Our Generation Does Not Work Hard
Why Today’s Young Adults Need a Reality Check and Fast
Photo Credit: bostonsports.mlblogs.com
Excuses Break Character
I was walking back from my dining hall the other day when I heard the dialogue between two students nearby. They were complaining about being cut from the soccer team and how neither of them “could find time” to do the preseason workouts.
As I listened, I became more and more bewildered and enraged and couldn’t believe my ears as they said ludicrous things like they weren’t Coaches type of players and that Coach was terrible and would regret cutting them. I got back to my dorm, angry and frustrated at the stupidity and ignorance of these two students, and just thought “Our generation is soft.”
The Only Way to Succeed is Through Hard Work
Our generation has been cossetted and pampered, and that has done us a disservice, because we do not know how to work hard for something we want. Instead of taking responsibility and blaming ourselves when we are unsuccessful, we instead search for any excuse to push the responsibility away.
The problem lies in our generation’s inability to accept that if we want something, we have to go get it, and the only way we are going to get it is through hard work. As Eric Thomas says in an inspirational speech given at Michigan State University to incoming freshman:
“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.”
As students, we make choices that influence our everyday well being, and we have to live with those choices whether positive or negative. We choose to succeed, or we choose to fail, and our generation does not understand that these choices are completely ours.
Larry Legend
People who are successful work for it. National Basketball Association Legend Larry Bird is arguably the hardest working athlete in sports history.
Bird won.
It’s as simple as that. He won because he was willing to outwork his opponents, and took pride in doing so. He would throw himself onto the gym floor diving for lose balls, sacrificing his body to gain possession.
In high school, Bird would wake up at 5:00 AM every morning and shoot over 500 shots before school even started. He sacrificed everything to reach his goals and did not care what it took.
Don’t Find Time, Make It
People who are successful do not “find time” to do things, they make it.
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned By Becoming a Student, is a book written by Rebekah Nathan that explains what the best college students do. In it, she describes her experiment in which she went back to college in her mid-fifties, posing as a freshman. While discussing the secrets to succeeding in college, she states, “If you plan your time well, you can have it all” (111). Nathan is talking about college students, but this theory applies to every situation.
Time management and hard work are the keys to success. Time wasting is one of the biggest killers of this generation. Those students in the opening dialogue who “could not find time” to complete the preseason work outs were wrong. They choose to not find time when, in reality, if they really wanted to make the team, they would have made time to work out.
Our generation wastes a countless number of hours on unbenificial social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. If students would delete these social networks, and take the time spent wasted scrolling through news feeds and apply it to reaching goals, they could make time to succeed. Instead, they would rather make petty excuses to push the blame away from themselves.
Today’s Generation is Soft
Today’s generation needs to grow up and man up quickly. I am ashamed to be part of a generation who would rather make excuses than make time to reach their goals and achieve success. Today’s young adults would rather waste their time on social networking sites rather than apply that time to reach their goals. They do not understand that hard work and sacrifice are the only ways to become successful, or if they do, they are unwilling to exert the effort needed. As the great Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Nothing worth having comes easy.”
