Greetings everyone, my name is Lee Jong Min, but you can also call me William.
Today, I would like to tell you about my life story, and hopefully also tell you about
the things that I would have to done to make my life better, and also give some
advice so that people here will not make the same mistakes I did.
In every life, there is a challenge, a barrier that we have to face, then with enough
courage and strength we just might be able to go through them. I also had a lot
of barriers and challenges in my life. And the method that I used to go through
them was persistence. Persistence was what got me through when no one believed
in me. It got me through my SATs, my failures, my mistakes, and also my toughest
times. Persistence is what got me through my toughest times... I'm sorry.
Until the age of 16, I was just a normal Christian boy who went to junior high in
Beijing, China. Life was pretty ordinary, and I was pretty happy with the way things
were going. But one day, a week before my graduation, I had a tragedy in my life
where my only tower of strength, my mother, has passed away due to stage
4 breast cancer.
At first, I thought it was for the best because she was having a tough time due to
chemotherapy, but as time passed, her absence has left a burden on my shoulder
which I could not bare. In the end, I started to question my beliefs, wondering why
God would allow a 16-year-old boy to lose his mother, and eventually I couldn’t
find the answer, and I decided to live life the way I wanted to, and in the end, my
grades started to fall and my attitude towards life to change. I basically lost the me
aning to live.
Then after a year or so, I’ve gotten a call from my pastor, who was my mentor. He
knew about the problems I was going through, and eventually when he found out
that I could not solve the problem by myself, he decided to step in and solve the
matter with his own hands, and of course with the hands of God. We met up at a
café and even though I knew what he was going to say to me, I did not want to
meet him as I didn’t want to admit the problems that I was going through.
He told me about his experience, how he reacted when his parents passed away,
and he asked me a question where he said, William, how would you feel if mother
saw you right now, and he also said that she is indeed seeing me right now in
heaven, or was I believing in a lie for the past 16 years? His question did get to
me. I did started to think, what would my mother think if she saw me right now?
What would I say to her? And then I realized I actually could see my mother in the
face if I was actually going to meet her a few decades later?
So, since that moment, I had started to have persistence in my life, persistence
strong enough I, where I would constantly be trying to go over my failures, and in
the end, I was able to go through my failures and go through multiple trials. I was
able to succeed and pursue my life goals. One of the examples is, I was able to
apply, I was able to try hard on my SATs, even though I was a senior and I was a
bit late, and then I was also able to go to the best humanitarian studies university
China has to offer. That is something where at that time where my current status was really hard to do. But I was able to do that through persistence.
So, what I think from this is persistence is basically what carries you through your
failures, so if you have persistence. I'm sorry, um... There's a person who is
Raymond Albert Kroc. He is the founder of McDonald's. If I quote him, he used to
say that, “There's nothing in the world that can take the place of persistence.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” If we, in order to succeed,
we have to learn to fail, and persistence is basically what carries us from that
failure to, to, to succession.
To me, persistence is the only way to succeed. Without persistence, we will fail,
we will not be able to pursue our goals. I hope that everyone here today can find
the persistence in their life and proceed with your life goals and achieve success.
I would like to thank everyone here today for giving me the chance to stand here,
and I also would like to thank the Hackers Group for giving me the honor.
Thank you.