Success Or Failure? It's Our Choice

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Earning an educational degree is very important. Likewise, leading a righteous life is crucial to one's future. Life is what you make it.The following illustrates this:

Brothers Michael and Chris were born early 1960s and grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in Richmond, California, right outside the San Francisco. Both boys were well behaved in school and brought home mostly A’s on their report cards all through grade school.
But coming from working class family with 8 children, money was always tight, so the boys often had to go without. In fact, things were so tight, the two growing up boys were often hungry.
So they resorted to stealing. From the time they were five until they were well out of high school, the boys stole. They stole crackers from the cupboard in the middle of the night.... they stole cookies from the grocery store... they even stole money from their parents.
It was during high school that something happened which Chris decide to change his behavior. At the end of his freshmen year in high school, Chris had received three A’s and three F’s on his report card the first time he had to failed anything in school.

Because the school only allowed three failures over four years, one more F and Chris would be kicked out. That’s when he made up his mind to change. Years later Chris would recall that defining moment in his life with three words: “I sat outside my house at the beginning of that summer knowing that I was letting my chance slip away. One more F and I’d be just another high school dropout, hanging around the neighborhood.”
Chris’ decide to change his behavior wasn’t an easy one. He took a lot of grief from his friends for choosing to excel in school, instead of squeaking by with C’s and D’s. But that decision to change took him in an entirely different direction from his brother Michael, who resisted changing his unproductive behavior.
Chris when on to graduate from high school... graduate from college.. and graduate from law school. For 15 years he worked as a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles, California, prosecuting murderers, drug dealers, gang members and crooked cops.
Today Chris is better known as Christopher Darden, one of the lead prosecutors in trial of the century, the O.J. Simpson Trial.
What became of Christopher’s brother Michael? After high school Michael joined the army and returned to his hometown shortly after his tour duty.
Back in Richmond, Michael continued his pattern of antisocial behavior hustling in the streets.. and stealing to support himself and a growing drug habit. On November 29, 1995, Michael Darden died at he age of 42...... From AIDS.

This story of triumph and tragedy serves to remind us that when all is said and done, who we are and what we become is determined by the choices we make.

We can choose to get better...... or we can choose to get bitter.

You can choose to become Michael. Or you can choose to become Christopher.

XOXO