During the fall of my junior year at McDaniel, my best friend and teammate were talking about a few current events that were going on in the world as our coach was driving seven hours back to Westminster, Md. from the Mt. Holyoke Tournament in South Hadley, Mass. Somewhere around rural Pennsylvania, she said I should write a book one day about my thoughts and ideas of the world around us. I thought about it and decided it would be a good idea to create a blog about what I was thinking about any given current event at the time.
Unfortunately I have not updated that blog in years – since the spring semester of my junior year at McDaniel College – but now that I am older and am in a new chapter in my life I was thinking about reviving the blog.
Three years ago I was surfing around YouTube and came across the late Randy Pausch's hour long "Last Lecture" video. Pausch, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia, was dying of pancreatic cancer and was only given three-to-six months to live when he gave his "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon.
Like many others who watched his lecture, I too took a lot out of it and many of my favorite quotes today are from him. But one that really stands out to me is when he mentions "the brick walls" we all come into contact with in our lives and how they are not there to stop us but the other people who do not want it badly enough. So we have to figure a way to get through/over the brick walls. That's where the title of this blog comes from.
All of our experiences in life, even the ones from when were young children, has shaped our reputations and given us the strength to tackle those brick walls and will encounter in the future.
"The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough."
