Persisting

**Persisting**
 * Persistence means //staying// the course, taking the time to work at something until you achieve //excellence//.

One example of persistence was when I had to learn one of the lessons I missed because of APAC basketball. During APAC, we learned a concept of enthalpy and reactions called Hess's Law. It states that even if you don't know the enthalpy of a reaction, chemical equations that use parts of the reaction with known enthalpies can be used to figure out the enthalpy of the desired reaction. Since I was away, I didn't learn this in class with everyone else and as a result it seemed very foreign to me when I first saw it. It was so weird to me that I had no idea what the question was asking me to do and I didn't understand the concept at all even after reading about it in the packet. It really confused me but I persevered and after playing around with the equations, I figured out that all I had to do was either switch the products and reactants, or multiply and then cancel opposite reactants out until I reach the desired equation. It took a lot of guesswork but ultimately I got the hang of it and could do it easily. I felt like giving up a lot and just setting it aside and doing something else, but I kept wanting to persist and figure out why and what Hess's Law is all about. If I had set it aside, there was a good chance that I would never have learned it until the day before the unit test, but by then it most definitely would have been too late.

This habit of mind is really personal to me since perseverence is something I believe defines who I am. It is a characteristic I'm proud to have and am glad that it forces me to work so hard at achieving a goal even when I feel like giving up. Although the process is always grueling and tiresome, it's worth it in the end as I feel completely satisfied with unlocking the puzzle of whatever I'm doing. Sometimes I do just give up on something though. I hope that the more I persist at things, the better I get at it and the less I give up on hard problems.I feel that the more I push myself to do things, the more easier tasks and concepts become for me to carry out or understand. Persisting is very important in the real world as well; if you meet a situation you don't like and there is no simple solution to, you cannot just give up. You have to persist and find a solution that satisfies the situation the best.**