A Person Who Has Influenced Me Research Paper

My life has been shaped, I feel, by the amazing people and opportunities around me in my daily life. The first and foremost of these people are my parents. I am the child of two small business owners, named Jon and Misty. They run a store that sells sewing machines, located in the small town of Yankton, South Dakota. From an early age, my parents taught me the value of education. My family has never had a large amount of money, and it was my parents who urged me to do my best in school, take my academics seriously, and to make moral decisions in my personal life. Although there were times growing up that I resented my parents attentiveness, as I have matured and began preparing for my next stage in life, I have realized the true benefit of what I once perceived as strictness from my parents. While many of my peers have made destructive …show more content…
A big influence in my life is my grandfather, a man who I greatly admire. My grandfather has spent his whole life in South Dakota, and he was a teacher before his retirement. When he was teenager, he was set to play college football until he suffered a terrible leg injury. His dreams of playing football were gone, and he could have gone down a very destructive path. Instead, he went to college and earned his degree in biology and had a successful career as an educator and coach. My grandfather has told me this story many times, and it has taught me this lesson- You can’t decide what your lot in life is. You may be born into unlucky circumstances, or have something unfortunate happen to you. And while you can can’t control if these things happen or not, you can control your reaction to the situation. When tragedy occurs, one has three choices..to give up, to reminisce about how things could’ve gone differently, or to move forward. My grandfather’s story taught me that to be successful, one should always choose the third