Defeat Hardships With Hard work

Defeat Hardships With Hard work
I believe in hard work even there are various hardships in my life wants to stop my step of moving forward. I was not born with the world’s highest IQ, and I was not born with special talents. I am just an ordinary person who was born in an average middle-class Chinese family. That cannot be any more normal. The only way I can stand out from the normal is by hard work. I always make every piece of my work the best performance I can, and I always sacrifice my private time to study anything that I feel I’m behind in. I remembered my life expert, my first-grade teacher, said to me that “life is one percent luck and ninety-nine percent hard work.” This pearl of wisdom eventually became my life principle.
In the first day of my first grade fall semester, I fell on the track and someone stepped on my elbow. That crushed my right arm bone. After the accident, I was warned by the doctor that I could not have too much exercise, so I couldn’t go to school until my elbow was healed. The healing process took about three months, which was the majority part of the fall semester. The first challenge I faced after returning to school was the final exam; I had to take it to go into the next grade level. So I took it, and it turned out that my score was the second highest in the entire grade. Some parents and students said that I was talented and smart, but I knew I was not. They only saw my glory, but they never saw my private sacrifice to reach it. They never knew that during the time I could not attend school, I stayed up late in the night every day struggling to learn the textbook on my own and to write with my broken arm.
As I became older, I had a chance to go aboard and face new challenges. I came to the United States. I first went into a public middle school in the second trimester of the 8th-grade year. At the time, I faced numerous problems that would seem unimaginable to most local students: I could neither remember people’s face nor understand people’s language during classes. Even though there were mandatory English classes in China, when it came to speaking, everything was different. People in the United States do not talk the way I learned in China! My teacher told me that it was normal that people from other countries cannot remember faces well in the first year, because people’s brains need time to adapt to the new information. I did not want this adaptation process to take that long, so I forced myself to talk with local students and made friends with them. Initially, I could not even remember the person’s face I spoke to just a few hours ago. But the more people I made friends with, the more I could remember people’s faces and comprehend their speaking. Four years later, I became a high school junior capable of speaking and studying just as well as local students. My experience shows me that there are no hardships in my life that cannot be overcome by working hard. If there are, I work harder. This I believe.

H. Li