Above & Beyond

This week was a reflective one. I found that a lot of things were pushing me forward, but that only made me want to reflect even more on myself and look into the past. A lot of things happened this week: the SAT, original work, AP Seminar exam, etc. This made the week hectic and busy and I started seeing patterns of myself in my life.

The main thing I realized was that responded well to positive feedback. That may seem like a trivial thing but really it was the opposite aspect that held more weight; I don't respond well to negative feedback. Many times looking back, I see that my actions show extremes. There are periods of extreme highs and lows. Seeing myself succeed and struggle to achieve a desired result pushes me to continue to achieve my next goals. This may seem like a good thing as it shows that I won't get lazy and slack if I am doing well. But the moment one thing goes wrong, be it I disappointed a teacher or fail assignment, everything seems to start falling with it. I never noticed it before, but when I fail i get into the mindset of “oh well it’s all going bad anyway” and suddenly it's not one failure but a constant flows of failures that creates somewhat of an emotional distress. When I say failure, I don't mean I actually fail. It just means that I stop putting my best effort in what I’m doing and I get disappointed because usually the result is not what I know my potential can show.

But this is definitely not the best mindset to have, in fact the opposite, responding strongly to a failure, would be more beneficial. That is because while success will be constantly desired, failure is inevitable.Studying y for a test for hours and still failing is definitely a possibility. But the chances of acing a test without studying has much less of a probability. I need to learn to look at failures as smaller than what my head perceives them to be. As a surgeon, am I going to stop practicing if I lose one child? In any profession failure is inevitable and I cannot get so discouraged by one factor that I lose sense of the big picture.

This week I saw this quality in myself. My grades have been good so far and so I am pushing myself excessively to not let one failure occur. While I should keep pushing myself, mentally I need to prepare myself that perfection will never be possible but that doesn't mean everything else is a failure. Striving to achieve that level of success in everything I do is what is important, not necessarily the number of judgment that will come as a result of it.