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What Is Determination? Sample Essay
You will never see a bird that doesn’t fly because it is scared, or a baby that doesn’t walk due to fear. It is a process for a newborn bird to learn how to fly just like a baby learns to walk, the only way they don’t is if they were physically incapable. You see, we are born with determination and we don’t even realize the challenge it takes as a baby to learn to walk and talk, we just do it. When did humanity allow this skill to just fade away or become difficult? Does the lack of determination affect our lifestyle? Is there a way that we can practice and get back the ability to be determined? Some people have just given up, but it is not too late to be able to bring this skill back to life.
Determination is more of positive emotion than it is an action, and it is the ability to persevere towards your goal despite the challenges that arise. A crucial part of being determined is having the discipline of consistency. The loss of determination can come from the comfort that you have created for yourself in your life, it can also come from the fear of failure. Being determined to lose weight for example will take time, consistency, dedication, and motivation. The minute we lose one of those characteristics, we lose sight of where we were going. Embarking on a new challenge, like losing weight, can be very difficult if you don’t have your goals clearly set and written down. When we don’t have a clear goal and how to get there it is like aiming at a target with a blindfold on. Society also plays a part in the fear we have of failing, but what we don’t realize is that to reach the success we must climb the ladder of failure. These reasons have led us to lose our natural ability to be determined because we have simply lost ambition, we don’t have a clear understanding of our goals, and we have allowed the pressure of failing to keep up from trying to achieve greatness. Before giving up and settling, remember that a lack of determination can affect our lifestyle.
How many people do you know that truly work in something that they enjoy? Not very many people give themselves the opportunity to do something they truly care about which can lead to a lack of motivation, therefore they will not be determined to improve in their work. You can also look at it in the scientific way as shown in this article that talks about how your dopamine levels can be the cause of your ability to be motivated and determined. "Low levels of dopamine make people and other animals less likely to work for things, so it has more to do with motivation and cost/benefit analyses than pleasure itself,†adds the University of Connecticut researcher, John Salamone (Rampton). The fact is your determination does affect your lifestyle because it is the drive that we need in order to live a purposeful life. Not having this drive can lead to a dull, boring, and even frustrating life of not accomplishing what you set out to do. Whether you focus on increasing your dopamine levels or focus on setting achievable goals you can always allow yourself to find your determination.
Setting yourself up to be successful in any task can be challenging, but never impossible. To be able to find your motivation and determination you must first be able to identify what is something deep in your core that you have always wanted to accomplish. Your reason why you do something has to be greater than the reward you expect out of your goal. For example, back to the concept of losing weight, say you have reached your ideal weight and body shape, what now? It won’t be much satisfaction if you don’t have a reason why you were trying to lose weight if you’re a woman trying to conceive a child and you were overweight, that is a strong reason to not give up. Maybe your life is at risk because your weight has caused complications in your body, which is another valuable reason to lose weight. The reason "why†you decide to peruse a goal is the same reason that will drive your determination to make it happen. After you identify your reason, now you can work on the details of consistency and how you will take the steps to stay determined.
At the end of the day, we are all human beings, and losing our determination does not have to be permanent. Finding your way back can be challenging, however, if you don’t take control it can have a real effect on your lifestyle. Simply start off by identifying a strong reason to reach a goal and how this goal can positively affect you. Determination can either make or break you when trying to achieve a goal, if you try hard enough, we can go back to when we were babies when this skill was just a natural instinct.
Works Cited
Rampton, John. "Science Discovers Why Some People Are Motivated to Succeed While Others Aren't.†Entrepreneur, 15 Dec. 2017, www.entrepreneur.com/article/306204.
