Living Kindfully

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• 10 Dec, 2025 *

Tonight, I received a text message from my eldest son telling me that he could be failing one of the subjects in his engineering degree. He did not do well in one of his major assignments because he did not have any friends to cross check the work. I know he is socially awkward; I told him that sometimes he needs to be thick skin to ask for help. Help can come from friends and his lecturers. As long as he is not leaching on someone’s work, someone will help him. He gave up before even trying to ask for help.

I also took this opportunity to tell him about my recent financial loss. The loss is nearly 6 months of his education fees. I told him that I have to suck it up and keep trying. Life is a series of mistakes. Mistakes are unavoidable. We have to learned from it.

I do not define him by his success or failure in grades. I define him by whether he has given his best on whatever that he did. If he has given his best, I have nothing more to say. The more important thing is to have better strategies.

I feel very relieve that I told my son about my financial losses. I supposed this is an important lesson to him and to myself. Everyone made mistakes. We cannot let our mistakes define us. Rather, we have to use the mistakes as a form of feedback to tell us where we can improve? It is not easy; I have been beating myself up for nearly 2 months and it is not getting easier.

The best lesson to my son is to show him how I live. To show that I have made a big mistake and I take full ownership of it. Instead of blaming others, I work hard to make up for the losses. As for him, he has to take ownership of his mistakes and fix it.