We all know the classic coming of age story. A child faces great adversity and against all odds they preserve. Whether attributed to some great talent or some lesson they learned along the way, they grow into the person they are supposed to be. Growing up in our lives is so much more complicated and never ends.

Reflecting back, I realized I have used different mantras to direct my growth and development during different periods of my life. While not intentional, I believe they each provided me direction and guidance. When I was in junior high and high school trying to find my confidence during the aftermath of being bullied, “make your weaknesses your strengths” would sound through my head; I would find strength when I was struggling. While this may have caused some perfectionist tendencies, it also forced me to become very comfortable with my weaknesses. As I worked to improve my weaknesses, there were some weaknesses I had to accept or realize weren’t weaknesses at all. Once you stop seeing certain attributes as weaknesses, you can draw strength from and learn to love them. Strength and confidence does not come from a lack of weaknesses, but an acceptance and love of them.

Once I got to college, I faced a new set of challenges.  Though I redeveloped my confidence and was very comfortable with weaknesses, I was now in one of the best engineering programs in the country and was living on my own for the first time. Sometimes it felt like I was facing insurmountable challenges. “Where there is a will, there is a way” helped me face each one and learn to trust myself to figure things out.

Once I got to graduate school, those challenges became much more psychological and I was constantly questioning my ability to solve any problem (which I had arrogantly believed I could do). Eventually, I adopted another mantra, “life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.” The goal of a Ph.D. is to expand human knowledge; to learn something that has never been known before. I needed to accept living at the edge of my comfort zone and “embrace the suck” because that was the only way I was going to lean over the edge of knowledge and find something new.

When I was in junior high and high school, my mantra showed how I valued self-awareness and improvement. In collage, I valued perseverance, creativity, and hope. Now, I value the challenge.

We define who we are by understanding and choosing our values. This year, I have run into this concept in both my Gordon Scholar discussions and in “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***” by Mark Manson (if you have not read — or listened — to this amazing book I highly recommend it). As Mark describes it, by choosing our values we choose what to give a f*** about, which makes us happier because we aren’t wasting energy caring about things that don’t align with our values. Also, by understanding our values we are able to evaluate if they are constructive or destructive. Constructive values rely on factors within your control, while destructive do not.

Through the development of constructive values by which we want to live our lives, we define who we are and who we want to be. I do not believe life is about figuring out who we are, but about being comfortable with our strengths and weakness, believing in ourselves, and always challenging ourselves to evaluate and improve our values and therefore our lives.