The Student News Site of Granite Bay High School

Granite Bay Today

The Student News Site of Granite Bay High School

Granite Bay Today

The Student News Site of Granite Bay High School

Granite Bay Today

Devote Your Life to Something Meaningful

  I walk out of my home and into the busy streets of my hometown where I’m met with a plethora of middle-aged men and women sluggishly making their way to and from work.

  I see them in and out of cubicles, accompanied by stationary chairs and mounds of white paper with a permanent frown and an obvious thirst for some kind of excitement.

  I find nothing appealing about that kind of life.

  I go to work and hear co-workers remark that if they were my age they would go back and do things differently.

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  I walked into my job one day and I saw a co-worker holding a couple of her fashion designs. Because I’m interested in fashion, I jumped at the opportunity to ask her about them. She told me she’d always wanted to be a designer but never had the courage to move to New York and pursue her dream.

  I sat there a little dumbfounded because she is extremely talented and the only thing that discouraged her was the fear of failure.

  This is so heartbreaking to me because instead of becoming a successful designer, she settled for a minimum wage job and is now living paycheck to paycheck.

  You get one life to be the best at whatever it is you’ve always wanted to be.

  I often see people stuck in a shell of themselves, settling for a life that is so far from their potential, scared to make a change because of  a potential fiasco.

  The lifespan you’re given is a length that could end at any day, any hour, any minute. Why should you waste time being unhappy with your life when you could be so much more? When all you get is one short life on the earth, you need to make the most of it.

  One thing I’ve always noticed is how afraid people are to step over their personal boundaries in order to jump into possibility. And I don’t mean hurl yourself off a cliff because you only live once – I’m talking your dream job, your dream location.

  Anything you could imagine is real.

  As we enter our final year of high school, we also enter a very bittersweet experience. On one hand it’s exciting to be the oldest on campus, but at the same time there’s a hovering pressure to know exactly what we want our futures to look like.

  I’m no fortune teller, but after seeing the adults before us, there is one thing I do know – I cannot fathom accepting a mediocre life.

  Like the rest of my peers, I’ve always been enticed by a fast-paced, exciting life. But when do we start that life?

  We graduate high school, and then we go to college; after college, we’re expected to find a steady job to support ourselves. Twenty years later, those once-fiery teens now find themselves confined to their cubicles.

However, as we leave high school  we get the amazing opportunity to design our own futures. We have the platform and the opportunity staring back at us as we walk out of  our high school gates and into adulthood. The only thing holding us back is our own thoughts and fears. The fixed mindset of conformity – both tragic and completely false – is what prevents us from forging the lives we dream of.

  For most of us, our definition of success is in the dollar sign and the path our parents have forged before us, but there are billions of ways to be successful without being traditional.

  Most people don’t realize you can get paid and prosper in almost anything; if you find the right outlet, you can even get paid to do what you love.

   I see college as a clean slate for opportunity – to find that outlet and work hard enough so we never have to settle for something we don’t truly want.

   I’m both excited and terrified to enter that chapter.  Don’t let time escape you.

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Devote Your Life to Something Meaningful