When I was young, I always gave up easy and afraid of challenges, troubles, and mistakes. A lot of times when I met a challenge I always tried to avoid the challenges. So, if there is a challenge, I couldn’t overcome it, and I appeared to be an unsuccessful person. However, deep inside my heart, I want to be successful, and I want to achieve something through my life time. After many times of avoiding challenge and troubled by failures, I finally came to realize that is not because I can not overcome difficult tasks or challenges, I was afraid of failures. Whenever things get difficult, I fail to continue, because I don’t want to accept failure. However, a conversation with a stranger changed that part of me.

One summer, I and my family were traveling. We arrived at a beach in southern California, the weather there was beautiful, it was sunny and the entire family was having a good time. After awhile I decided to take a walk myself, and I saw a person far away from me picking up something from the beach. So I went closer and try to see what that person was doing. And when I got close enough to that person, I found out he was actually picking up sea stars alone the beach. Every time when he saw a sea star got washed to the beach, he picked it up and through it back to the sea. I was standing there for around 40mins, and he kept doing the same thing. I was shocked by this person’s consistence. Then I walked to him and presented my curiosity of his action.

 There is millions of sea star being washed to the beach everyday, you will never be able to pick up all of them and throw them back to the sea. Some of them will die eventually, and your action is a completely waste of time. However, he told me:” Yes, there are millions of sea stars being washed to the shore everyday, and I don’t have the ability to save them all, and I know I can’t. However I want to try my best and save as many as I can. So at the end of the day, I can tell myself that, I have tried my best, and therefore I have no regrets.” I was stunned by his response, compare to what he just said, I felt ashamed of myself, and all the challenges and difficulties which I tried to avoid. After that conversation, I always force myself to try my best for all kinds’ challenges and difficulties, and I ended up overcoming many of them with great results.