Unfortunately
many of us who have dropped out of school, we will never be able to convey to
our parents, families and friends why it became necessary to do so. No one will ever understand if they have
never had to deal with teachers or
school systems that judged you by a standard that did not apply to you. It is
difficult to ever convince everyone else, including our parents, that it’s not
because you are a quitter, or that you lack the ability to learn, it’s just
that the model that you are forced to learn in doesn’t fit your learning
style. But we can’t say that because,
for all intents and purposes, we are failures, and for that, there is nothing
else to say, so, we’re out.
I
thought it was important to share this message after 3 years of writing
messages congratulating various graduates of high schools and colleges. I have posted these messages, hoping that
someone benefitted from a positive message.
I have posted these messages on my Facebook page, believing that someone
would be inspired, or uplifted. I
thought briefly about posting something to those whom I believed had dropped
out of school, but I couldn’t imagine what I would say. More importantly, I wasn’t sure of how it
would be received. But then, I realized
that I was drop out as well. I had
dropped out of college. Using that time
in my life, I am writing this message.
Afterall,
how do I address those who have dropped out of school? For example, do I say: To the Dropout class
of 2013? Or, should I address these as
Quitters of Graduating Class 2013? And,
do I address them exclusively, or their parents and families? After a year of soul-searching, I believe
that I have a message that hopefully, this year’s group of dropouts, as we currently
call them, will have an appreciation. My
message is to those who are the Drop Out class of 2013: “You’ll Never Amount to
Anything.”
Dropout Fact Sheet:
My Story
I have
a personal incident that helped me to formulate this message. I was kept back in the 8th
grade. But my parents, although
disappointed in me, helped me through summer school and I was able to get back
on track for the next school year. I
wasn’t able to go to the same catholic school (St. Augustine High School Lawless Middle School
Later,
I would go on to college, UNO, or LSUNO at the time. After a year and almost a half, I was discouraged
by the teachers and the feedback to my work.
I had completed all of my remedial work and was not succeeding any
better, particularly in English and writing.
I received failing grades. I
decided in the middle of the following fall semester that I would drop
out. To say that my parents were
disappointed was an understatement. It
was then that I was told the words that would always haunt me:
“You’ll never amount to nothing!”
“You will always be a nobody!”
There
were several other terms of endearment that got lost in translation, but I got
the message. I got the message that
because I had dropped out of college, that they (my parents) would not be proud
of me. I got the message that I would
always be working low-paying jobs and that no one would ever respect me. Whether that was the intent or not, it became
clear to me that dropping out of college was not necessarily a welcomed idea,
but I had made the decision and I was going to stick to it. I had made the decision to drop out of school
in part because I had a “good job”. I knew that I couldn’t just drop out of school
and stay around the house, I knew that I had at least better have a job.
At the
time that I dropped out of college, I was making at that time well above
minimum wage as a part-timer from when I was a junior in high school. So, I had that “good job” that my parents
said I would never have. I had made it,
or so I had thought. But soon I would
learn that my decision to drop out of school went well beyond myself and my
parents.
Who Else Was Impacted by My Decision?
When my
managers and supervisor learned that I had dropped out of college, I remember one
of them had tears in his eyes. His name
was Ricky, and he was very upset with me as was my parents, if not more so. Although he was probably 5 years older, he
was one of the owners who had taken a liking to me since I had started over 4 years
prior in summer of my junior year in high school. Ricky had expressed that he
had hoped that I would not be tempted by the money I was making at the shop,
and that I would stay in college and graduate.
I was surprised by how much he cared for someone whom had hardly spoken
to me, a porter in a bakery.
Why Do Students Dropout?:
Ricky
wasn’t the only one at the bakery who was disappointed in me. Many of my long time co-workers, many of whom
I had realized how much they paid attention to me, found out that I had dropped
out of college, and seemed to all be saddened.
A couple of them took me on the side and advised me to try and get back
in school, because the life that I was going for was no life for me. But I didn’t listen. I eventually held over 10 jobs since then.
Statistical information on High School
Dropouts:
Even as
I had jobs that paid well, and offered promotions, I still found myself trying
to prove to my mother, Sarah, that I would amount to something in my life. But I knew that she would never be happy until
I had gone back to school, and had become the doctor, lawyer or Indian Chief
that she had prophesied that I would be eventually become. No pressure.
Our Families Bought it Lock, Stock and Barrel
Whether
this message applies to you as dropouts from high school or college, you have
to know this: there are a lot of people depending
on you. Yes, they want the best for you. A lot of people
are watching you, believing in you, and hoping that you will do something truly
great in your life. Don’t think I am
trying to blow smoke here. I didn’t
realize it entirely back then, but when I think back about the number of people
who were disappointed that I had dropped out of college, I had come to realize
that my dreams, weren’t just my dreams. They were other’s dreams as well. How?
How
often had we as children and young people shared our dreams of becoming a
business owner, a medical professional, a football player, a singer, a police
officer, a doctor, lawyer or whatever it was we really believed that we could
achieve? If we have ever shared our
dreams, we have shared our dreams with family and friends. We have shared those dreams as though we had
sold a share of who we were. And if we
sold our dreams well enough, family and friends bought into them. They believed in us so much, that they were
ready to cash a proverbial check that we would were going to accomplish our
dreams lock, stock and barrel.
People
in our communities who watched us grow up, or watched us doing things that we
never thought they noticed, saw us doing things towards our dreams. They bought into our dreams because we were giving
them everything to believe that our dreams were worth pursuing, until….
Eventually,
I had come to realize that the dreams that I had, that I had failed to believe
in, or was unwilling to make the sacrifice to achieve, was that of my adopted
mother and adopted father, Sarah and Dan.
I had come to realize that my dreams, however seemingly insignificant to
me, were very important to the guys at work; to the people with whom I had
attended school, and of course my own birth mother. But the list doesn’t stop there. I was unaware of how much neighbors who had
watched me grow up and knew me to be a hard-working person, and who said that I
would one day be somebody, would not have dropped out of school. And I haven’t even gotten to my aunts, uncles
and cousins who also believed that I was going to go far in my life. I was just so unaware of how much people
believed in me, and how far they had expected of me to go. That’s my story, now what is yours?
11 High School Dropouts Who Found Success:
What is your story?
To say
that all dropouts are the same would be totally illogical. It would be prejudicial towards anyone who
has, for whatever reason, withdrawn from any educational or academic
setting. Your story is your story. But it is your story to be told, to be
written, to be lived. The moment you
decide that you are no longer going to return to the classroom, there has to be
an overwhelming desire to discover who you really are. And as much as family and friends are
depending on you, as I know many are, you have to be committed to something
greater than what you have dropped out of to get into something that is going
to propel you far beyond the academic arena. Or, that’s what we would like for
others to believe, as we resell and repackage our dreams. I’ll discuss reselling and repackaging later.
In many
cases, unfortunately, you will be labeled a dropout. And while that is unfortunate, I can think of
worse names to be called. But it is the
cross you must bear in a society that is quick to label anyone who is not “towing
the line”, or playing by the majority’s rules.
It is also important to remember, that whatever your story, it’s not
what you are called, it is what you answer to.
So, what will you answer to for the rest of your life?
As a
dropout, whether from high school, or college, you may feel least compelled to
account for your actions. Fine, you have
that choice. But you do owe a lot of
people an explanation. Just like I found
out that there were a number of people who had counted on me before I dropped
out, I also found out that there were a number of people who were counting on
me, despite the fact that I had dropped out.
What does that mean?
People Never Stop Counting on You.
What I
learned after I had dropped out of college is that people still have high hopes
for you. Why? What I also learned is that people expect
something of you regardless of your station in life. The fact that you are in school or out of
school, or whether you are on a job, or out of work, someone always has great
expectations of us. We either don’t
realize how much or how many people are counting on us because of ignorance, or
we just don’t care. I’ll go with
ignorance. It’s easier to go with
ignorance because it is hard for me to believe that we never really care what
people think. I know that we care, and
because we care, we do certain things in our lives to let people know,
especially the ones that we love, that we don’t want to hurt them, and that if
and wherever possible, we want to be as much apart of their happiness as we
want them to be apart of ours. But the
counting on us that people do, that’s inevitable, and it won’t stop anytime
soon. So now what?
Statistics on Student Drop Out Rates 16-24:
From Repackaging to Reselling Our Dreams
Why we
dropped out school is an oft asked question.
And while we can articulate it to ourselves, it never seems to be a
question that we can answer well enough without coming up with a quick follow
up response, “I’ll be going back soon., though”, or “I am just sitting out for
a year”. These answers sound pretty
good, and they manage to hold off everyone and allow us to buy time until the
dust settles. Because in many cases, a lot
of us have no intention of going back soon.
Instead, we plan on going back to school “One day”. And I personally believe that many of us are
going to go back “one day”. As a matter
of fact, I am aware of one person who did go back “one day”. Why? Well,
for me, I found out that I couldn’t successfully sell my dreams as well as I
used to. People were still counting on
me, but selling my dreams in my later life was more of a challenge. The
question that kept haunting me was the question on applications that indicated
that I left in the middle of a semester.
It hit me that selling my dreams under a set of circumstances where I
didn’t at least complete a college semester, suggested that I couldn’t complete
what I set out to do. It was one of the
underlying messages to myself, that I needed to complete something very
important that I had started.
One
other reason I returned to school was because I had a family (your motivation
maybe different). Back in 1975, there
were certain stakeholders who were not present then. They weren’t there in 1975 to buy into my
dreams as they were beginning in 1978.
Beginning with my wife, my son and my daughter, and now my grandson, I
had to repackage my dreams, even today.
I had to begin repackaging my
dreams in a way that meant I was ready to achieve the dreams that I had been putting
off. In 1981, it became evident that I
needed to return to school. Why? In
order to make sure that the dreams that I needed to repackage gave a beneficial
return to those who meant the most to me in my life.
Highly Successful High School Dropouts:
In
repackaging our dreams, we may find that it may not be that the end-result will
be that we return to school. For some of
us, repackaging our dreams may involve opening a business, and maybe taking a
few courses to make sure that we run a successful business. In repackaging our dreams, it may not have to
do with a new family, it may have to do with getting past the fact that we
don’t have to please everyone, just the ones that we love and who mean the most
to us. Repackaging our dreams may mean
pursuing our dreams based on our talents and loves. Things, that at one time, we were too caught
up on if others would like us if all we wanted to do was be rapper, a football
player, a movie star, or a street performer, even if it isn’t what others think
we should do. How do we repackage our
dreams? It’s a basic approach, but from
there, we may have to look to others who are achieving some of the great things
that we are destined to do as well. It’s
all about setting goals. Old song? Yes it is, but goals are necessary for anyone
who is determined to start out rebuilding, and repackaging their lives. We’ll get to goals in a minute, but it will
also be important to be able to resell our dreams. It may not be an easy task, but it is very
possible to do when we are as determined now as we ever were to make some great
things happen in our lives.
Reselling Our Dreams
For
those of us who have dropped out of school, it is possible that we knew exactly
what we wanted to do the moment we dropped out of school. Perhaps the very next day, we walked into our
new office, our new job, or began training for something that we always wanted
to do, but school was not preparing us.
Perhaps we were hitting the ground running because school was holding us
back, or even discouraging us from achieving what it was we had not only
dreamed of doing, but had successfully sold to our family and friends.
But for
those of us who had no clue of our next move, but knew that school was not
doing it for us, dropping out of school was the best move to make. Dropping out of school gave us an opportunity
to look at the dreams that we had, and to see if they were our dreams, or
someone else’s. For those of us who had
dropped out of school, the dreams that we had sold, perhaps all too well, was
not the dreams that we truly believed in.
It was just possible, that continuing school would be to continue to
pursue a set of dreams that was not our own.
Dropping out of school was the beginning of reselling our dreams, not
only to others, but to ourselves.
Setting and Achieving Our Goals
The
idea of reselling our dreams to others begins when we begin reselling our
dreams to ourselves. Earlier I spoke
about goals. If we have ever set out to
do something, significant, or something valuable, goals must be the guiding
point. Why? Because goals, our goals, are the beginning
of not only repackaging our dreams, but selling them. By setting goals, we are putting on display,
just like in a bakery, or a showroom, what it is we are intending to do. Setting goals means that we are committing to
do something so important that we are prepared to do whatever it takes to make
our dreams come true.
Setting Goals Worksheet:
The
good thing about setting goals is that they are for everyone, and
everybody. By that I mean that you don’t
have to be a high-powered CEO, or District Manager to set goals. As a matter of a fact, we more than likely
set goals every month, when put together a budget based on our income. A budget is a goal, but it is financially based. It is a dream of how we intend to invest
and/or spend the money that we anticipate coming in each month. And we sell that budgetary dream to our
family. Goals are for teachers,
performers, police officers, doctors, housekeepers, even the homeless person on
the street. We all need goals. Why?
Because we always want to be more successful today than we were
yesterday, and more successful tomorrow than we were today. So what do we do? We set goals.
And we sell those goals to everyone around us. But the most important stakeholder of those
goals is none other than each one of us who set the goals for our achievement.
Setting
the goals aren’t necessarily easy because it may require that we step out of
our comfort zones. We may have to do 12
hours of something that we would be happy if we only have to do 2 hours. But the re-selling of our dreams to others
becomes evident when we do 14 hours even though it required only 12 hours. The re-selling of our dreams means that that which
we always wanted to do now requires we wear a uniform that we once were afraid
to wear because others might make fun of us.
The re-selling of our dreams means that we now put on display the
artwork that we did in our bedrooms or in our homes, but now, put on display
for all the world to see because we believe now more in ourselves than we have
ever done. The goals we set require that
we put out 10 displays this week and try to sell 5. On the next week, we put out 20 displays in
an effort to sell 10, or 50% of our displays.
The goal is to re-sell the fact that we are on a mission. Our goal is to show that our decision to drop
out of school wasn’t because we were quitting, but redirecting our lives. And while many of our loved ones would not
want us to be associated with a label such as a drop out, we have to be willing
to take a great risk that dropping out of school means that we have bigger
plans, and that we didn’t drop out of school, but that school may have dropped
out on us. We have to resell to not only
our family and friends that we didn’t quit, we just changed gears.
Dropout!
The
term Dropout has a negative a connotation as you can imagine. It suggests strongly that we are
quitters. It suggests strongly that we
can’t stay on track, that we are incapable of learning, or following the model
that others have successfully followed.
Being called a Dropout suggests that we are not able to get with the
program. While all of these things maybe
true for some people, for a lot of us, being a dropout may actually suggest
that we have a better plan. By looking
at some of the links that I have included in this post, you will see that many
successful people were once drop outs.
But they were anything but quitters.
They had a different calling, and for all intents and purposes, school
was holding them back (don’t quote me on this).
For those who were called dropouts, or who were told that they would
never amount to anything, they were able to repackage their dreams and in many
cases become millionaires. For many of
those who were labeled as dropouts, many were able to resell to their family
and friends that they had a dream that school was discouraging them from
achieving, and that they were then able to resell their real, true dreams. Are you one of those people? Are you able to repackage your dreams as a
so-called dropout? Are you able to
resell your dreams not only to others but yourself in order to accomplish some
great and wonderful things in your life?
I believe that you are able to do these things. Why?
Millionaires Without High School Diplomas:
Taking Charge
(Conclusion)
The
misconception about being a dropout is that you are not in charge of your
life. I believe that nothing is further
from the truth. I believe that you are
in charge. I believe that your decision
to drop out of school was perhaps the most strategic thing that you could ever do
to take charge of your life. Timing will
always be wrong, to others. But for you,
it will never be a better time than when you have to get off of the interstate
of life and take a road less travelled.
Maybe you don’t want to do the speed limit of 75, as does everyone else,
but instead the minimum speed of 40. You
have that choice because this is your life.
And if you don’t take charge of your life, where you actually set the
goals to achieve what is best for you, first, all other things will matter very
little. Yes, a lot of people will be
disappointed that you dropped out of school because they were counting on you. But the real reason why people are counting
on you is because they want to see you accomplish something great, something
fantastic. Well, you still can do that.
Unfortunately for others, but fortunately for those us who find the need, or
the compulsion to drop out of school, the road to something great may require
that you get off at this exit, right here, right now. But it’s okay, because there are more on ramps up ahead.
Take
charge of your life! Set goals! Repackage your dreams in a way that
works best for you, and then resell
your dreams in a way that let’s people know that now, more than ever, you’re in
charge. To the drop out class of 2013, I
do wish you the very best that life has to offer, but do not for a minute give
up on your dreams because so many of us are counting on you.
So I encourage each and everyone of you to prepare for your next move.
Planning to Live Your Life Your Way:
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