Academic excellence IS the best indicator of Potential for success in life

It is hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world… talent is but natural but excellence is choice and anything worth doing, is worth doing right.  Academic excellence is the demonstrated ability to perform, achieve or excel in scholastic activities. Academic excellence has been identified with achieving high grades and superior performance. But academic excellence is more than just making good grades. It is the maximum development of your intellectual capacities and skills in service to humanity so as to be able to flourish and make great contributions in the society. Is there really a key to success or a magic formula to succeed in life? Success means different things to different people. Success for some means making a lot of money, getting all the awards and honors. For others, it may mean becoming famous or just mean doing the work you love on a schedule that meets your own needs. Most people wait for success thinking it will find them. Usually, it doesn’t. You have to leave space for success to happen. Just as there are many kinds of success there are many ways to achieve it. Success does not depend on wishing or on luck. It requires two things – working hard and dreaming harder. If you don’t have both, success will always just be out of your grasp.

There is not one, but many keys to success and in today’s day and age, academic excellence is the golden one. It carries with it a sense of responsibility and attitude that will help flourish and make an impeccable contribution to society.

One of my seniors once inspired me by the following words, “I have proven to be an outstanding student, one who excels both in academic and extra-curricular activities in school and the community. Such experiences indeed prepared me somehow to face the realities in life because the real battle lies outside the school walls – in the so-called real world.

Having the values of academic excellence are what makes one an extraordinary achiever. After all, being an achiever does not always lie in succeeding in everything, but in how one picks up the pieces and stands up to fight once more after each and every failure.

After all, Sir Henry Wardsworth Longfellow rightly quoted, “Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.”