What Motivates Me

As I look back at what I've accomplished in my life, I can't help but notice that everything I've done hasn't truly been for me. As a sophomore at my high school, my friends and I got an invitation to apply for the National Honor Society. There's this one girl at my school who is known for being very competitive when it comes to things like this; she just about nearly gets into this as prestigious as this, so everyone expected her to get into this.
Now, everyone who got an application, and there was maybe about five or six of us, were asking each other "oh, do you think you'll get in?" or "yeah, I think me and you have a good chance of getting in." So that girl was sitting a couple of seats down from me in my adv. biology class and overheard me talking about it to a couple of my friends and just gave me this look like "i highly doubt that they're gonna induct you into something like that." I noticed this and I was just like "are you effing kidding me, who are you to look down on me and judge what I'm all about?"
So all of us turned in our applications and waited a couple of weeks to see what decisions the panel of judges would make. Then, in my adv. bio class, which was my 2nd hour, the sponsor of NHS walked in our class and gave our teacher envelopes to give to us when he was done with our lesson for that day. Well, we weren't doing anything that day, so he walked around the room giving us our envelopes. Well, when I got mine, I didn't really pay much attention to it because I was listening to my MP3 player and when I listen to my music, I really tend to get into it. Well, she opens her letter as soon as she gets it, and as she reads what was written, a shocked expression flashed upon her face.
Okay, so I'm sitting there and I already know what it said, and even though she can be a bit stuck-up at times, me and her get along pretty well and I start to feel a little bad for her because I know how much it would've meant to her to get inducted. So I start talking to her and trying to comfort her and I tell her that they probably thought that even she is the top student in our class, and possibly our school, she lacked something that they find essential in the people whom they induct.
So after I'm done talking to her, I return to my own desk and put my head down and continue listening to my music. Well my other friend looks over at me from the desk on the side of me and asks me if I got in. I told him I didn't know because I had yet to open my envelope. So at that moment I figure I might as well open it and find out if I had been accepted or not. So as I sat there reading it, I wasn't really shocked to read what was written, because I knew that there was a fifty chance, but I couldn't believe that someone as smart and talented as her didn't get in when there supposed to take the best of the best.
After a couple of weeks, the academic assembly was held in the mini-stage at the high school. When it was time for the NHS induction, I was shocked to learn that only two people were inducted. And then to make things even more incredible, there was only one member that would be returning for their senior year, which meant that there would be only three members the following year. I was extremely proud of the fact that I would be one of them.
So thinking back on that experience, I feel really honored to be part of something like this, because there are a lot of deserving students at my school, but the judges obviously saw something in me that the others didn't have.