Through adolescence, our childhood is exhausted. After 18 long years of playtime, we’re then faced for the first time with definitive personal obstacles.

How we overcome these obstacles will undoubtedly shape our future and the people we will come to be. Some of us will jump, with relative ease over these and continue on track. Some of us will identify the obstacle, and then figure out the simplest way of getting through it, be it over or under. And some of us will run straight around, avoiding the obstacle altogether and eventually ending way off track.

In the past whatever obstacle we were faced with was small for the most part. Any significant obstacle was overcome for us, our obstacles became our parents and responsibility was not in our vernacular.

However now and In the future this will end. It’s the end of the beginning of our life and it is time for us to stand alone in the world, as individuals. It is us alone who will make us the people we aspire to be. There is no destined chain of events that will conclude with our happiness. We have to do it ourselves.

I often thought that it was results that spelled success. That the work and effort required achieving those results is just an unpleasant by product of success. However I have grown to see that was childish. Just because you can get an A doesn’t mean you’ll achieve, just because you get an F doesn’t mean you’ll fail. It is the process which produces the result. Life is not a test of intelligence but a test of attitude to work; how much we are willing to do, what sacrifices we will make in order to achieve our goal. Our attitude to our early obstacles will result in our future attitude to life, for better or worse.

                 We may have found, upon entering the independent world that we are filled with ambition. But soon we see our ambition begin to dwindle as we reflect on what we previously planned and how much of it we actually got done. And before you know it, its a year gone and you still haven't much. Why? Because adolescence is gods way of showing young people how the world is. Doing things which have no real relevance to your survival, but to see how blindly you’re willing to follow. He will then reward us with money, grades and a higher level of security, financial or spiritual.

Who we are is nothing to do with money, grades, or degrees. Neither will make us happy, and neither will significantly change who we are. We will tackle our final year in school and the preparation exams as the first obstacle in our life. If we try to jump it and fall, we will learn to run faster before we jump. If we try and just get through it, we will just repeat that pattern until it fails. And if we dodge it, and jus keep running, we’ll end up lost.