Strive
It’s the action of following through on a personal commitment. It comes after someone has made a promise or determined what they have to do and is before overall accomplishment or complete failure. It’s pushing towards a goal that has been set; it’s the word Strive. Strive comes from motivation, and motivation comes from promise or commitment that a person has made. The things that make strive possible are promise, dedication, and respect.
Promise creates reason to strive and the promise Greg Mortenson made to Haji Ali is a great example. In the book Three Cups of Tea, written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, there is a mountain climber named Greg Mortenson. He promised for his sister, who would later die from massive seizures, that we would climb one of the world’s highest peaks and leave her necklace there in her memory. Wanted to do this created motivation for Mortenson and began his strive to complete his mission. Although he failed in his attempt to fully scale the mountain, Mortenson stumbled onto something else that he would want do. In an isolated tribe, in Korphe, Pakistan, there is a village that is in great need of education. Greg Mortenson promises to the village leader, Haji Ali, “I will build you a school… I promise.”So he sets out on a great odyssey to build a school. Strive does not come out of thin air, someone needs to have purpose to do so. This promise made to a poor village gave purpose for Greg Mortenson to strive to build a school.
Strive is the actual dedication towards struggle and does not exist unless obstacles do. An example of dedication is the NFL team, The Seattle Seahawks. The year that Shaun Alexander was MVP, Most Valuable Player, he had played a majority of the season with a broken wrist. Although he had a broken wrist he strived to help his team reach the Super Bowl. Being a runner in the NFL requires you to use all parts of your body including your wrist, so playing with a handicap like he did and still leading his team to the Super Bowl is an extreme example of dedication. Another simple gesture of dedication is the way that NFL player Larry Fitzgerald plays football. He is a wide receiver, and every time he goes to catch the ball, he will put himself into any kind of outcome in order to catch the ball. This would be a means of physical dedication. Some duties are more severe than others, while on the other hand, there are such missions that only are done for the fun of it, like playing professional football. Even though Shaun Alexander didn’t have to travel to 3rd world countries and build schools, he still had to strive to achieve greatness in the NFL. Like Greg Mortenson, his mission to complete the school in Korphe, required great sacrifice and required him to strive very hard to complete it. The word strive is much underrated and its definition falls into many situations, regardless of the severity or length.
To strive is to have boundless determination to succeed. Even though the word strives is a verb or an action, it is also being honorable and respectful to a person’s word or commitment. Respect is something of great importance in the overall outcome of someone’s mission. When someone finally completes something, they don’t want to look back and see that they had stepped on people while they strived to accomplish. It’s not just about finishing something, but maintaining a great morale in respecting the people they work with and the things they encounter. If respect is kept during an adventure, there may be things waiting for them that they didn’t expect, like friends or connections for the future.
Striving is being true and not second guessing oneself (Being realistic is fine, but trying to find any reason NOT to follow through is being inconsistent and untrustworthy). It’s not procrastinating. Not to say everything needs to be done in a timely fashion, but maybe your word won’t mean much if it’s put off for so long. If Greg Mortenson would have procrastinated and not prioritized himself and then returned to Korphe, Pakistan 20 years later to build the school, it probably wouldn’t have meant as much.
Finally after one has strived, and after all the hardships, they can safely say they were true to their word and can feel comfortably accomplished. There are going to be a lot of things that are going to require us to strive, whether they’re small things or extremely important, regardless, what is really going to matter is that you were faced with a dilemma and you worked through it.
