There is so much responsibility that comes with being a high school senior. Being trusted with setting a good example for the underclassmen around me as well as juggling the responsibilities of a job, getting good grades, leading organizations and applying for colleges and succeeding in all of those tasks, is a little hectic.
However, I've learned a lot about powering through the confusion and chaos that is my life at the moment.
As someone who has grown up in theater, there's one saying that has stuck with me since I first heard it: fake it till you make it.
If you're in the middle of a scene and someone misses an entrance or a line, you can't just stop and go back to the beginning and start over. You have to get creative and make it work.
Faking it 'till you make it is a lesson that has proven to be more valuable than anything I've ever learned in my public school education.
No matter what, never stop working towards what you want. Set a goal, and get there. Whatever you have to do, just keep going until you find the path that leads you to where you need to be.
This may seem a little obvious, but knowing where you want to end up is one of the biggest steps to getting there. You can't have a journey without a destination and vice versa.
Everything you do from the moment you decide where you want to go should be in pursuit of that one goal or idea.
Accepting the fact that you don't know what you're doing is the hardest part. No one likes to feel like lost, but sometimes you just have to pretend like you're doing everything right before you can actually do anything right.
It’s a pretty common fear that someone is going to notice that you have no idea what you’re doing, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: no one else knows what they’re doing either.
Since the beginning of time, anyone who has ever done anything with their lives has always started out with nothing. They had an idea, and they just ran with it until something came of it, and then reached where they wanted to go.
The same goes for leaders and other people in positions of power in everyday life. I went into the college search having no idea how I was going to pay to go to school for four years.
Now, I’m on track to go to my top university with almost 100 percent of my tuition paid through my powers of persuasion and pretending like I deserved every penny of it.
I promise that you can do whatever it is that you want to do and you will make it out just fine. Don’t worry.