Member-only story
Imagine this paradox.
It’s the summer following my senior year of high school. I already earned a semester’s worth of college credit during high school but I am enrolling in adult school to retroactively earn my high school diploma. Plenty of factors precipitated this paradox but the moral of the story:
when we do not proactively create an environment that is conducive to achieving our goals, by default, we actively contribute to failing them.
This story began with a young boy from a city near Los Angeles called San Pedro. As young as five my father told me graduating from college was mandatory. I figured I could make that happen en route to my dream of working in the movie industry.
When I was eight, my dad moved us to the rural, agriculturally dominated San Joaquin Valley in Central California. It was not an environment teeming with the presence of academia or movies. Nevertheless, I promised myself I would return to my hometown, graduate from college, and pursue a career in the movie industry.
Fast forward to high school. I had tricked myself into thinking the druggie crowd (high on weed and low on ambition) was cool. So eventually my dream of attending the University of Southern California (USC) before going off into the movie industry, seemed like just that — a dream.