Persisting

=Persisting=

Although it's one of the habits that everyone stresses--as a theme in literature (called "perseverance"), as a successful behavioral habit as seen from examples in history, or even as a lesson taught to young kids by adults, it's a habit essential to life as we know it. Without perseverance, the world would fail--if we decided to give up whenever we wanted to, because we became too lazy to continue, nothing extraordinary would get done (or just //nothing// would get done). Persistence is a key to life, and I'm quite glad that it's a habit I possess. I've been told that while I can be impulsive and flighty at times, I'm obstinate and I also have a sense of responsibility to any works in progress, so I am capable of "persisting."

One memorable example I remember was when Faline and I struggled to complete the 4th lesson in the stoichiometry--which was basically to prove whether the mole relationship between NaHCO3 and NaCl was basically the same as it was theoretically (or in the equation: NaHCO3 + HCl => NaCl + H2O + CO2). We followed directions accurately (we were very careful), but we ended up with mutant samples of NaHCO3 and HCl. For some absurd reason, while other only took less than 10 minutes to finish adding their hydrochloric acid to the baking soda in the evaporating dish, we spent close to 25 or 30 minutes. Supposed to keep adding hydrochloric acid until the sodium hydrogen carbonate in the evaporating dish stopped fizzing, we added in each drop carefully and really did swirl the dish to make sure all parts of the NaHCO3 could react with the HCl. Several times in this process, Faline and I wanted to give up. Everyone else was almost done, and we were still struggling with it. It would've been so much simpler to say "we made an error some time in the process; since our results will be affected and be inaccurate, let's just give up." Yet, in the end, our results were not as "off" as we thought it was. The ratio of baking soda to salt was about 1.56 to 1, rather than 1:1.

Because we were able to persist, we succeeded (in a roundabout way). It's great that this is one habit that I don't have to improve as much on (unlike some of the others).

Figure 1: The evaporating dish and the bunsen burner flame--the annoying experiment that took forever.