Why Do We Push Ourselves

My daughter recently came back with a very long book, about 100 pages long. For context, she is 6 years old and normally only reads books that are 10 to 20 pages long, and even those are in big fonts. Recently her teacher let her choose her own books to read, and that is the reason she went overboard and brought back the book.

I am a bit worried that she would be discouraged when she can’t finish the book, because even as an adult, I have a hard time to accept that I can’t finish some books. I still keep a few books that I have started but not read for years, in the glimpse hope that I will miraculously read them. Hopefully my daughter would not fall into the same trap.

She does seem to flaunt that the book that she gets to bring home has a “hundred and twenty pages!” and I think that is partly the reason she pushed herself to pick the book. However, when she started to read the book, I noticed she just kept reading it without any hesitation. There are wrong pronunciations everywhere as there are a lot of tricky words, but other than that, it was just another day to her. Maybe she isn’t pushing herself, but rather she doesn’t think there is a limit to push herself through? Maybe it is only me that sees her age as a limit, and the length of the book, much like how she flaunt it, make me doubt her too unnecessarily.

Let’s see what the future holds.

Thank you for reading.