You are on page 1of 3

Truc Tran

06/01/2015
EN001

SACRIFICING TO SUCCEED IN COLLEGE


Eric Thomas who has ascended from being a destitute secondary school dropout to
become among the most adored motivational orator in the world. In his autobiography dubbed,
"Secrets 2 Success" Eric Thomas shares three main secrets to success to the whole world. Eric
does this by reflecting on his past days living in uninhibited structures in Detroit Winters to his
rise as the most sought motivational speaker, successful husband, C.E.O, father, and educator.
According to Eric, one of these steps entails the willingness to take sacrifices like sleep, luxuries,
friendship and late night parties. However, only sacrifices on sleep and friendship are focused on
in this essay.
Friendship is one of the most significant sacrifices a student has to make to succeed in
college. The significance of friendship sacrifice is because failures of students are mainly due to
bad peer pressures and unnecessary time wastage with friends and families. Throughout my
college as an English student, I have made and still continue to make several friendship
sacrifices. For instance, reflecting back to during my first year in college, I had befriended
Bluma, a young female business student at the same college and suddenly fallen in love together.
With our love blossoming in the air, we regularly met at night, lunch hour or at break times. As a
consequence, I experienced a dwindling performance in my exams and some instances I was
forced to retake some of the exams. With such dwindling performance, I realised the significance
of sacrificing friendship as it was consuming much of my study time. In my second year at the
college, I decided to separate with Bluma removing all her hopes in marrying me after

graduation. Additionally, I have also sacrificed my family and friends. I remember having lost
four of my close relatives in accidents during my third year at the college. Despite the loss of my
close family, I could not even create time to attend their funerals and join the family in grieving
because of my tight schedule.
Sleep is the second most sacrifice a student need to sacrifice on to succeed in college.
Just like Eric slept in abandoned structures in his quest to succeed, I too sacrificed and still
continues to sacrifice on my sleep in my quest to succeed in college. During my first year in high
school, I was very lazy and would often be the first to sleep and last to wake up. More
particularly, I would usually pretend I am sick and remain in the dormitory when all students
were attending evening tuition. However, this came to change as I could not catch up with the
rest of the class members. As a result, I registered very dismal performance in my class. I
realised the significance of sacrificing sleep during an open day at school when my parent had an
opportunity to discuss my poor performance with the teachers. After which I made a dedication
to being sacrificing on my sleep by reading on my own during the night when every student was
asleep. In some instance, I would place my legs in the cold water while studying during sleep
time to avoid falling asleep. As a result, I started registering an improvement in my performance,
and this has been my main motivation for forgoing sleep in college. Forgoing sleep can enable a
student to get ample time to reflect on what has been taught and grasp knowledge.
To conclude, the two sacrifices explored in this essay turn out to be the most critical
sacrifices that any student need to take so as to prosper in their career. Thus, I would suggest that
students should sacrifice sleep and friends to succeed in college since these sacrifices have
proved very fundamental in my career. Nonetheless, also to these two sacrifices students also
need to compliment these two sacrifices with other sacrifices like partying out if they are to

enhance their success at the college. Moreover, due to the difference in individual intellect, this
essay does not intend to imply that students who do not make these sacrifices often fail in their
career. To this end, it is upon each and every student to know himself or herself and set up
sacrifices that he or she deal can negatively influence his or her career outcome.

You might also like