Final paper...

Chhuong Le

English 1A                         

McFarland

                       Passion, Privilege, Success 

There goes a saying that starts out defining successes at a young age. At the age of ten, you are seen as a prodigy, when you’re fifteen you’re now known as a genius. However, the moment you reach your twenties you’re now just considered a normal person. When we see doctors and surgeons making differences in the world, we only see them as people doing their jobs as people in a society would naturally do. What ever happened to that little three-year-old Asian child playing Bach’s Canon on stage in front of millions we will never know. As soon as he reached a certain age, people stopped caring. Success is only something you can define, a goal that has been reached, a part of a dream that has been achieved, or maybe even something that has made you feel better about yourself like helping at a child shelter. Success is something that is defined differently in every human being. A person living in a suburban home may not find having water running through their pipes a success. However a man in a third world country would find it a success when water is available for his toilet. Man made the very essence of success after all; we do not see ants gloating over the fact that they have found the biggest sugar cube. Instead, they take it to their ant holes in which they share it happily amongst themselves. Man has always gloated over their successes, for example we have Independence Day. The US is practically showing off to the British that they were able to separate and prosper for this long. This is probably the largest display of success the US has had in the course of its years on Earth.

The Book Into the Wild written by Jon Krakauer is about a young man named Chris McCandless. McCandless is a very interesting young man that performs differently from the rest of society’s view of things. First off, he is a very successful young man, that I cannot deny considering the fact that he was able to reach his achieve his goal of “ultimate freedom”. Secondly he is a college graduate and has achieved high grades being on the Dean’s list and was planning to go to Harvard Law. This would in turn make his parent’s extremely happy and he would be able to bask in his own success. And Lastly, McCandless was able to find his passion. That in itself is the most difficult thing to find. McCandless was born on February 12, 1968. This date marked mankind’s first real trek into the world with no order. He adapted the alias of Alexander Supertramp later in his journey. He ridiculed society and the way it treated others based on their races, appearance, and social standing. He left his humble home near the end of June and left on a journey that would be told for decades to come. Chris roams the world from Virginia to Arizona to Mexico and to his final destination, Alaska. He faces many hardships, some of which could have killed him along the journey. When he was leaving towards the Gulf Of Mexico on the rapids that traveled through Arizona, it could have very welled have killed him. However, through those hardships, new experiences were gained that he could have benefited from. He learned to live with what he had. After a long while of working to save money and hitch hike towards Alaska, he finally made it there. He achieved “ultimate freedom” as he called it. No one was there to judge how he lived, how he acted, or how he lived. It was just him in his own little world, what more could he asked for, maybe a longer life expectancy, but hey you can’t have everything. He lived off in Alaska in an abandoned bus hunting and gathering like what was done back in the stone ages, but with a rifle at hand. He lived there for a around one hundred twelve days, he decided to leave once, but the passage out was blocked by a river flowing in too violently to cross. He later died where he settled camp by consuming poisonous berries.

In this essay, I will be discussing the different types of privileges, passions, and successes that one can feel. I will use references from both Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. In the first paragraph I will define what privilege is in retrospect to those in society’s mindset of how the world should work. I will be comparing the rich and poor also using Bread Givers as an example. In the next five paragraphs I will discuss how Into the Wild connects to the concepts of privilege and passion using examples from both the book and the movie along with some Bread Givers as well. The next two paragraphs I will use the Passion Project to discuss how Passion is defined in my book. I will use lines said by the people interviewed in the video and tie this into how it relates to Into the Wild. In the next two paragraphs following that, I will be using Andrade’s speech on the more and less privileged to show how it can relate to the fact that society has affected everyone’s views on different subjects. The next two paragraphs will talk about how privilege affects people’s way of performance in a society. I will use a video that films Jeff Bliss stating his beliefs towards a lazy teacher. After that I will be discussing in the next three paragraphs using real life instances and the two books Bread Givers and Into the Wild on how education can be prevented due to the lack of privilege. In the next few paragraphs I will discuss on what success is and how to obtain it using real life examples, and the two books Bread Givers and Into the Wild. Then I will discuss in the next three paragraph how success can be prevented through things such as passion and privilege.

Now when going into the act of privilege, what exactly is privilege? Privilege is society's law on what is acceptable of certain types of people. When thinking of a man, it is socially acceptable for them to go around and about on the beaches topless, however, as for a woman, well, you get the point. We can also see in people who have higher social standing. If a poor man buys a considerably priced car while owning a trailer as a house in the ghetto, he would be seen as a fool. However, if a rich person were to buy the same car, it would be seen as appropriate considering they have the money to afford it. Also with privilege, plain words can manipulate how a person thinks. If the person looks, or seems knowledgeable to you, you would obviously listen to what he or she says. Comparing the views between college professors to a random homeless man on the streets, you would unconditionally believe that the college professor is more knowledge able in every aspect. This privilege comes from the fact that the college professor is more successful and has a degree in what they are teaching. The credentials are the credibility that leads you to trust in his words, whereas the homeless man does not have anything to show to prove that he knows what he is talking about. In a novel by Anzia Yezierska called Bread Givers, the father of four girls uses the privilege that he is the man of the house. He controls their lives, telling whom they can and cannot marry and how they should their lives. Rather than allowing them to live out their own lives, they suppress their freedom and cause them to suffer. Three of his daughters follow their father's will and live out their lives in total misery, never knowing what true happiness is. The fourth daughter breaks away from the chain and is called a disgrace in the family even though she becomes the most successful. Using his privilege, he is able to control his daughter's lives and manipulate them to play out the way he wants it to. When he marries one off to a wealthy man, he is able to gain from it, be it self-esteem or a part time matchmaking job where he literally sells off his daughter to an old fisherman. When having this privilege is available, you can make anything yours. Be it a spot in a top paying job or the support of citizens for your campaign.

In the previous works that we have done, we have elaborated about how privilege can be seen directly and indirectly by using examples from real life events, books, and even films. Tying in Into The Wild by Jon Karakaure, privilege is shown in a far more different way. Instead of a man rising to success of obtaining millions of dollars, it instead shows what society can still see of this young upper middle class white male.  Privilege can be seen out in the open by people of power, by power I mean money and social standing. As Chris In this case Chris McCandless was a very privileged young man, he was white to top it off. He was also able to live in a fairly close family along with the fact that he was able to graduate from high school and graduate from college. He had a great outlook on the future, but he chose not to go down the privileged path of having that future go into success. Rather, he took the privilege to go into the wild. For a person born into a less privileged family, the first one to college is a great accomplishment. Nobody would just simply throw all of that out of the window. To show how privileged Chis was, his father was "an eminent aerospace engineer who designed advanced radar systems for the space shuttle [. . ._­]" (18). His father held a steady job and also was involved in major projects in NASA, which made him a pretty big deal at the time. Any kid would love to brag about their parents and show off what they do for a living. With that comes the inspiration to try to become more like them, even trying to surpass them to later have their kids do the same. As more privilege is given to children, they become more critical on behalf of what their parents can do. They “can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.” (154) As a privileged individual, it seems that he did not care what would happen in his later life, he had enough of it and wanted to explore the world. His parents most likely worked hard all those years in order for Chris to be where he is, educated and now a man of society. What privilege does is that it allows you to do things that you thought impossible. When given that power, or after finding out about it, it enables to do things that you thought was once unjustified. 

It also intersects in the fact that he is not only privileged in the fact that he was living in the upper class, but by the fact that he was white. By being white, people would judge you less for what you have done. With so much social standing, one can do almost anything. Chris was a very educated young man, by being educated, it must mean that you have come from a financially privileged home. As he points out while on a journey with two traveling hippies, he is able to pull off a quote from Thoreau like it was second nature. As one person describes Chris they state that he “He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking.” (28) In McCandless' case, he has lived a privileged life. He has felt how privilege feels and can do whatever he pleases with that privilege. Chris is allowed to do whatever he wants with his own life. As I live as an Asian male in this society filled with a large variety of different people with different ethnic backgrounds, I have come to judge a person by their looks rather than their actions. Usually when you see a large man with tattoos on running down his arms, you think to yourself that he is the trash of society. Maybe he has killed one or more people and so on. However, with Chris, a man privileged enough to “judge artists and close friends by their work, not their life [. . .]” (154) is able to live in complete safety because he was raised in an environment that was less harmful than most people. In the news we always hear stories of murders and robberies, but he has a privileged individual probably did not have to deal with that.  If he so chooses to make his life better in a way that people see, having a job and living in a nice home with a family, he can so choose so. But if he wants to make his life good in the sense where he has freedom and explore the world on his own accord, he can so choose to do so.

Being a male also has its privileges. Males can do things that women cannot, such as taking off their shirts in public, making obscene noises in public (burping for instance), and even not having to be in the kitchen (sorry for the stereotype, I was out of ideas). Chris, being a male, had the ability that no other woman could have. That being that he could hitch hike, women cannot do this because, well because they're women. What does a dominant male do to a woman that cannot defend herself? The obvious answer is rape since men do not think with their upper head, you if you get where I'm going. With that said, males have the ability to justify their powers over women, we see this in our everyday lives. The head of the country has been male since the beginning of the United States. We have had forty-four presidents, not one of them being a female. Even in the animal kingdom it is shown that males are the dominant species, it's never the alpha “female" it's always the alpha male. Yes even in the animal kingdom, males dominate, from gorillas to lions. We have some deviants such as hyenas, but that is one of the few. Even in Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, Reb, the father, abuses his powers as the father. Even when they're in poverty he chooses to give away the majority of their money to charity. It would be much more sensible to save that money and support his own family in need. But because he is male, he can justify his actions as the "man of the Torah." He can use that privilege to use his family’s life support for some other reason that would make no sense to us nowadays. For Chris, he is able to make these decisions because he is a male, and because he male, he does not have to fear the options of getting raped, sure it's possible but not likely. 

Another way how it ties into the topics that we have discussed is how it relates to a person's passion. Passion can be defined in a number of ways, a dream, a goal, or even an accomplishment. As we strive to catch our passions, others are faster than others, we continue to strive on and do our best. My passion in swimming has always pushed me forward to strive for a better time, these times allow me to feel better about myself as a person, it tells me that I have not yet reached my peak, I still have room for growth. In Into The Wild Chris' passion was to get away from society and live his life in the wild. Though this passion would seem unruly and very much "stupid" in many aspects, but it still is a passion that drives Chris forward. As he says "It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...” (109). People take everything around them for granted, the beautiful scenes around you and the way nature is all there for you, no one ever bothers to take notice and marvel at how amazing the world is. Instead, they take it all for granted and live their lives in an endless loop never making it more interesting by adding more new experiences. Chris left his way of live because of the lack of difference that everyone had, they were all the same in the aspect that they all had expectations. Expectations are always met through the same daily routine of going to school, getting a job, getting paid, and living in society like everyone else. Because of this lack of difference he came up with the idea that "The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure." (70) If no one is willing to make a difference, what point is there in life? With change comes a new age, a revolutionary cause. For example, we can use the founding fathers as an example. England held the United States for quite a time period, the colonies were treated poorly and had barely any say in the government. If not for these select individuals, we would still be living the same way we did a couple centuries ago. The reason we are not is because they dared face a new journey, they we passionate in the fact that they could indeed change the course of the world and hopefully make lives if even a little bit better for those around them. They succeeded, but now look where we are, trapped in the society that the found fathers attempted to make better. The lack of new experiences has led man down the wrong path, the path that makes our lives an everlasting loop. We lack the aspiration that the past generations had to make lives better because our lives are already too easy. As passionate Chris was, he was the most radical out of all the people in the world. A man that goes against society and dared to live out the opposite of everyone's expectations. His passion has led many others to follow their own passion because it brought him joy and it too can bring them joy. 

How this relates to passion is, if you are privileged, you are welcome to follow that passion of yours. Those with less privilege will have trouble doing so due to the lack of power. For a person to become a scholar, one must have time and money. If the individual has neither, the likely hood of them pursuing the dream will be reduced to nothing. Also, if you are only a beginning artist, you have very few connections and your art will be hard to sell off to make ends meet. However, if you come from a more privileged household, you will have more connections and sell off your art fairly easily than the guy who has no one. We get a few of those lucky people who start from scratch and end up successful by following their passions, such as one of the richest people in the world, Bill Gates. Gates dropped out of Harvard later to start a failing business called Microsoft. By following his passion and gaining connections, he was soon able build this electronic empire of Microsoft later earning money up to the billions. But people that want to acquire a job in theater require connections. There are actors that have children that later become actors because of their parent's influence. An example we have is Will Smith's son, Jaden Smith. Just because his father was an actor, he was able to have an acting job while others out there who struggle and dream to perform on the big screen cannot make it because they "lack" certain capabilities.

Using the Passion Project to define passion, I realized many things in my life. What it had shown me was that going it alone is not the correct path to success, everyone thinks of himself or herself as an independent person, believing they can shoulder everything society throws at them. If that were the case, no one would be committing suicide to get away from it all. Even the people who put up the toughest fronts cannot succeed alone. What people do not realize is the fact that road to success is a difficult journey. We must face many failures before achieving a dream. We all know Walt Disney and his awe-inspiring movies we watched as children. He was not always as successful before death. He first started as newspaper editor because he "lacked" imagination. Later as he began to start his businesses, they ended up in failures resulting in bankruptcy. He kept chugging along until he reached success, on the road that only seemed to fail, he was able to once, succeed. This is even shown in one of the Disney movies "Meet the Robinsons" a young boy named Lewis is an orphaned child who later becomes a brilliant inventor. Though it's not a walk in the park for poor Lewis, he is required to face the harsh realities in life where things never go the way you plan. His inventions never seemed to work whenever he presented them, but as he grew older and learned from his mistakes, he became an inventor innovating the future's lifestyle. His motto was "Keep Moving Forward" these words still resonate in my head till this day. The road to success is a long and difficult journey, but once you find something you're passionate about, it will all be worthwhile. 

Another thing the passion project showed me was that, in life, there are two main roads you can take. One road is the passionate road, the road in which you feel like you have an interest in. This road will make you happy for who you are and you will enjoy life. The other road is road that makes money. This road will not necessarily be the road that will make you most happy, working day in and day out in a cubicle is not a person's ideal work day, unless you are the type of person who stays holed up all day in a room with a computer, for whatever reasons I need not know. The Passion Project showed me that in order to be my own person and break away from the "black armor" that is holding me back, I must keep pushing for my dreams the dreams that I want, not my parent's dreams, not my teacher's, no one but mine. My passion is to help others, I want to help others indirectly, and not having to hear a word because helping others is an obligation. What I want to do is to become a chemical engineer, making medication for those who really need it in third world counties. Where I came from, the medication was all fraudulent and many people had died because of this. I do not want to face any more loss from children who barely knew their mothers or fathers because of an early death. My father lost his mother at the age of three months; he was taken in by his aunt and abused to the point where now his cartilage in the knees has worn down. The aunt would force him to cook food for her and her family only giving my father the scraps of what was left. This was harsh for a child who was barely eight years old. If children were to suffer like this, it would be unjust for me to sit back. 

Showing how bad things can get in a society, I will be using Andrade’s speech in which he discussed the topic over students in a less fortunate neighborhood. He believed that students, or people in general are living miserable lives. This happens because no one is paying attention to what is happening around him or her rather, they focus on the things that they can only see never putting themselves in their shoes. They would always believe that they care for each other, that they understand each other, but they never actually do, the schools, bosses at work, they never really care about you as a person, and you’re more of a tool in their eyes. So, people wondering why the suicide and murder rates in Oakland are where they are, it's because of this reason that this is happening. For example, there are examples of these from literature as well. We have Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska; three girls suffer from their father's rash decisions. He believes he is making the right choice marrying them off to "good" husbands that follow the holy Torah. However, he is only doing it for his own personal gain. Rather than thinking about their happiness that will lead for the rest of their lives, he would much rather feel his own accomplishment for marrying off his daughters and gaining some sum of money and fame. His daughters come to hate their own father, marrying off to these husbands only to get away from his tyranny. They would much rather live their lives in misery than having to stay with such a father. Andrade's speech states that he wants to help students have a safer environment to work in and hopefully have adults that can understand them. He wants these individuals to have this sense of giving and never taking, hoping to help these students in their social lives lessening in the amounts of suicides and murders. A man by the name of George R. Price was an astonishing individual. He was socially awkward, but a genius in number theory and sense. He was able to formulate a formula for kindness, or altruism. He believed that kindness is only a gene that is passed down from person to person. There is no such thing as TRUE kindness, because kindness is something done out of the good of a person's heart. Rather, he found that there was always an alternative motive between the acts of kindness. When a person performs an act of kindness, it's because they want to feel the self-satisfaction of helping others. This is not because they want to help others, but in order to make themselves feel good, almost like a drug. The reason there cannot be true kindness is because, say there's a person who possess that gene for having the ability to sacrifice his or her own life for another person. That person will indeed eventually lose their life and that specific gene will be lost forever because they cannot pass it on to another offspring. So from this, the theory of evolution will come into play and show that the idea of true kindness cannot exist because those who had it have already died. This idea comes into play with Andrade's idea of "helping" others succeed in life, and hoping that students will be able to have the access to the "kindness" that teacher's show. Humans are cruel beings; they only think about themselves and only hope others will help them. Sure, you can say people such as soldiers and firemen are sacrificing their lives to save civilians, but it's out of pure satisfaction that they are able to do this. To feel good that they are doing something that will put the idea in people's minds that the soldiers or firefighters are dying for a noble cause. What I'm trying to say is that, no matter how kind a person can be, there will always be an alternative motive behind it. There's a saying "If you're good at something, never do it for free."

In my perspective, Andrade's speech was more about the social hierarchy rather than the idea of negligence. When he was discussing about Piedmont and how they separated themselves from the rest of Oakland, living in their own protective walls, I believed this was a discussion of class and the constant struggle of social hierarchy. As always in history, the rich are constantly looking down upon the poor. They see them as some kind of disease hoping they can get away from them as quickly as possible. Why? It's not like touching a less fortunate person will bring misfortune to you. From this belief though, they separate themselves from the poor and live next to people of the same social standing, hoping that the fortune will continue to circulate within their area. What they do not realize is, due to this, the poor will only continue to become poorer and rich, richer. For an economy to thrive, money must be circulating through the open market, but how can this be so if the poor have nothing to circulate? The degrading system will only cause harm to those less fortunate leading to worse conditions of higher suicides and murder rates. In order to fix this, we need to harness the ability to work out each other’s weaknesses. If the rich and invest in some business, the business will soon thrive and allow the money to circulate. The economy will once again rise and the problems will be solved one at a time. It will be a long process, but it’s the best option we have. But can this really be fixed? History has been a repeating battle of classes, each leading to a downfall of a civilization. In every history text, there's always a social hierarchy, we saw it in the Mesopotamian age back in 150 BC, we saw it in the Roman age in 31 BC, the French Revolution in the 1800's, heck even now there's a battle of the classes. We see protests for the rich to pay MORE taxes. As if they're not paying enough, we just believe that the rich are wealthy enough to take more of burden so that the poorer folk can have their burden lifted. But let me ask you this, if you have a steady income, and all of a sudden a group of people want that income to be cut in half for their cause, would you allow it? I sure as heck wouldn't. Back in the French Revolution, the entire reason why there was a revolution was because the poor were enraged to the point where they couldn't even buy a single piece of bread for a family of three. The poor literally had no money where the richer folk could dine like gods. The battle of the classes came to point where they started the working class, also known as the lower class, overthrew the kind and queen, decapitated them, and lived on by making another system. Now we're facing the same problems they were having problems of a problem that was developed from over centuries old. The saying goes that we learn from our mistakes, if this is the case, why haven't we solved this thousand year old problem? Simple, power, everyone lusts for power. If you read Animal Farm by George Orwell, it talks about the Russian revolution, but personifies the entire event in the view of farm animals. They talk about being equals and creating a system where the animals can live in harmony with one another. A system similar to communism, but upon doing so, overthrowing the farmer and gaining their independence, the pigs of the farm, being the leaders, take over the position of the farmer. Rather than it being an equal society, they've only redeveloped the old system and polished it to seem new and more equal because the leaders were ones that once were their own brethren. So in order to fix this system, we as a whole have to get into the idea of not standing on top of each other, the idea that is one for all and not all for one. But as we all know, this is not possible.

Now when talking about privilege and how it can affect people, it can make them downright lazy because they believe that they are better than everyone else. Just because someone has a job or a degree in a certain area, that certification allows them to perform at a certain standard. The guy with the red shoes, or Jeff Bliss, is an individual that knows what is good for the children inside of a classroom. In order for students to be fully engaged and learn, it is the teacher's duty to be able to bring up a discussion. If nothing is brought up, what good will sitting there and handing out worksheets do? As students are more physically and mentally engaged on a subject, new ideas and concepts can be brought up upon it. In my high school physiology class my teacher would put us into groups of four and allow us to converse the topics of how the body works. She would give us homework the night before about a topic, such as how the heart works and what causes the beating. As some people were not able to understand the reading last night, this would allow it to be clarified through not only a teacher's point of view but a fellow peer's point of view. What Jeff was doing was that he was arguing for the hope that teachers will interact with others, rather than just pass things out and expect them to understand. Some teachers believe that they should only teach content rather than actually helping students. Different people have different learning styles; others are better at retaining knowledge by just learning straight from the book, others require hands on attention in order to grasp the concept. I will paraphrase Andrade, a rose growing out of the concrete will only continue to grow if an outside source will help nurture it to health. The student is the rose growing up inside a community that only seems to reject them, the teacher is that gardener that helps that rose to grow up and shine inside the community that only seems to forsake them. If a student cries for help and no one is around, will they make a sound? Yes, but only if you choose to hear it. That's what it means to be a teacher, a guide, a nurturer, and a difference.

Teachers must also be willing to give up some of their spare time to help these students in need. What else does it mean to be a teacher, what it means is that you must teach. They must be able to not only teach content but also how to understand the concept how to grasp it and a bunch of other things that can help the student. Teachers fail to realize that they were once those same students that had those same questions. They also fail to realize that once in their life, a teacher had once made a huge change into their lives causing them to be a teacher as well. There is a passion in being a teacher/professor, that passion is to ensure that all, not just one, but ALL of the students understand the content. A survey shows that students usually enter college with no idea what they want to do in the future. However by the time they leave, something must have touched them in order for them to keep pushing onward with a dream that they have not realized yet. Future teachers are usually inspired by other teachers and realize what they want to do because of what their teachers have done for them. But the future teachers fail to realize this and ask students why they can't decide a future or why they lack inspiration, it's because they haven't found it yet. There's a phrase that goes "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine." In this context the teacher will have to provide the student with something of meaningful value, that being their time and effort to aid their growth and ever expanding curiosity of students. From there, the students will then give their full attention and cooperate with the teachers more fluidly.

Now how this ties to real life is the fact that colleges are having more and more people dropping out of schools. I feel that in college, there are many potential deal breakers. Many of which may or may not relate to one another. But either way, even with those deal breakers, I'm still here. One of the deal breakers I had to face was, well, the fact everything was so expensive. Each class is about forty-six dollars a unit along with all the books and gas that are needed to attend classes. All of which in two semesters could cost well over a thousand dollars. With all that accumulated in the time span of two years or more, more and more money will have to be spent on classes and books alone. That's a lot of money, with this in mind; you could probably just drop everything and just start working. I had this in my mindset in the beginning, but with the way I was raised, I decided to go through with college. Even though it's expensive, it will all be worth it in the far future if I am able to get a good job. With that potential deal breaker of possible money issues, Sara from Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska had to struggle day in and day out with her money issues. At one point she had no money to afford food for herself. She worked as an ironer, ironing clothes, but as she began daydreaming about her mother's home cooked food, she forgot about her job. Consequently, she burned the shirt and had to get three dollars deducted from her five-dollar pay. Sara, already in a money pinch, could not say anything it was "either [. . . her] job or pay" (224). Going to college and working part-time is a harsh experience, especially since you have to pay for not only college, but also your living expenses. In this era, jobs were scarce and if something were to happen, you would not be allowed to complain. If you did, then the boss would happily find you a permanent replacement for your leave. When you can barely afford college, what can you afford to eat? Can you live off cup noodles and bread for four years or more? With Sara's case, she was only able to afford bread, when "three dollars out from [her] wages, when every fraction of a penny was counted [. . .] Maybe for weeks [she'd] have to live on dry bread to make up for the loss" (224). Sara had to suffer with all these hardships for several years, but in the end it was all worth it. She could now afford anything she pleased, a house, food, and clothes. All of the material items she had ever wanted as a student is now within her grasps. So what I'm trying to say is, with a little hard work and a LOT of perseverance, money will no longer be a problem.

Another deal breaker was time management. As a person of the working class, this is rather hard to manage, taking three classes in the summer and working for my parents right after is not an easy matter. Now I'm not saying that my life is harder than anyone else's it's just that, if you work and study, you should be able to understand this struggle. Aside from working, I am also swimming for a private team on the side of that as well, so with classes, work, and sports, I tend to fall behind on homework. But I cannot give up on any of them, without the classes I would not able to graduate and transfer to four year institution. Without swimming, I would be super stressed about school and work with nothing to blow off my steam and keep in shape. And of course, I can't stop working, how else am I going to pay for college? All of these things cost time, money is important, but "time is of the essence.“ In the beginning of summer, I was thinking about dropping my English 1A course because of the time commitment needed to write essays and reading books. It was too much for me in the beginning, I had to read the book within a night and write out a six-page paper minimum. With that in mind, I had to do homework while on break at work. The first assignment was due the next few days, but I had barely written anything down at all. I was just about to give up, when my father decided to say that he would be able to change my work schedule so that I could be given more time to do my homework. Now I work twice as long on the weekends, but at least I have time to do my homework on the days when school is in session. With that, I was able to write a nine-page paper in one night and later compose a sixteen-page paper right after that. Even with my schedule, I was able to procure enough time to do such a thing and find out my capabilities. In a book, Breaking Through by Francisco Jimenez, a young boy, the author, and his family are illegal immigrants trying to make ends meet in America. Later in the story, the hardest working person, the family, dies. The burdens now lay on top of Francisco, having to work three jobs and study at the same time for high school. It goes to the point where he had to read an article why sweeping the floor at three in the morning in a janitorial job. Working to support a family and having to go to school are very harsh on a young fifteen-year-old boy, especially since the family isn't "legal." But with his perseverance he was able to go to Santa Clara University and become a successful author. Even if it seems hopeless, keep pushing onwards because you will never know where it will take you.

 The last deal breaker that I had to deal with was with the lack of confidence I had in myself. As time goes on, people become smarter, faster, and even stronger. Expectations grow and cause people to feel lesser of them when comparing themselves to other people. With new advances in technology, one must now find something that is even more technologically advanced, and this of course is not a simple task. A couple of years ago, the times in swimming for JO's or Junior Olympics, had always been in my grasp. Time after time, I would keep on making the time standards and feel proud of myself. But not soon after, as I grew older, the time standards became harder and harder to accomplish, pretty soon I was no longer making the cuts for the Junior Olympics. A fifty-three second one hundred free short course was not going to cut it because now there are people who are able to swim forty-six seconds one hundred yard free. My confidence had dropped considerably. Obviously this has nothing to do with education, but what I'm trying to say is that, standards are always rising. Those who already struggle cannot compare to those who always succeed. As you lose more of your confidence, you begin to doubt yourself. When that happens, quality of your work ethic also begins to drop and causes you to give up entirely because of your failures. As Chris states "I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once."(127). Rather than moping around in your own failures, you can always try the opposite and look at your successes. Even the littlest of success can get you right back on your feet because it is an inspiration to reach higher. With a small success you aim to make an even bigger one. With the growing successes that attempt to achieve, an inspiration will grow and cause you to regain your lost confidence. In the movie of Into The Wild the narrator says something that catches my attention, Chris' confidence allowed him to accomplish a feat that many people cannot do. "That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do." Confidence allows you try and attempt, without it we do not bother. Chris on the other hand had such great confidence that allowed him to experience different feelings. Because of that, the low confidence deal breaker did not affect him. 

With that said, life can also be full of happy moments, mine, not so much. So far, my life has been full of being unsuccessful. Not a single day would pass by without one of my failures being pointed out to me, be it by my parents, friends, teachers, or just any random occurrence that can be tied to a failure. For instance, when I go to Chabot, I realize I've failed in getting me act together. If I had not procrastinated in signing up for universities or state colleges, my parents would not have to lecture me day in day out about attaining he highest grades possible to transfer to an acceptable four year institution. But in order to understand that feeling of being a failure, I must also know what it feels like to succeed. One of which can be described in a form of victory. When you come out to be the victor in a competition that you have trained several weeks for, it leaves a sweet feeling of success. In the early ages of my childhood, my father believed I would be able to go far in playing basketball. At the age of eight I joined the YMCA basketball team. We had practice five days a week for two hours. Each day we would run, do drills, and have practice matches. It was a gruesome practice for eight-year-old children. At the end of the three-month session, we would have a match against other YMCA teams; yes apparently there were other teams in the area. I was not the best at basketball, considering many of my team mates towered over me and the fact that I had almost no ability to make the ball go into the hoop. The only thing I was good at were rebounds and being on defense, when I go into offense I have no ability to shoot but I was able to control the ball and assist pretty well. My team was down a measly two points. My team only needed one three point shot to win this game or two two point shots. Since nobody had the ability actually make a three point shot with confidence, we all decided to go with closer two point shots. There was only five minutes in the game before the coach called in a time-out. He told everyone to just pass it to the person most open near the hoop, so much for any other real advice. The opposing team started the game, they ran down the court in hopes to make a shot to pull away from us, a team mate was able to block it and pass it down, two minutes left. He passed it an open teammate down the court, he was in a pinch, and everyone was surrounding him, no chance to make the shot. One minute left, he saw me open so he passed it to me, thirty seconds left. I thought to myself, "Can I really plow through this crowd of people to perform a lay-up? No it's impossible." I was at the three-point line; I looked at the hoop and threw the ball. Everyone looked at it in its last seconds, it all counted. *Swish* I made it. My entire team erupted into cheer, and patted me on the back. Well, I'll never be doing that again, because once I made it, I landed on my ankle and twisted it. Oh well, least we won right? That feeling I had of winning by a hair was the feeling of utter success. Though it may seem like luck to me, the people watching were probably thinking that this was all paid off by my hard work.

         Another way to define success is through achievement. Hurdles that must be overcome no matter what the cost. Achievement in anything is a success anyone can feel, through athletics, education, or a goal that has been achieved. Once you have achieved something that you once deemed to be impossible, that itself is a success. In my short swimming career that all started in the second year of high school, I was able to achieve many awards and best times. It all could not have been done without the many months of hard work put behind all of it. I started with times that could easily be beaten by children younger than me, and ended with times that children can still beat, I know it's pitiful, children are way too fast nowadays. I mean look at Michael Andrews, a fourteen year old 6'4" swimming prodigy already going pro quicker than Michael Phelps. He now holds 34 age national age records for swimming. If that itself does not define achievement, I don't know what does. Rather than thinking that he is a "prodigy" or a "genius" it would just put his hard work to waste, he worked hard for those achievements and it was probably not handed to him on a silver platter. We also have the fact that Chris McCandless was able to achieve "ultimate freedom." Though most people would rather not throw their lives out of the window, Chris was able to achieve something that not many people can have. That would be the idea of "ultimate" freedom. This idea would probably spring from the idea of getting away from society's harsh views on everything. He was able to get away from all the hypocrites and undo the chains of law and order to live out the life he pleased. As people live now, we work slaving away day in and day out in order to make money, we believe that money is out ticket to freedom, but now matter how much we have, we can never achieve enough money. McCandless' father was a very wealthy man. He achieved many things that others only dream of getting, a good job, fame, and fortune. One can only have so much, but Chris' father only sought out for more. As people, achievement is defined by the amount of joy or elation we feel by reaching that goal, that achievement will later turn out to be success if you keep pursuing for that dream.

Another way to define success is through passion. A passion to follow and a dream to chase is a large goal in life. When you reach your goals and attain your dreams that would define success in all its glory. Success will always follow after achieving a goal in life, it just means that you were able to push yourself to your limits and achieve something that only seemed like a dream. With said, in Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, Sara was able to pursue her dreams to be a teacher. In her time period, it was very rare for women to be able to go to college and attain a higher degree, or a degree in anything at all. She being a female and working is something so radical in her family's culture that this dream was seen as impossible. She would literally have to go against the cultural norms that have been followed for decades and become the black sheep of the family. Rather than chickening out on her ambition, she decided to follow through with it and obtain a success that no one her family dared do, the success of passion. She started out with a rough start, running away from home with little money and with little food and no shelter. Rather than giving up like most of the run away children, she kept pushing forward with her passion to become a schoolteacher. She knew that her life would only get better if she kept it up. When she achieved her dream, her outlook on life was much brighter than it first started when she was with her father. She was able to afford her own house, clothes, and even find the man of her dreams by following this passion of hers that seemed impossible with the little privilege she had. McCandless also had a passion to follow that later led to his success of being free. That passion was to head into the wild and live as one with Mother Nature. Many people would look down upon his decisions as wasteful or just plain dumb, but it was much more than that to Chris. What he wanted to do was get away from the "fake" faces and fronts that society throws at him. The lies that they lay down in front of each other disgusted him and he hated the fact that he was a part of it. So, he had a passion to get away from it all, to go in to the wild where no one judges you, where you only live on your own accord with your wits and intellect. That passion took him on a journey where he had no regrets, he was actually happy. Rather than having to spend more time in a room cooped up and having no freedoms and only expectations of what to do, he ran away from it all and became something that he wanted to be. This form of success is not something that we see everyday, in fact it might just be once in a lifetime. But with that said, it still is a form of success for he was able to see that his passion was achieved, that's what counts.

Success can be halted greatly due to certain circumstances. I can claim many things prevented any of my successes, but that would be me giving into the reality that I am a very incapable person. One of the issues that can prevent success from occurring is the concept of time. Time passes with each and ever second, minute, and hour, it waits for no one. Those who always move forward succeed and excel in the world. Those who stand and look back into the past will only slow their development and never attain the success they yearn for. The concept of time is one that humans developed in hopes to understand how the world works; simply put it's the idea of how the Earth revolves around the sun. And so from this concept, the limited amount of revolutions of the world prevents many successes from happening and stops many in their tracks to reflect on their past failures never to move forward again. For me, whenever I have failed at something I throw it away hoping that the subject will never focus again. This happens to me a lot in math class, when a hard lesson comes my way and I have just bombed the test, I push it aside and never bother to understand it because it's an embarrassment on my part that I do not understand it. But as we all know, math is a foundation type learning process, without the foundation, how can the future lessons stand on top of it? It can't, if you do not understand it now and never bother to understand it later, more failures will come to surface. As McCandless states "So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet do will not take the initiative to change their situation [. . .]" (58). You can interpret his quote with the concept of time in mind. As people come and go, they continue living with their miserable lives, they lack the concept of time and how their lives have come thus far. If you take Chris' idea, it would be the opposite of mine. His idea states that people should look to the past and they should recognize their sufferings in order to change for the future. But since they do not take the time to do so, nothing will ever change in their lives never leading to success. Some of them may be successful in the fact that they have a job and a home, but they are not successful in the fact that they lead lives that do not appease them. Having a job and having a career are two completely different ideas; the latter is the only one that is able to make you happy. However, in order to have this happiness, one must take the time to understand themselves in a world where time keeps moving, this is not an easy task. As things go, most people live their lives on the spur of the moment rather than thinking about the future and how it will affect them.

      The second thing that can prevent success is the lack of privilege that people have. As far as education goes in the beginning twelve years, it's all free. Government still has your back and is paying for your education; reach college, not so lucky anymore. The government no longer funds us and we have to pay for a large sum of money for a higher degree. The lesser privileged now have no way of getting their higher degrees, instead they are forced to slave away working and have to pay for the tuition. The less fortunate are forced to turn away from the option of obtaining a better education and are forced to go into labor in order to provide for themselves. For example, in Breaking Through, an autobiography by Francisco Jimenez, the author comes to the United States in hopes for a brighter future. This is considered the land of the free and the land of opportunity. They soon find out that in order to make in America, you must work and it is not as easy as they had anticipated. Francisco starts working in the fields with his father picking strawberries on a pay to rent farm, meaning they rent the land and whatever sum of money they make more than 50% of the profit goes to the landlord. His father eventually cannot walk due to his bad back and cannot work to support the family. This places the burden on Francisco, who is only 15 or 16 years old and still in high school. Being less privileged than the rest of the world, he is unable to do anything to gain an upper hand in life, his grades begin to fall and his family is falling further and further in to debt. Of course his mother is also doing work in the fields, but that obviously is not enough money to provide for anything. As you can see, money is one of the many reasons in which success cannot happen. Francisco is actually a very bright student, but because of this lack of privilege he cannot allow his potential to grow. However, when we look at McCandless' case, he had no problem with money and was just about ready to become a student at Harvard Law School. This would be considered a high achievement on many people's part, even on my part that's seen as a major success. Because his family had money, he was able to achieve high standards and succeed in life rather than having to suffer such a cruel fate like Francisco having to work multiple jobs, attend school, and suffer the cruelness of society. Not only that, but the fact that Francisco was not a white male but instead an illegal immigrant from Mexico also made it hard for him to obtain certain jobs or positions. It was much easier for Chris to reach his goals of going in to the wild because he was more privileged, if he was not as fortunate or if he was not white, things would have not gone the ways they did. Living in a privileged family allowed him to feel society's nature of hypocrisy, this allowed him to make and obtain a passion unlike any other. From there on, his privilege in the fact that he was a white male allowed him to keep pushing for his passion, he was hired to work at many jobs such as burger king and wheat farming. If he were of different ethnicity, it would probably be significantly harder to obtain these jobs. People with more privilege tend to gain their successes with more ease than people that have less privilege.

Finally, another idea that prevents success is the lack resolve individuals have. They lack the ability to settle a dispute, not with society, but with themselves. They attempt to live up to expectations and try to make themselves acceptable the eyes of others, having a well paying job and a sizable home, rather than trying to pursue their own dreams and passions. A person with a lack in resolve will never be able to obtain the success of happiness. For instance, many Asian families, including mine, expect their children to go into the medical field. Sure, these types of jobs pay considerably well, but the amount of effort and time put into the major is back breaking. As a child, I had been pushed towards the idea of becoming some kind of doctor, and the idea has stuck with me ever since. Even now, I too have no idea what I really want to do like most people. I lack the ability to think for my self and my own happiness. Chris on the other hand has successfully gained his own passion; he is able to escape from the world of expectations and lived up to his own. When he goes into the wild, he makes up a name for himself. An identity that society has not given him, a name that will severe the ties between him and the rest of the world. He was no long "Chis McCandless; he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own identity." (23) His resolve was so great that it allowed him to severe his ties with everything that he once had. He no longer wanted to live up to his parent's expectations of having a good job and living the life of a privileged person. Rather, he wanted to be his own person by settling his own dispute between him and society's views. He is able to achieve the success of becoming free and "unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers [. . .]" (23). He is able to get away with from his parent's dreams and is able to pursue his own by allowing himself the opportunity to break free from his metaphoric chains. Aside from the fact that this dream seems unreasonable and that it breaks all the teachings that our parents have taught us, he is at lease able to pursue the life that he has wanted instead of living up to the expectations that his parents put him through.