I had the good fortune of meeting two people from our area who serve as role models for others.

Both are women, and both grew up here in our county. Both had the good fortune to go on to college, to pursue their dreams and make them reality.

Alyce Manley Spruell grew up here in Demopolis. A 1976 graduate of Demopolis High School, she went on to get her law degree, open her own firm and is the first female president-elect of the Alabama Bar Association, which will make her the first female president of that organization in its 87-year history.

Angela Cox-Williams grew up in Faunsdale and graduated from A.L. Johnson High School in 1981. She loved to write, spending a lot of her youth writing poetry that was appreciated by her classmates and teachers.

She has since published two books — a book of her poetry and a children’s educational book — and is working on her first full-length novel.

They are both shining examples that success doesn’t know geography. It doesn’t find people who live only in the big cities or go to the schools that have everything and provide opportunities hand-over-fist.

These schools that these ladies attended are good schools, though, and did provide them the opportunity to formulate their dreams and get a good enough grasp on them to make them a reality.

As our own students return to school in a couple of weeks, I can’t say enough that they should not think that they are low on the list of success stories.

It doesn’t matter if you grow up in rural Alabama or midtown Manhattan. The ability, the talent, the dream and the success are always built inside of you.

Don’t ever think that you are less than what you really are, and don’t let others tell you that, either. Success doesn’t choose where it finds people; it may be living inside you today.