It's about love

My parents are outstanding at what they do.  They're great people, and have done a great job instilling their great values in my brothers and me.  They always pushed us to do our best in school, and when we got bad grades they were always pretty genuinely disappointed in us.  I have a lot more experience in this category than either of my brothers, so I consider myself the resident expert.  Anyway, I always thought that they just wanted me to get good grades.  I was always pretty scared of bringing home bad report cards.  It was terrifying.

Then I realized that they weren't disappointed in me for getting bad grades.  They were disappointed in my lack of effort.  You see, if John and Jennifer stress one thing, it's going balls to the wall.  I don't remember them ever taking the easy way out, and if I ever did, there was hell to pay.  The two times that my dad has been most angry with me came after basketball games where I didn't play as hard as I could.  As long as I provided effort though, there was never anything but pride for me from them.  That's why I can't stand when people don't try things or if they back away after something goes wrong early.

There's a kid who is infamous at our Lady's fine university purely because of his record levels of douchebaggery.  We're going to call this fellow Scott.

I honestly saw him wearing the exact same outfit as the kid in the pink, and doing it seriously.

I know one person that likes Scott.  One.  As in, that's it.  Literally everybody else that I know who has interacted with Scott has nothing but animosity for him.  Anyway, Scott was in one of my classes, and it's definitely a very hard class.  On the first test, he didn't do as well as he'd hoped, and he decided to drop the class.  Not too uncommon, happens every day in college.  But, this dude already has an internship lined up with Goldman Sachs, the New York Yankees of jobs.  This was an econ class, which is extremely important if he's actually going to be an investment banker, and he decided against toughing it out because he wanted a 4.0 on the semester.  Let's review.  He already has a job for this year, this class would help him learn for his job, but he dropped it because it was hurting his GPA.  This is a serious problem.  Where's the motivation?  Where's the love for learning?  Where's the effort and the hard work?

He's obviously a smart kid, but instead of busting his butt and trying to earn the best grade he possibly can, he's copping out and making himself feel good about himself because of his 4.0.  This really bothers me.  Too many people want results.  Not enough people want to work to get there.  This would be like if Scott had been flown to within a half mile of the peak of a mountain, climbed the rest of the way, and then claimed that he had successfully climbed the mountain.

Bullshit.

The best things in the world are the things that we work to earn, the things that we put our passion into, the things that we love.  It's hard to love something that's placed into your lap, because there's no value to it.  The reason that everybody loves walk-ons is because they're there for the love.  They're not trying to use a college team to vault themselves into the pros.  They're not riding it out for scholarship money.  They know there's a good chance they'll never get playing time, but they love the game and the work is worth it, even if they never get to see the A+ results that they might want.

Someday they'll make a movie called "Tom"

I try to avoid doing things just because the results will benefit me at some point.  Sure I'll benefit from my Notre Dame degree, but I want to love the things that I learn along the way.  I want those to be worth it.  What's the use of a degree if you don't know what you did to get it?  I'm sure there are a lot of people at this school who are here because of the degree they'll get.  That bothers me.

"Why'd you want to come to Notre Dame?"
"Isn't it obvious?  For the girls."

I love this place.  If I didn't I wouldn't be here.  I love everything about it.  It's the greatest place in the world.  There's no place better.  I love it.  And being someplace that you love, doing something you love, being with people you love; these are the greatest feelings in the world.  If we go places to get things and don't enjoy the time we spend going there and being there, if we do things to get results and don't enjoy the actual act, if we meet people and use them just to get something out of them without really valuing them, we're really missing out.

People have asked me why I write this thing.  I love writing.  Writing is a release for me.  I'm really good at having a lot of thoughts, and this is a way to get them out.  It's a way to reassert my beliefs, to make a record of what I think is important, and while there are always certain people I think would find each post valuable, but I don't write because I think I know better than anybody.  I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life or what's important or what they should be doing.  I don't think I'm "holier than thou."  I just need a release. 

That's the other thing about hard work.  The more time we put into something, the more it becomes explicitly ours.  If we take the easy way out, what have we gained?  A meaningless reward?  Trophies and honors and awards mean nothing without the things that they're based off of.  Giving me an Oscar wouldn't make me a good actor, it would just give me a paperweight.  Giving Scott a 4.0 doesn't mean he's learned anything, it just means he knows how to work the system.  I'll take someone with a farmboy work ethic and a value for learning over somebody with good grades any day of the week.  It's not about results.  It's about love.  If results are good, that's just an added bonus.