Payton+R’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

Pretty much everyone can agree that technology does crazy things to your self esteem. We have all seen someone holding their breath for positive feedback and people being torn down from the comments and reviews on the things they felt willing to share with the world. The repercussions of this social platform hopefully won't be too drastic for my future america but who knows what will really happen. I can’t keep up with how tech is evolving or how it’s going to be later on in life but the change in people is hard to lose track of. When I was younger i never felt like something wasn’t good enough or that my own effort was useless like I know has been a problem for some of my friends as a result of technology. In fact I don’t really remember experiencing this feeling until i was around 13.

The whole experience started when I was about 8 or 9 when my goal was to do as much to do as much as humanly possible to preserve every resource and protect every animal extinction. This meant my dreams and actions all revolved around this goal. Like being determined to write a letter to the president explaining why we need cut down on fossil fuel emissions or my boycott of all things heavily packaged in grocery stores. With these hopes I truly believed I would be someone to make serious positive change for the environment. I mean why not? if I just worked hard enough I would solve everything, as the whole world told us while we were young. But I stopped because after getting a little older i started to actually see the reality that for the one person who did care there were a thousand more destroying our resources as if they were going to last forever. It was difficult to ignore the articles about massive oil spills like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, and the statistics of some 8 million tons of plastic in the ocean, I couldn't see a point anymore. I was outraged that not many people saw our planet as something to protect. I completely gave up faith and hope I had in everyone including myself. Now that it has been quite a while since I was fully invested, new instances of this same problem have come up like the three or more dragon talks on both the environment and wildlife that was being destroyed due to human impact. The problems never went away from me but I went away from the problem.

 Maybe I may have done something or maybe not but if i had trusted myself and my goals the answer probably would be more simple, I would have succeeded or failed, but I never would have failed to try. There is no way to succeed from giving up. In any accomplished individual there is a character trait that little of us posses, or should I say many traits because the one i'm addressing probably isn’t alone. The difference between their success and the lack of in others is mainly their ability to pursue ideas that seem impossible, they embrace the dream in all it’s entirety. If you might have guessed I think the most important thing today more than ever is following faith, if not others than in yourself. On the internet, someone’s negative words are going to hurt when they dislike something you care about that doesn’t mean we should stop liking or pursuing it. If it is what you think is right or something you have interest in people shouldn’t make you change yourself because their opinion differs(unless you want to of course). That is what I wish I had remembered during my earlier years and hope to remember later on as well. I couldn’t control other into helping recycle or to use water bottles and not plastic but i definitely could have continued to do the same for myself as I grew up. In an America where we all laid most of our doubt and worry to rest, there could be more of the impossible ideas shared (the ones we keep to ourselves for fear they won’t be taken well or appreciated) and hopefully this can lead to better communication and a more open air for the spreading of ideas. I don’t think today this is a major internal dilemma for everyone or something we all need to work on because maybe you always have faith in your ideas and follow through with them but for those of us who don’t this may be novel advice as communication is changing quickly.