Page 10 - 2022 Kaleidoscope Volume 8

Diligence

Group B ( Junior Middle 3 & Senior Middle 1 ) Champion Hiew Jun Ian

A very good morning to the honourable judges, teachers and my fellow friends. Today, I will
be talking about “Diligence”.

How do you perceive someone as a diligent person? Do they wake up very early in the

morning, clean up their house, do exercise, go to work or school and keep themselves busy all

day long? Many of us might think of a diligent person having such characteristics, but in reality,

they are much more than that.

Most successful people are not only diligent, but they are smart in the things they are

diligent in. They have a clear goal in mind as to what they want to get and work diligently to

achieve it, as compared to being blindly diligent and wasting time on things that are not useful to

reaching their goal.

Being the richest person in the world today, the founder of two successful companies, Tesla
and SpaceX, Elon Musk resembles a magnificent example of diligence. He constantly travels

between 2 cities every week to manage his companies. He actively participates and leads these 2

companies from scratch, up to the scale of today.

Some people believe that talent is the only way to succeed in life. However, as many

examples have shown us, diligence is actually the more important aspect of success. Being

talented without diligence is like having racing skills with a rusty car. You cannot reach your

fullest potential using just talent. On the contrary, diligence can make up for the lack of talent,

and even outperform those who only have talent. I am sure we have all heard of the lesson from

the story of “The Hare and the Tortoise”.

We all know how successful Dato’ Lee Chong Wei is from his outstanding achievements in

the badminton world, but his hard work, perseverance, self discipline and the spirit of “dare to

lose” are more inspiring to me. He spends most of his day in training. Talent may be an

advantage, but without all of this hard work, he would have never reached his world

championship status in badminton.

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