February 26, 2005
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Source of Confidence
I think tonight I finally understood something: parents are not good
sources of confidence. Whenever you are about to start a new project in
life, you have to be extra careful and strong-willed when discussing
about it with your parents. Don't ever expect them to pat your shoulder
and say "go for it" in a straightforward manner - if you need a pat on
the shoulder, go talk to your sibblings or friends instead. On the one
hand, parents give good advice at times. On the other hand, the very
same parents will always
try to
strip you of every single bit of confidence that you may have built-up
in anticipation to the new project. If they don't bluntly say "you
can't do it" in the present tense, they will at least bring out all
their worst memory fragments about you, in order to convince you how
immature or naïve, or what a failure you were, are, and will always be.
You can't blame them. They love you and are afraid to see you get hurt in your new project.So here are things to keep in mind when talking with your parents:
- Listen to their advice because your parents have, after all, built up a couple of decades' worth more wisdom than you;
- Your parents will never
understand completely accurately, even at the highest levels of
abstraction, what you are doing or thinking because they lived your age
a couple of decades ago. In other words: the way things worked around a
22-year old in the 1970's probably differs from the way things work
around a 22-year old today, in subtle yet important manners. This is
particularly true if your parents have not grown up where you are
living now; - Your parents will always treat you like a baby. Don't let them delude you: you have grown up no matter what they think;
- As a result of items 2 and 3, before accepting as truth the aforementioned advice from your parents, you should carefully analyze its applicability in today's context;
- You can safely ignore the bad memory fragments that your parents
bring out, for the simple reason that they are in the past and that you
have grown up and hence changed; - Confidence is not something that you should try to obtain from
other people. There is a reason why the term "self-confidence" exists:
it comes from within yourself, not from other people.
- SwordAngel
Comments (2)
Parents are even worse people to try to get help from when the languages you both speak, although the same one in theory, seem to be from different planets. Have you ever wondered how many different ways you can describe one state of affairs without knowing the two single words you could have used instead? Then, have your parent say those two words and not be able to confirm those two were the right ones, b/c those two words are not in your vocabulary, otherwise you probably would have used it and spent that time a little more wisely.
Meh, I don't have that kind of problem because I even know Chinese better than my mom does.