You wake up. You do what you’re told.

You get good grades; you’re kind to your family; you have friends.

You have a job; you work hard; you’re smart with your money.

You go through the motions. Every day.

But whether you know it or not, you’re tired.

You are tired of constantly doing what is expected of you. This can’t be it for me, you think. This cannot be the bane of my existence.

Well, it's not.

Starting when we are young children, there is a pressure put upon us. A pressure the seems to force itself on us as we grow up.

This is the pressure of expectations.

At a young age, we learn that we must be presentable in the presence of other people. We do not want others to deem us as anything other than proper or well behaved.

This is our first mistake.

We, as young children, should be taught that while it is respectable to be polite, it is equally respectable to show people our true personality. Fabricating who we are hurts us by telling us we must change in the presence of others.

As we move into middle school, we learn that how others view us is more important than how we view ourselves. We then strive to conform to the societal norms.

This is our second mistake.

We cannot be true to ourselves if we are following the roles of others.

High school is all about the desire to be perfect. We must have perfect grades, perfect extracurricular activities and perfect recommendations in order for people, who we will never meet, to tell us we are good enough to get an education at their school.

We stress, we cry, we form a competition with our peers--but for what?

To show people that we are good, well-rounded children.

That's the third mistake: striving for perfection.

College and beyond puts us in a continuous rhythm. But are we happy in this rhythm?

Was all of that pleasing and pretending worth it for where you will end up?

Even as we follow these rules that we have been taught, we only accomplish what is expected of us. We are hindered by caring about what others think, which restricts us from doing what we care about.

This is simply wrong.

For those you who do everything right, the question that stands is: for whom are you doing this?

If you cannot say yourself, then there is something you are not doing right.

You can have everything in your life go right until you wake up and realize you pushed yourself in the wrong direction.

The beauty of finding your direction is that only you can find it. Only you can decide what makes you truly happy.

And if it is something that is unexpected from you then it's all the better.

Life doesn’t seem fulfilled by the expected. Rather, it is the unexpected that always brings a little more fun to a typical day of following the rules.