I came across this quote in a magazine I picked up at Target on an ordinary day in 2006, when I was in Rhode Island spending one year with my dad who was on a sabbatical leave at Brown University. The quote was said by the headmaster of Rhode Island School of Design. It made me think for a while, and somehow it lingered in my head. “Study hard, play harder”… Yes, indeed! You have to work hard to be successful, but it is more important to enjoy moments of your life while you may. Over the next few weeks, it slowly became clear to me that I should live my life based on the quote. From then, I believed that I should study hard, and play harder to seek a satisfying life.
The world today is very competitive; I mean super competitive just like a jungle where animals fight each other for survival. Have you seen Mean Girls? Yeah, I’m talking about the scene at a mall where Lindsay Lohan imagines people as mean and aggressive as animals: explosive, destructive, and savage-like. People these days would do whatever it takes to become successful. I swear, if SIS students were given guns and weapons with the words that we will be granted 4.0 GPA, they will start shooting each other. Well, they may not. But my point is that SIS students are that desperate to get good grades. In Korea, private institutions, so called hagwons, are flourishing throughout the nation. Parents would literally make their kids live there whenever they get a bit of break from school. Even my parents signed me up for a full week program of hakwon during the Korean thanksgiving break from 9 A.M. until 4 P.M. We are little teenagers whose brains are still fresh and malleable. We need a lot of experiences and fun for proper maturation of our brains. However, we are under enormous pressure to study hard and get good grades. Of course, one better study hard to have a successful life in the future. Yet, experience also plays a huge role in making one’s life successful. Additionally, for one to be motivated, it is important to relieve stress by having fun. Hence, whilst studying, one should know how to enjoy life. Enjoying too much will disrupt your studying nonetheless. One should know how to balance between studying and having fun, as I like to put it.
So, study HARD during the school days and play CRAZY on Friday nights. That way, you will have no regrets when looking back to your past. If you do not study hard, you will definitely be disappointed and discontent. But if you only study alienating yourself from the wonderful land of excitement, your life will be miserable. I guess another way to state this quote is "live life to the fullest, without regrets." To me, two important things for high school students are “studying” and "enrichments." We are in the critical time period that will shape our future; our grades and experience will pave the pathway of our lives and set our personalities. I am going to study hard, in order to seek success and not to disappoint my parents, whilst seeking every excitement I can get from my life.
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