<p>I'm going to be a senior next year, and I've worked so hard through high school. The final stretch is finally approaching (college apps), but senioritis began setting in second semester of junior year.</p>
<p>What keeps you guys motivated? Sometimes I just want to slack off and go to one of my safeties instead of pursuing my reach schools.</p>
<p>Expectations. my friends and family expect me to “be the best” and go to harvard or stanford or something like that. Along with that, I expect nothing but 100% from myself all the time and couldn’t live with myself if I failed others expectations. most of the time expectations just make me more worried but they do serve as a very strong motivator.
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<p>I really relish pushing myself and the challenge of doing it. It’s like my coach once said,</p>
<p>“There’s a point halfway through the race where it’s going to hurt. You have two choices. Go slower, or go faster. It’s better to be alive and in pain than dead and feeling nothing at all.” </p>
<p>So it’s just about pushing yourself and winning.</p>
<p>I know mine is corny but it’s the reaction my family will have when I tell them that I got into a top university.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that’s corny. I think it DOES say something about your parents and yourself, and your relationship to them (and by say something I mean possibly reveal a sad point, or unhealthy aspect).</p>
<p>Yes, it does say something–it says that when they were both 17 year old teenagers and had a child, they probably did not expect a future aspiring businessman seeking to enter a top university. It also says that generations of children from a family without a single kid graduating from a college does not limit nor inhibit the prospects of this one. My relationship of sharing all of my success with my parents as a token of my appreciation to their committed support despite a lack of luxuries that other children were born with? Sounds healthy to me.</p>
<p>i just found it interesting that it was the REACTION that sustained you. </p>
<p>One would think (maybe naively) it would be the future success, the money, all the vague things associated with it that would be the motivating thing. I think maybe the vagueness though is what makes this being the sustaining thought less effective than the one you have. Because envisioning the reaction of your parents to the acceptance, that picture is very easy to imagine, and a very nice one. </p>
<p>still, I wonder why it is SO nice to you. I conjectured if there was some defect to your relationship with your parents, their reaction would be more meaningful to you.</p>
<p>I know it will be meaningful them - what you wrote indicates that. They will be quite shocked that their son is going to such a great university, etc., and quite proud. But how that meaningfulness to them translates to meaningfulness to you is dependent on more than just the meaningfulness to them (one is not a function of the other).</p>