Remember in school when you had easy teachers and hard teachers? The easy teachers didn’t really push you, everyone got a good grade. The hard teachers were the ones who gave you a tough work load, kept you on your toes, had you try harder.

When I was a freshman, I was taking a history class and submitted my first paper. When I got it back, it was a C-. Now, it had been a long time since I had gotten a grade that low. I was convinced that my acceptance into school was a mistake, and that I would definitely be flunking out.

So with each paper I tried harder. Slowly, I worked my way up the letters: C, B-, B’s.  My last paper….I finally got an A, but I knew that my grade for the class would be the average of all my papers, so I knew I would, at best, get a B-/C for the course.  This was a big disappointment for me: history was my major, and I started questioning whether or not I could make it.

When I got my grades for the semester, I was completely shocked that my professor had given me an A for the class. So I went to see him to find out why. He looked at me and said “You did the work. I know how hard it was for you. But you did the work, and finally got to where I thought you could be.”

That experience was a million years ago. But I still remember it, because it taught me that you learn the most about yourself and you gain some invaluable skills with the hard assignments. You don’t learn if it’s easy. And the goal is to learn, gain skills and confidence in yourself and what you can do, so you can tackle the next thing.

I didn’t love my professor while I was going through this process, spending late nights at the library. Often, you resent the people who are pushing you and holding you the higher standards. Here’s what I realized: they hold the higher standard because they believe in you.