This I Have Learned
Looking back on my K-12 journey, the most important thing I’ve learned, and the most important advice that I would take away from it to give to other students, is to not look back. To be specific, I learned that looking back on the little details and mishaps throughout my career ended up being more detrimental than I thought it would be, contrary to the advice most people gave me. “Practice makes perfect,” “mistakes breed success,” etc. These people weren’t wrong, but the thing is, these sayings are really vague when it comes to the intensity of scrutinizing mistakes, and I learned that firsthand. Beating myself up over simple mistakes, like a bad test or forgetting to turn in a homework assignment, probably wasn’t the intention of the people who made those sayings. Fundamentally they aren’t wrong, since humans are indeed social creatures who grow from social interactions, but those people also didn’t consider that humans aren’t limitless, and often they don’t even know where their l