Who are you really? Describe yourself without using your name, or any attributes given to you by society and really think. Deep down, who are you?

“I am a person who enjoys seeing progress happen on many different levels and I think what I mean when I said progress is that I don’t like the thought of something that is a good thing for society to be at a stagnant situation or a stagnant place. I always want to see things getting better, being better, and living up to their full potential. That is the type of person that I am: if I see something that is a helpful thing, I’ll do it. I’ve taken on many different projects at Darlington like working at the greenhouse or in the band room, I’ve done many things for many different teachers because I like to help others and see people being able to get the most out of their surroundings. I feel like in order for that to continue to happen year after year, day after day is that we continue to make progress.”

What terrifies you the most? Describe a situation that you would feel this way.

“There are not many things that scare me physically. I mean, snakes and spiders and that type of thing would not be a fear of mine. I guess probably something that fears me the most would be failure. And I don’t mean it as in like a test. I mean as when I let somebody down, didn’t hold up to something and didn’t live up to the reputation that I think that I have. If I tell someone that I’m going to do something, I want to do that for that person and I would be terrified to know that people have given me the reputation of failure.”

What drives you to do better at something?

“ I would say that I’m a goal-setter. I like to set a goal and achieve that goal and then along the way to achieving that goal, I think about what I’ll do next. For example: the greenhouse project that we’ve been working on here at Darlington. The greenhouse was built a long time ago. So, over the past 20 years, it’s become a used and dilapidated structure and there are long term goals for the greenhouse. I will have graduated by the time that goal is complete, but my big thing is to set goals and then achieve those goals. I think that motivates me. It’s a constant motivation to say that this is what I want to get, this is the destination I want to go to and in order to do that I have to constantly keep working and I can’t be standing by and not making progress.”

Describe a time in your life where you felt pushed to your farthest physical, mental, and/or emotional boundary.

“Pushing my boundaries for me would be patience because I’ve often found myself in a situation where I really wasn’t the best fit for it, but I thought that I might be interested in this but it turns out that it’s just not for me. An example of that would be the Golf Academy, which is a wonderful program. As a freshman I thought that it might be something for me to do in the afternoon as an after-school activity, but it turned out that my passion for golf didn’t run as deeply as I thought it might have. I guess the challenge there, the limits I had to push was not being a quitter, seeing it through ‘til the end and still getting the most out of it. I feel like there’re so many situations that people come in and they’re like, ‘I hate this, but I’m just gonna get through it,’ and my response would be to say, ‘Well let’s not just get through it, if you’re gonna do it, don’t quit and be happy that you’re not doing it anymore. Try and get something out of it because if it’s something that you dislike that much, it’s something that you will probably never do again. So learn something that you don’t know because you aren’t gonna ever do it again’. So, the hardest thing for me would be finding my patience in situations that make me, well, impatient. Because when you’re in that situation, it’s not easy to just say ‘Calm down, I’m gonna get something out of this’.”

Is there something you wished everyone knew about you?

“Well I think one of the more interesting things about me that only some people and my friends know is that I am a Coca Cola memorabilia collector. What that means is, Coke has been around for 129 years and over those years, they’ve produced a lot of different mediums by which they advertise and history is by far my favorite subject. I just can’t answer the question of why Coke and not Dr. Pepper, but this is Georgia, and Coca Cola has always been around. One of my favorite things to do is to look at history through the lens of advertising because it tells so much. You go through so many different stages with artwork: the Victorian era, 30s art deco, 60s pop art, there are so many things. You even go through world events: World War I, World War II, all of those were reflected through Coca Cola’s advertising. And the perspective of the consumer, which is obviously what all those advertisements were trying to reach, is a perspective that you would not even think about during history class. Actually, a project that I’ve taken on, I’m working with my parents on this, is remodeling the old Coca Cola bottling plant in our downtown about 15 miles away from here. I’ve been collecting these Coca Cola things for about five years and we are doing a museum in that space. That’s what I’ve been spending a lot of my time outside of school on.”

What impact do you want to leave on this world?

“ I think the impact that I want to make on this world would be to say that motivation is something that can enable you to do things that you might think are impossible without some type of financial backing or some type of intellectual foundation. If you are motivated by something, I truly believe that you can achieve your goals or even a higher level of success with motivation. I hope to live a life that people might remember and say, ‘Daniel was able to achieve the things he did because he was highly motivated’. It’s not that I want them to look back on me and say, ‘He is highly motivated and therefore all his dreams came true’. My goal is to say that they can learn the things that I have done and realize that motivation is the common thread through everything that I’ve done and will do successfully in my life and my hope is that they can find that motivation and enjoy their own success.”