My father says that I lack drive. Drive meaning the will to strive for self improvement and. He claims that I am an easily contented person and such behavior will limit my advances in life. Well, to put it truthfully, he thinks I am simply too slack. He said that he didn’t get where he is today by simply accepting anything that came his way. He always strove for something better. In other words, he had drive which I was sorely lacking in. This is true in a way. It’s true that I am easily contented. I guess that when I was younger, being easily contented made life a lot easier to handle for me. Think of the number of times an argument could have been prevented if you simply chose to give in a little. Think of the number of times that you didn’t get all upset and moody with yourself simply because you lost a match. I used to think that being like this was the nice thing to do. To avoid conflicts, to avoid heated arguments and to avoid loss of friendship maybe. Whatever the reason was, it was actually the wrong way of thinking. My dad had a point. Nice guys don’t survive in society. They get chewed and eaten alive by other people who think mostly for themselves. If you want to be nice, you either be at the top of the food chain or you don’t even consider that prospect.

But I guess a lack of drive isn’t my only problem. I believe that my main problem now is first to accept who I am. There are too many times when I get influenced or affected by others. Sometimes I ask myself, why can’t I be like him? He is so terribly articulate that it scares me. Or at other times when I see people doing part time degrees while serving their NS, I ask myself why can’t I be disciplined like them and make full use of my time to learn something new. Or again when I see people reading novels and paperbacks and all I have to show to them is a collection of TIMES magazine that is collecting dust in the corner of the living room. But I guess the worst is when I am influenced by other people’s principles. Some guy tells me what he thinks about life and after chewing on his idea for a while I wonder why was I so dumb not to have thought of something which now makes so much sense to me. And I will then follow his way of thinking and put it as my own. It doesn’t take a man with an IQ of 200 to tell me that I nuts. Everyone is entitled his own set of opinions and the right to deem others opinions utter rubbish (behind their backs of course) if it somehow conflicted with your own. So, I guess that before I find ambition and drive to survive in life, I must first learn to realize that I have to accept myself for who I am, to stop agonizing over something which I am not and to occasionally shut out the world and listen to myself.