Enhancing Your Personality

YOU ARE IMPORTANT

“What can one small person like me do? I don’t count for much.”

This is the attitude of one who is still young and inexperienced.

But don’t underrate yourself. There’s something you can do, however small. You are a creature gifted with thought and imagination. You tell yourself: “What little I can do, I ought to do. What I ought to do, by the grace of God, I will do.”

You challenge yourself this way and you cannot go on thinking of yourself as “small.”

Your daily labor will have meaning when you realize that as an individual you are meant for something important. Here are some questions that should ask yourself:

Why am I living?

What is expected of me?

What direction am I taking?

What do I want in life?

Take the first question, “Why am I living?” The answer is, because you are meant to accomplish a definite task in life. This task you alone can do.

“What is expected of me?” Right now your sacred duty is to prepare yourself for your assigned task. You start right now being a good member of your family, your school, and your community – obedient, cooperative, loyal, dutiful and diligent, kind and considerate to others.

Right now you are being trained for citizenship in the home, in the school, and in the community. If you are a good citizen in the home, you turn out a good citizen in the school, and then a good citizen in the community. In like manner, if you are an undisciplined member of the home, you become an undesirable member of the school, and later turn out a menace to the community. All the training that your home, your school and your community give are your preparation for a useful life ahead.

Knowing the answer to the second question, it is for you to reflect whether or not you are taking the right direction. Your answer to the third question is your own honest estimate of yourself. Are you heading for the right direction? Are you using your time in diligent study, or wasting it in useless or harmful pastime as gambling, drinking, and loafing?

The fourth question requires a deeper reflection to be able to answer. A young student cannot fully ascertain what his purpose in life is. He knows very little of the things that make life rich and beautiful and these are the things that he must strive to attain. But if you are making the right start you are headed for the realization of your dream.

“What do I want in life?” Is it to acquire wealth? Is it to get learning? Or be a leader in the affairs of man? A statesman perhaps? To attain physical perfection? As you study and gain experience you gradually form a definite image of what you want to be.

Working towards a definite goal is a noble aim. It gives your life meaning. You aim to rise from your present state. This is the meaning of enhancing your personality. You certainly want to be a respectable man or woman, honored for your achievements, loved for the contributions that you make to your country and people.