Sacrifice: Are Your Dreams Worth It?

Happy New Year! Here’s to an awesome and wonderful 12 months up ahead filled with great experiences, wonderful company, and lots of dreams turned into reality! :]

Lately I’ve been thinking about sacrifices. How much is too much? How much are you willing to give up to get to where you want to be in your life? How hard are you willing to work?

I think the answer to that is dependent on how much your dreams mean to you.

Mayhaps it’s idealistic for me to think this, but I like to believe that if you have a goal in mind and it’s something you really want to accomplish, you’ll get there if you’re willing to put in the work for it.

I wholeheartedly believe that I got to where I am today because I refused to give up.

As a pre-med undergrad, it meant taking 10-12 classes per quarter so that I could take all the classes I wanted and needed and still graduate in 4 years. It meant using my “free time” to work several part-time jobs to pay for my livelihood while volunteering at hospitals and clinics on the side to gain more experience in the medical field. It meant missing out on time spent with my best friends and loved ones. It meant moving across the country, away from everyone I’d ever known, to pave my own path.

I think finding that perfect balance was what was the most difficult. I did a test run in grad school where I stopped doing almost all the things I loved to do—exercising (for the most part), dancing, volunteering, music—to focus almost exclusively on my grades, and yes, while they did improve, it was a depressing time (made better only by the awesome friends that I made in the program).

“Sacrificing” my free time for my extra-curriculars was never an issue for me because I loved what I was doing. They were my break from academia, and I loved every moment, but what was most difficult for me was sacrificing quality time spent with loved ones.

A lot of these thoughts were spurred by my recently looking back on my grades—they’re not completely horrible, but they really aren’t the best either. (Nowhere close.) After grad school, I made the conscious decision to not spend the entirety of my med school life buried under stacks of books and notes because I value the people I love, staying healthy, community involvement, and giving back. I tried to keep all those aspects in my life as much as possible, at the expense of a potential marginal improvement on my grades.

Could I have done better if I hadn’t been so involved in the community? If I didn’t bother cooking all my own meals and keeping a regular workout schedule? Possibly, although my quality of life [and health] would have taken a spiraling nosedive.

So in the end, was it worth it? Am I on track to where I’d like to be eventually?

I’m happy to say that I am. With each pothole along the way, I try to take something from it. I learned to adapt, to manage my time, to fight for my dreams. I learned to talk myself into believing that I could do something, even if I had shadows of self-doubt hanging around.

Whether your goal is to land your dream career, to PR at a competition or race, to set national records in your sport, to start up your own business…(this list could go on forever)…it’s not always going to be easy. There will be setbacks along the way and times where you’ll fall, but when you finally reach it, it will make you appreciate it that much more because of all the time and effort you spent into making it happen.

If you put your heart and soul into turning a dream into reality, you will make it there.

Don’t give up on yourself.

Your dreams are worth it.

You are worth it.

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• Is there something you’ve always wanted to do that you’ve been afraid of attempting? What’s holding you back? Go forth and give it your best shot! <3
• What’s something you want to accomplish this year?