Eyes on the Prize

By Atiya Abbas

A couple weeks back, there was an interesting debate raised in the “Media and Modern World” class. Of course, being in that class it always means that there will be some interesting nugget which will provide food for thought.

Miss Sadia Mehmood said that once you fashion your lives around long-term goals it will be easy to bypass any small obstacles in your path in the present. In that journey one has to be selfish in order to achieve something. One class fellow piped up that why should we be selfish? That is not the correct way. We should be helping all those who need our help and take everyone along.

Pondering on it, I feel that once we don’t define our goals, we will be left blaming present-day hurdles for all our problems. Nowhere can this lesson be more aptly learnt than in KU where every effort to do something good has to pass through a series of “red-tape” in order to get somewhere. One has to get this signed, get that application, some attestation, some stamp, some letter in order to take one infinitesimal step to getting somewhere. It this journey that truly teaches us the importance of long term goals and remembering that to get through this, whether “this” be a compulsory class, or walking for miles to one department to get facts for a report or visiting sponsors for a seminar is all adding up to the master goal one has set out for themselves. To illustrate I can give the example of two of our class fellows. If they had thrown in the towel thinking (like I was guilty of) “Fine, that teacher is not available for the recommendation I wouldn’t bother applying for the scholarship” they wouldn’t be in the U.S today gaining new experiences. If at that moment they thought “I don’t want to wait till two! It’ll take forever!” they wouldn’t be looking at the bigger picture. That “big picture” is what Miss Sadia taught us to define for ourselves in class that day.

However, if in reaching that master goal, emotions get in the way it can spell trouble. And they will, there is no doubt about that. We are all human and to not feel would make us lesser beings. But remember that sometimes a cry for help from an esteemed one is just a plea from them to listen. Be that listening support and everything will take care of itself. People know what they have to do, you just have to be there to listen and let everything take care of itself.

If one truly wants to learn what goals are and how to achieve them, a semester at KU is enough for teaching them that. It is a crash course in personal development and you won’t even have to read all those self-help books in order to attain that sense of achievement!