Imagine myself ten years in the future. If I look back at high school, what will I remember? What will I be glad that I did or accomplished? What will I regret?
Right now, after the first month of senior year, I see a lot of struggle, hardship and pain. But that was not without cause. Only from failure did I learn the importance taking action. From failing to qualify for the AIME by 1.5 points, I learned to push on harder than I’ve ever before in pursuits of my ambitions. From realizing someone I liked was already dating, I learned to control my emotions and hardwire my brain to achieve in face of ignorance. Missing by a single testcase on the USA Computing Olympiad only added to the growing fire of perseverance inside. And of course, never forget my struggle in English – starting from that 1390 when I had to guess on fifteen questions.
I’ve recently been thinking about this text message from my friend:
“do those things also bc you like them and not bc you’re working towards a goal of something that may not even work out”
She has a point here – there are lots of cool parts about math and CS that I really like, especially the interconnectedness between seemingly disparate subject areas (e.g complex numbers and geometry).
But after what I’ve gone through… it’s hard to agree with this:
“not bc you’re working towards a goal of something that may not even work out”
In life, if you have goals, of course that may not work out, but you just got to try. And if you really want it, you just got to keep learning and trying. More trying and trying. Until one day, maybe, you get there.
The main reason why this is unrelatable is that I know that success looks ugly. Absolutely disgusting if you don’t have “natural talent” or if you’ve never touched upon it in your entire life. This past August, I’ve spent almost every day memorizing tons of new vocabulary words, reading scholarly articles and taking practice tests. You may as well equate my life to math problems the January of this year.
And yet, have my reached my goals?
Sort of – I’ve improved, but numerically I’m probably not there yet.
So to even gain an improvement, not to mention actually hit those goals, takes an insane amount of effort. Not to mention, when the expectations and goals are yours and there’s a high chance you’re not going to make it, of course it’s going to hurt more when you fail!
Going back to my initial questions: in ten years, what will I be glad about? What will I regret?
Well, I know for sure that I won’t regret the hard work I put in – how I managed to push through and conquer odds when everyone else around me raised their white flags. I know the furnace that God has helped me walk through. And chances are, a majority of you won’t know what I’m talking out.
Maybe I’ll regret letting youth, friendship and joviality slip by me.
Will I?