An Essay on The Speech of Dr. Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King has always spoke in a way that made you want to listen to what he had to say. When he spoke, you could tell that his voice was deep with passion and emotion for what he was speaking about. He spoke with vigilance and purpose. This speech is worded in a way that reaches out to everyone and can be understood by everyone. In this speech, he is talking about how no matter what your job is you need to do it to the best of your ability. He is explaining how your life is similar to a blueprint and how it needs to be thought out well, how we will have opportunities that our parents didn’t have. I like how he says, “Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives.” Each and every one of us is creating our life, and shaping it to what we want to do with it. We all have a purpose, and I agree with how he says we should live out our purpose doing it better than just a good job.

In order to achieve our goals and be good at what we do we need to have drive, determination. This speech speaks to me because it is important to me to do my best at things I try at. Dr. Martin Luther King views everyone as the same. No one is better than anyone. As he says, “Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you’re a nobody.” No matter what, you are worth something just like the next person. I agree with how he says you have worth, and your life has significance. If you don’t believe that it is going to be hard to believe in what you do, and do the best you can at your purpose in life, because if you don’t believe in yourself it is hard to believe in anything else. He does a good job explaining that no matter what you do, do your best at it. Also, that it doesn’t matter what you do because every job is an important one.

He uses a street cleaner as a reference for this he said, “If falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry, Sweep streets so well that all hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” He shows us that every job is just as important to the next. A lot of the times we don’t want to get up and do anything. When we have to we don’t do the job as well as we could have because we were feeling lazy, or felt or job was less than or didn’t matter very much. If everyone felt this way though then every job would be bad but if we do all jobs to the best of our ability everything would be ten times better than it is now.

Sometimes we want to do things that just aren’t the right things for us. We may want to be a doctor when really our calling could be a solider. Some people are going to be able to do things better than us, even when we feel they didn’t do anything to deserve it. We must let them and hope for them to succeed, because as Dr. Martin Luther King quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson from a lecture in 1871, “If a man can write a better book, or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” To me I think he is saying that even if someone does something better then you, they will be used for that skill and praised for it. So, don’t try to do something better than anyone else do something your good at and do amazing at it and make the world a better place. Don’t try to be something bigger than you are, but be the best at what you are doing and enjoy it.

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