Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

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The Path to Success

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It is that time of the year when kindergarteners graduate and look forward to elementary school, eighth-graders graduate and look ahead to being high schoolers, high schoolers graduate and look toward a variety of paths forward, and college students graduate and look to a future of being productive, working, and contributing adults…or maybe turning back and enrolling in graduate school. This year will certainly stand out in history what with a pandemic leading to school being moved to homebound and online programs nearly worldwide and to traditional graduation festivities being cancelled. My son graduated from Texas A&M at some nonspecific point in the past few days—his name appeared on the big scoreboard at Kyle Field with “Degree Candidate” and “Congratulations” alongside, oh, and #tamugrad down in one corner. That makes it as official as can be in this weird era.

It has been a few years since I engaged in a graduation-time rant (I think), so this oddball year seems like a perfect time to get back up on that particular horse. I had already been thinking about this topic while I was helping my husband with some back-breaking manual labor here on our ranch. We were talking about how a person has to have a “fire in the belly” for work in order to succeed and certainly to excel. No diploma or degree can take the place of hard work and long hours.

Yesterday morning I was watching an interview with Reese Witherspoon where she was talking about her path to becoming a film and television producer. One of the last things she said was “I will put in the hours, and I will bet on myself. I am my own lottery ticket. If no one else shows up, I know I will show up, and I will put in the work.” Yes, Reese is starting from a very privileged place and gets to go home exhausted to collapse in a very nice home, I am sure, but she still has only twentyfour hours in every day. Reese Witherspoon attended college but never finished a degree.

The key take-aways from what Reese said are these: Show up, put in the hours, and put in the work. No matter which path you choose to take, success and achievement require those three things. Another celebrity type I saw on television yesterday was chef and restaurateur Bobby Flay. I discovered that Bobby Flay dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen. But guess what—he showed up, he put in the hours, and he put in the work, and now he owns many successful restaurants, has had several television shows, and has a long list of books published.

We do not need to look to Los Angeles or New York to see people who have had success by the application of long hours and hard work. There are people right here in our community who exemplify hard-earned success. I could fill up several weeks of this newspaper with their stories. Success is defined differently by every person. For some people it may involve wealth or fame, for others it can be having a solid marriage and family along with a comfortable home. No matter how it is defined, success requires showing up, putting in the hours, and putting in the work. Success is so much sweeter when you know you have earned it.

I wish success in future endeavors to all of our graduates. And by that, yes, I mean I wish you a future of showing up, putting in the hours, and putting in the work—followed by the satisfaction of knowing that you earned your success. SpringCreekArtsGuild@ gmail.com