Speech On Adversity

trying to change or overcome obstacles can be damaging. Life is full of struggles, but it

Making it through hard times is challenging but worth it at the end. “Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret to success.” - Swami Sivananda

In life we may go through hardships that take us down a path that benefits us in the future and make us stronger individuals. These hardships can influence a person’s life by making us face obstacles we don’t want to face and

Most everyone has to overcome some type of adversity in their life. Some things are harder to overcome than others, but it’ll always be worth it in the end. These past few years I have been facing the challenge of a life time.

Imagine having the perfect life- you get into all honors classes, you get straight A’s, you are the first chair in the orchestra, you get into the A Cappella choir, you are on the varsity volleyball team, President of the Student Council, and you have a perfect home life. You have never had to face a single obstacle throughout your journey in life. When your whole life is like this, you do not know what failure feels like and will never experience the need to rise up after a downfall. There are many types of journeys one can take in life and dealing with obstacles has a prodigious impact on the outcome. The obstacles and hindrances are the things that shape us as we experience the ups and downs in life.

Overall, adversity is not always something to be avoided. Once someone is affected by adversity in their life, they must keep going and work through it opposed to allowing it to block them permanently. While enduring a difficult time, people are most vulnerable and receptive, making it imperative to properly handle these misfortunes that shape

Hardships have the power to make a break a person, as Roman poet, Horace, once said, “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant”. Everyone has or will have to face adversity at some point in their lives, it is a universal truth. Although misfortunes usually have a negative connotation, depending on the struggle and how one deals with it, it is likely the person will come out of misfortune better prepared for the world. Contrastly, if a person never experienced any hardships, they would lack a sophisticated understanding of the world and lack the ability to handle difficult situations. Adversity gives people strength they can not obtain with success.

Hardship is seen in some degree in everyone’s lives. It pushes us to the maximum, makes us hit rock bottom. These experiences change us, though not in the same way. Some souls rise to the occasion and rise out of the ashes, while others become stuck in the endless downward spiral. Although some individuals are crushed by the adversity, other are about to overcome it and become better people and lead improved lives.

Adversity can be seen in many different ways. Some people look at adversity as a learning experience, while others view adversity as a situation marked with misfortune. When a person is faced with adversity, rather than viewing it as something to hate, they should see it as a opportunity to grow. In the stories by Doris Lessing, W.D Wetherell and Alice Walker, they all show different types of challenges each character had to over come and their journey to do so. These stories all shared similar outcomes, they demonstrate how each character used an obstacle they were faced with, and turned it into a beneficial experience and how it shaped them into the person they are today.

Adversity is something we will all face. It’ll affect everyone ranging, from myself to characters in a book. Even though going through something so challenging, so painful, and so life changing can be hard, how you chose to handle it affects whether or not you overcome it. Adversity can either break a person or make them stronger; it’s up to their will to fight.

Since my younger years I have been compelled to differentiate between enduring and overcoming. From my parent’s divorce, our financial instability and my multiple social dislocations, I had to learn to adapt to ever-changing environments and circumstances. Before my grandfather died he shared with me one of his favorite quotes and one that I will never forget, which says that, “the key to life is found by

Obstacles change our way of thought and affect our emotions. A person’s values change as well as their character and they develop an understanding on their situation. Through the hardships of any situation, there is some way or another a solution only in the presence of desire.

Adversity has a way of bringing up challenges unexpectedly, most people shrink away from it and get consumed, but when they push through it people come out stronger than they were before.

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.” What the Roman poet Horace was saying was that when there is an obstacle in our way, our true colors will radiate. I could not agree more. When we as human beings feel passionate about achieving a goal, we may learn something new of ourselves, maybe a new trait that we did not know we possessed, when we reach new heights we did not know we could push ourselves towards. Challenges are similar to tests. Challenges are faced every day, but how we respond to them determines how strong we really are. Prime examples are superheroes and students that move dramatically.

Quite often you hear that we do not grow without failure; that failure is what teaches us a new skill and how to then succeed. I was not familiar with the quote, “adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant,” by Horace, however I think this quote is true. To me, this means that when someone has some kind of disadvantage, that person can use the challenge to his advantage through self-reflection, determination, and hope. Every person faces an obstacle, usually many and of various degrees of challenge, and although you cannot control the situation, you can control your reaction. Those of us that learn from adversity take our time to figure out how to approach the problem in a new manner. We recognize that one barrier is not a reason to abandon our course. We think outside the box for how to overcome the challenge. We learn from the first failure and we regroup for the next approach. Failure teaches you how to define yourself rather than how others define you. All four of the