(Delivered during the Honors Day at the Silliman University School of Basic Education-High School)
First of all, I would like to thank you for this incredible opportunity. Now I can say that this is one dream crossed out of my bucket list of things to do before I am 25: to speak at the Silliman University High School Honor’s Day.
You see, coming home to Silliman has always been something I’ve looked forward to ever since I left the school in 2009 to dive head first in what many of you would call ‘the real world’. That, my friends, I considered quite a feat. Looking back, I’m glad I survived. And indeed it’s true that growth begins where your comfort zone ends.
I’d like to congratulate all of you for making so many people proud today. You have no idea how just being here, up on stage for a couple of hours or so, has made your parents and loved ones feel that the days and nights they’ve spent working hard to send you to school has been all worth it.
Today, I congratulate you not just for doing exceptionally well in school but more importantly for making your parents and loved ones feel that they are equally worth that hard work and that they are worth every 95 or 100 on that report card.
Today, I don’t think I will be sharing an anecdote of some famous dead person’s life. Instead, let me take you through some lessons and realizations I’ve picked up across the best parts of my life: high school and college, and more importantly, right through the roughest three years I’ve ever had, the last three years after my college graduation.
High school was a good time for me even if I didn’t graduate at the top of my class. Many people would be surprised to know that I ended up at number 12 in our honor roll and they often thought, maybe she had too many extra-curricular activities and just lost sight of what was really important?
If you guys are dropping extra-curricular activities to keep up with classroom work, think twice about it. You may be giving up an incredibly important part of your life–your passions, the things that give meaning to your life.
Believe me, when you look back five, 10 years from now, and someone asked you what your best memory about high school was, I’ve never heard of a classmate who told me that it was during that time when he or she was taking our trigonometry exam or revising his or her term paper for the 5th time. Never.
The best parts of my life were spent working on issue after issue of the Junior Sillimanian or travelling with the Debate Society. Here, I met the few friends I can sincerely consider my friends for life.
I’m not saying you should drop your studies altogether. That would be equally disastrous. What I’m saying is for you to create that healthy balance between schoolwork and the other things outside of school that truly make you happy because life is at its best when you strike a balance between hard work and heart work.
Somewhere in the middle of high school and the months that teetered towards graduation, a lot of people expected me to pursue either one of two things: a degree in Nursing, which was incredibly popular during our time, or a degree in Accountancy to eventually cap it off with a degree in Law right after because according to them, well, we have to be practical.
The world doesn’t come easy and it pays to have a good map to follow. But you know, many times in life, you don’t need a map. You need a good compass to guide you because no matter at what position you find yourself in, that compass will still point you to the true north.
I ended up pursuing neither Nursing, Accountancy, nor Law. Instead, I opted for what many would call the ‘impractical’ choice, Mass Communication. Why? Because deep inside, I knew that the stuff you need to be cut out for to make it in Mass Communication, were the things I was really good at.
When I interview people and write down their stories for others to read, I always felt that the world was just an incredible place to be in. When I’m thinking of ways to let other people appreciate the extraordinary in the ordinary, time really just stops and I find myself in that state of flow–when you’re so engrossed with what you are doing, you literally lose track of time. It’s then that I know that I am genuinely happy.
Dare to make impractical choices and dare to dream of equally impractical dreams because at the end of the day, this is the most practical thing to do.
People today work so hard in the pursuit of future happiness but being happy and enjoying life doesn’t have to come at the expense of the present. All you have to do is to listen to your inner compass, create your own map and do what you truly feel will make you happy.
And all of this should begin by what my boyfriend told me when we were still very good friends: know your verb. Do you create? Do you teach? Do you lead? Know your verb because this will determine your noun, and eventually, your destination.
The months that followed right after my college graduation were incredibly hard for me because when you graduate at the top of your class people expect the big jobs to come to you, not the other way around.
But six months after graduation, I felt like a big failure because I still didn’t have a job. The worst part about it was that I couldn’t count the number of companies that literally rejected me right after the first or second interviews. I just couldn’t understand what was happening.
Then things started to take a sudden turn when I found myself in one of the country’s biggest multinational companies and I guess from every angle that you look at it, it was, for a moment, living up to society’s definition of success. Car, paycheck, everything. But I still wasn’t genuinely happy. The happiness you get during payday? Well, it only lasted for 10 minutes then I was back to doing things I really was not passionate about and this made me realize that regardless of what people say, you have to live your own definition of success.
If you are here today as a product of being pressured to cope up with what other people deem as successful, maybe it’s about time for you to rethink and rechart your destination.
Real success and real excellence aren’t always about the high profile post, the big job, the equally big paycheck, and it isn’t always about the high grades. The most accurate measure of real success is happiness.
What do you really want to achieve in life? Are you fired up to follow your heart and see yourself through those impractical choices?
Real success is excelling in the things that you sincerely love to do. It’s when you lie down at night and think: God, I can’t wait for tomorrow to begin because it’s another chance to live for my dreams.
Whatever that makes you happy, that is for you to define and that is for you to pursue with all your heart.
These may all be easier said than done but just because something is difficult to do doesn’t mean it is impossible.
Always remember that you aren’t in this adventure alone. Across all the hardest moments in my life, I’m incredibly thankful for great friends, equally great mentors and a very supportive family–people I would consider a glimpse of God’s love–who make me feel that it’s okay to make mistakes, to fail, to be weak, because that’s life and it’s meant to be filled with challenges–challenges and difficulties that open you up to the biggest changes, sometimes, the best of changes.
Life can be too much to bear sometimes with pressure coming in from everywhere. The challenges you face right now may be nothing compared to the challenges you will face later on in life but always remember, the biggest battles always go to God’s greatest warriors.
