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Phrase: Make your own way
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
There’s a lot to be said for making your own way in life.
Sure, this is not the easy way.
People tend to have more appreciation and respect for things they have completed, built or learned themselves than for what has been handed to them on a silver platter.
Japanese even have a proverb to reflect this wisdom – the third generation ruins the house.
When you make your own way, you progress through life from your own hard work and do not lean on the hard work of people who came before you.
As far as I know, every society and culture in the world values hard work and frowns on laziness and freeloaders.
Most parents, or even those with more experience, try to make it easier for their children or younger people with less experience.
The problem is that by making things easier and not forcing people to make their own way, we often do younger generations a disservice.
Much craves more, as the saying goes, and if you have no appreciation for how hard it is to get ahead in life, you will very quickly learn how easy it is to lose your shirt.
Let me tell you a quick story.
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Here in Wakayama, a local private hospital was founded after WWII by a grandfather who was a doctor.
His son also became a doctor and grew the hospital into a much bigger and well-respected one.
Now the grandson, who is also a doctor, is the head of the hospital.
The quality of the hospital has noticeably deteriorated, but the son seems more interested in driving his supercar than running the family business.
Perhaps, of course, I don’t know for sure, but perhaps if the grandson had been forced to make his own way in life instead of having a hospital handed to him, the hospital would not be going downhill.
Perhaps the third generation does ruin the house or hospital in this case.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 70.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.