A lot of people are born with talent. These people often do not have to work as hard for success as others who are not born with that same talent. The people who are born with talent are called “gifted.” There are also many other people who are not considered gifted, and who have to work very hard to become successful in certain areas.

As a high school student, I’ve noticed that those who become successful through hard work are not given as much credit as those who achieve that success through God-given talent. If anything, those people who spend a lot of their time working for that success are made fun of by others. Unfortunately, in high school, those who earn their success through pure talent with little hard work often get more credit than those who work for their success. This is usually the case for school work and academic success, but it is also true for other activities. It seems that one must simply hope they are naturally talented, rather than work hard for success. If that person isn’t talented, that person is going to have a tougher time becoming more talented.

This idea applies mainly to the way high school students think of others in terms of academics. It’s unfortunate that high school is one of the times in life when a person needs to be as successful as that person can be. Some people get good grades only because they are gifted with a strong intellectual ability. A lot of people need to work hard for good grades, and those are the people who seem to not get as much credit. Last year I earned a very good score on a test for which I studied very thoroughly the night before. After one of my tests on which I received the good score I expected, somebody said, “Oh yeah, well that’s just because you worked really hard.” That person was right, but that person said it as if working hard were a bad thing. If I had not studied for that test and had gotten a good grade on it, I bet that person would have been even more impressed with my success. Unfortunately, that’s the way it works for students my age. I don’t know if this will be the case in college, graduate school, or when I get a job in the future.

Students my age give more credit to those who do not study for a test and still ace it. Why? What did that person do for that “A”? The answer is nothing. Someone else has to work hard for that good grade. That person has to study for hours the night before the test. When that person gets an “A,” about 95 percent of the students probably will not give that person as much credit, or even any credit at all. It is comparatively easy to get an “A” without studying if one is very intellectually gifted. It is certainly a lot more difficult for someone to get an “A” by studying for hours the night before than it is for somebody who is a lot more gifted, and does not really have to do very much to get that grade. It does not really seem to make sense at all, but students my age just seem to give more credit to people who don’t work as hard.

Some students may even get to the point where they lie in order to not be made fun of. A couple of years ago, a student said that he had not studied for a single test all year. This student’s grade point average was a 4.143, and almost all of his classes were advanced. I did not believe what he said for a second. It is extremely rare for someone to not study at all and get a perfect grade point average. If somebody really does not study and gets perfect grades in the most challenging classes at his or her level, that student should have skipped a grade earlier. This student did not skip a grade. He is still in my graduating class, and he has been in my class ever since I came to George Mason Middle School in seventh grade. It is astonishing what some high school students would do just to not be made fun of.

I know that if I were an employer and I had to choose between somebody who works extremely hard and somebody who is smarter than the hard worker but does not work as hard, I would choose the hard worker. The hard worker may make more mistakes than the smarter worker, but more work will be done by the harder worker. Many employers find more value in hard work than in intellectual ability, and, therefore, hard workers are often more likely to be successful than those who do not work as hard, no matter how intelligent they are. If more high school students knew that fact, they would probably change the way they treat others who work extremely hard. High school students need to change this idea of giving more credit to those who are gifted rather than those who work harder. High school students should give more credit to and admire those who achieve their success through hard work. Hard workers really deserve some credit, and they will probably earn that credit later on in life by finding that hard work actually leads to success, and that it was completely wrong of those kids they knew back in high school to make fun of them because of their hard work ethic.