Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. I'm Billy Francis. I am a husband, a father, and I try to be a good friend and a servant. And I am the Director of the Veterans Center here at Florida State University. I think it's hope. If we don't focus on the possibilities and the potentials, we can lose hope. And I don't like to think of going through each day without hope. Adversity, that's the other thing, thinking about adversity, right? So we'll typically, when we get into adversity, we go, I want out of this right now. But if you think about what would life be like without adversity, it's not the adversity necessarily that makes our life exciting. It's our response to it. I get to choose how hard I'm going to work, what my attitude's going to be in adversity or in prosperity, and whether I'm going to give up or not. Learning to embrace it. And when we realize that failure, that's another thing I think we battle. As we battle this monster of failure, I heard somebody I read actually, it was an anonymous quote long ago when I was probably 18. And it said, show me a person that can't make a mistake, and I'll show you a person that can't make anything. And all of a sudden I started thinking about that. And I said, you know, we think about this failure thing, and nobody likes to fail, right? But if I am so afraid to fail that I don't try, that I don't push my limits, I am not contributing the way I need to. And if I fail, it doesn't have to be permanent or define me unless I choose for it too. People that really love me, they still love me. Just the same as before I failed. All of a sudden this failure thing is not the big monster that it used to be. Billy Francis, and I am the director of the Student Veterans Center at Florida State University. You're listening to voices that inspire.