A certain myth in our culture leads us to believe that hard work will be rewarded.

On the other hand, I think most college students prefer to believe in blind luck. Sometimes a blizzard comes along and cancels classes on the very day of an exam you haven’t studied for, or the one chapter or concept you studied counts for 90 percent of your test grade.

More often, however, you are staring at an essay question that makes you wonder if you’re in the right classroom.

Hard work, while often distasteful, gives us all an equal chance.

Everybody really could be a professional athlete, a doctor, or a poet if all it took to succeed was hard work. I hate to be a pessimist, but there is more to success than just honest effort.

Intelligence, physical limitations, talent, environment and inspiration all come into play.

My current philosophy is that without inspiration, there’s no need to work, because the final product of your efforts won’t be worth a crap. It’s quite a nice philosophy, actually. One day I watched five hours of Madonna videos on MTV because I just was not inspired to do otherwise.

Besides being a convenient theory, it has some definite truth to it. I find a direct correlation between my level of inspiration regarding assignments and my grade in my current writing class. Sure, a C+ proposal that I forced onto the page at the last minute was better for my grade than the F I would have received if I hadn’t turned in anything.

But somehow, I feel that a true artist would not submit an uninspired work.

I’m not saying that I want to be one of those people who border on genius, yet always manage to be hovering somewhere between a C and a failing grade. I don’t. A little more genius would be great, though.

Work, or perspiration, is important, of course. There’s nothing quite like a job well done, especially if you put a lot of effort into it. For example, over break I helped clean out the barn. It’s one of those jobs that no one ever wants to do, but somehow has to be done every year. The cows never learn not to poop inside the barn.

(You would think the cows would suffer considerable embarrassment, watching us fork their excrement onto the manure spreader, but judging by their rapt attention from the vantage point just outside the barn, they think it is quite amusing.)

Work can be inspiring, too. If pitching poop isn’t inspiration enough to finish college and get a good job, I don’t know what is. If you can find more inspiration than that in hauling manure, we have a cattle shed back home that could use some attention.

The only inspiration I got out of the project was that perhaps the reason I cannot seem to shake my boyfriend is that we have hauled manure together. Three times around Lake Laverne just doesn’t pack the same punch as three hours in a barn with pitchforks and months of soiled bedding.

Other than manure treatment, how does one become inspired? Well, that’s the question of the century, I am afraid. Everyone knows the feeling of frustration that comes with being stuck on a math problem, staring desperately through the microscope without locating anything, or writer’s block. Not everyone knows how to combat such a feeling.

There are a few things you can do. You can take a break; do something else for a bit until the answer comes to you. You can check to make sure the microscope is plugged in. Or, you can work feverishly and hope you hit on something.

If I burn out on writing or cannot think of a topic, I read. I read good creative writing, or I read the newspaper until an article angers me or starts a thought-process, or I go back and read my old journals. I also read old letters. Once in a while, I get inspiration from movies, TV, my classes and being outdoors.

Sometimes these tactics work. Sometimes I resort to whining or throwing tantrums.

Hey, nobody’s perfect.

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Catherine Conover is a senior in liberal studies from Mapleton.