In The End, No One Can Help You, You Can Only Help Yourself

This I Believe…

In The End, No One Can Help You, You Can Only Help Yourself

I believe that the only person I can truly depend on is myself. Most children are brought up thinking that they can depend on their family and friends during times of need. I believe that these people, who are expected to help, don’t have to. If I end up in a rough situation and a friend helps me out of it, I learn nothing. If I don’t take up my responsibility to fix my own problems, then what’s to prevent me from repeating the same mistakes? Nothing, by seeking help from others I am personally crippling myself and jumping on a road to some type of a failure.

Ever since I started playing football, which was at a pretty young age, people told me that I had a lot of potential with the sport. It started with the usual, and expected, family support and eventually it would spread to friends, coaches, teachers, and sometimes people that I didn’t even know. By the time I was going to enter high school as a freshman my town, and the people in it, had very high expectations of me. It’s not like the pressure hurt me or anything like that, it actually helped me gain confidence in myself if anything. The thing that hurt me was the fact that people were telling me that I was going to be great, and after so long I started to believe them. This resulted in me caring very little about my education, over confidence, and even preventing me from reaching my full potential as a football player. It was not as if I was a fluke as football player once I entered high school. I was a great player in high school, but for two and a half years of my high school career I did very little training and relied solely on my natural talent. And I feel that if a person has a good amount of natural athleticism, they can be a good high school athlete. There is one thing that kept me from becoming a great high school football player. If I was mature enough to not have become dependent on what people told me and I had worked hard, it would have put me in a much better situation going into college. I had always wanted to go and play division I college football. Instead of taking the compliments people gave me and using it as a boost to further myself as a player, I simply settled with this and figured it could get me to where I wanted to be. I realized that this was not going to be a possibility a short time into my junior year. It was made clear to me that there are much better football player’s in the country and that I am not even close to being a top one. As I write this I say to myself, “At least I didn’t realize it too late.” And some people might read this and think the complete opposite. The truth is, I worked hard in school and trained hard for football my junior year and was eventually lucky enough to get a scholarship to Bentley College to play Division II football. This is not only a very good football program but it also is one of the top business schools in New England. No matter what there will always be the thought of, “What if?” What if I hadn’t allowed those people to get into my head, would I be where I am today or would I be in a better place? The feeling that I got after my senior season was much better than the feeling I got from any of my other seasons. Not because it was my senior season, but because I had worked extremely hard and I became noticeably better as a running back. I took my life into my own hands and did something with it. It was easy to do work when people made me, but that’s not enough. I had to be able to make myself work in my free time, I had to do my part and study and train. People can only help so much, there has to be desire, I had to truly want to succeed in order to do so.