<p>Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?</p>
<pre><code> Throughout the years, I have witnessed many people lose interest in school and work, as they each believed that no matter what they did, their efforts would not please their parents or fellow peers. The source of their motivations came solely from the positive reinforcement they received; when the reinforcement gradually began to diminish over time, so did each of their drives to succeed. Among these people was my older brother, Kyle.
Growing up, Kyle and I had a father who did not always positively motivate us the same way we saw our cousins fathers motivate them. My brother and I were told only what we did wrong; our father seldom congratulated or honored us for the things we did right. Despite my brother and I being nearly the same age and being raised under the same roof, we grew up to be two nearly opposite people: I was school-oriented and acted independently while my brother became more socially-focused, and often fell under the influence in order to gain approval from his friends.
I believe that the difference between my brother and I was how we reacted to our lack of positive reinforcement. While Kyle soon lost interest in school once he learned that he could not please our father, I found another reason to do well in school, aside from winning my fathers approval: I learned to work for my own future success, not for the approval of others. Early on in life, I gave myself this personal philosophy: we cannot learn to rely on something that will not always be there for us. More specifically, I learned not to rely on positive reinforcement or on anothers approval, since I knew there would be a day that these things would not be there for me when I needed the motivation.
As humans, we constantly train our youth through methods of conditioning by using incentives such as candy and money to promote good behavior and hard work. While this may have worked to start us off on the right track, for some, it backfired, causing many to rely only on positive reinforcement as an incentive to do good and succeed. Nowadays, many people will work hard and do good deeds only to hear verbal appreciation. Rather than working for the sole purpose of bettering ourselves as individuals, we only do well and strive to succeed in order to gain some sort of positive acknowledgement or reinforcement from others.
For us to truly be successful, we must learn to do things for ourselves, and not for the recognition and approval of others. By relying on the approval of our parents and peers, we lose sight of the real reason to succeed and we begin to want to do the right things for the wrong reasons. If we do not learn that we must do things for our own sake, we will find that we will never be content with our actions, for we would have lived a life based on pleasing others, and not ourselves. We must always remember that no one will benefit our actions more than we will ourselves and that the greatest deeds are the ones that go unappreciated.
</code></pre>
<hr>
<p>Please be brutally honest. Also, point out my strong points as well as my weak points.
Most importantly, I need to know if I approached the prompt correctly. I was aiming to describe a personal quality, but I got carried away with my topic, and I'm not sure if I've strayed too far from what the prompt wanted. Thanks!</p>
<p>Just a last-second question I had: Was I not supposed to expand my point towards the end of the essay? Should I have kept it focused on me, personally?</p>