Growth mindset: writing to inform; drafting 4

Jackie Chan

1. Jackie has starred in more than 110 films. Jackie’s success didn’t come easy. He faced many things. His childhood was rough. Many of his movies were total failures.

Early Life

2. Jackie Chan was born in Hong Kong on April 7, 1954 to a poor family. He had a lot of energy as a kid, his dad would wake him up early to do kung fu. Kung fu is a kind of Chinese martial art. Jackie loved it so much and was very good at it. Jackie didn’t do very well when he first started school. He had a hard time learning. Later in his life he was diagnosed with dyslexia, but at the time, he didn’t know it. Because Jackie didn’t do well in a normal school, his dad took him to the Chinese Opera Research Institute. Jackie was only seven years old. To pay for the school, his mom and dad left Hong Kong to take jobs in Australia and they left Jackie at the boarding school. The school taught Jackie drama, singing, martial arts, and acrobatics. But the school was very difficult and the teachers were mean. Jackie had to work at his studies 18–19 hours a day! If he did bad at something, he was punished. Through it all, Jackie worked hard and gave all of his time and energy himself to becoming an excellent kung fu fighter.

Achievements

3. Jackie was in his first movie when he was eight. He then did a bunch more. Many of them flopped. It made Jackie sad. He kept working at it, but he wasn’t getting the results he wanted and he spent many days being frustrated with his life. When he graduated from the Institute he got to be in some other movies where people liked his stunts. He did hard stunts—things other actors wouldn’t even think of. He still didn’t have the success he wanted. One director even called him “useless.” That is when he decided to try a different approach. The kung fu movies of the time were serious. Jackie had the idea to make them funny. He did silly tricks to make the audience laugh. People loved it. Jackie became a success because he had grit and didn’t give up. He tried things in new ways.