HOW TO BEGIN SELF-CONSTRUCTION

Define your foundation Just as a house can not stand without a solid foundation, it will be difficult to build a meaningful life for yourself if you do not have a clear idea about who you are and where you want to go.

Your foundation is made up of your values, what makes you feel good inside, how you define success and what it means for you to be happy. Just like the “rocks in a jar” example – if you add the small pebbles and sand first, there will be less room for the rocks. If you add the rocks first, the small pebbles can fall through the cracks and make their way to the bottom – so can the sand.

Your foundation, or your definition of you, are like these rocks, those are the things you want to incorporate into your life first, and let everything else surround them.

If you take the time to identify what makes up your foundation, or your own large rocks, it will give you a good place for you to start thinking about how the decisions you make in school will reflect your interests, values and everything else you find important. As you go through life, you will continually strengthen and refine your foundation as you experience more of the world around you.

You can start building on your foundation with things that you love to do. Using the idea of rocks in a jar, your rocks are your foundation, and the pebbles and the sand that surround those rocks are your interests.

Things you love...

We often dismiss our interests because we do not feel they are serious enough. It is easy to imagine someone saying that video games are a waste of time, but tell that to the nearly 8,000 employees of Electronic Arts who make their living developing video games.

Or athletes, for example, it is very easy to tell someone “you cant do this or that” but for every single time someone has been told they cant do something there is someone else out there proving people wrong.

Montalvo packs power into small frame... When she arrived at Alabama for her recruiting trip in the fall of her senior year of high school, Head Coach Patrick Murphy had never met her; had never seen her. He was told “If you can get past her height, you're going to really like her.” Just how short was this kid, Murphy wondered? The answer, as he recalled, was simply, "Well, you'll see. She's not very big." Too often, she felt schools simply weren't willing to look beyond the fact she didn't look like a Division I college softball player.

It didn't take her long to prove she belonged at the collegiate game's highest level. She started 52 of the team's 65 games as a freshman, hitting.285 with a.408 on-base percentage and committing just six errors on her way to a.957 fielding percentage in her new home at hot corner. Her glove remained steady as a sophomore, and her power blossomed at the plate after two years in the team's conditioning and weight training program. The smallest player on the field just about every time she steps between the lines, Montalvo hit 11 home runs and 16 doubles in 2007 en route to a.667 slugging percentage, the third-best mark in the SEC.

You should never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something because you aren’t “good enough.”

Explore the world and expose yourself to new people, places, and ideas; you will start finding things you love doing so much that time passes without you realizing it because you are happy and productive.

EXERCISE 8 My Jar... In a word document, write a paragraph about how to start building a life that is meaningful to you. Then, using the jar I am providing you with, fill out your foundations and place them inside your jar. Draw rocks and label each as your foundations.