When reflecting on personal influences in my life, no one has had a greater influence in my life than my current girlfriend. She may not have been there all my life and she may not have seen me through all my failures as I grew up, but she became my motivation. She taught me how to be independent, to be more determined, and to be stronger. Instead of being a distraction, she became an inspiration. First of all, she was one of the people that taught me how to be on my own and less dependent on other people. I grew more as a person. I stopped depending on everyone else around me and became individualistic. It was hard at first, because I got use to relying on my parents all the time, but everything changed. She had the personality of wanting and doing her own thing, and as our relationship got longer, I eventually wanted to be like her, in which I would be less immature and be more of an adult. I learned how to provide for myself to avoid asking my family for too much. I got a job for myself so I would not have to ask anyone for money just to get the things I need or want. I realized that it was not easy to work, but my girlfriend taught me how to grow up and face the real world as a grown adult. She never failed to tell me to grow up when I needed those words. The fact that I knew she would be disappointed if she seen me act like a teenager or even a child, pushed me in accepting the fact that I am in the age of learning how to live on my own, as if there was no body else who could help me. Secondly, she turned me into a person who wants to achieve the things I thought I could not achieve before. Before I met her, I did not focus in school at all and I would always choose to play around more than being serious with education. But when she entered my school in high school and became my girlfriend, I wanted to work harder as a student because she was the type of person who cared a lot about her grades and maintained a 4.0 GPA. Her personality of an achiever became the reason why I started to do my work and listen during lectures in high school. I could not imagine the person I have become. I thought that I would always be that type of student who will never have honor rolls but she changed that point of view. I got my first honor roll certificate when she was there to help me. It was the first time I made my family so proud that they would even post my honor roll certificate on our refrigerator. Once they seen that I got my first honor roll, they started to believe in me more that my name would be on the newspaper more often for having honor rolls. In addition to that, having good grades gave me the chance to be part of the Maui High School basketball team. I always wanted to play for the basketball team but I could not because of bad grades, until my junior year. In my senior year, I would go to the basketball tryouts, although even though I did not make the