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Student Life
Life @ SC

Do It, Believe It, Push It

By Pénélope L., Grade 11
I strongly believe in the power of personal development. Self-motivation, self-belief and self-discipline are the keys to achieving your goals and becoming the best version of yourself. However, I think the biggest obstacle to personal growth is procrastination. 
 
Procrastination is quite simply the worst thing you can do to yourself. By constantly pushing tasks to later, you're choosing to be average and undisciplined. As Chris Williamson, a famous podcaster, said, “Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Telling people, you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.”
 
So, my first message to you is simple: stop procrastinating. If you want to achieve something, start now, don’t save it for later, just do it.  
 
But action alone isn’t enough. It all starts with belief—belief in yourself. Because if you don’t believe in yourself, who will? Even if your friends, teachers, coaches or parents believe in you, it won’t matter until you believe in yourself. They can support and inspire you, but they cannot do the work for you. No one is going to build your future but you. Everything begins with you. It has to come from you. I am confident that the best gift you can give to yourself is believing in yourself. Believing in yourself is the root to every challenge, success, failure you’re going to face in your life. We talk to ourselves more than anybody else talks to us, so we must give ourselves that grace, we have to challenge ourselves, we have to be tough to ourselves but also give grace to ourselves, and that’s what balance is.   
 
People love talking about the greats and how well they are succeeding, but they never really talk about how they got where they are. Of course they don’t, because we don’t like talking about failures and challenges. We like talking about wins. You don’t want to talk about the rocky, slippery road but only about the beautiful view up top.
 
But I want to talk about it. I want to talk about my failures, because this slippery, rocky road full of challenges and failures built my character. Not making Team Quebec the first time, making Team Quebec but not playing my position, coming back to my team and not having the role I had. Those are called failures, downs, whatever you want to call them, but I call them opportunities -- opportunities that I embraced and took advantage of to get better.
 
I also think that failure is essential to success, “Because if you don’t fail you’re not even trying.” Denzel Washington said. When you fail, you have to get up, you need to want to get up because if you don’t, what you built was just a complete waste of time.
 
Some people ask why keep going? My answer to that would be the exact same as Christian McAffrey who says that people need to keep going because there is possibility that you can make it and that is enough. Just the thought of maybe you can do it should be more than enough for you to keep going, even if it’s the lowest odds. 
 
When I have opportunities presented to me, I count myself very lucky because I don’t go through them alone. I am surrounded by wonderful, successful people that I trust. These people make me better. When you surround yourself with winners, you start to win more. When you compete with people who want it more, you start to want it more. That becomes addictive. If you want to be faster, run with people that are faster. And for me those “faster people” are my parents, mom, dad, my brothers and my friends. I love these people so much and I admire each and every one of them. With people like that in my life I am bound to be lifted up.
 
Like Brad Pitt once said in a speech, “I was reading a passage recently where a character was asking which is more important the journey or the destination, and the other replied it’s the company,” and I couldn’t agree more.  
 
 So, I’ll leave you with this: Thank you to my parents, brothers, and friends you make me want to run faster every day.  

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