Question:
What's more important, talent or ambition?
To me, the answer is clearly ambition and this is something that has been plaguing me for awhile. Sure, talent is the proof in your pudding, but without that raw sense of determination nobody will see your work, and nobody will care. It gets me pretty angry when I see people putting themselves "out there" probably because I am full of myself enough to know that I may do a better job than them, but they are the ones succeeding. I always thought of myself as a go-getter, but the truth is, I'm really uncompetitive to a point where I just back off. I really dislike this about myself. I've decided that I'm going to start looking at writing as a hobby (I hate that word though) rather than a potential career path. Teaching has always been my "fall back" but the closer I get to graduating, the more I realize that I don't want to spend years struggling to land a coveted editorial position only to be on a contract basis half the time. Instead, I'm going to get excited about putting together the best high school reading list and maybe making a real impact on sombody's life (even if that's only for a year). I definitely respect those people who go into journalism without holding back, but I've always been such a realist. It's a blessing and a curse because although I know I'm going to do great things, maybe life is about failure just as much as it is about succeeding. The concept of failure has become blurry to me anyway. Is failure not giving up on something even if it isn't working out for you? Or is failure giving up on your dream? It will be interesting to see how much freelancing I will do now that I am retiring my portfolio. I really hope I wasn't doing all of it for selfish reasons, but time will tell.
I'm climbing out of the shark pool and I'm going to sit back and watch the feeding frenzy. I guess I'm going to be seeing my name less in print, unless it's on a report card.
