A Drive to Achieve the Extraordinary
I believe in mystery.
I believe in family.
I believe in being who I am.
I believe in the power of failure.
And I believe normal life is extraordinary.

This I believe. I'm Jay Alison for This I Believe. Juliet Frerking listened to our series, where she's on the Fulbright fellowship in Tunisia. Once a week she went to town and downloaded the podcast at an internet café. Her belief is tied to the improbable fact that she ended up in Tunisia at all. Here is Juliet Frerking with her essay for This I Believe.

I believe in the challenge to accomplish something out of the ordinary. I have to confess that I acquired this belief from the Guinness Book of World Records. That book showed me the value of equal opportunity and competition. It proved to me, early on, that I could rise above anonymity and achieve remarkable things.

When I was 9, I used to huddle in the back of the library with my friend Leanne, and we'd turn the 1991 edition of the Guinness book's pages with purple hands sticky from raspberry Laffy Taffy. Reassured by Mrs. Balanoff, our third-grade teacher, that we could be anything when we grew up, we felt challenged by 320 pages of incredible feats. And so, with the obsessive focus of 9-year-olds, we assumed the daily task of finding our place in the universe.

The Guinness Book of World Records taught me to believe in the accessibility of the improbable. I was captured by the little bit of fame conferred by inclusion in that book: the fastest, the longest, the widest, the most — whatever you can imagine. It opened up the possibility of what I might be able to do.

I was attracted to the lure of the unusual. How long would it take to grow my fingernails to beat a record for a total of 14-feet, 6 inches? I bet our teachers never thought the equation "d=rt" would be used to figure that one out; or that we would be tempted to research everything about Namibia because it was home of the world's fastest caterpillar. Leanne settled on holding her breath for the longest time, and I decided to make the world's largest cookie. Thus, Leanne joined the swim team, and I gained 10 pounds.

The Guinness book taught me tenacity and perseverance and, more importantly, the desire to do something unexpected. So many people in the book were mocked by family and friends for what they were doing, yet they did it. I see them as success stories — the normal people who did something extraordinary.

In college, I decided to study Arabic before Sept. 11. I am not Muslim or of Arab descent; I am a Southern Baptist girl from Texas. Enticed by the sounds of elongated alifs and lams, I fell in love with the complexity of the language and the beauty of its slanting script. After graduation, to put my skills to use, I moved to Cairo, and then to Tunisia, where I just finished working with divorced women.

I am not saving the world, I am not the best at what I do, but I am only 24 — there's still time. The Guinness book of World Records helped give me new perspective on the impossible and instilled in me the desire to try something unconventional. I believe in making the implausible a reality, and I hope to someday break a few records myself.

Juliet Frerking, with her essay for This I Believe. Frerking is back in the United States, she finished her Fulbright Fellowship and is living in New York, looking for a job. When she hopes that will to take her back to the Middle East. We hope you might consider writing an essay for our series, to find out more and to sign up for the podcast as Frerking did, visit NPR.org. For this I Believe, I'm Jay Alison.

This I Believe is independently produced by Jay Alison ,Dan Gediman ,John Gregary and Vicky Mirror. Support for NPR comes from Prudential retirement, sponsor of This I Believe. Prudential believes every worker can achieve a more secured retirement, Prutential retirement, where Beliefs matter.

Support for This I Believe comes from the Corporation for public broadcasting.