You'll miss 100% of the shots you don't take...

It's official, I am the first of my family on both my father's and mother's side to graduate from college. As nerve-racking as that was to endure four years of paving and guiding my own path of what I believe success to be, I have always been met with lessons and insights after each experience. One of the most memorable lessons I've learned recently is that "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Towards the end of my senior year of college, the pressures of obtaining an entry level position has weighed on my mind. My biggest goal in my senior year was to try to better align myself with opportunities that would alleviate my situation. That is when I heard about MAIP, the Multicultural Advertising Intern Program. One of the requirements was to submit a video about why we believe we'd be a good fit for the program. I knew I wanted to pour my all into the video I submitted because that is my nature. My mother would tell me all the time when I was younger "don't do anything halfway, otherwise do not bother to do it at all." A quote that instilled in me that things must be perfect otherwise the world must not see it. However, once I felt finished with my video submission, I kept overthinking everything about my video. I thought "My font can be changed.", "Does the background look weird?", "Maybe I should start over?" As time went on, the deadline approached even faster but I still felt like my video wasn't "perfect". I made up my mind hours before the submission date that I was going to scrap the entire video all together and give up. However, a close friend of mine loved my video so much that he told me that I should submit it and that I'd definitely not get accepted into the program if I did not submit anything at all. Spoiler alert, I ended up submitting it and got placed into an agency because of the program which has changed my entire perspective and approach to life. This is all to say that you must take a stab at every opportunity because sometimes the people around you may see the value in your work better than you can. It was the ultimate reminder that whether it is your career, or personal life that you will miss all the shots that you don't take, so take a shot at everything.