My greatest accomplishment to this day is the experience that I had the privilege to have when I rowed on a club crew team. While I was not a natural rower, I had to work extremely hard at it. I had never wanted anything more than to be in the A boat for rowing. I did achieve my goal, but that is not the point. The point was that along the way, I discovered who I as a person truly am. I found out what it feels like to push my body further than it has ever been pushed, and I experienced the feeling of victory in the face of adversity. I had never had anyone believe in me as much as my coach did. He inspired me and showed me that I can achieve anything that I set my mind to. I learned what teamwork truly meant, and I found a new passion. Rowing is something unlike anything else, and I learned so many life lessons from it. I learned that success does not necessarily mean winning first place everyday, rather, success is measured by the work that I put into something and the feeling that I get out of it. Every time that I finished a race, I felt so good, so accomplished that I was able to finish, because it meant going against that voice in my head that told me I couldn’t and proving it wrong. This transferred over to my life. I began realizing that although I told myself I could not accomplish things, I was wrong. If I set my mind to it and worked hard enough, then I could do anything I wanted to. I learned what it meant to truly be passionate about something. Passion is not loving something every minute you do it. Most of the time I hated going at five in the morning to rowing simply to put myself through hell and back, yet at the end of the day, one thing remained. That was my desire to go out the next day and try even harder, and accomplish even more. Passion, I learned, could be defined as wanting to achieve or do something so badly, that in the process you discover something about yourself you cannot find elsewhere. And every time you do this thing, it gives you such a feeling of fulfillment, that you know you cannot live without it. That is passion, and passion is what rowing gave me. It gave me a desire to live and succeed, and this is why rowing is the biggest accomplishment of my life, no matter how short-lived it was, for without rowing I would not be the same person that I am today.