Home Court

The basketball court located in GORC park near my house is a popular gathering location for high school students and some live-at-home college students (like myself). Completed with two courts and four hoops, it is a good location for friends to meet up and play basketball. In my observation, I found that rarely anyone went in the mornings, but around five or six o' clock, the court was filled. The court is easily accessible, as it is located in the middle of my neighborhood. This is a great place for really anyone looking to play a pickup game of basketball.

Word Count: 100

This I Believe (Alandre Cato)

Success Through Failure
Alandre Cato

Word Count: 251

I used to believe that in this world, there were naturally smart people and naturally not-so-smart people. I believed that some things were out of reach for some people, and that sometimes, no matter how much one tried to achieve something, it wouldn’t matter, as that thing was just too high on the shelf of possible achievements.

Then I learned that the world wasn’t divided between naturally smart people and naturally not-so-smart people. The world is divided into people who try and don’t try. There are people who make an effort to be good at something, and there are others who tell themselves that they won’t be able to do it. The people who make an effort fail often, and the people who don’t make an effort fail once. I learned that it’s only through failure that people succeed. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. It took a thousand tries for Thomas Edison to develop a successful prototype of the light bulb. Walt Disney was fired from his newspaper job for “lacking imagination” and “having no original ideas,” and Oprah Winfrey was demoted from her job as a news anchor because she “wasn’t fit for television.”

And so I’ve learned to try at things. Through my process of writing this paper, I’ve realized that I haven’t failed much because I haven’t tried much. People say that “failure is life’s greatest teacher,” and I agree completely.

I believe that true success comes through genuine effort and disappointing failures.