About a month ago, my younger sister seemingly received the most devastating news of her academic life: the score on her AP world history exam. And while it may seem like my sisterly love is clouding my judgement, I can honestly say, I've never seen my sister work so hard in her entire life. I don't think I even worked as hard as her at her age. The amount of hours she put into studying. The times when she said she couldn't go out because this exam was coming up. The detailed pages of her study guide with notes crammed in the margins. The flashcards, the bolded terms, my sister practically worked herself to death. So when it came down to it, when she got that score out of 5 back in July--she felt as if her hard work was for nothing. Late nights of studying and weekends spent at her desk studying--all vanished as it came down to that number out of 5. All of her work reduced down to just one number.
Society is fixated on numbers. And many of us have lost ourselves in our obsession with numbers. The number of likes on our most recent Instagram posts. The number of notifications waiting for us after we set our phones down for 5 minutes. The number out of one hundred that our professors scribble in the right hand corner of our blue books. The number out of 2400 that we scored on our SAT. The number we rank in our high school class.
And if we're being honest, I was person who prided herself on numbers. For a long time, whether it was academics, friends, family, numbers defined my life. And I didn't even realize it. It just felt good knowing that my numbers compared to someone else were better. And in my head, how compared to other people in terms of numbers equated to things like success and even happiness.
And here I am, shoving my pride down my throat and telling all of you that at the end of the day, numbers are just numbers.
It's easy to measure your self-worth with numbers. I've done it. We've all done--one way or another. It makes everything so extrinsic. It's easy to say that you're the best person in the world because you were #1 in your high school class, got a perfect score on your SAT, you have 1000 likes on your Instagram posts, etc. But what really counts, is something more complex than a number on a phone screen or on a blue book. Worth is not measured by the number of likes on our profile pictures. Worth is not measured by a grade. Worth isn't measured by external forces, it's comes from within. It's how we feel about ourselves as an individual and how we impact ourselves, our loved ones, and our society as a whole. Worth is measured by our answers to the questions: Do you push yourself to your maximum effort? Do you always out your best foot forward when it comes to other people in your life? Are you truly being the best person you can be?
Now, don't get me wrong. Some numbers are important. Aim for that SAT score to get you into that college. Aim for that grade out of 100 that's gonna boost your GPA. But at the end of the day, a number is just a number. If you try your hardest, that's all that really matters.
