You never realize how important your reputation is until you are older and realize how much you may need to repair it. My Family‘s best friend Johnny, went to apply for a job. Shortly after he was rejected he was informed that it was because of something that he had posted on his Twitter account years before that was racial. Although most people don't realize it your reputation does determine your future and can affect it in the long run.

    Your reputation can determine whether or not you get into your dream college. One of my family's closest friends was denied into colleges that he had the academics to get into. It was later to find out that it was because of something his old classmates accused him of posting on social media even though he didn't. His negative reputation enabled him from getting into the college of his dreams because he chose to never fight for it and correct it. Your reputation is also based on your behavior. If you are incredibly smart but have ASC’s, suspensions and other disciplinary problems, colleges will most likely not accept you. Just by looking at your disciplinary report from high school the admission office will automatically form their own reputation of you without even knowing you. Whether you realize it or not, your one Saturday d-hall freshman year of high school that led to an in-school suspension can affect your acceptance into your college of your dreams.

    After damaging your reputation, most would say it is very hard to build it back up. Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build up your reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” You can ruin your reputation just by one small thing you say or do. Once you ruin it, it takes 20 years for people to change their view on your reputation. My mother used to always say, “Once someone hears something negative about you, their point of view on you will never change no matter what they do to try and fix it, they will always result back to remembering it.” You have to be very careful with your reputation because everyone has different points of views on when your reputation can be fixed and or changed. Once you hurt your reputation people will never forget about it and it will take a very long time to bring back up.

    Some people believe your reputation is constantly changing, it’s not hard to build back up and it will not affect you in the long run. You may agree with some parts of this, but once you mess up or do something people don’t like, everyone will expect nothing more of you. You will have to show people that you have more to yourself than what you did before.

    Always try to keep your reputation as good as it can be so it will only help you, not hurt you, in the long run. Your reputation matters because when you want to move on to the next chapter of your life and you encounter someone who knows you have a bad reputation they may affect you from starting that chapter of your life the way you wanted it to, weather its getting a job, getting into a college or becoming friends with someone.  Johnny never realized how much jeopardy the post would put him in. So always remember to be wise with your decisions and cautious about your actions because they affect your reputation for the rest of your life