Experiences Effect on Personality Essay Example

As young children and teens, kids develop beliefs so fast by taking in the information in their environment, which help kids interact with the world. The beliefs created at a young age are some of the strongest factors that influence our personality. Experiences in life affect people’s personality in a good way because it teaches people lessons, teaches right from wrong, and helps determine success in life.

Experiences help people later on in their life by teaching them right from wrong. In these experiences, regardless it’s being good or bad, there can be many lessons, inspirations, and wisdom a person can learn from. It’s what a person does with an experience that makes them what they are. For example, in The Kite Runner, a book written by Khaled Hosseini, which is about the life of a young boy named Amir and stories from his journey from Pakistan to the United States. Amir had gone through many experiences, but he learned greatly from a specific one, “I could stand up for Hassan- the way he stood up for me all those times in the past -and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run. In the end, I ran”(Hosseini 77). Amir experiences his friend, Hassan, getting raped, and instead of trying to stop it, he chose to run away for selfish reasons. After this incident, Hassan and Amir grew apart, and this really shaped Amir as a person. Later on in the book, he owes Hassan back for running away by taking care of his son, Sohrab. Amir didn’t want to go back to his old home from the United States because he had a family and he didn’t want to die, but he realized that Sohrab needs someone to take care of him, and he owed it to Hassan to do that. Amir learned how to choose the right thing to do from his experience as a child. People can change their beliefs and perspective on how they see the world based on what they’ve been through. Another example is in the book, How Dare The Sun Rise by Sandra Uwiringiyimana. This book was about Sandra growing up in a war zone, and the struggles of moving to the United States, with a completely different environment. Sandra had many obstacles in the U.S., going to a school with many white people as an African American herself. She didn’t make the best choices for herself, which led her to go through a really hard time, “I didn’t want to kill myself, but I didn’t really want to exist either. It felt like that the first month after the massacre, like it was too exhausting to exist”(Uwiringiyimana 238). As an adult, Sandra went through depression because she never fully accepted or talked through what she experienced at a young age, which was the shooting of her sister. She kept it all inside and it led her to not want to do the things that she used to love to do. It made her believe that life didn’t have a purpose anymore, but her friends started to realize how she wasn’t acting herself anymore. Sandra started to see how she needed to get help and see a counselor/therapist, so she did. From this, she learned that it’s okay for someone to ask for help, and nobody has to go through anything alone. If people never make mistakes, they will never know what not to do.

Experiences help teach people lessons. As people grow older, they realize that life is not going to be easy and gets more difficult as people have more responsibilities. Experiences help people get through obstacles in life. Every Falling Star, a true story by Sungju Lee, is about him growing up in the rough conditions of North Korea, and living through poverty at a young age. Through his life, he learns that life is difficult, but if you hold on to hope, it will get better. He has a really hard time going through poverty by himself at first, “Death was all around us. We’d enter markets in the mornings to find women wailing and rocking in their arms children who had died in the night. It was as if they had got stuck looking at and feeling all their grief and pain”(pg 175). Sungju Lee had to accept the fact that more and more people were dying around them everyday. His parents had left, he didn’t have much to live for, but he did have hope that he would find his father again. At the very least, he wasn’t completely alone because his gang always helped him. He later learns that if he had lost hope, he would have never actually found his father, and escaped North Korea, leading him and his father to have a better life in the United States. Another example is in How Dare the Sun Rise, where Sandra goes through many obstacles in her life as well, “Sandra, you’re so pretty for a black girl”(Uwiringiyimana 229). Sandra goes through racism, and many other obstacles in her life, but she wanted to prove to her family and herself that she could be successful in life, even if she didn’t follow everything her parents had wanted her to do. She learned that if she just believed in herself, good things would happen to her. Lessons that people learn from experiences help them grow as an individual.

People can have success in life by learning from experiences. Success isn’t easy and people know they have to go through certain life experiences to be truly successful. To also be successful, though people also have to look their failures in a different perspective. In Every Falling Star, Sungju Lee had to fight many other gangs to live and provide food for himself and his brothers. He didn’t always succeed though, “This time, I didn’t even try to remain standing when their leader hurled his entire weight down on top of me. As his fists pounded my face, somehow I managed to indicate to him that he had won”(Lee 171). Sungju hadn’t won a lot of the fights, but the ones that he lost, he learned a lot from them, and it led his gang to decide for Sungju to be their leader. Once he was the leader, they won a lot more fights, which helped them survive by getting more food and having people work under them. Likewise in The Kite Runner, Amir tries really hard to have Sohrab, his nephew, live with him in the United States, “That means you’d have to live with Sohrab here in Pakistan, day in and day out, for the next two years. You could seek asylum on his behalf. That’s a lengthy process”(Hosseini 339). Dealing with these challenges, Amir kept on trying, which helped him later on get Sohrab to stay in the United States. These challenges help people do something that might be inspiring to themselves or others.

People use experiences to grow and benefit themselves in a good way. A troubling experience can keep a person stuck in a bad place, but if they learn that there is a good outcome to everything, it’ll help them succeed in life.