One random day *in 2018* I was scrolling through Twitter as I usually do after school (yes I do use Twitter) and landed on a four-minute clip from the podcast No Laying Up. The clip was from an interview they did with professional golfer Max Homa who had one of the worst seasons ever on the PGA Tour in 2017. He was talking about how he fought through it and became one of the best players in the world. While the entire four minutes captivated me one main part stuck out. Homa found a quote written by Jacob Riis that he turned into his life motto that helped him get through the hardest time in his career. The quote spoke about persistence, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before”.Much like Homa, I adopted this quote as one that would define me. No matter the results or what was going to happen whether it was on the golf course, in the classroom, or life as a whole, no matter how much I was struggling I was going to keep pounding that rock, knowing that eventually it was bound to break. Reflecting on how much implementing this quote in my lifestyle has transformed me over the past few years, I started to think about how we shape our identities.
Right now, in most of our lives, we are discovering who we are and who we want to be. As high schoolers, we face so many decisions: What classes do we want to take? Where do I want to go to college? What do I want to do when I get older? But the one that hits me the hardest is “Who do I want to be right now? I’ve changed so much in the last few years that for a while I did not really know who Reid Heaton was. What I realized is that the answer to that question has always been around me. Those answers resided in the people that surround me, my hobbies, my passions, and so much more. I know I want to have the infectious energy my brother has, I want to be willing to put others first like my Mom does, I want to be as hardworking and resilient as Max Homa, I want to spread smiles and joy like all my closest friends do, I want to do my best but have fun like Ronald Acuna, I want to be a good leader in S-7 like all the Editors before me. I would not know who I am today and who I want to be if not for all these things that are around me in my everyday life. I don’t know the person I would be if I hadn’t listened to that podcast clip, or the person I would be if I had not joined The Hoofprint my sophomore year, but one thing I do know is that both of those things helped me to understand who I am today, and who I want to be.
At the end of the day, I learned that if you want to figure out who you are and who you want to be, a good place to start is just by opening your eyes and observing what is around you. It may come in the form of a quote, a teacher, or a friend. I can confidently say that part of who I am today came from a quote about breaking rocks, and I hope that as you read this paper you may see something that can help you figure out the big question of “Who do I want to be?”.