Gimmie, Gimme, Gimme and Gimme

America, where are your Manners? Grow up! No one owes you anything and you aren't entitled!

“Entitlement is simply the belief that you deserve something. Which is great. The hard part is, you'd better make sure you deserve it. So, how did I make sure that I deserved it? To answer that, I would like to quote from the Twitter bio of one of my favorite people, Kevin Hart. It reads: My name is Kevin Hart and I WORK HARD!!! That pretty much sums me up!!! 

I can still hear these sentences ringing in my head," WOW! You have Professor Davis for English 101? You are crazy! Someone should have told you about her and how tough she is on her class. If I were you, I would drop her class or try to get another English teacher because she makes you work for everything." Professor Davis had a reputation of being tough and frankly speaking she didn’t care what people had to say about her. I inquired about Professor Davis and her style of teaching and everyone told me that she's tough and to run in the other direction. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to change my schedule, so I decided to keep the class. I mean how bad could she be, right? At the end of the day, I had to take English 101 and I couldn’t get around it. I will never forget our first day in Professor Davis’ class and you wouldn’t forget it either if you arrived late. Everyone who came late to class was told to wait outside the door until she instructed them to come into class. Thank goodness I didn’t arrive late. I didn’t want tardiness to be my first impression with Professor Davis. After all, I had already heard how tough she was, and I didn’t want to be an example that day.

The class was packed with about thirty-plus students and when she was ready, she asked us all to settle down, passed out the syllabus and started to teach the class. Everyone was so shocked! This is day one and she’s teaching. I’m sure that everyone was thinking the same thing, but no one had the guts to ask Professor Davis why we were working on the first day of school. Finally, one person raised their hand and asked her the question that everyone wanted to know, “Are we going to stay here the whole entire time? Don’t you know today is the first day of school?” You could hear a pin drop as Professor Davis leaned back on the desk behind her and explained to us that we are in college now and that it was her responsibility to teach us. She explained to us that our parents sent us here to learn, we are not entitled to a “free class” and now that we are in college, we are adults and should start to shape our minds as future leaders. Once she was done, she continued with the lesson, informed us about our first paper we had to write and told us that it was due the following week. Man, what a rough day! But not as rough as the grading of our papers. 

The day Professor Davis passed back our graded papers it reminded me of a scene out of a horror movie where blood is dripping from the walls and dramatic horror music is playing in the background. In the famous words of Kevin Heart, “Let Me Explain!” 

You see, Professor Davis had a VERY particular way that you had to write your papers. It was outlined in our syllabus on how she graded our papers and how our papers should be structured. I still remember her style, to this very day on how all paragraphs should be written:

1. The first sentence in EVERY paragraph must be a simple sentence.

2. The second sentence in EVERY paragraph must be a compound sentence.

3. The third sentence in EVERY paragraph must be a complex sentence.

4. Lastly, the fourth sentence in EVERY paragraph must be a compound- complex sentence.

Wow! Talk about learning to be a structured writer, not to mention, creating a new love/hate relationship for using transition words. Lord knows, I probably never paid a lot of attention to transitional words until her class. Nevertheless, (Ha! See what I did there?), Professor Davis made sure we used them frequently. Our first assignment was rough. I’ve never considered myself to be a strong writer, but I didn’t think that my writing skills were off the deep end. Judging by the faces in the room that day, I’m sure many people had the same thought. Professor Davis had a way of using a red pen that would make anyone feel like your paper was evidence in a crime scene. Many people in the class thought that Professor Davis’ style was too tough and because so many of us had low grades on our papers that she should grade on a curve. Other teachers did it, why couldn’t she do it as well? Many people felt like she owed it to the class, but she wouldn’t grade on a curve because she let us know that we earned the grades we received, and she wasn’t obligated to give us anything. 

Week after week I watched the class get smaller in size because people didn’t want to do the work that Professor Davis required, and she wasn’t changing the way she taught her class for anymore. Rather than accepting Professor Davis for who she was and remaining in her class to become a stronger writer, a lot of my classmates decided to quit because they weren’t receiving the outcome they felt was deserved. Out of the thirty-plus students in my English 101 class I was one out of ten students who passed, oh excuse me, I mean I was one out of ten students in that class that EARNED every bit of that STRONG “C” that I received in that class.

So many times, we hear people complain or talk about what they aren’t getting in life. Blaming life, people, finances and lack of education for all the things that they feel like they should have right now. Many times, people want to put in mediocre work and instantly get huge results. The only way to truly feel successful is through hard work, perseverance, setting goals, executing goals and resisting a sense of entitlement. It’s so funny how people want so many things out of life but aren’t willing to do the work to achieve them. When things don’t go as planned, most people complain about the situation and talk about how they deserve success versus disappointment. When things don’t go according to plan, we should see it as a way to learn, grow and take a step back to evaluate the situation. How do you expect for anyone to invest in you if you aren’t willing to invest in yourself first? How do you expect to start a business if you aren’t willing to create a plan? Why do we expect success to come easily without experiencing some disappointments? Just because we make plans, set goals and empower ourselves to achieve our goals, it still doesn’t mean that we are entitled to success instantly. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

Often times, in life when we encounter failure, in the moment we don’t see how it can impact our lives. We get stressed out, burned out and rather than spending time constructively to solve our problems we get stuck in our thoughts. We spend more time complaining about why we should be on top and why we deserve to be successful. We talk about all the hard work we put into a task and how we deserve a positive outcome. Instead of losing faith in your accomplishments, getting disgruntle and over analyzing everything that went wrong, change your attitude, look forward and don’t look for a reason for why you deserve the success you feel you deserve. We all have moments of weakness (including me) when we have these feelings, but you have to remember that you have a greater purpose! Don't let disappointments put you in a place of entitlement! Pick yourself up and try again, again, again and again! You are your biggest supporter!

Gone are the days that we used dial up connections for internet usage. It would take time to connect to the internet, but we waited because we understood that it took time to connect to the service that we needed. In this day and age of high-speed connections, “…. instant gratification through technology has conditioned us to expect what we want at the moment we want it.” - Devon Franklin. Everyone wants success, but like high-speed internet we want to push a button, instantly connect and reap the benefits of success. It’s funny how dial up internet conditioned us with so many life lessons. When we take the time to wait, learn a craft, create a plan and accept failure during the process we will obtain great results. 

In closing, Vince Lombardi says it best, “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”

P.S. - Would you believe me if I told you that I took Professor Davis for English 102? Well, if your answer is yes, then you are correct! Here’s to hard work and determination!

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