Excuses...

I thought I'd put a new post up this week until Jesse gets around to adding his final post about his actual marathon experience. Anyway, I've wanted to use this quote (I just added it to the side where the rest of the quotes are) for some time now and I just figured I'd add it to the quote section and write about it this week especially since I feel Jesse took a HUGE chance by undertaking a marathon challenge...here goes:

I teach inner-city kids all day long.....all day long I see kids who have already given up on themselves, their future, their life in general...it's very depressing and damn near emotionally exhausting on a very daily basis. I came to a conclusion years ago when I was teaching in inner-city Baltimore...I had kids who wouldn't even try in class. They just accepted their failure and didn't seem to care either way. What a shitty way to go through life?! Anyway, I concluded that in a lot of cases, their willingness to accept failure was because it's easy to fail when you don't even try! It gives you great excuse (you could always say:"of course I failed, I didn't even try!")! Sure you're gonna fail when you don't try....it's like having a safety net, it wouldn't reflect upon you as much as if you REALLY tried and failed...as if failing at something reflects sooooo negatively on them. They think that somehow, failing at something would mean that they, themselves, are a failure. I fight that attitude everyday in soooo many ways.

I began thinking about this as I read Jesse's post. He said a lot of people say they wanna run a marathon but they just don't' have the time...that is BS and just as much a likely excuse as many of my students use to not even try. I've been saying this again and again in my previous posts: take chances! Accept new and different challenges! How many times do we think of things that we'd really like to do, dreams that we often dream....but we shoot ourselves down before we even get started cuz we've already decided that we couldn't do it, that we couldn't succeed, that it just wouldn't be practical, prudent?! I'm not saying that everyone should run marathons...what I am saying is that if you re the type of person who continually lets yourself off the hook with good excuses not to try things...QUIT IT! What victory, what achievement is there in not even trying? If you haven't figured this out yet, learn it now: accept that you will fail in many things in this life...know that failing does not mean you are a failure. Know that you need to learn from those failures.

"Boats are always safe in the harbor, but that's not what they're for"

Thanks for reading,
SEE YA ON THE HILL!
Michael