Back in China, my Mom, had a childhood greater than that of her peers. While under Confucian cultural influence, most parents were busily pushing their kids and molding them to their dreams, but her parents let her pursue her own career. As such, she pursued a law degree, only to realize with dismay upon immigrating to the United States that firstly she could not afford law school, and secondly that law school would require great English, which she lacked being a first-generation immigrant. She initially went for an accounting job at Pepsi, but following my own birth she set out a better job and eventually switched to a financial job.
A multitude of reasons were behind this but one of them was simply because she was better at analysis rather than the tedious work of accounting. She now works as a Financial Analyst for this very reason.
One overlooked skill people fail to observe is listening. My mom has personally agreed that she thinks of herself as not the smartest, yet she always knows what people want to hear and says what people want to hear because she listens first. As a fact of her job being non-creative, her primary interests are creative, including art and reading books.
Although my mom did not experience the biggest changes compared to others, she still holds as an example of the importance of flexibility to not only a small change in character, but also a job path. From this, we now get the lesson that life is not a mere single road but a network of highways, detours, and uphill. Some parts might even be missing. When I was starting 6th grade, I was fresh from the summer of 5th grade, when I had built some bad habits. Although I breezed through virtually all the tests and did well on group projects, waves of disappointment washed over. I expected to do much better on group projects. However, around winter, I rapidly began to rebound, through a turn in character for one more hard-working and self-striving. With this in mind, in a flash, I was a perfectionist.
I had not only broken bad habits, but had become more hardworking in character. This was not only a recovery but a breakthrough, and by spring, my lexile levels had broken through a higher barrier, and this spread to math as well.
In essence, the golden rule here is that we must realize that the rewards for change in character lead to not only success, but can go far beyond the simple solving of a problem. They lead to cascades, and these cascades all point to success. Along the way, habits are the incremental bits you should take positively to boost you further, or without that you will be slowed down by them. You must learn to be like a spring, flexible to a change in form, yet very firm against loss of confidence.
- It helped me look at my own way of life in the same way as I view others and thus be more neutral. Neutrality is incredibly important to success as a nonfiction writer, as without it nonfiction would be filled to the brim with bias and essentially being dishonest in the fact that it is a slightly warped reality. It also allowed me to view my life in an even further scientific way, and simply exercised my writing skills as an added plus.
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