A similar situation happened during the middle of my senior year, shortly after I'd been accepted to the colleges I'd applied for. After I received my acceptance letters (some time in late November or early December) I kept it to myself--in hindsight, I'm not really sure why; I think I just liked to keep a distance between me and most of my classmates. Anyway, some people were still waiting on their letters and others were bragging about where they were going. During a conversation, one of my classmates slammed me for being unrealistic since the only two schools I'd applied to were Georgia Tech and Clemson. According to them the odds of me getting in to either of those colleges were slim, I should have applied to an easier school, and I should also be thinking about what I would do if I didn't go to college. I remember thinking to myself, "what do you mean if I don't go to college?" It had never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to college. In my mind, that was just the next step in life. Graduation from high school equaled entrance to college. It also hadn't occurred to me that I wouldn't get accepted into Georgia Tech or Clemson, my only concern had been how to pay for it.
Yeah, ok, I'll admit maybe a lot of the above was just me being cocky without knowing I was being cocky, but I often wonder where I'd be if I hadn't been. A lot of people I knew who had the mentality that maybe they would move out or maybe they would go to college, never did. Some of my peers have run back to mom and dad as soon as something happened and completely given up on leaving the nest, while others have struck out and left without a backward glance. I'm not saying its a bad thing that they didn't go to college or didn't move out--different strokes for different folks--but I can't help thinking that my outlook on life has been one the biggest reasons I am where I am.
Being independent is so much more work that you expect at 17. After paying rent, electricity, cable, etc., I find myself in the grocery store number crunching and saying things like "if I only eat meat 3 nights a week I can afford the fruit too!" It is hard to go from having a fully stocked fridge and all the channels, to ramen noodles and hot dogs with only the local channels. If I didn't EXPECT myself to be independent, I probably would have went home after my catastrophe at UF. If I didn't EXPECT myself to be out of my parents house, I probably wouldn't have saved so much (after all there's nothing in my mind that I'm saving for...) which is what allowed me to not go home after UF. The same is true for college and a variety of other things in my life. I expected to accomplish something and so I set my mind on accomplishing it, which ordered my steps in the path of success.
Maybe you don't want to move out or go to college, but whatever it is that you want to do I think the first step is always fixing your mind that you aren't going to take no for an answer. Maybe it won't work out exactly as you envision, but I'll bet you get that much closer (i.e. with the college example, maybe you can't go to your #1 school--I didn't--but I still went). Granted belief and expectation can't do all the grunt work--I probably would have been up the creek if I'd applied only to Harvard and M.I.T, because for me that may have been unrealistic. Grounding myself into reality is a topic for another blog, though.
I think of success as a door with a bazillion locks on it. All you have to do is find the keys and let yourself in. One of those keys is confidence: belief in yourself, expectations for yourself, and trust in yourself.
"Reach for the moon; if you fall you'll still be among the stars" -Unknown
