Personal Essay Effective Leads/Hooks Descriptions Shortly after my grandfather decided to go off of chemotherapy last January, I went with the family to see him one last time in his Connecticut home. I had never lost a loved one before, and I almost didn t want to go, as if that could keep Grandpa alive. While there, however, I learned more about life, death, family and love than I d previously learned in all my sixteen years (and seven months) of experience. And by being there, I ve kept him more alive than he could have been otherwise. Six years ago my younger brother Peter, who was my closest friend and the only remaining member of my immediate family, ended his life. Nothing I have ever experienced, or have experienced since, has had such a powerful impact on what I believe. Never, ever give up. My father said it to me for the first time nearly thirty years ago. He gripped his sooty hands around the steering wheel of his beat-up Chevy truck and stared out through the windshield, while the wipers batted away big, fluffy, white snowflakes. You just can t. You can t ever give up. No matter how hard it gets. No matter how it hurts. When my four children were younger, I relished one ritual above all others. Hours after their bedtime and often after mine, I walked down the carpeted hallway dividing their rooms. I walked barefoot, as soundless as a cat; silence reinforced the intimacy of the ritual. I paused briefly at each door. I didn t open it. I just stood there, thinking about the child inside, and about how if I opened the door, I d find a son or my daughter asleep in their favorite position, clothes or toys or books or stuffed animals or soccer shin guards strewn all about depending on whose room it happened to be. It wasn t important for me to actually see that scene. I d seen it often enough when I told them goodnight. In the back of the ambulance, I kept falling out of consciousness. The medic shouted questions at me, to keep me from fading away. What is your name? The urgency in his voice cut through the fog. I didn t know my name. I didn t know much of anything. So, why exactly are we doing these visits, a dear friend asked me today. Strong Statements I have gone through 10 pounds of flour in three months. My life s philosophy lies in a chocolate cake with pink sprinkles. Last year my beliefs changed. Mommy, our four-year-old daughter began, When I grow up, I want to have breast cancer, too.
Belief Statements I believe that people should take pride in what they do, even if it is scorned or misunderstood by the public at large. I believe that making a stack of rocks by the sea keeps my father s memory alive. I believe in calling your mother. No matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, a phone call to your mother will make the world seem less daunting and help you feel stronger. I believe there is no place in this world more beautiful than the rolling surf of Grande Isle, Louisiana, when the first rays of the sun peek over the Gulf of Mexico to the East and turn the water from gray to green. I believe I am not my body. I believe in people. I believe hunger can be a good thing. I believe in singing badly. I believe that mowing the lawn is my life. Maybe I d better explain. Taking care of the lawn, my father always said, is like taking care of your life. Finishing a job well done soothes the soul. Questions How do you believe in a mystery, in something you don t understand and can t prove? Quotes My foundational belief, the one thing I find that I can count on in myself, and that I cling to in times of crisis, was formed during my service in the U.S. Marines. Their motto is Semper Fidelis, which means always faithful. I take issue with Mr. Thomas Wolfe who said, You can t go home again. People repeat this phrase like a mantra, but I do not think it s true. You can go home again, if you took enough with you when you left. There is a saying at the race track that you can t rule a man off for trying.
We re All Different in Our Own Ways Joshua Yuchasz - Milford, Michigan As heard on NPR s All Things Considered, October 16, 2006 What if everyone in the world was exactly alike? What if everyone talked the same, acted the same, listened to the same music, and watched the same T.V. programs? The world would be extremely dull! I believe it s important to accept people for who they are. Differences are important and they should be respected. For example, many important people throughout history were considered different, such as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Harriet Tubman, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Abraham Lincoln. They did great things, but some people thought they were weird, because they had strong feelings about something. I can relate to these people, because I ve been in that situation before, many times. It all started in elementary school when I realized that I wasn t like everyone else. My mom says that I have a tendency of obsessing on certain subjects. Unfortunately, these subjects don t interest other kids my age and they really don t interest my teachers. In fact, my kindergarten teacher said she would scream if I mentioned snakes or lizards one more time, while she was teaching the days of the week. I would get in trouble for not paying attention, and the teasing began. In third grade, my teacher informed me that I have Asperger s Syndrome, and I said, So what? Do you know that Godzilla s suit weighs 188 lbs.?: Later, I asked my mom, What is Asperger s Syndrome? Am I gonna die? She said that it s like having blinders on, and that I can only see one thing at a time, and that it s hard to focus on other things. Like, I would tell anyone and everyone that would listen about Godzilla, because my big obsession was, and still is, Godzilla not a real popular subject with the middle school crowd, and so the teasing continues. I might be different, because I have different interests than other teenagers, but that doesn t give them the right to be so mean and cruel to me. Kids at Oak Valley make fun of me for liking what I like the most. People also make fun of me for knowing facts about volcanoes, whales, tornadoes, and many other scientific things. My mom says that she has been able to answer many questions on Jeopardy just by listening to what I have to say, but I ve even been ridiculed for being smart. Maybe someday, I ll become a gene engineer and create the real Godzilla. I can dream, can t I? Sometimes I wish I were like everyone else but not really. Because I believe people should be respected for being different. Because we re all different in our own ways. Fourteen-year-old Joshua Yuchasz is a high school freshman in Milford, Michigan. He plays in his school s concert band and on its football team. In addition to Godzilla, Yuchasz likes other reptiles including Bubba, his pet red-tailed boa constrictor.
My Students Are Writers, Even When They Don t Realize It I believe in writing. I assign this This I Believe essay quarter after quarter, and each time I tell my students, I ll write one too. Only I never do. I never write it because I don t have time, I m grading papers, I m catching up on email, I m busy. The truth is, I never write it because I don t know what to say. There s too much; how can I say it all in a 500-word essay? Some of my students ask me, How do I narrow it down? I believe in so much, I can t fit it all in one paper! I tell them that their This I Believes don t have to be a treatise on life. They just need to pick one thing to write about. So. I believe in writing. I believe in writing when I see my students work, struggle, and triumph in their writing. I believe in writing when I see my student who was always told he was bad at writing, write a paragraph, an essay, a This I Believe paper. I believe in writing when I hear an anorexic student say that writing about her disease cleared her head just a little bit. I believe in writing when I see a man who spent years homeless and addicted write his first essay. One of my students was just out of prison when he entered my class. He had no idea how to use the internet to find his assignments. He typed multiple drafts of his papers fresh each time because he didn t know he could save a document for later. He hadn t written anything since high school, and even then it was rare. I watched him learn to write paragraphs and essays. And now I see him on campus working toward his goal of becoming a counselor, still writing only now it s research papers. My students are teenagers, adults, single parents, grandparents. They want to be nurses, welders, engineers, and actors. But they are all writers. I believe my students can write and write well. All of them: the single dad of four, the student who learned English just five years ago, the gas station attendant working her way through college, the abused student who was afraid to share her This I Believe essay. The students who dare to share their work, the ever-smiling student who grew up in foster care, the student back in school after two tours in Iraq, the student who failed out the first time and returned, determined to make it work. The students with learning disabilities who have to work two, three, ten times harder than everybody else. The student who hates to prewrite because he just wants to put it all on paper now, the mom who left her baby in Africa with relatives so she could make a better life for them both by earning her degree in the states, the bus driver from Chicago who lived through Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi. They re all there: snowboarders, animal lovers, football players. They are all writers. I teach my students to stick to a topic, to develop and explore it, but be sure to stick with it. It s funny then, that what I have discovered is that, while I do believe in writing, what I meant to say is: I believe in my students.
Disrupting My Comfort Zone Brian Grazer - Beverly Hills, California As heard on NPR s All Things Considered, June 26, 2006 I was 45 years old when I decided to learn how to surf. Picture this: The north shore of Oahu the toughest, most competitive surfing spot on the planet. Fourteen-foot swells. Twenty tattooed locals. And me, 5-foot-8-inches of abject terror. What will get me first, I wondered, the next big wave or the guy to my right with the tattoo on his chest that reads RIP? They say that life is tough enough. But I guess I like to make things difficult on myself, because I do that all the time. Every day and on purpose. That s because I believe in disrupting my comfort zone. When I started out in the entertainment business, I made a list of people I thought it would be good to meet. Not people who could give me a job or a deal, but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the world. So I started calling up experts in all kinds of fields: trial lawyers, neurosurgeons, CIA agents, embryologists, firewalkers, police chiefs, hypnotists, forensic anthropologists, and even presidents. Some of them like Carlos Castaneda, Jonas Salk, and Fidel Castro were world-famous. Of course, I didn t know any of these people and none of them knew me. So when I called these people up to ask for a meeting, the response wasn t always friendly. And even when they agreed to give me some of their time, the results weren t always what one might describe as pleasant. Take, for example, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. You ve heard of him? However, he d never heard of me. It took me a year of begging, cajoling, and more begging to get to him to agree to meet with me. And then what happened? He ridiculed me and insulted me. But that was okay. I was hoping to learn something from him and I did, even if it was only that I m not that interesting to a physicist with no taste for our pop culture. Over the last 30 years, I ve produced more than 50 movies and 20 television series. I m successful and, in my business, pretty well known. I m a guy who could retire to the golf course tomorrow where the worst that could happen is that my Bloody Mary is watereddown. So why do I continue to subject myself to this sort of thing? The answer is simple: Disrupting my comfort zone, bombarding myself with challenging people and situations this is the best way I know to keep growing. And to paraphrase a biologist I once met, if you re not growing, you re dying. So maybe I m not the best surfer on the north shore, but that s okay. The discomfort, the uncertainty, the physical and mental challenge that I get from this all the things that too many of us spend our time and energy trying to avoid they are precisely the things that keep me in the game. Oscar-winning movie producer Brian Grazer co-founded Imagine Entertainment with Ron Howard. They created A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and other acclaimed films. The Producers Guild of America honored Grazer with its lifetime achievement award in 2001.