In the article, he mentions the opinion that came to mind from an article he remembers from the past. According to the priest author, we cannot live by giving 100% of our strength all the time. If you do that, it won't be long before you give up. Therefore, you usually live with 80% of your strength, but when you need 100% of your strength, you use that strength, and when the work is finished, you go back to 80%.
Whether we know it or not, we were asked to always do our best from a young age. He doesn't know how it is these days, but when he was young, the goal of all elementary school kids was Seoul National University. At that time, to get into Seoul National University, you had to be in the top 1 percent, but with a competition rate of 100 to 1, how much effort would you have to put in to become that number 1? Naturally, all children were forced to study hard and did not think it was strange.
At that time, we did not know how unfair and unreasonable it was to demand that every child be one in a hundred. He remembers a girl in 5th grade who put her head down on her desk and cried when her homeroom teacher berated her for getting a zero in her graded test papers.
The demand to always do your best was not limited to studying. In Korean society, where college admissions and jobs are determined based on grades, the stereotype that poverty is due to not studying hard makes us feel bitter. It is a very big aspect of an unhealthy society that good performance in national affairs determines the future level of the economy. This is a social ill that must be fixed, but since this problem is directly connected to very strong vested interests, it is probably the most difficult problem to fix after the real estate problem.
With a father, mother, and older brother who graduated from Seoul National University, he was not poor at studying, but he could not enter Sky University. (The SKY abbreviation is the first letters of the names of South Korea's most respected universities: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University).
Fortunately, his parents were not too concerned about grades, and he became a priest, a way of life that was even less concerned with grades. However, more and more was always attached to his belief system, which had a strong desire for recognition. He continued to need a better ‘me’ than what he had presently achieved. When he entered the seminary, at some point he came to the realization that becoming a better me, would not bring satisfaction and only served to occasionally call me back to keep moving forward. There was no way he could properly understand the request to accept himself as he was, which is the first condition for happiness. He didn't really know what that meant. What does it mean to accept things as they are?
In fact, it was only after 20 years since he became a priest that he became aware of the meaning of ‘as it is’ to a certain extent, and now knows that it will take a long time to truly realize it. This is because knowledge about it belongs to experiential knowledge. In other words, it is a knowledge that can only be understood by experiencing it yourself and living it— relying on the Lord. It is impossible for someone who has not done the training to explain this to others. That's because they have not gone through the process.
Anyway, without understanding the expression “just as you are,” which he encountered as a seminarian, his goal of becoming a good priest was connected to a desire to do more things well, and he ended up trying to do too well regardless of his capabilities. If you live with these thoughts, you will not have much leisure in life and will become frustrated. In short, it's because you're trying to use 100% of your strength the whole time, but the real problem is that this doesn't produce the best results. Let's think about it. Have you ever seen someone who always does their best in life? Personally, he hasn't met anybody yet. When we think of ourselves as people who do our best, we don't just look at working hard at the tasks given to us.
The admonition to always do our best in everything leads us to impossible goals and ultimately leaves us discouraged. He thinks the true wisdom is to live your daily life with 80% of your strength and to distinguish when you need to exert 100% of your strength. When we try to reach an impossible goal, we often experience situations where we fail, so we always feel a sense of disconnection. The satisfaction or reward that comes with this does not last long, and you end up feeling stressed because you always feel like you are not good enough. You think more about what you did poorly than what you did well, and you become sensitive to mistakes. In the end, your overall life energy becomes depleted as you age, and you may fall into workaholism or other addictions.
Everyone has a desire to do well, so it's natural to have that kind of desire, but trying to do too well is bound to be unreasonable, as it means always wanting to give 100 percent. There is a saying that moderate tension brings good results, and I think this is possible with an 80% mindset. This is because the remaining 20% includes the mindset of accepting our shortcomings, limitations, and mistakes that inevitably occur. When this happens, leisure comes into our lives and we can accept our shortcomings as they are, allowing us to see others the same way. How bleak would it be in a place that does not tolerate mistakes?
God the Father, whom we believe in and follow, does not always demand 100 percent from us. There are times when you have to give 100 percent, but never always. However, this does not mean that 80% of daily lives are lived in moderation. And even if you put in 100% of your energy and the results are not as good as you hoped, the accepting attitude will be over 80 percent.
