people, but I am not one of those people
anyway. Giving up is not even an option for me. If I get a challenge, I face
it. If I have to go out of my comfort zone, I reach as far as I can out of it.
Even when things seem impossible, I try my best to find a way around the
obstacles present in front of me and traverse them in a way that paves a path
of success for me. In short: I never give up.
There is always an easy way out.
Paths that require very little effort and resolve all of your problems by
simply making them disappear. I call these methods: quitting. And believe me,
the second most-hated thing in my book after giving up is quitting. Many people
consider these to be the same, but I think that there is a fine-line difference
between the two. Although you may give up at times, you do not completely
abandon something altogether if you give up – you still have a chance to come
back and make things right. Quitting is running away from all of the problems you
have, not sticking through with things to the very end for whatever
unacceptable excuse that comes to mind. Before 2014, the FHS Varsity Tennis
Team was considered a joke. Tennis itself was seen as a sport that one could do
to get the credits he/she needed to graduate while putting little effort for
two hours after school. Although I was Co-Captain of the team in 2012 and 2013,
I wasn’t really someone who could enact change, being an underclassman and
having another captain who was a junior and senior the two years respectively.
But why was tennis seen such condescendingly? Because everyone on the team was
willing to give up. They were willing to give up when they felt like it and
quit as they pleased. This year, though, I decided to change the way that things
worked on the team – instill the values of not giving up and not quitting,
trying your best and giving it your all, into the team. And guess what? It
worked! The team is much stronger now and day after day demonstrates the values
of not giving up at work. To see that one saying that I lived by my whole life
changed the way in which a whole group of students conducted themselves in a
competitive environment is extremely self-satisfying, and it just goes to show
that having the mentality that is ready to fight it out until then end goes
such a long way.
“You only live once” (yolo) is a
saying that has been crazily popularized in the past years, and through this
repetition, it has lost its real meaning. The truth behind yolo, when looked at
from a generalized perspective, is very real: you truly do only get one life to
live, and what you do to make the most of it is what you are going to get out
of it. Would you rather look back on your life knowing that you gave your 100%
in everything that you did and that you never left anything hanging? That you
never gave up? Never quit? Or do you want to look back in retrospect and
shamefully regret all the times that you gave up or quit and realize that you
lost so much because of it? Giving up, or even quitting for the matter, is not
living your life to the fullest. And this is what goes against my most
fundamental personal philosophy. You have
to live your life to the greatest extent that you can, otherwise there is
no point in living altogether. And the only way to achieve this, in my mind, is
to never, ever give up. No matter how easy it seems. Just never give up. And as
Tom Robbins said as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank
Redemption, “Get busy living. Or get busy dying.”
