A reflection on perseverance

~Johnnie Soukup, Class of 2026 

“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.”
~Newt Gingrich

SOMETIMES LIFE PUSHES YOU DOWN. It kicks you, spits on you, and leaves you in the dirt. But you always have to stand up again. I walked out of the audition to the orchestra with terror. Did it go well? Did I make a huge mistake? What if I failed? Not just me, but my teacher and parents would be disappointed. I was anxious for the days following, until my mother told me the thing that I, to my bone, did not want to hear. I would not be able to go to the music festival. My mind was swirling with thoughts of defeat and discouragement. All of those hours of practice, gone down the drain, useless. My hard work dissipated with nothing to show for it. For a while after that, I was stuck on what had happened, unwilling to move on. But I slowly began to realize that this kind of failure is what I needed. I was too used to easy success. I had never pushed myself far before. I decided that I would no longer take victories for granted, and I had to work hard to achieve my goals. I began to practice more often and more diligently. And throughout all parts of my life I improved and challenged myself.

LIFE IS NOTHING WITHOUT SETBACKS. And with this failure, I had to learn to improve. No one can succeed on the first try every time. Not on the second, and not the third. But if I could keep going, I knew that it would all be worth it. At first I was crushed, utterly speechless in the face of failure. I thought there was no way to get back all the work and time I spent. Through this, however, I learned that all of it was worth it. Even if I didn’t make it this year, there was always the next. Even if I was pushed down now, I had to get up and keep going. All the hours I had thought I wasted, I learned good technique and practice. This rejection wasn’t the end of my music journey, it was only the beginning. I live with the idea throughout my life, that life is nothing without setbacks. And when I am lazy, and slacking around the house, I feel great in the short term, but I slowly begin to feel the consequences of inactivity. I begin to feel unfulfilled, and unmotivated. When I am in the lowest parts of my life, I know that if I lay in defeat, it will seep into my life, and only continue the downward spiral. The longer you wait to overcome your loss, the less you will want to. If you are complacent in defeat, you will never overcome it. Believing in yourself, even if life tells you otherwise, is the most important thing of all.

CONFIDENCE IS NECESSARY TO SUCCESS. I had to believe in myself in order to move on. Without courage, you will not move forward, like a train without fuel. You will need to keep going, even if you are only running on fumes of a distant hope. At some times in my life I felt unmotivated and depressed. But a small, distant thought kept me rolling along. A thought that read, “I will be happy soon.” At times when I am feeling down, I remind myself that I won’t gain anything by laying around. If you don’t think you can do it, you won’t. If a commander doesn’t think he can lead his men, he can’t. But if you believe, faith can be stronger than what is keeping you down. I had been knocked down. And I doubted myself. But I convinced myself that I would be able to stand up again, so I did. I turned the doubt that was killing me into confidence that I used to improve. Through that I was able to get back on track. Knowing that I could keep going, kept me going.

YOU WILL ACHIEVE NOTHING YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT. If I hadn’t cared about making it in, then I would never have improved. In order to get better, I had to actually care about it. Setting goals and working towards them is crucial towards success. After the rejection, I was sitting in my room, thinking about what I could have done better. I began to see the ways I had messed up, and I remembered some sloppy mistakes and incorrect tempos in my audition. I realized that I was not perfect, but I was making progress. I knew that even though I had been rejected this time, as long as I kept improving, then next time I could make it. Throughout my life, I kept improving, knowing that I could do anything as long as I gave a damn. Little things, like late homeworks, or times where instead of being lazy practicing or studying, I began to care more about. If you didn’t care about anything, you would live like a mindless robotic drone, no goals or anything productive to do. Knowing why you do things is essential to life. Simple things like reading sharpens your brain, just like how scraping a knife on a whetstone sharpens it. Just the act of knowing why and wanting to do something productive will influence your mind to take action. Caring to complete something is the only way you can do it.

THE NEXT YEAR, I tried again. I used the skills I had learned and the techniques I had so tirelessly practiced. Not only did I make it in, but I got 1st part for clarinet in the orchestra.

WHEN YOU ARE OLDER, looking back on your life, do you want to see your old self as lazy? Do you wish you had spent more time on short form brain rot? Or do you want to look back on the bigger picture and be glad you worked hard? Hard work is the only thing that matters. Even if you don’t know what you are working towards.