Lots of paths to any goal.
Lots of paths to any goal.
That and being goal-oriented towards a concrete intrinsically-motivated* life mission that you can mostly control (concrete being something that is measurable and dependent on you and not the opinions of others, so curing cancer would count as would reaching a specific financial milestone or keeping global warming below a certain threshold or being top X in the world by an objective criteria but not being famous or attending a prestigious school, as prestige is in the eye of the beholder).
*Intrinsically-motivated meaning that even if nobody cared about you acheiving your goals/missions or not, you would still strive to reach for it.
I feel that that really needs to be pounded in to high schoolers’ (and their parents’) heads.
Once you internalize that, it’s hard to justify ever sacrificing your ethnic identity or feeling salty about being rejected from any one school (or set of schools) as a door closing here means a door opening elsewhere.