Responsibility is not dependent upon perfection.
Success and significance are not one and the same.
For 19 or so years of my life I’ve weighed these beliefs. After two and a half years of college and several jobs and internships I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no glory in perfect scores or performance gained by failing at relationships.
I am a Clemson junior enrolled in five classes this semester. My heart is in two of them. In the other three, though I know I’m subconsciously picking up on valuable information, most of the time I feel like I’m wasting otherwise better-spent time. Lately I’ve been finding myself wanting to forsake homework and testing perfection for the sake of doing something significant with my time. Thus, this past Friday I drove to Anderson with some friends and played in the rain with the children of low-income families in a run-down apartment complex. I should’ve been writing an essay for my French class. So irresponsible yet so exhilarating. It was better than an A.
Perry Noble asked this question today: “Who do you most admire and for what quality?” Do you spend more of your time trying to be like that, or going through the motions of what will lend the the generic title of “success” ? Significance far outweighs it. The question I’ve been asking myself is: In what ways is my life and work significant beyond myself, and how is it exactly that I can tell?
Any thoughts?
