Travis

Some people tend to believe that life is meaningless, temporary, and that we are just a small portion out of the world’s population, thus, impossible to make any substantial impact on the world. A close friend of mine once reminded me of how insignificant we are by reflecting on the fact that we only live for 80 – 90 years, while the earth’s habitable-zone lifetime is 7.8 billion years. “We are nothing”, that’s what they said. 
 
Instead of becoming despondent and pessimistic about life, I choose to look at the bright side. The fact that I have won the battle against the other 250 million sperms to be born into this world, make me believe that I have the DNA to do big things. I know it sounds silly, but trust me, statistically, it is almost impossible to win, as the chance is only 0.0000004%. Since then, “I have the DNA to do big things” became my life motto, and it actually helped me quite a lot to overcome problems in life. One of the problems was when I was rejected by HKUST School of Engineering due to failure in meeting the admission requirements. At that time, to be honest, I almost gave up and planned not to do university education. However, I remembered my life motto and did not give up. I began to see and acknowledge every opportunity that could possibly take me into HKUST. Then, I wrote an appeal letter, and surprisingly, after an uphill battle and tough time, my appeal letter was approved and I was able to get into my dream university, HKUST!

From that story of mine, I realized that ‘success’ is not only about how impactful we are in this world. For me, ‘success’ is when you are able to see a glimmer of hope and motivation in the midst of your worst time.