I spend more time than I should on Facebook, and am a participant in a number of interest-groups that post the usual stuff. Recently, someone posted a general question for a group, more or less as follows:
What was the most difficult or challenging thing that you accomplished when growing up?
After thinking about it for a while, it occurred to me that there was nothing I could cite. I mean, there were a few things that I did that required a bit of effort, but nothing significant. On the contrary, when I was confronted with anything that would be difficult or challenging, I walked away. For example (one example of a few that I came up with), I very much enjoyed playing basketball as a yoot, and after failing to make the HS team in my 9th and 10th grade years, I finally made the team when I was a junior, but I was conspicuously the 14th man on a 14-man squad. I sprained my ankle and had to miss a week during the pre-season, and when I got back to practice, the coach told me I would have to work extra hard to learn the plays and defenses, to make up for my lost week. Adding it all together, and realizing that I probably wouldn't get any playing time anyway, I just quit the team. A more industrious yoot would have taken that as a challenge and at least tried to make it to the second team by the end of the year. But that wasn't me.
In fact, I never took on any challenges or voluntarily did anything difficult until I went into the Army at age 19. After that, I took on a lot of challenges and responsibilities, and worked my way through a lot of garbage, but I simply didn't have the maturity to do that when it might have done me the most good.
So what about "you"? I'm not talking about having a difficult life that you had nothing to do with. I'm asking whether you voluntarily challenged yourself to accomplish anything significant when you were growing up. Like being an Eagle Scout, or volunteering to take AP classes, or learning to play an instrument or learn a foreign language that was not required. I did a lot of such things as an adult, but never as a kid.
What was the most difficult or challenging thing that you accomplished when growing up?
What was the most difficult or challenging thing that you accomplished when growing up?
After thinking about it for a while, it occurred to me that there was nothing I could cite. I mean, there were a few things that I did that required a bit of effort, but nothing significant. On the contrary, when I was confronted with anything that would be difficult or challenging, I walked away. For example (one example of a few that I came up with), I very much enjoyed playing basketball as a yoot, and after failing to make the HS team in my 9th and 10th grade years, I finally made the team when I was a junior, but I was conspicuously the 14th man on a 14-man squad. I sprained my ankle and had to miss a week during the pre-season, and when I got back to practice, the coach told me I would have to work extra hard to learn the plays and defenses, to make up for my lost week. Adding it all together, and realizing that I probably wouldn't get any playing time anyway, I just quit the team. A more industrious yoot would have taken that as a challenge and at least tried to make it to the second team by the end of the year. But that wasn't me.
In fact, I never took on any challenges or voluntarily did anything difficult until I went into the Army at age 19. After that, I took on a lot of challenges and responsibilities, and worked my way through a lot of garbage, but I simply didn't have the maturity to do that when it might have done me the most good.
So what about "you"? I'm not talking about having a difficult life that you had nothing to do with. I'm asking whether you voluntarily challenged yourself to accomplish anything significant when you were growing up. Like being an Eagle Scout, or volunteering to take AP classes, or learning to play an instrument or learn a foreign language that was not required. I did a lot of such things as an adult, but never as a kid.
What was the most difficult or challenging thing that you accomplished when growing up?
