It is sometimes said that nothing in life worth achieving comes easy. I've noticed that what often separates those who achieve their hopes and dreams from those who don't is that they possess a certain drive and determination to stop at nothing to achieve those dreams. Although the two individuals Chris McCandless and Frederick Douglass lived in different time periods and grew up in totally different environments, they possessed the will to overcome whatever obstacles life threw at them and achieve the goals they set for themselves. Chris McCandless was determined to live an unconventional, nomadic lifestyle like that of his idols Henry David Thoreau, Boris Pasternak and Jules Verne's character Captain Nemo. As he grew up, he waited for the right time to begin his journey across the country and into the desert. John Krakauer writes: Five weeks earlier he had loaded his things into his car and headed west without an itinerary. The journey was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything. He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to accomplish an absurd and onerous task: graduate. He finally felt free, emancipated from the suffocating world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction, security and material excess, a world in which he felt severely cut off from the raw pulse of existence. (22) Later in the book we were again given a glimpse of Chris' gritty determination to achieve a goal he had set for himself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay During his travels Chris stopped in the small, dusty town of Tapock, Arizona. It was there that he noticed an old, second-hand canoe that he purchased in an attempt to float from Lake Havasu to the Gulf of California. During this adventure along the Colorado River, Chris traveled through the Colorado River Indian Reservation, Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, and Imperial National Wildlife Refuge, crossing the border into Mexico. He was unaware that once in Mexico the Colorado River turns into a maze of irrigation ditches, swamps and dead-end canals. At one point he follows a map drawn by a group of Mexican canal officials he had met to no avail. He found himself at a dead end in the middle of the desert. But he didn't give up. Instead he hauled his canoe and gear three days to a new channel to continue his search of the sea. After traveling for several days, Chris once again found himself lost and stranded in a swampy area. By chance he met a group of duck hunters who, after listening to his tale of wrong turns and dead ends, agreed to take him to the small fishing village of El Golfo de Santa Clara, located on the Gulf of California (34-35). At several points along the way Chris could have easily given up on his quest and turned back, but he would not allow himself to fail. This is the same type of determination that can be seen in Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland, in the early 1800s. He was eventually sent to Baltimore to live with his new master and lover. It was there that Douglass found the key with which he could unlock the bonds of slavery and enjoy the freedom that few of his peers would ever know. Douglass wrote, “My mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the thumb, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell” (31). He remained faithful to his.