A piece of advice that I often receive is “as long as you do your best.” This refers to success in everything from school to careers. I believe that this is good advice because it tells me that they trust my judgment and will respect my decisions, even if they are the wrong ones.
This helps to take pressure off of me when I am going to school because I don’t have to live up to certain standards and try to accomplish goals that are unattainable. Instead, I can just worry about doing the best I can. It is possible that I may have a career that is not the highest paying or the most prestigious. But as long as I am happy, and I do the job to the best of my ability, I will feel like I have accomplished something. This is good because many kids have to live up to expectations that they can’t attain, or do something that they don’t really enjoy in order to make their parents proud.
The problem with saying “as long as you do you best” is that when I know I could have done a better job, I have a sort of guilty feeling. I hate it when I get a mediocre mark or fail in something and my parents say “as long as you tried your hardest.” It gets quite annoying when I second guess myself about what I could have done. However, when I know I did the work as well as I could and it isn’t a good mark, I don’t worry about it as much as some people might. In conclusion, the piece of advice that I receive most often from my parents is basically a good one, and often it keeps me motivated in the things I do.
It also shows me that my parents will support most of my decisions and treat me like a responsible person. I believe that somewhere along the line I will probably pass along the advice “as long as you did your best” to my children.
