People say: "What happens to you does not define you, but how you react to it does". She is a genuine office worker, once scolded by her boss like water, threatened with fire for writing incorrect data and ruining the structure of a large project, right in the middle of a meeting. She recounted that at that time there were two choices: One was to go home and cry, write the status "Life is a sea of suffering", two was to eat bun cha, and then do it again the next day. She chose... both, but in the opposite order, eating bun cha first, then going home and deciding not to cry anymore, rewriting the structure of the project. And surprisingly, after that time, she worked more tỉnh táo, not because the boss suddenly became gentle, but because she stopped considering scolding as a life sentence for self-respect.
Life, if you look closely, is like a game where you don't set a problem, but you have the right to choose the solution. You don't know it's raining on the right day to take photos, but you can choose to take photos in the rain, or sit and complain about the weather. Both are legal, just different results, when one side has a beautiful photo, the other side has a story to tell in a coffee shop.
Usually people tend to exaggerate everything. Failing an exam, we think we are inferior. Being rejected in a relationship, we conclude we are not good enough. Making a mistake, we consider ourselves to be always a failure. While in reality, those are just moments, even if very uncomfortable.
Our reaction is what silently writes a longer story. You react by shrinking back, blaming, or maybe asking yourself: "What did I learn from this?". It sounds a bit bookish, but if you don't ask that question, you will have to ask another question that is even more tiring: "Why does this thing keep happening to me?".
Returning to his coffee-stained white shirt. That day, instead of going home to change clothes and being late, he put on a windbreaker that he always carried away and came in to meet customers as if nothing had happened. When the conversation went smoothly, he even joked that if customers saw him smelling of coffee, it would be the perfume his girlfriend gave him. At that time, customers laughed heartily and the meeting went well.
It turns out, life doesn't need you to be perfect. It just needs you to react flexibly enough not to turn a coffee spot into a tragedy. And sometimes, what defines you is not how much trouble you avoid, but how charmingly you have "handled" them.
