During winter break, my mom asked me this deep question about whether motivation can be cultivated using external factors or motivation primarily depends on one's inner drive. The reason my mom asked me this is that a lot of Asian moms in the local community wanted to know how my mom raised me after they learned that I got into MIT (don't want to sound pretentious or anything).
To answer my mom, I started to think about why I started to care about school and academics. I would say that my attitude towards academics became more serious when I was in 4th grade, which sounds a bit too early. I attended a bilingual school in Taiwan, and technically my school was part of Taiwan's public school system. As a result, there was a lot of eastern influence in my bilingual school. For instance, our school had awards for the top 3 students of each class ever since 3rd grade, and the school culture emphasized hard work from a young age. While I had time to play with my friends, I wouldn't be surprised if I spent more time in academics compared to my peers that attended elementary school in the U.S.
Now, I should get to the point and answer the question. According to my 4th-grade diary, I said that I wanted to become studious because I watched some documentary about rural kids in China that spent hours walking to school and it touched me. I felt bad that I didn't take school seriously at the time. Looking back, I don't really recall that documentary to be the spark but given the fact that a diary is a primary source, I trust what I wrote in my diary.
This may sound silly, but I think another thing that fueled my motivation to become studious was that I was rivals with this boy in my class partly because I was mad that he said the piano piece I played wasn't that hard. I don't get why that infuriated me, but that event drove me to prove to him that I was better than him so I started studying for the spelling bee.
After a year or so, I developed a good reputation in my grade for being smart when in reality it was all because of hard work. Coming from a school that only had 50-60 students per grade, the world at that time was so small. As a result, I became the big fish in a small pond. Because there were few people I could compare myself with, I barely thought about young geniuses in neighboring schools, let alone in other countries. I was so proud of small academic achievements that barely meant anything. As I am writing this in 2021, I wish that I still had the confidence that my 10-year-old self had, yet at the same time, I am glad that I am a lot more humble than before.
The identity that I had of myself shattered when I transferred to a new school that was more prestigious and bigger than my old school as there were 200 kids in my grade. My first semester grades in 6th grade no longer resembled what people in my old school thought of me. At best, I was above average. Considering that I was not in the accelerated math class, that meant that I was ranked below 25 kids when it came to mathematical skills. Of course, these are rough estimates, but you get the basic idea. From this sudden change in environment, I stopped viewing myself so highly. I began to look up to other people that were known in my grade to be geniuses, which indirectly prompted me to be more modest.
So why am I telling you what happened in 6th grade? The purpose of telling you this anecdote is that if you want to cultivate self-motivation, you cannot be the smartest person in the room because if you are, then you are in the wrong room. This eloquent sentence is not originally from me but rather from Lorne Michaels. While some people disagree with this quote, I feel that this quote aligns with the moral of the story. Back in 5th grade, I started to become complacent and didn't really push myself that much compared to middle school. Because I was no longer one of the best students in my middle school, this forced me to strive towards the top. I don't think I did in the end, but I was better than when I started.
The general moral of the story is that if you want to be motivated, you have to constantly challenge yourself and be placed in settings in which you have competitors and people above you. You may ask, "Well Vivian you go to a ridiculously tiny high school, so how do you live by this quote?" Good question. Although I go to a small school that kind of reminds me of my elementary school in the sense that people think I am intelligent, I still remind myself I am not that smart by being engaged in outside communities that are a lot bigger than my school. For instance, I have been taking online chemistry classes since junior year, and being surrounded by students that are better than me in other subjects like competition math and biology helped remind me that I still have a lot of new things to learn. I definitely agree that frequent comparison is unhealthy and bad for one's mental health, but comparisons may be necessary at times for one to gain greater clarity and see the overall picture.
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