|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Isla Carr | ||||||||
| Success Story | ||||||||
| Summer 2005 | ||||||||
| �"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry" | ||||||||
| Robert Burns | ||||||||
| One of my biggest successes this past year is in how I look at my successes. The definition of success is as diverse as the population attempting to define it. What I see as success may even be failure to someone else. I have always tried to be open to other people's ideas of success, so I hope you, the reader, will stay open to mine. | ||||||||
| I recently read an article in the July 2005 issue of the Readers' Digest about people who succeeded in their chosen fields against all odds, "Yes, I Can: Seven Inspiring Stories of People Who Proved the Naysayers Wrong". I found the article intriguing, but the one piece that impacted me the most was a quote by Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic after much trial and tribulation. He said that there was no real difference in his failures and his successes. He said that you cannot succeed all of the time and that sometimes in order to succeed you have to fail in order to learn what to do differently next time. He lets his failures guide him as much as his successes, if not possibly more, because he understands that success is not always something he controls. | ||||||||
| His words on success are similar to the understanding I reached this past year about success. I have often been accused of not celebrating my successes. It is not that I do not celebrate success, but that I realize how close success and failure really are. I think that many times the difference between success and failure is sheer luck. For this reason I do not like taking full responsibility for my successes, because I know they are not fully under my control. I no longer blame myself completely for my failures, because I realize that they are also not under my control. I do, however, pride and chide myself for the factors affecting both my successes and failures that are under my control. | ||||||||
| So after many years of realizing my successes were not fully mine to claim, what led to my breakthrough that I was not wholly responsible for my failures? Extreme circumstances that I could not control (which by the way is a nightmare for a control freak like me) put an end to my previous notions of success and failure. After 23 years of living on this planet, I had just about gotten used to the fact that I can't control everybody and everything and that despite my plans and back-up plans for my back-up plans, things would not always go they way I expected. | ||||||||
| My motto used to be Ben Franklin's famous saying, "Failure to plan, is planning to fail." There are very few things in my life that I feel I have failed at. I have always thought that if I wanted something bad enough and was willing to sacrifice enough, then I could succeed at whatever I desired. With teaching, especially in the school I was placed in, there are so many factors that are out of your control. | ||||||||
| The first semester I constantly berated myself on not being able to be more successful. I knew I was up against insurmountable odds: not having a door, having partitions instead of walls, having a ten-foot gap between a partition and exterior wall that opened to the most popular section of the hall (which housed the seventh grade bathrooms, the gym and the outside hallway to the cafeteria), working in an environment where the only consistency was the lack of consistency. I never knew what to expect and so I never could really come up with a successful plan. I let my failure to plan around and in spite of these things get in the way of any success I might have experienced. | ||||||||
| Light, no matter how dim, seems brighter in the darkest corner. I felt that I was in a dark corner and I knew I had to find some light to get out. It wasn't until after Christmas that I began to see success in the fact that I got up and drove to work every morning. Going to work everyday, although it was a small success, was something I had a measure of control over. Not having an administration that supported me or upheld our district discipline code was something I did not have control over. As I started focusing on the things that I did have some control over, no matter how trivial, I started to focus less on all of the things I could not control. | ||||||||
| They say that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. While I do not feel that my life was ever in any real danger, I definitely think that my first year with Mississippi Teacher Corps was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I also think it has made me a stronger and better person. I was tested to my limit many times and looking back sometimes I am not sure how I made it. The important thing is that I did make it and the way I look at life has been permanently altered due to this experience. | ||||||||