3 Cups Of Tea
Greg Motenson’s, Three Cups of Tea is a story about the life journey of Mortenson as he encounters failure and turns it into a great story of success. The beginning of the story focuses and centers on the theme of failure and what good can come from it. That has sometimes also been a theme in my own life. One passage from the story that demonstrates this kind of failure is when Relin writes, “Drifting in and out of consciousness to a groaning soundtrack of the glacier’s mysterious inner machinery, he made his peace with his failure to honor Christa. It was his body that had failed, he decided, not his spirit, and everybody had its limits. He, for the first time in his life, had found the absolute limit of his.” This then spins back into the theme of failure which later turns into reward. From here Mortenson, the Mountaineer who fails to climb K2, goes on to build fifty schools.
To me this theme of failure and the above passage remind me of some of the failures I have experienced or seen during my life. I can relate to this because when I was a freshman in high school I tried out for the basketball team and didn’t make it. This was rough on me, but over the next year after that all I did was practice and get better. The next season I made the team. That was a great feeling, like I’m sure Mortenson’s was.
Everybody has failures in their lives. Some people’s failures might be worse than others, but those might also turn out better than others to. I believe to succeed you have to first face some type of failure to motivate yourself even more. It’s like how after Mortenson failed to climb K2 he saw the problems and Korphe and decided to help the children out. His failure turned into the success of many others.
Overall, the main theme I have taken from this story is failure, but in a sense of benefitting from failure. All of these examples mentioned above relate to the theme of failure in the Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea. Failure was the...
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