So what if I'm a cleaner?

Marie Kondo is a Japanese woman born in 1985. Since she was a child, she loved to organize things. When she was in elementary school, every time she went to class, she would run to the bookshelf and enthusiastically rearrange everything to make it neat and beautiful. While her friends were running for "big positions" in the class, she only hoped to "win" the position of bookshelf manager so that she could arrange the bookshelves every day. What she loved to do most was cleaning and arranging things! She did it with all her passion and creativity.

At the age of 19, while studying sociology at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, she opened a cleaning and organizing consulting company. She came up with a method of organizing things called the KonMari method. In 2011, she published the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (or The Japanese Art of Tidying Up). The book shares creative and interesting ways to clean and organize things, from identifying why our living spaces are messy, considering what should be thrown away, to keeping things to make our lives brighter, to arranging things around us to change our lives in a pleasant direction. Marie Kondo believes that the goal of cleaning is not just to clean, but to feel the happiness that exists in the living environment.

After being published, her book immediately attracted the attention of readers around the world and became the number 1 bestseller of the New York Times. To date, this book has sold more than 2 million copies, translated into 39 languages. Her simple yet effective cleaning and organizing method has helped many people around the world turn their homes into a comfortable and inspiring living space. With her unique way of living and working and her unique creativity that has a positive influence on the majority, Marie Kondo was voted by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2015.

Referring to Kondo's case, university lecturer Nguyen Quoc Vuong, who studied abroad in Japan and is the translator of several books on Japanese educational methods that are widely read, wrote: "Many parents want their children to be good at math, physics, and chemistry. Some parents worry that their children are too fond of reading books, too playful... Others are afraid that their children only like to disassemble and draw and are not really good at math. But in fact, they are only afraid of not being passionate enough, because anything good at it can now become a profession and earn money. Don't be afraid that your child won't get the highest score, be afraid that your child won't do something with the highest passion and concentration."

Yes, one of the greatest happiness of a person is to live with passion, to do the work that one truly wants to devote all one's heart to. Only when one is truly passionate about doing work can one develop one's full potential, and thus, can one devote oneself to the development of oneself and society. Marie Kondo's story of starting a business and living with passion certainly evokes much thought for parents as well as educators. While many Vietnamese parents deeply intervene and somewhat impose in career orientation for their children, causing the passion in children not only not to be awakened and discovered but also less encouraged, even extinguished, education in our schools still focuses on cramming knowledge, tends to pursue uniformity and uniformity in results rather than teaching children to appreciate uniqueness and respect differences in themselves and those around them.