In Chapter 2 of 16 in her 2011 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, non-profit founder and executive Courtney Spence answers "What is Getting Easier and What is Getting Harder in Your Life?" She finds it harder to find and manage time, as increasing responsibilities and interests are pressuring her to better prioritize and schedule. Spence is finding relationships easier to navigate and manage as she comes to accept as you get older and have less time, you realize everyone else is in same boat. As a result, she finds keeping up with her college friends more manageable than previously thought. Spence is founder and executive director of Students of the World - http://studentsoftheworld.org - a non-profit that partners with passionate college students to create new media to highlight global issues and the organizations working to address them. Spence graduated with a BA in History from Duke University.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: What is getting easier and what is getting harder in your life?
Courtney Spence: Wow. Well, it is getting harder to find time, I think. That’s something – I think back to even just my college years and all of the things I was able to do, and volunteer, and go to church, and still have time to work out every day, and hang out with friends, and bake cookies for people. And do, I mean it was – I had, you know – I had all this time, and then you know, you make the transition into the workforce and the workplace, and you realize, okay, my time is a bit more limited. But particularly, for me in the past year, I just – I can’t seem to find the time. I have found more and more things that I’m interested in doing and learning about and knowing about, so there’s – it’s almost like my horizons keep getting wider, but my time somehow seems to be a little bit less. So that’s hard.
I think it’s – at the same time, I guess I would say what’s getting easier is this concept of relationships in a sense that, you know, most recently this year, I was able to reconnect with some friends from college that I hadn’t seen since we graduated, so its been over ten years, and we picked up like it had been yesterday that we are at Duke, and there was just this sense of awe that I had that, you know, I was sort of worried about some of these friendships and these relationships, and what would it be like, I haven’t seen them in so long, and it was – it was incredible, and I think there is something I have understood as you get older and you don’t find that you have the time that you want to put into relationships. You realize that everybody else is in that same boat and that more often than not, if you have had a period in your life where you’ve been close to people, you will always be able to go back to that foundation. So it’s not to say that you don’t have to work at relationships and friendships because you do, but I think there is this sense that, you know, everybody is going through their own battles, everybody is going through their own struggles, and you know, if you ever had a connection, you can still find that connection again.