<p>A persons greatness derives from the many small moral choices one makes moment by moment. To be born into great wealth, power, or ability is not to be great at all. Rather, greatness only comes from the continual choices to use that endowment wisely, to struggle with the needs of humanity as a member of its family.</p>
<p>Assignment: Are human beings more the products of their endowments, or of their choices?</p>
<p>Those select few who are endowed with great wealth or prestigious positions in society and those who are endowed either with natural talents, good looks or high intelligence are all greatly envied by many for the endowments possessed. Such lucky people are naturally predicted to become highly successful in both their personal and professional lives because of their special endowments. However, in reality, each of the important choices one makes throughout life has a much larger impact on influencing his or her life course and future, for while good choices made by sound wisdom and values will ultimately lead to a better and fulfilling life, bad choices based on wrong or less developed reasoning can destroy ones opportunities for a bright and happy future despite all the riches or talents he or she possesses.</p>
<pre><code>In the book Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is portrayed as a young man gifted with an unusually high intelligence, and his poor family expected this young mans high intelligence to make him into a highly successful and respected man. However, Jay Gatsby, mainly influenced by his unrequited love for Daisy Buchanan and desire to gain wealth quickly, made many poor judgments and decisions that ended in him leading a miserable and lonely life until his untimely death. Instead of using his intelligence to succeed in life through honest ways, he made the wrong choice of choosing a life of crime that destroyed his prospect of a bright future. Meanwhile, his foolish choice of dedicating his life to win the love of a married woman, Daisy Buchanan, ended in him wasting five precious years of his life away and caused him to be murdered by mistake. His wrong choice of denying his own family by changing his family name and creating a false background of rich heritage because of his reasoning that Daisys high society world will look down on his familys poverty ultimately led him to live a life of falsehood filled with lies. Jay Gatsbys life choices in the end destroyed him.
In the book The House of The Seven Gables, Judge Pyncheon was a man endowed with great wealth, prestige and natural charisma. Instead of living a content life however, he allowed his greed and ambition to influence him into choosing to make many cruel deeds that greatly harmed and hurt his own relatives. His choice to covet and to desire greedily his uncles wealth during his younger age made him to become a cruel, deceitful, and avaricious man when he grew up. He chose to never be content with his wealth, and his greed led him to die in a gruesome way. Ultimately, his life choices made him live an unsatisfying life of misery and greed, and ended in life in tragedy.
Endowments in the form of natural talents, intelligence, and wealth or prestige become meaningless if we continually make wrong choices based on base values or illogical reasoning and thus destroying our lives in the process.
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