My own path- Szymon Bielecki

Are you doing the right thing?  What matters at the end of the day?  What is success? We quite often ask ourselves: is what I am doing right? Am I successful? What do others think of me? Am I important enough? Should I be richer? Are my parents proud? Those questions relate to our vision of personal success. Success, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, has few meanings: 1) The accomplishment of an aim or purpose     1.1) The attainment of fame, wealth, or social status     1.2) A person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains fame, wealth, etc. 2) The good or bad outcome of an undertaking You may have noticed I highlighted one definition. This is something most people in a standard society seem to follow. We attribute success to thickness of the wallet, to the position in the society, and our looks- the clothes we wear, the whiteness and straightness of our teeth, how fashionable our hairstyle is, what logo appea...

How did I end up on the other side of the world? Whenever I am back in Poland, and meet someone new, who does not know me yet, and the conversation leads to me revealing in live and study in Taiwan, I usually get wide-opened eyes in response. "Where?"- people ask. "In Taiwan, you heard right" is the usual response. What comes after, can usually be grouped into three main types of a response. Type A: "Where the hell is that", type B: "Careful with the ladyboys, I heard Thailand is full of them", and type C: "Isn't facebook banned in China?/Do you eat dogs?". In the beginning, I was getting irritated with the responses, maybe slightly offended, but as time passed, I got used to it. There is not a huge awareness of the existence of Taiwan among Westerners. The ones who do have some idea, will consider it a part of China- from their perspective, a reasonable assumption. After all, the language spoken here is Chinese, the majority of ...