Emerson's Enthusiasm and Effort

            “Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved” was once said by Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, I feel that the opposite is true and that you cannot be enthusiastic about anything unless you put some effort into it. The best way I can relate this to my life is by comparing to the three seasons of high school baseball that I have played.

                During my freshman year of baseball at Colleyville Heritage it didn’t seem like I loved playing the game as much as other players did. The other players were always talking about how excited they were to play the next game and I never felt the same way about it. I told myself that I didn’t enjoy the games like everybody else because it was only my freshman year and I didn’t think the games mattered as much as they would when I was older. But, as the season progressed I noticed the others also cared more about how they performed than I did. For some reason I didn’t take pride in how I played and I couldn’t figure out why. Before I knew it the season was over and I still didn’t know why my teammates were so much more enthusiastic about baseball than I was.

            My sophomore year of baseball was a lot different than my freshman year, the games mattered more and the coaches started to pay more attention to how you performed. That’s when I realized that I needed to take more pride in the way I played the game. So I started practicing more in hopes that I would get good enough to feel excited about playing. However I did not realize that my practice habits were nowhere near as intense as some of the other players who were obviously taking the season more seriously than I was. Near the end of my sophomore season I decided that I would work much harder at becoming a better baseball player than I currently was. So instead of only practicing during the season, I worked at improving my game through the summer, fall and winter.

            When the first game of my junior season came around I was an immensely improved baseball player. After we completed our first game, I finally realized why my teammates loved the game so much more than I did. It was because they worked so hard to become better players that when they saw the results it made everything they did more fun, and that’s what was finally happening to me.

            I do not think that Emerson was wrong in saying “Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved”, however, in my case it would be more accurate to say “effort is the mother of enthusiasm, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.