By Aidan Smoley

I believe hard work is the key to achieving anything. My parents taught me this and it continues to play a crucial role in my life every day. 

For as long as I can remember, I never got what I wanted most just for the sake of owning it. Apart from Christmas and my birthday, toys, video games, etc., were all earned; my parents emphasized this to me. No matter how long I spent crying to my parents, begging them for the latest and coolest Xbox or Playstation, they would turn towards me, their faces riddled with stone cold looks, and ask “what have you done to deserve this?” 

Around the middle of the fourth grade, Apple released one of the largest advancements in touch screen technology for the time, the iPod Touch. The small, black, eight-gigabyte device had to have been one of the hottest new consumer goods on the market, which opened up a whole new world to my innocent young mind. While I thought the iPod Touch was a dream come true, it only turned out to be one of my worst nightmares. 

For the rest of the year, as dramatic and sad as this may sound, I felt unincluded and alone being one of the only kids without an iPod. Considering Christmas had already passed and my birthday wasn’t for at least six months, the iPod was long out of my reach. While I stood on my skinny little knees, with tears flowing down my face, I pleaded my case to my parents and begged they would cover the $500 cost of a brand new iPod. Despite my long, emotional speech, their only response was “what have you done to deserve this?” 

I realized the only way I could get my hands on one of these highly coveted iPods was if I purchased one myself. For the rest of the school year, I spent hours doing chores, mowing lawns, and selling old toys I no longer used to raise the money I needed to one day buy an iPod. 

My iPod, even though it was the exact same make, build, and brand as everybody else’s, was completely different in a massive way. My iPod was the product of hard work, sacrifice, and time. Simply put, you sell a few things, do a few chores around the house, make a quick buck and before you know it, as time blindly passes, you have a brand new iPod in your hands. Weirdly enough, working hard felt easy to me, well, at the time at least, so it became my mantra for achieving anything. 

From kindergarten to the end of the seventh grade, from an academic perspective, I was, at best, an average student. My report card consisted of mostly C’s, B’s, and the extremely occasional A. My parents expected a lot of me academically, but I had a really hard time living up to their standards. Come the start of the eighth grade, I was tired of being just average. I wanted to make my parents proud and after a tough first year at RSGC, I had something to prove to all my peers and teachers… so I went to work. 

That year, unless I had a game or practice, I would head straight home at the end of each school day and work until I went to bed. Whether it was homework, a project, or studying for a test, I put as much effort as I possibly could into everything I did. My hard work ended up paying off as in January of that year, I received my first straight-A report card. At graduation, I was awarded the grade eight “French award” and my first “proficiency award” for having one of the top ten overall averages in the class of 2020.

Hard work has brought me a lot of material success, but it has also brought me a great deal of happiness.

During the summer before grade 11, I worked as a counsellor at UCC Tennis Camp. During my first week on the job, one of my campers, Kaleb, had autism and struggled to fit in with everybody the first day. I got a text from my director that evening saying Kaleb went home, cried his eyes out, and begged that he wouldn’t have to come the next day. Throughout the remainder of the week, I did as much as I could to ensure he was enjoying himself and making the most out of those short five days we had together. 

At the end of that week, Friday afternoon, I sat with him until 5:30 waiting for his mom to come pick him up. Before we parted ways, he turned to me and simply said, “Thank you. I had a great week,” and he then proceeded to run off into his mother’s car. I wasn’t given a medal, nobody applauded for me, but in the end, my hard work paid off. It gave me a feeling of happiness and pride that I had never experienced before; I could feel it tingle throughout my body. 

My story is not complicated. Anybody could have done what I did. It’s just only those who are willing to put in the work achieve the most… and change for the better.