Find Your Tiger Face

For my mid-term, I had to write a 350+ word persuasive essay based on a fable from India. It is about a tiger whose mother dies right after he is born and he is raised by a herd of goats. When he is older, an adult tiger finds him and shows him in a reflection of the lake that he is really a tiger. The essay was to a persuasive argument about a) People need to see their tiger faces or b) People need to continue to live as goats. I chose to write about people needing to see their tiger faces.

I’m not entirely sure my essay is very persuasive, but it meets the criteria of being written in the Academic style with a one-paragraph personal example (allowed to be in first-person), a thesis statement and a conclusion. It is 646 words, so I think I met the 350+ word requirement. haha. 

Anyways, here is my essay. Feel free to submit feedback.

               We live in a world where people put down others and try to conform people to what they believe others should be. This could be because of personal insecurities, a desire to keep others from getting ahead or a true belief that we all need to hold to the same personification. There is a mass hysteria to form people into cookie cutter images of each other while stamping out a person’s desire and drive for individuality. People need to see their tiger faces because only then will they know their true capacity for greatness.

               When individuals strive to conform their actions and ideals to match the actions and ideals of those around them or live and do things in a way they’ve been told things should be done while ignoring their own thoughts and feelings, those individuals are living as a tiger raised by goats. They are overlooking what they feel inside to match with what they see. While a tiger can conform to parts of a goat’s lifestyle, eating the same diet as a goat is physiologically damaging and will make the tiger ill and unable to perform at capacity.

               Individuals are the same way: When one attempts to conform to the way others live while neglecting what is right for them, the individual prevents him or herself from living up to his or her potential. The person may feel content or like they are not missing anything, but when they realize how much they are truly capable of and the potential they have, they realize what has been missing as a new world of possibilities opens up.

               At a job I held previously, I was instructed on how to complete my tasks and told the proper way things needed to be done. At first I went along with what I was taught because I didn’t know any better. Over time, though, I realized that my work could be done in half the time if some of the tasks were adjusted in minor ways. When presenting this idea to my trainer, I was told I needed to keep doing things the way they had always been done because it worked. While I complied for a time, eventually I started changing the way I did my job and found that I was boosting my production as well as making things easier for others who had tasks to complete further down the line. This resulted in my being transferred to several different positions over the course of a year to rework the procedures for those positions as well as write training manuals for each position to assist in teaching others how to improve performance in those areas. I had never thought of myself as a person who could reorganize and form procedures inside a company. I’ve always been the one overlooked and passed over for responsibility because I’m quiet and unobtrusive. I didn’t mind too much because I never really thought I wanted all the responsibility others were given. But when I realized what I can do and the skills I have, I saw my tiger face and the greatness that I can achieve.

               We each have a tiger face inside of us. Some individuals have seen theirs while others are still living peacefully with the goats and do not know they are really a tiger. Being like a goat is not a bad thing, per se. One can live a happy life as a goat, but imagine the joy that can be achieved once that person sees their inner tiger and realizes what they can be. Seeing a tiger face opens up a world of possibility and brings out an endless expanse of potential. We all need to look deep inside to find our tiger face and see what it holds. Only then will we be able to truly see the greatness we are capable of.

Ugh. After reading through this for the 5 billionth time, I just realized how awful my first paragraph sounds. I completely spaced rewriting that one to go with the rest of my essay. I’d originally intended to take my essay in a different direction, but then decided to go this way. I keep reading through this and finding places I could have done better, places I should have phrased things differently and other things I could have said. Oh well. At least this is only 5% of my grade. I’ll still have an A even if I get a low score on this.