Fed up with people’s negativity on everything, I set one of my goals in life to finding something positive in daily negatives. Of course, it doesn’t always work and most things can’t even be explained with karma. But the negative outlook of some people really bothers me – you can decide if you want to see your life positively or negatively. It’s just an attitude!

Another goal of mine is to have as few regrets as possible. I don’t want to spend every day thinking about ‘what ifs’ and go over and over every decision I make. Accept your decisions and make the most of them.

Something that has always motivated me a lot, but even more in recent years, is other people’s negative outlook and criticism: ‘You won’t be able to achieve this’. That always gives me a great push! That’s my biggest motivation. For example, when we knew about moving to China and I set up our blog, someone told me ‘Yeah, this is something everybody does when they move abroad, but it’s also something that you’ll stop doing after 3 months.’ And I was like: Challenge accepted! … Or when I decided to do my master’s, one of my previous classmates made a comment to my friend like ‘SHE is doing a masters?’ and somebody else doubted that I could get a better grade than a 2:1. Well, guess what, I did. And I’m so proud of proving people wrong! Another example would be when we planned our move to Japan and someone said to me ‘Sure, you’re young and you might feel enthusiastic now, but it’s impossible to keep learning Chinese and to start learning Japanese.’ Well, thank you for this motivation! We’re still having Chinese lessons, taking our HSK3 soon, reading Chinese news articles, while learning new kanji and Japanese vocabulary every day.

The most important lesson that I’ve learnt is that it’s so easy finding something negative in everything and always making negative comments. But what’s the point? Why not see the positive side of life?

– Her