Leadership Essays
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James RuizShareholder, Winstead PCLeadership Austin Affiliation: 2008 Essential Class Member |
"This I Believe"
I believe the charity of its people makes America great.
One day while attending a seminar, I heard a speaker say the one simple truth he had learned is that everything you want in life someone else has to give you. After thinking about the statement, I came to the conclusion the speaker is right. To be loved, someone else must love you. To be successful in business, someone has to pay for your services or products. To be educated, someone has to teach you or provide you with the instruments to learn. If we reflect on our lives, I believe we will realize that the charity of others helped each of us to achieve many of our goals. I know I am where I am today because of the charity of others.
I was very fortunate to be able to attend Cistercian Preparatory School in Irving, Texas, from the fifth grade to the twelfth grade on a full tuition scholarship funded by the generosity of the benefactors of the school. I made very good grades and each year my academic scholarship was renewed. Despite this, my prospects of graduating from Cistercian looked bleak when midway through my freshman year my father died in a car accident leaving my mother a widow with twelve children. My mother decided it would be better to move the family to Albuquerque to be closer to relatives and was in no position to pay housing for me to remain in Dallas so I could continue attending Cistercian. I was very disappointed but understood the reality of situation and I notified the Headmaster that I would be withdrawing at the end of the school year. Some of my friends' parents, however, took it upon themselves to fund a trust to pay my expenses and opened up their homes for me to live during the school year. This allowed me to complete my Upper School education and graduate from Cistercian. Their charity helped me get what I wanted, to graduate from Cistercian, but its benefits extended beyond this intended purpose.
Equipped with a Cistercian education, I went on to graduate from The University of Texas at Austin in three years with an accounting degree, then to earn a law degree and accept a job with a large Texas-based law firm. I, in turn, was in a position to house and assist six of my younger siblings during their college years, all of whom have now graduated and obtained good jobs.
While I probably have now paid back the equivalent of my eight years' tuition to Cistercian in the form of annual contributions to its Alumni Scholarship Fund, I continue to contribute each year and support local charities because I believe it will help others get what they want in life. I am very proud that my siblings who I helped are themselves charitable. I believe this cycle of charitable giving is repeated countless times over the span of our lives and makes this nation great.