The real truth of it is: Through persistent action and discipline, you can dramatically increase the probability that you can be what you want to be.
I always use the lottery analogy with my kids: “How many lottery tickets did you get today?”.
The second part of the truth is: Some people come with a lot more lottery tickets that you, through genetics, income background, family support and, yes, luck. Don’t let that stop you; most don’t and you don’t need to be first to win this race.
The thing is I believe that statement is a bit misunderstood.
Calculators were already becoming pocket sized back in the day, but using it to calculate things if you don't know how to use it is where the actual problem is.
Hence the reasoning to learn how to math vs only having the device.
it's very easy to enter wrong numbers on a calculator, but you need some basic reasoning and familiarity to know when an answer is off, and you need to start over
You may carry one now, but can you calculate percentages on it without your maths lessons? Can you convert fractions? I blame the technology, if it's going to math it needs to math all maths
Frankly, these days? Yeah you totally can. "Hey Siri, what's 3% of 235,889?" or "Hey Siri, what's 8/37ths converted to 300ths?" will most likely just feed you a correct answer.
Nah even statistics is perfectly logical and right, but not because truth is absolute (there may be such a thing, but we definitely don't have access to it in that case. [At this time?]), but rather because math defined there to be a way in which all you derive from it is 'absolutely' true. It just might be 'absolutely' true in a system that isn't ours, or isn't useful for answering anything we want to ask...
You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!
"Girls desire a knight in shining armor to come sweep them off their feet!" — my pastor
For the longest time, I struggled because I was told all my life what a "woman's purpose" was, and my desires never lined up with that. Felt like a freak because I never desired romance, sex, or partnership with a man (or anyone else, for that matter). If that was my purpose, was I supposed to will myself to want that for myself? Was I doomed to be alone forever? Was I wrong to want to pursue adventure and things that I wanted?
If my desire ≠ God's desire (which was apparently union with a man at some point in the future), then my desires were.. wrong. Maybe/probably even evil.
So I fucked up my life trying to follow that and fit into that mold. I did things I never wanted to do because it was the "right thing" to do in the eyes of God.
After I escaped, I never really recovered. But.. I discovered a lot about myself.
I did bearded dragon rescues & fostering, I got into cosplay, learned how to sew stuffed animals, got some mental health care, rekindled my love for nature.. all by myself. I learned to love me and not base my worth on what other folks believe I should do or how I should behave. I don't have a partner who gets to dictate my personality. I got to grow on my own.
I'm still coming to terms with.. a lot of things about myself, but now I'm able to grow freely instead of being confined to such a small pot.
Don't let people define who or what you are, or what your purpose is in life. Only you get to do that. It's both terrifying and freeing, but you can do this.
Even for those us who fit into the straight/white/cis mould, learning how to create purpose and meaning for yourself is a really hard battle against expectations imposed growing up. Thanks for sharing a really wholesome story :)
Some that others have already said (hard work = success, trust cops), and off the top of my head:
That my ultimate goal in life is to find a husband, and carry and then raise children (people don't stop saying it once you grow up, you just hopefully learn that they're full of shit)
That "blood is thicker than water" and that your family will always be there for you/want what's best for you
IIRC, the original "blood is thicker than water" quote is actually "the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" which means those that stand by you and fight and struggle with you, and are there for you, are more valuable than those biologically related to you.
Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack and Messianic Rabbi Richard Pustelniak, claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cite any sources to support their claim.
Nice, do you have a source for that so I can fix the wikipedia article? Either way it doesn't particularly matter.
On the plus side, I have a pretty bangin' signature. On the minus side, they wasted a good chunk of lesson time teaching a useless script. Fortunately it was on the way out already, so I was never really required to use it even in school.
Millennial here and I haven’t yet seen a non-cursive self-identifying signature. Are they just like bubbly high-school antics and hearts dotting the letter i?
That if a racoon saw you swimming, it would swim out to you and sit on your head and drown you.
My fully adult mother actually feared this was something that could happen to her children, and she warned us of this “danger” every summer when we were young.
My grandma always told me that if you push to hard while pooping your organs will come out. Technically hemorrhoids can do that but they are not really organs.
Not only hemorrhoids but you can also get diverticula from straining too hard too often. They don't go away once they form, and can become infected (diverticulitis) which is most unpleasant. Pain like kidney stones or appendicitis.
Over thirty years ago, I told a friend of a friend “Australians come from Australia, Romanians come from Romania, therefore Canadians come from Canadia”. She’s been calling it “Canadia” for thirty years.
We’ve been together for ten years now, and she’s just found out that it’s not called “Canadia”. Boy am I in trouble.
My dad got pulled over and warned about the light being on. I suspect it was really to check her wasn’t drunk-driving though, as he was giving me a lift me from the pub.