As I look at my peers, at those in my generation, I see many flaws. Now, don’t get me wrong, every generation is flawed. The Baby Boomers were selfish, Generation X saw and caused a lot of bad in the U.S., and so on. Every generation has flaws. Ours, though, millennials, have a fatal flaw.

We have always lived in a world of electronics: computers, X-Box, cell phones, we have it all. With all this technology and progress in this and other fields, we are very used to instant gratification. I will be the first to admit that waiting for something to happen, or worse, having to work for it, is much harder than it should be. We are a society where it makes total sense to take off work for five days to camp outside of Best Buy because the iPhone whatever is coming out. Call me old fashioned, but I feel that this instant gratification just isn’t working for our generation anymore. When everything in your life is handed to you, and handed to you mere hours after you proclaim your need for the item, you look at the world much differently.

There is so much value in hard work. Working for something is not very fun. It is the harder way to do things for sure. Working requires you personally to put in hours of painstaking effort for something. That work, however, also gives you a connection to whatever you are working for. Think of a school paper. Yeah, you may be able to sit down and write it in 45 minutes, get a decently good grade, and still do well in the class overall. You could, however, spend hours and hours writing, researching, proofreading, and perfecting and get an A. When you devote that much time and effort to a paper, that much hard work, you are much more likely to be emotionally invested in it. You want to know what you got on it, what the professor thought, and if there were any changes that you should have made. That paper goes from just another drab assignment to something that you will always remember.

Working hard for something, whether a grade, new phone, or even a relationship, makes you appreciate having it so much more. When you are handed something, it’s a great feeling at first, but that thing tends to lose meaning quickly. It fades into the background of a busy life. Something that you worked hard for, however, is much more likely to hold a special place in your mind and heart for a much longer time. I know that it isn’t fun. I know that spending 10 hours on a paper, working a month to save for a new phone, or devoting countless hours to building a relationship with someone that has the power to end it in a second is not easy. It’s so easy to take the easy road, however, this is my plea. Don’t. Don’t take the easy way out, don’t be unappreciative, don’t be a stereotypical millennial. Take the road less traveled, work hard, appreciate your success, and stay humble. Great things come to those who wait, we just have to be patient enough to let those things come to us.