Make Up Your Mind
Make Up Your Mind
As a teenager growing up in Hawaii, Obama was suffering from an identity crisis. He had a need to belong but felt he fit in nowhere. As a result, he began to blow off his schoolwork and even experiment with drugs. His mother was afraid of the path he was on, but he eventually awoke from his temporary stupor and decided he didn’t want to end up where he was headed:
“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.”[1]
When Obama said, “Enough is enough,” and decided to move toward more positive things in life, like getting serious about school, it opened up all sorts of possibilities for him. And I really don’t have to tell you the level of success he ultimately gained as the result of his hard work and his refusal to give up even when he failed. But he went on to become the forty-fourth president of the United States, and the first black man to hold that post.
Your life is too valuable to leave in the hands of bullies and negative thinkers. You cannot expect another person to take care of your needs;
[1] Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. 1995, 2004. Three Rivers Press: New York, pp. 93-94.
Think Like A Winner – Act Like You Won
