<p>I really suck at churning out 25-minute essay so please bear with me. I went over time for this too. Thank you!</p>
<p>Prompt: "Tough challenges reveal our strength and weaknesses." This statement is certainly true; adversity helps us discover who we are. Hardships can often lead us to examine who we are and to question what is important in life. In fact, people who have experienced seriously adverse events frequently report that they were positively changed by their negative experiences.</p>
<p>Assignment: Do you think that ease does not challenge us and that we need adversity to help us discover who we are?</p>
<p>Sweet are the uses of adversity. These times of turmoil compel us to evaluate our priorities and test our character. On the other hand, ease and the absence of worries in life may lull us into inaction and complacency.</p>
<p>My father was born into an impoverished family in Singapore, 1949. He is the eldest of seven children, a norm for that time period. His father was a coolie - a manual labourer that does anything from unloading sacks of rice from a cargo ship to working at a construction site. Life was tough and often, he and his siblings would only have soy-sauce and plain rice for dinner; chicken is a rarity except for special occasions like Chinese New Year when even then, all they had was a chicken drumstick to share amongst themselves. These tough times shaped and influenced my father's thinking that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. He realised the value of hard work and an education. He pursued his studies studiously, stopping at high school only because if he attended university, his siblings would have to drop out of school due to the family's difficult financial situation. He is now an accomplished insurance manager, due in no small part to him having the courage and dogged determination to break out of the poverty cycle.</p>
<p>In contrast, Jesse Livermore Jr, born as the eldest son of Jesse Livermore, one of America's top financiers in the 1900s, had everything he could possibly want. Pampered and adored by both his father and mother, he led a profligate life, squandering the millions that his father toiled for in the stock market. He even took to drugs, alcohol, and philandering, often sleeping with his mother's friends. The ease of his life, having not the necessity to work for anything, yet still being able to enjoy the fruits of his father's labour have imbued an idle mindset in him.</p>
<p>The difference between my father, overcoming his disadvantaged background to create a better life for himself and his loved ones and the life of Jesse Livermore Jr, whose easy life led him to disdain work shows that without trying circumstances and tough challenges, men seldom see the need to improve.</p>
i really like the sentence structure… its also brief but well explained…i like it:D</p>