The Last Word

By David Cole | Posted: Tuesday September 9, 2025

The one person who will stop you from reaching your full potential is yourself.

While the people around you may tell you to go down a certain path, give you advice you don’t necessarily need, or belittle you so much that you eventually give up on your dreams, the one and only person you have to spend your entire life with, from start to finish, is yourself. No one else. Just you. For many people, this thought alone is too much to deal with, and they simply fall in with the rest of the crowd, going through life as if they don’t even know who they truly are as individuals. However, for the few who manage to figure out who they are, control their minds, and focus on achieving their goals—well, they’re the ones who make sure they leave a positive impact on the world they eventually leave behind.

It’s very easy to let external opinions dictate your internal thoughts, but this is something you must block out if you want to get to where you want to be in life. If you don’t block out these external voices, you end up putting limits on yourself and eventually following everyone else down the same road, which inevitably leads to a dead end. At our age in particular, it’s very easy for your mates to throw you off course when they ask you to go clubbing or partying, because you want to fit in—you want to be seen as cool. Let me be the first to tell you, though, that these clubs and parties aren’t going anywhere. So if you don’t want to go anywhere either, then by all means, keep clubbing and partying. But if you know you should be putting in extra training for your sports team, or if you know that you should be studying so your academic results improve, then you need to have the confidence to say no. Because at the end of the day, if you want to be different from everyone else, why would you do what everyone else does?

When I was in Year 11, I—like many of you—had social media, and I would spend hours each day simply wasting time. Many of you know the feeling: you get home from a long day at school and want to relax for an hour or so, so you open up TikTok or Instagram and start scrolling. Before you know it, five hours have gone by, you’re behind on everything you actually needed to get done, and you’re annoyed at yourself for wasting so much time. Towards the end of Term 2 in Year 11, I finally got fed up with making the same mistake over and over again, so what did I do? I uninstalled social media. Yep, that’s right—I got rid of it all. And to make sure I wasn’t tempted to go back, I deleted all of my accounts. What effect did this drastic change have on me? Not only was I generally more focused throughout each school day, but I also found it much easier to concentrate for hours at a time.

The reason I bring this up is because uninstalling all of your social media under the age of 25 is quite a rare phenomenon in today’s society. But it’s a perfect example of someone our age going against the crowd—and benefiting as a result.

To finish off this Last Word, I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes:

“The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before.”