What is the definition of success? Being well liked? All knowing? Wealthy? If you asked multiple people what success meant to them, you definitely wouldn’t get the same answer twice. That’s the beauty of the seemingly simple concept of ‘success’– there is no definition. No matter what your personal option may be, there’s one common ground nearly all ideas of success share: Education.

Being a student, you’re surrounded by opportunities to learn, grow, and prosper. There’s no big secret to grabbing these chances by the horns, holding on tight and making them your own, all it takes is the confidence to reach out in the first place. The feeble existence of opportunities of every imaginable caliber is often overlooked by students, who typically are just doing everything they can to scrape by day to day. The fact that these opportunities are actually in your grasp? Unfathomable!
School provides you with many outlets to grow outwards into world around you. Within one building, you have people eager to see you succeed, extracurriculars ready to rocket-launch you into what you’re passionate about, and qualified teachers to expand your knowledge about almost anything, just to name a few.
Alas, only a handful of students year after year will take full advantage of these connections. By the time kids reach high school and college, the majority are slowly melting into sluggish piles of laziness, stress, and the overwhelming desire to just get by. It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind and begin striving for mediocrity. One second you’re in your elementary school’s ‘enrichment’ program, and the next you’re ripping your hair out while desperately investigating how to get your grade up in your AP U.S. History class. My dear lost souls, school is so much more than this! Sure, the founding fathers were important, but don’t ever forget that at this very moment, the world is at your fingertips.

There’s no better time to start than right now, with all the experiences you can imagine laid out before you. Life is moving so fast. Don’t be a sluggish pile of decomposing education. Get out there and grab hold of something that could guide you to your definition of success!