Complaints and Restraints

   Usually, I consider myself a fairly tolerant person.  I put up with my friends' seemingly endless political banter, my mom's constant nagging about how I need to figure out what I want to do with my life, and my dog's strange obsession with licking any exposed parts of my body.  I put up with my sister's weekly tantrums about going to ballet and my dad's new-found fascination with remote-control airplanes.  I can not, however, put up with people when they complain about working hard.  Unfortunately, as a high school student, I encounter this every day and have only recently learned to hold my tongue when I hear this complaining instead of hostilely refuting the pathetic arguments. This past weekend, I finally agreed to let my parents drag me around half the country visiting colleges that, quite honestly, I had little to no interest in.  At one of the colleges, I visited my cousin and, much to her dismay, shadowed her for the day.  I followed her all around campus, bored out of my mind until she took me to her English class.  Now, seeing as this was indeed an honors English class at an actual college, I expected some intense seminar-type discussion or an equally as intense writing workshop.  Instead, the professor divided the class up into small groups for an hour-long peer editing session of a five-page paper on, ironically enough, In Cold Blood. As I looked over the papers in a state of disbelief, I heard the subtle yet distinct groans from the kids at my table as they complained about having to analyze the book and how long they spent working on their papers.  Without thinking, I began to laugh.  As much as I sometimes resent all of the work that I put into my own English class, after looking at those papers I resolved to never think that way again.  As high school juniors, we could analyze books and write papers at a higher level than this group of college freshmen.  This could not happen, of course, without the arguably insane amount of time and effort that we all put into our work--and, of course, a lack of complaining.  The more complaints people make, the less inclined they feel to work hard.  This network of complaints forms a sort of restraint not only on those who do the complaining but also on those who hear the constant whining.  They subconsciously convince themselves that they will not effectively manage their workload, thus mentally blocking themselves from unleashing their full potential.