How Bad Do You Want It?

It’s been about a month since my last post. Sorry about that, it’s been a busy past month. School’s started up again. So most of August since my last post was dedicated trying to finish summer homework and get my last few freedoms of summer in. It was the last summer I’ll ever have as a high school student, so I didn’t want to waste it.

Personally I don’t feel like it was wasted. I might not have accomplished as much as I was hoping to, for example I really would have liked to have finished my book revision. However, I did make some desperately needed changes and make it 2/3 through the book. I finished writing a major, soul destroying, three years in the making, total of 319,994 word fan fiction. My little sister and I developed a method of co-writing together. Margaret and I established the bare bones of a story we’d like to co-write together and maybe post here (Bare bones as in we have the basic development of two main characters and the world conception – more news will come when we ourselves know what’s going on. So it’s actually more like we have the bones, but no skeleton yet. Considering we were lucky to have a real conversation every two weeks this summer, I hope you can understand).

But school’s back, and along with it a regular schedule. I am taking a lot of hard classes this year, but I’m also a lot more determined to really focus on literary aspirations this year. If I am indeed going to have two books before twenty (TITLE DROP), I really need to get a move on, especially considering I turn 17 this month.

It also helps that this year in my AP English class we are required to submit a piece of writing every single Monday, though it doesn’t really matter what the writing is. And you can get a virtually unlimited amount of extra credit by submitting multiple pieces (as long as you complete all the other required assignments). So now, not only am I writing just because I’m a writer and that’s what I love to do, but now I can get school credit for it! Is that awesome or what?

You’re jealous, I know you are.

But enough catch up.

As I mentioned earlier in the post, I did not manage to finish my book revision by the end of summer. My new goal is that I want to have it ready to send out by my birthday. It’d definitely doable, but it might be hard, especially considering I’d like to keep my grades up and I also decided in my infinite wisdom that senior year would be a great time to all of a sudden get involved in a bunch of clubs and take all the hardest classes. Also, because I finished that giant story that I mentioned earlier, now my brain is free to go and come up with all of these other lovely, tempting story ideas that I want to write.

Last night I found myself done with my homework at 8:30, a rare occurrence – but I’m really trying to be better at getting homework done early this year for exactly the same reason that led me to working on my book instead of the most recent story that has captured my attending.

The most recent little temptress taking occupancy in my brain has been a short little fan fiction that would take a lot of explaining that wouldn't be relevant to this post. I’ve been writing it in between classes and sometimes in class when we’re done with whatever’s going on.

Last night I found myself with a few extra hours to work on my Monday Musing (the name of the assignment for English I mentioned), or in other words, time to write.

When I pulled up Microsoft Word, though, I had to make a decision about what to actually write. I could be productive and actually work on the story instead of letting it die a few scraps of paper in a notebook, or I could be even more productive and work on my book. Just as I was about to pull out the notebook I had been writing the story in, though, this thought occurred to me.

How bad do I really want this book?

I had two ways I was willing to spend my time, working on my book or working on a fan fiction. I wanted to work on the fan fiction. I wanted to write it instead of working on this blog post.

But I asked myself how bad I wanted my book. Did I want it more than I wanted to write that story?

The answer was yes, I did.

Just because I needed extra inspiration, I looked up a Youtube video. Eric Thomas’s “How Bad Do You Want It” speech set to “Time” from Inception and sports videos. The sports were kind of lost on me. Never been good at sports, and no real desire to be good at sports. But the message of the speech itself is really applicable to just about everything.

This is the first part of the speech:

“There was a young man who wanted to make a lot of money, and so he went to a guru. He told the guru he wanted to reach his level of greatness. And so the guru said: “If you want to be on the same level I’m on, I’ll meet you tomorrow at the beach.”

So the young man arrived at 4:00 a.m. He had on a suit, but he should have worn shorts. The old man grabbed his hand and said: “How bad do you want to be successful?” The young responded: “Badly.”

So the old man told the young man to walk out into the water. It was waist deep. The young man thought: “This old man is crazy.”

The young man said to himself: “I want to make money and this guy has me out here swimming. I didn’t ask to be a lifeguard. I want to make money.

Then the old man said: “Come out a little farther,” and the young man did so.

As the young man was up to his shoulders in water he again thought: “This old man is crazy! He’s making money, but he’s crazy.”

The old man said, “Come out a little farther.”

The young man obeyed, but wavered as if he might turn back.

So the old man said: “I thought you said you wanted to be successful?”

“I do,” said the student.

So the old man ordered the young man to come out even farther, and when he did he pushed the young man’s head under water and held it down. Although the young man fought, the old man would not let him up. Just before the young man passed out the old man raised his head above the surface and said: “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.”

I don’t know how many of you have asthma today, but if you ever had an asthma attack before and you’re S.O.B. — you’ve got shortness of breath — and you’re wheezing, the only thing you’re trying to do is get some air. You don’t care about no basketball game. You don’t care what’s on TV.  You don’t care about nobody calling you. You don’t care about a party. The only thing you care about when you’re trying to breathe is to get some fresh air. That’s it. And when you get to the point where all you want to do is be successful as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.

I am here to tell you Number #1, most of you say you want to be successful, but you don’t want it bad. You just kind of want it. You don’t want it badder than you want to party. You don’t want it as much as you want to be cool. Most of you don’t want success as much as you want to sleep. Some of you want sleep more than you want success. And I’m here to tell you today that if you want to be successful you got to be willing to give up sleep.

You have to be willing to work off of three hours of sleep, two hours of sleep. If you really want to be successful, some day you’re going to have to stay up three days in a row because if you go to sleep you might miss the opportunity to be successful. That’s how bad you got to want it.””

I am not telling you in anyways to ignore everything else in your life in order to write. No. I want to breathe a lot more than I want good grades in my classes, and I’m working on that as well as my book, but the point is that if we really want this, we can’t just bandy about.  We can’t just “kind of want it.”

We have to actually want it.

I’ve talked before on this blog that it’s hard. It is. I don’t even know a lot of things about what I’m doing. I’m just muddling through all of this myself. I do know that it’s hard though.

More than that, though, I do know that if I don’t want it bad, if I don’t really want it, if I don’t want it more than I want to write some other story or surf Facebook then it’s not going to happen.

If you don’t want it bad enough, you won’t work hard enough to get it.

The Youtube video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watchfeature=player_embedded&v=_T1KyRtOWOc

It does NOT have the full speech. But it does have epic music.