Leaving a path for others to follow by Ranya

Leaving a path for others to follow by Ranya - March 2015 Scholarship Essay

Anyone can be a leader, but not everybody has the qualifications of being a strong productive leader. Envision living in a world where you are blindfolded and surrounded by complete darkness. Unaware of where to go and how to get there, nor whether which way is left and which way is right. In the absence of leaders, the world would in a sense be as described above without having the presence of leaders to pave the way for us. Upon every corner we turn, we have a leader to direct us; this illustrates a football coach leading his players in the state championship, or a teacher briefly telling her students what is on the agenda. Nevertheless, leadership represents a driving force for any successful endeavor among the lives of both the leader likewise the follower. Leadership is crucial in college as it carries on throughout the rest of your life.

A leader is an individual whose primary focus is to mold others into becoming creative collectively and giving them the tools to strive. Leadership is about taking responsibility and teaching others while both parties take the opportunity to learn from one another, simultaneously becoming mentally and physically stronger in any situation. Holding a superior title and dictating the lives of the weak does not make one a leader, it is more so about the contribution of positivity you place into the world while transforming it into a more suitable place for you and the future generations to live in.

As Henry Kissinger once said, “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” I can attest to this because I was appointed as the class historian during my junior year. As historian, I had the task to unify our class, and to ensure that we had represented ourselves in a well-constructed manner. This position had brought on many responsibilities, and I had to overcome many obstacles throughout this time while still maintaining a positive leadership role for all the people that I had to mandate. And I hope to carry it out for the rest of peers in college. This ensures not only my success but the others around me because I will be able to carry out tasks that might put me in a difficult situation and advance my problem solving skills, while working as a team with my peers.

I advocate for leadership because I have always been a leader. Being the eldest I have always been looked at underneath a microscope by my siblings. Something difficult a leader has to face is the fact that they are placed on a pedestal. Your opinions are usually questioned while any of your wrong doings can be imitated by your disciples bringing about a plethora of wrongful actions into the world because of one discrepancy between what is right and wrong. At the end of his teachings, a leader will have embedded enough knowledge into his disciples so that they too can then become the next generation of future leaders of the world. By the end of my journey I have hopes that I would have implanted my footsteps firmly on the ground so enough people can follow my actions, and have my legacy thrive.