There is an old adage that states “life is a marathon, not a
sprint.” Many Korean and Korean American
teens growing up here in the states are faced with hyper pressure to do well in
life and school. They often erroneously
perceive that their future is completely ruined if you failed to achieve near
perfect GPA or SAT scores. One of the most
common calls I receive from a High School counselor near my office is “one of
my Korean students wrote a suicide letter because s/he received an A- on
her/his final grade in math.” For those
of you whoever felt this way, I want to amplify this old adage once again, and
say that “life is a marathon, not a sprint.”
It is an adage because no matter how clichéd it may sound, it does
contain some truth to it. Many of most
influential people in our society have very humble beginnings. Even intellectual giant like Albert Einstein
was rejected by his first choice of university, Swiss Federal Polytechnic in
Zurich. Instead, he attended the
Argovian cantonal school, a gymnasium in Aarau, Switzerland to complete his
secondary schooling. J.K. Rowling was a
school teacher until 23 and published her first book in her mid-30s. Vincent
Van Gogh did not paint until age 27.
Steve Jobs was kicked out of his own company at his early 30s and had to
start all over again. You get the
drift.
For the parents of these teens, please help them to gain
some perspective in life. Perhaps you
are more anxious than your teenage children about their future. If this is true for you, take a breath and
examine your own life. Take an inventory
of your achievements and failures. Would
you not agree that your own success has do with your willingness to take risks
and fail at times? Our children are so
deathly afraid to fail that they have developed an aversion to take on any
risks that may lead to any kind of failure.
Denise Pope, PhD. from Stanford
University echoes this sentiment in her book “Doing School: How we are creating a generation of stressed out,
materialistic, and miseducated students” where she says that out of our own
anxiety about staying on top of our educational achievement, we are creating a
generation of Stanford educated students who do not know how to be creative and
become leaders of our community. Rather,
we are raising a generation of children who are good at jumping through the
hoops to get better grades.
My point is simply let’s give some room to our teenagers to
explore, and even dare to fail at their first attempts to figure out what it is
that they think they want to contribute to the world and hopefully leave it
better than the way they found it. In
order for the grownups to witness this process, we better understand that “life
is a marathon, not a sprint.”
