Yes/No – No/Yes

This is one of the critical points I want to dissect but it’s quite painful because I got to realise this complexity in the last year of my schooling.

“Yes/No, No/Yes” is a concept that came across when I started observing the reason why we fail at school and in various areas of our lives. This is a combination that is unbreakable because one cannot operate without the other. As teenagers, we’ve got this unusual fascination and tendency to saying ‘yes!’ We say yes when we have to say no, and vice versa!

We have created a huge picture on our imaginations that yes is the best answer that will definitely open doors for us. We say yes in order to appease people even when their words are not worth agreeing with.

I came to the realisation that many teenagers fail at school not because they’re stupid but because they say “Yes, we understand” to stuff they don’t! We don’t know that in the absence of ‘yes’, ‘no’ gives us the opportunity to learn more and understand more. As teenagers, we will keep on failing at school if we don’t change our concept about ‘no’.

We’ve lost our identity and principles just because of desperation and that is because we wanted to have something instantaneously. We got to a point where we said yes to a deal that we can wait and have at the right time. Learn to say no! That gives you an opportunity to rethink your response and ultimately you’ll make the right choice.

And this is because we seek instant gratification and I know because I endured it through as a teenager. As teenagers, we think we’ve got it all figured out, but really we do not.

It’s more like putting water into the kettle and we expect the water to be hot within one second. We seem to have forgotten that everything takes time. We want everything to blow out instantaneously and we forget that it takes baby’s steps. As teenagers, we are given everything on a silver platter. That ultimately reflects badly when we start growing up and the tendency has escalated and is now turning out to be a habit.

We want to be body builders but we want to achieve it with little effort. More often we want to try out relationships but we are not willing to go through the tough moments, we only want the easy route to a successful relationship. We meet people and just after a day we suddenly want to take things to another level. Many teenagers want to try things out but they become ambushed by the work required to be successful.

Some things take time, and we need to start understanding that the process is building us to be the best version of ourselves. It’s not going to be easy, it takes babies steps. If we can stop imagining the outcome of something, we will start understanding that it takes time.

You can have all the specific material to build a house but that does not mean that the house is complete. Just like the tree that produces an apple, for it to grow and flourish to its best version it has to be watered on a daily basis.

And this means that we should learn to depend on our parents. There’s nothing wrong with depending on our parents but we need to share the burden at a tender age because at some point we are going to be independent. We’ll encounter situations that will expect us to practise the lessons we learnt at a tender age.

As teenagers, we got the wrong side of the coin about dependency. The only thing we depend on our parents for is money as we are not yet working. But they should not clean, do laundry, and cook for us because these things have a major impact on our growth and, it’s quite helpful to do them ourselves.

The advice I give to parents is to allow their kids to take a step in enhancing their responsibility in preparation for their future, as some think that it’s strenuous for children to work but it’s actually not. Parents need to start understanding that they won’t be alive forever and their kids will suffer the pain alone when they’re no longer around.

We need to start designing our futures right now. It has been said that “if you want a thing done great, do it yourself.” Sometimes we regret somethings at a later stage. It’s never too late to change your focus and start thriving for independency not dependency.

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