A Knack for Excellence Is striving to graduate with Honors really worth the struggle? You might be wondering, is he really taking it there? Well, Yes I am. What if you gave and dedicated your life and soul, solely on achieving this honor and still don’t make it? Yes, I’m sure it looks great on a resume and one may feel like they have accomplished life’s greatest feat, especially when graduating from a Harvard, Yale, Princeton or any other highly-notable University with such prestigious of a honor; but neither life nor success in life is solely characterized by acquiring A’s in school. So is it really worth it, and what does it truly mean to graduate with honors? As the film “With Honors” depicted, for Harvard it meant everything, but he realized the bigger picture in the end. I believe graduating with ‘Honors’ should be considered more than a goal. It should be considered a way of life, a lifestyle so to say. In the film, “With Honors”, ‘Harvard’ was at the mercy of Simon, the ‘Harvard Bum’ who found his thesis paper. Even though Harvard failed to graduate with honors from Harvard, he essentially did one thing right when he chose to chase a dream of graduating with Honors. He set his goals high! He set his eyes on the prize and began a figuratively climb upward the likes of a Mt. Everest; with Mt. Everest being his graduation from Harvard with quote, unquote, honors. Simon taught them that just graduating with a flimsy piece of paper can only get them so far, that there is far more to life than meets the eye.

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence,” as said by arguably the greatest football coach of all time, Vince Lombardi. Life is a never-ending maze and with this comes everyday challenges. Everybody wants to have an inner knack for excellence, an inner desire to be great, success in this crazy world that we live in. The only way to achieve this desire is to be the best we can be at everything we do so we must give it our all, one-hundred and ten percent! We must rise knowing that we may fall, and in fact will fall, but the key is that we must get back up. While we all come from different walks of life, we all desire to be quote, unquote, successful in life. Not only to graduate from school but also life with ‘honors’.

My growth through this semester has been a daily occurrence. The lessons in class and the assigned readings have taught me everything under the sun, from ‘A-Z’ when it comes to dealing with the Sport Business industry. In my opinion, the three concepts that I grasped the most were that; there is no exact plan, persistence trumps talent, and we must learn to strive to leave an imprint wherever we go, a little corny, but in other words to leave a stamp so bodacious that wherever this life may take one it may be seen and says I came, I saw, and I conquered. Before this class I have always felt like I have had the potential to be great, have always wanted to be great, and to do great things. Earlier in the semester, Professor Cutting asked each and everyone in class the question, not in these exact words but something along the lines of “At what point/position in life will you stop and say wow this is what I have been dreaming most of, I am on top and this is where I want to be at.” I boldly said I want to be able to be the CEO/owner of a major sports team. A little shocked by what I said, Professor Cutting without poking fun at my dream graciously said, “You know your going to need a lot of money to do that right?.” I laughed and without a doubt and with a little snicker I subtlety said, “I know”. Yes, I had and still up to this day have those dreams but I was missing out on the most important aspect. The only way to tap into this big dream was by acting upon those dreams. I want to make it known that yes, I don’t know exactly how or exactly when that dream will come true but what I do know is that it will not stop there because I will continue dreaming and growing through this life striving for the next level of excellence. The tools to excellence are right in front of every single one of us, the nails are in our hand, and we just have to grab the hammer and pound away. I am in my junior year and truthfully, I have never been the academic type, more of an athlete so to say. I must admit I have not received the best of grades while here at UCF because I thought I was going to just walk-on the UCF football team, play my way through my senior year and be off to the NFL to do bigger better things. That never materialized though due to certain circumstances. “Different strokes for different folks” is what my father always says and I was starting to believe that maybe college was not for me, maybe I need to be out there rapping or something or runoff to California and start up an acting career, yes I contemplated dropping out. I do not know whether it is more of a burden than a blessing, financial wise, to even graduate. Matthew 7:7 says, “Ask and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” The biggest mistake I’ve made while in college was not asking for help, not going to my advisor or SARC for extra help as I ought to, trying to do everything by myself but I have come to the hard reality that in this life you cannot do it by yourself, no one has. So with that being said, I want to graduate with the personal honor of knowing that I may eventually go along another path I gave college my all, building relationships and networking with every individual that could or would bring me closer to my dream, and did everything in my best effort to make it. Those are the type of honors I want to receive. Those are the truths I want to live by. In a nutshell, yes it is worth the struggle, for I believe graduating with ‘Honors’ should be considered more than a goal. It should be considered a lifestyle that everyone should be ever-so-wanting to adopt. While in this class I have come to realize that in this life that is filled with so much ambiguity. We have to realize three empirical ideas about life and success in life: that there is no exact plan, persistence trumps talent, and we must learn to strive to leave an imprint. We all are on this great journey and though we may walk different paths we, whether consciously or unconsciously have the same goal, and that is to graduate life ‘With Honors’. Not only should one search for knowledge but one should apply that knowledge to his or her life. Do not stay in college searching for eatable garbage, nobody wants to be a ‘Harvard Bum’, so dream big, live life, take chances and for heavens sake be ambitious. Have the audacity to be great, utterly, having a knack for excellence.

References

Vince Lombardi | About. (n.d.).Vince Lombardi | Home. Retrieved November 16, 2010, from http://www.vincelombardi