A Must-Read for Everyone - Breaking Night by Liz Murray

What decides your success for you? How smart you are? What your financial standing is? How popular you are? What connections you have? In my opinion, none of those things are deciding factors in how well you do at anything. The only thing that really matters is your level of motivation. Liz Murray is a true testament of that.

Breaking Night is a memoir about Murray's life. It details her childhood, growing up in a home with parents struggling with drug addictions. It then follows her into her teen years, and into early adulthood, when she was living on the streets by herself. She didn't go to school. She didn't have any money for food. She didn't even have a place to live....What if I told you that she eventually ended up at Harvard? How would someone in that situation ever get anywhere in life? She was living on the streets, worrying about how she was even going to survive another week. How was she able to do anything else? The answer is simple. She had the motivation to do so.

When she was 17 years old, she decided that she didn't want to continue living her life the way she was living it. She didn't want to end up like her parents, so she went searching for a high school to go to. She hadn't been to school since Junior High, and she was rejected by almost every school she tried to enroll at. The one school that did end up accepting her, tried to push her to get her GED and not actually go to school. They thought is was too late for her to get a full high school education, but that's not what she wanted. She was determined to go to school and do well, so she could graduate, and get somewhere in life. So she did.

She kept searching until she found a school that accepted her, and she buckled down and dedicated herself to her learning. Instead of using everything she had been through as an excuse for why she couldn't do well, she used it as a motivator. She thought about what she had gone through, and how her parents ended up. The more horrible things she had to deal with in her life, the more determined she became to change the way her life was going. That shows that if you're motivated, you can accomplish anyone. It doesn't matter what else you feel is standing in your way. You can overcome any obstacle, if you have enough grit. All of the other things in your life that might make it harder are just obstacles that you have to climb over. They might make things difficult, but they don't decide your fate for you. You do.