Transcriber: Rana Al kilaney Reviewer: Anna Sobota
Hello, everyone.
My name’s Landon,
a junior from Saigon South International School.
I just want to say that I’m truly honored to be standing here, I am.
I’m really grateful for this opportunity
to share some ideas that are worth sharing.
You know, as I was drafting this speech, I was contemplating between two options.
Should I write a speech that is 20 minutes long?
That will surely bore you to death.
Or, you know, keep it simple,
a five minute speech with all of information I need to cover.
And obviously, I chose the latter.
That’s also the topic I brought to you today.
The debate between quantity and quality.
Quantity and quality, a long debate in any field of study.
In science, is it better to take
qualitative measurements or quantitative measurements?
In literature, is it better to write a 28-page essay
or just write a few short paragraphs with the utmost syntax and diction?
For athletes, is it better to train every day
or just train once or twice a week with a solid plan?
And I often hear the answer being quality over quantity.
But is that a case for everything?
Is that a universal law to success?
No, I don’t think so.
Recently, I finished a book called “Delayed Gratification”
by a Japanese lawyer and author, Jun Mitani.
In his book, he talked about how to execute and setting up your plans.
And my plans have been significantly more successful compared to the ones before.
There’s one section where he talked about quality and quality.
When I first read it, I was like,
of course, which is called, that’s a common sense.
But I was deadly wrong.
He mentioned that neither quantity or quality is the key concept.
It is about adjusting those two concepts best according to your ability.
When we fail, do we really fail?
We often misconceptualize that the opposite of success is failure.
It is not.
The opposite of success is not taking actions.
It doesn’t really matter
if we did bad on English test or missed a shot in basketball.
As long as you’re still moving towards your goal,
success won't be far away.
Let’s not get sidetracked and turn this into a motivational speech.
Again, quality and quality.
Like I said,
success is tangible as long as you’re putting in the work.
In other words, not only are you putting enough work,
you also have to put in high-quality work.
As ambitious and self-motivated high schoolers as we are,
we tend to make our goals too grand and too challenging and too difficult.
And that’s when we’re prone to lose confidence.
I don't know if you studied psychology in the past,
but there’s a term called “fight-or-flight”
where we flight when we see the challenges that are too challenging
and fight when we think the challenge is manageable.
And when we make our goal too challenging,
we tend to flee from it.
However, if we adjust those two: quality and quantity,
we can influence us to take it on and do more of it.
Let me give you a personal example.
Like I said, I’m a junior
and I’m currently preparing for the ACT exam.
ACT exam is famous for its advanced vocabularies,
which often throw students off.
As someone who wanted to do well on it,
I decided I'll learn those vocabularies.
So, I went ahead and bought ACT vocabulary book
and decided I’ll learn 20 words every day and write a short paragraph about it.
It sounded like a good goal, right?
Indeed it was.
And at first I was, you know, doing it every day:
remeber 20 words, write a short paragraph,
I felt really motivated.
However, as time went on,
I felt the words were harder and harder to memorize
and harder to incorporate them into a paragraph.
And with everything else going on in my life,
I had doubts, I had disappointments,
and I stopped for a few weeks.
Then I realized I should have used the principle of quantity and quality.
Can’t do 20 words with a paragraph?
Don’t write the paragraph.
Can’t do 20 words?
15 words.
Can’t do 15?
10 words.
It’s not about seeing the challenge and backing away from it.
It’s seeing the challenge yet still taking incremental steps towards it.
It seems like I was lowering my standards so I can do less work,
but compared to doing nothing, I was far better off by doing something.
Even though my topic today is about quality and quality,
I true message I am trying to send here is,
“making progress is really important even when it’s little.”
So next time when you’re feeling like a failure
for not succeeding in your goal,
make sure to understand the fact that the opposite of success is not failure
and make sure you’re still taking small steps towards it.
Thank you.