To “hammer your thoughts into unity” [1] and die a leader, one must undertake a lifelong journey. The journey to become a leader is a pilgrimage to the truth. During this pilgrimage, questions concerning identity are reoccurring throughout college. College students find they are learning who they want to be and choosing a path their lives will follow. Along this pilgrimage, to be successful, they must have the motivation to fulfill the dreams they have nursed since the day they began to imagine. For the longest time, my personal motivation has been fear. However, the pilgrimage to understanding my role model’s life and leadership has led me to abandon the motivation of fear and implement the motivation to excel.
Growing up, absorbing leadership quotes was a hobby. Among many films and writers, I memorized famous lines and used them in conversations as if they were merely air. Gene Hackman once said on screen, “I look at you and I see two men, the man you are and the man you ought to be. Someday those two will meet and you’ll make for a hell of a football player” [2]. Russell Crowe once said, “What we do in life echoes in eternity” [3]. Lines, such as these, were frequently used around my house, either for the games I played with my brother or for essays, which I wanted to make a good impression. These are only two quotes, out of a large sum, that I have lived by all of my life. The most prominent man to identify with my plethora of leadership lines is the literary genius and play writer William Shakespeare.
William is a paradigm for leadership and his many qualities accomplished my dream hundreds of years before I was born. His name echoes through eternity. His plays and Sonnets are testimony to his greatness and all generations can touch his mind through reading them. Years from now, when the average men of my time are shadows and dust, it is my wish that my name is still said in respect and admiration as Shakespeare’s name is said. Of course, Shakespeare was never a football player, but when he died, he was the man he ought to be. Shakespeare wrote, “But be not afraid of greatness; some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” [4]. I believe he was born for greatness and he died a great man.
Reading the depths of Shakespeare’s work, his biography, writing a number of essays on his plays, and listening about his reputation in educational facilities has taught me he is distinct among leaders. Of Shakespeare’s plays, I have read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, and some of Othello. Some of his plays are required to be read in middle school and many of them have been made into movies. One example of popular movies made from Shakespeare’s plays is William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. It was a movie in which the Montagues and Capulets were rivaling mob families in a modern city. The 1990 Hamlet movie with Mel Gibson and Glen Close is another example. This movie was much more true to the original play than William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The movies are further proof that the modern day still regards Shakespeare’s plays with great respect. Even Disney’s Lion King was based on Hamlet, with Scar as the murderous uncle and Simba as Hamlet.
Further
testament to Shakespeare’s genius is the creation and use of the Globe Theater.
It is located in
This is a snapshot of the Second Life version of the Globe Theater!
During my studies about Shakespeare, my academic life has been based on fear. In fact, the motivation of fear has caused me to reach a vast majority of my accomplishments. From playing as a defensive lineman on the football field, to writing my papers about Shakespeare, I have been motivated by the fear of failure. It is not uncommon for an athlete or a scholar to fear failure. The fear of receiving a failing grade in any class is enough to get the assignments finished and turned in on time. People, without motivation, end up living on the streets and penniless. A man without motivation is a man without hopes and dreams. They drift through life with the belief they can do nothing about the conditions of their life. If motivation did not exist, there would be no progress. The human race would be only another classification of animals and content with enough food and water to exist. People without motivation are lost. Those are the ones a student fears to become. The idea of becoming a failure has caused me to persevere, ignore the bruises on the field, and finish the last paragraphs of a lengthy paper. The fear of failure was the central motivation that propelled me to make the grades I needed. It was the only motivation I had even known.
While the motivation of fear is something that can be enough to succeed, it has limits. It will not provide me with a strong enough tool to reach Shakespeare’s excellence. One of Shakespeare’s most famous poems says:
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And
one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages” [6].
All people enter this world and then leave it. People play their parts in society and then die. The last line of this poem, however, is the most interesting to me. A man or woman’s actions will last ages, but only if his name echoes through eternity. Fear is simply not enough to achieve this. Fear will drive a person to complete a paper, but something else drives a person to revise it a number of times to achieve perfection. Fear can cause a person to revise a paper to compete with the average grade of the class, but a person, attempting to achieve perfection in every journey, must be motivated by more than just fear.
During the time I was writing P1, my motivation of fear was all I had. My paper was not nearly as strong as it could have been. I spoke of the Globe Theater and how it was built as a dedication to a great man. The monumental value of the Globe Theater and related it to Second Life after actually finding the Second Life version of the Globe. I did a great deal of research about Shakespeare’s life to strengthen my explanations about why I chose Shakespeare. Full paragraphs were written about Shakespeare’s literary accomplishments, his sympathetic imagination, relating his personal qualities to leadership. However, while creating P1, I was merely writing to fulfill a grade. I was fearful about falling short on word count, forgetting important information, creating errors in punctuation, and creating a paper that was not impressive at all. I was worried about being forced to reveal of failed paper to my family and to constantly print out the same failing grade for points in the U.T. Exploration class. Fear was engraved into the writing of P1, resulting in a mediocre paper. It was written only for completion.
P2 enlightened me with something far more useful than P1 ever could have. During P1, I was gaining knowledge about Shakespeare’s life and relating him to leadership. However, this did not tell me who he really was or how he achieved such great success. P2 allowed me to grasp an understanding for Shakespeare that research could never provide me with. Through my own use of sympathetic imagination, I became Shakespeare. If for only a short time, I was forced to look like Shakespeare, talk as him, and practically be him. I felt what a leader feels. Regarded with high respect and an immensely large amount of knowledge, I was standing in a virtual world in Elizabethan clothing and using Shakespeare’s personal quotes. I found knowledge of my role model that I never expected to find. I had an epiphany as Shakespeare in the virtual world. I did not merely talk in the discussions of leadership and diversity for the grade, but rather for respect. Typing in a quote for Shakespeare was not meant to enhance my chances for receiving an A, but rather to be a contribution to the group and to been seen as an independent intellectual. As a result, I realized there is something else that motivates the strongest of people. I found the motivation to excel. I found what Shakespeare lived by all of his life and I took a piece of him with me. The experience allowed me to touch Shakespeare’s mind and view the driving force behind Shakespeare’s many accomplishments.
Second Life discussion group
A person who can use the motivation to excel has ability to be a self motivator, to be completely independent, and to be able to strive for excellence purely for the sake of reaching it. Where the motivation of fear is implemented by other people, by outside assistance, by numbers, love, and failure, the motivation to excel is only implemented by oneself. Excellence is achieved by more than one-hundred percent. I am currently taking a Shakespeare’s comedy class as this time and my professor has said that Shakespeare specifically chose almost every word in his plays with precision. Shakespeare was dedicated to perfection. He wrote his characters with a number of different personalities. He wrote with a combination of prose and verse, puns and songs, soliloquies and metaphors, and kept his audience entertained at all levels of society. In comedies, low level jokes were meant for the “ground-lings,” while intelligent jokes were meant for the aristocrats. Shakespeare covered all angles and his ability to motivate himself extended his capabilities. Shakespeare gave more than one-hundred percent, because any other man would have stopped working once he achieved his fortune. A weaker man would have retired with fame. Shakespeare eventually retired, but he continued to write until he died. When his riches overflowed, Shakespeare continued to push himself to find his limits.
The ability to excel will allow a person to do what it allowed Shakespeare to do: exceed personal abilities and extend personal accomplishments as close to perfection as humanly possible. In Second Life, the group discussed leadership with powerful and persuasive arguments. With each addition, the knowledge of each participant grew closer to perfection. We obtained knowledge from each other, from the personality of our role models, and idea that we were living as our role models. I exceeded because I was motivated to exceed. I paid close attention to every assertion and detail to increase my knowledge of diversity and leadership. We helped each other excel, because we wanted to excel. While this new motivation is now the omnipotent source of my determination, the motivation of fear is still present. Until we have nothing to lose, fear will always be present. People always seem to want more and fear to lose what they have. They don’t want to start from the bottom of society a second time. While the motivation to excel would be perfectly adequate to make it through life and far beyond excellence, fear is nearly uncontrollable. Everyone has fear. The motivation to excel is definitely worth the most between the two motivations, but I must make it clear that though fear has been overridden, it is still present. Extra motivation means more effort. More effort means I will think at a critical level and attempt to include all aspects to the project in detail, emotionally and physically. There is, however, the chance that the fear will overwhelm me and distort my thinking in panic. It is my belief that the idea of excelling repels most of that fear. It takes up a majority of the reason behind my efforts in writing. Therefore, the less room for fear, the less power it has over me, and the less likely it is to cause me to panic. While our abilities continue to exceed the expectations of the world and those closest to us, we will always fear to lose what we have.
I now have more freedom from the power of fear!
A leader is self serving and strong for their followers. They are selfless, because they do not need to think about themselves. They are independent. In my discussion, Betty Questi said “it is the leader’s job to encourage the discovery of diversity”. It is their job to promote "the use and effectiveness of discovery learning" to "develop problem solving strategies for confronting the unknown or unfamiliar" [7]. Leaders guide followers, dedicate their time to their beliefs, and strive to exceed. When an Olympic runner breaks a time record, the next step is to break the new record. They attempt to exceed what they have already accomplished. They stand up for what is right, as Martin Luther King Jr. did. They live for beliefs greater than themselves and are willing to put their lives at risk to uphold their beliefs. They live for visions that worth dying for. Behind all of this, all their qualities and accomplishments, their motivation is what drives them. The motivational norm is fear. A leader is not motivated by fear. A leader is motivated by the idea of his/her personal excellence can be exceed, that their voices should be heard, that their goals should be fought for, and their causes are worth the price. This makes them diverse. A leader stands out as a leader being he is driven by himself and not by others. It requires other people to invoke fear, but a leader is self-serving. A leader needs no one else to excel. He/she can excel in discovery, in writing, and in life without the help of anyone or anything. Following through on a project is pleasure for a leader, because they are reaching higher levels. They don’t merely receive pleasure because the project is complete. There is completion and excellence. In a race, completion is accomplished by crossing the finish-line. Excellence is accomplished by crossing the finish-line in first place.
My desire is to connect completion to excellence, as is the goal of any leader. An excellent completion is what makes a name echo through eternity. Shakespeare’s literary works are testament to this. The Second Life experience provided me with a new motivation. It is not one that comes from the pressure of a professor, the system, or a grade book. It is a motivation that comes from within. The world is powered with fear, but a leader rises above the world’s normal machinery and becomes independent from all others. Second Life will cause me to use this tool to achieve independence from the normality of fear driven people. I can enter a world in which I need no other person to discover excellence. As the great quote on the U.T. Tower says, "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" [8]. The motivation of fear can only take a person so far but the ability to use the motivation of excellence will take a person beyond imagination. In the famous words of Shakespeare and written in his play Romeo and Juliet, "Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow" [9].
Word Count-2,568 words without quotes included
[1] William Butler Yeats, Course Anthology, page 762
[2]
Hackman, Gene, perf. The Replacements. Dir. Howard Deutch. 2000.
5 The Phrase Finder. 7 Oct. 2007 .
[3] Crowe, Russell, perf. Gladiator. 2000. DVD.
[5] 3 Shakespeare's Globe. 7 Oct. 2007
[6] The Phrase Finder. 7 Oct. 2007
[7]"Discovery Learning." Explore U.T. 66915. Vol. 1. N.p.: Jenn's Copy and Binding, n.d. 330
[8]"King James Bible." Explore U.T. 66915. Vol. 1. N.p.: Jenn's Copy and Binding, n.d. 303.
[9]Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
All pictures:
Linden Research, Inc. Second Life. 23 Nov. 2007
<http://www.secondlife.com>