Never give up is so much more than just a cliché.
Regular readers will know that fellow LfD author, John Lewis, has been posting regularly on the subject of remarkable people. I have found them inspiring, to the extent that I’m going to depart from my usual safe area of economics and tell a personal story. It’s a story of family dynamics, the power of sibling bonds and why hope and trust in the future, especially for young people, is so, so important. I have called my story the Power of Words.
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I can hear it like it was yesterday, resonating in my head, crowding out the doubts and negative thoughts, filling my mind with possibilities: yes, I CAN do it!
I was in my junior year of college and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. It was becoming quite a burden.
Because I had always been good in school, i.e., the “smart one,” everyone had expected so much of me when I went to school. I really envied my older sister; she had always been the pretty one, the popular one, the one who got invited to the prom by not one, but three young men.
And, it seemed to me at the time, she was so lucky because no one expected her to go out and conquer the world after high school. She didn’t go to college; she went to secretarial school and studied to become an airline attendant instead.
I envied her in every way possible! But at least I had something: I was “the smart one,” or so I thought! Years later, my sister went back to school to study psychology. She earned a 4.0 [four straight ‘A’s. Ed] and was invited to continue on to earn her Ph.D. I’ll be darned if she wasn’t the smart one, too! And she is a wonderful and thoughtful person to boot! But I digress.
Learning from Dogs 