In the course of our daily lives, it's so easy to feel swamped and overwhelmed. It's so easy to say that the teachers were tough, or the books were boring, or the exams were impossible. It's easy to say that you didn't succeed because you weren't meant to succeed. It's easy to say that you can't do something.
I've found myself quitting a million things before I am able to fully succeed at them. Three years ago I bought a set of calligraphy pens and tried to learn how to write in beautiful scripture. I didn't succeed as quickly as I would have liked, and I decided that it simply wasn't for me, though I would have loved to be good at it.
When I was in the fifth grade, I decided that I wanted to knit. My grandmother taught me how to knit and I spent every day at recess for weeks inside with my teacher knitting instead of going outside to play. I was determined to make a scarf for myself. After a month, however, I missed being able to play with my friends and decided that the scarf simply wasn't being done fast enough. I brought it home and left it in my room never to be completed. (It turns out my Mom or Grandmother found it and finished it for me, but I had just left it to rot).
Last year, I joined the Bhangra Team at UConn and worked hard to improve myself at the dance. I found that though I loved the dance, I was never quite good enough. I felt like I worked harder and more seriously than many people, and yet I reaped little of the benefit. Where in the beginning I spent hours working on improving on my own, with time I became disheartened and came to a realization that I was simply not cut-out for the dance. Instead of keeping motivated, I watched others succeed from the sidelines and simply wished that I could be better.
Over this past winter, I decided I wanted to try designing my own clothes after having watched season upon season of Project Runway. I spent hours drawing designs and thinking about cuts of fabric. Before I got started, I decided to take out an old shirt of mine and cut it up to practice some stitches and get warmed up. I went down to the sewing machine, and within 10 minutes, the needle head broke and there was a ball of tangled thread locked into the machine with a small swatch of my fabric. I quickly tried to do some damage control and yank the fabric out of the machine with a pair of scissors before my mom would notice, and never went back to it.
The pattern is simple. I develop a passion for many things, but I quickly lose motivation when the results are not obtained as quickly as I would like them to be.
Watching Nyle DiMarco win Dancing with the Stars (after having won America's Next Top Model) just a few weeks ago has completely changed my perspective. Here was a man that was blessed with a handsome face and wonderful personality, but was born into a multigenerational deaf family. And yet, he triumphed over not one, but two highly competitive televised competitions.
Imagine trying to dance with no music, but needing to stay on beat. Imagine performing in front of millions of people and not being able to hear them cheer and applaud you. Nyle DiMarco had to do just that. Nyle and his partner, Peta Murgatroyd developed a system by which she would squeeze his hand to indicate the beat or a particular dance move. By recognizing the squeezes on his hand as well as visual cues, Nyle and Peta were able to dance in synch with each other and the music. The pair danced in a variety of styles throughout the season, and never once faced a challenge they could not overcome.
Nyle DiMarco mesmerized audiences and viewers worldwide, not because he was deaf, but because he turned out to be an incredible dancer. This is not something he was born doing, but something he worked incredibly hard to do. A person watching him dance would find it hard to believe that he was anything short of a professional, let alone an individual with a disability. Watching Nyle dance is a reminder to everyone that while the rules of the game are always changing, one thing will not: hard work will always pay off. If you feel like your hard work isn't paying off, it just means you have to work harder.
So many of us take the term "hard work" lightly. I feel like I've worked hard at my passions, when in reality, I still have not worked hard enough. If a deaf man can win Dancing with the Stars, surely I can knit a scarf, or write beautiful calligraphy, or stitch and design my own clothes, or be a great Bhangra dancer. I've given up too many times and much too quickly. As Professor Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture famously said, "The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough."
Nyle DiMarco is the prime example of an individual that was faced with an enormous brick wall, and triumphed over it. He sacrificed hours of his life that he could have spent relaxing or hanging out with friends, and devoted it all to his passion for dance. He didn't let anything stop him from his success. He knew he would have to work harder than other people, and so he did. He successfully beat out every contestant on the show, though he had the largest disadvantage from day-one. Nyle is an inspiration to everybody out there who has ever had a dream that they felt they weren't good enough to achieve. He is the face of personal triumph. I will never again look at my failures as anything other than opportunities where I did not put in 100% of my effort; I know that if I put my mind to the task at hand, I can achieve it. Giving up is failure. Working hard is success.
