Think about yourself and the goals you want to accomplish in the next five years. Ten years. Twenty years. Where do you see yourself?

Now think about yourself right now. Are you doing the things necessary to prepare yourself for the things you want to do in the future? If not, ask yourself why.

There are hundreds of thousands of people that share similar goals as you, so in order to achieve your goals you must get ahead and do the things that others won't.

As a college student, I can fully attest to the temptation of wanting to sleep in and skip that 8 a.m. class, or go out on a Thursday before a big test, and I have been guilty in the past of both. As a freshman, I would go out every single Thursday regardless of what I had to do on Friday. While it is great, and highly encouraged, to go out and have fun or catch up on sleep, sometimes it is not the best idea. Now I know there are some people that can go out all the time, all while maintaining a great GPA but those are very rare cases.

Something that I have learned to do when I am tempted to put something before my school work is to think about my future self and how the work I am doing now can help me reach the goals that I have set for myself. Sometimes it can get really easy to lose focus of what your end goal is, but maintaining that determination can make it all worth it in the end.

This concept of striving for your best possible future does not only apply to what happens in the classroom, it can apply to clubs and organizations, service or a job or internship. For example, one of my goals during my time in college is to build my resume and myself as well-rounded and experienced as possible. In order to achieve this goal, I have taken many leadership positions on campus and worked on becoming a better leader overall. This is something that I feel a lot of people can learn to do more of because there are so many opportunities to get involved around campus no matter what your passions and strengths are.

If you look at a lot of the successful people in the world today, they all were motivated by their future goals and they pursued them relentlessly. There will be countless Thursday nights with friends throughout your life, countless opportunities to sleep in and countless excuses as to why you can't reach your goals. Ignore all of them. You can do anything that you put your mind to and work hard toward achieving.