Skip to main content

Be an Eagle, Not a Chicken!--What I hope to learn in CS3216

When I was little, I saw a father in a river town teach his kid how to swim. The father dragged his kid to the middle of the river, and then swam away. Helplessly, the kid cried out. Not until the kid could make another sound, his whole body had already sunk underwater. The father did nothing but watch his kid struggling. The kid desperately flapped his hands and legs for survivor. Gradually, the kid was able to take a short breath. It was not long before his body sunk underwater again. Once his month gets out of the river, he kept on yelling for help or scoring his father. However, the father did not swim close, nor did he allow anyone to help. Before long, the kid struggled to the bank, keeping on crying and scoring on the father. Something magic happened the next time we met the boy. He can swim really fast, even faster than guys with life buoys. The boy swam among the fastest ever since and he was the youngest among those swimming peers. CS3216 is like a special swimming lesson that we are all dragged to the middle of the river by Prof. Leong and then pick up the surviving skills by ourselves along the way. It was the native way for teaching swimming in a river town which proved to one of the most efficient and effective. It's not about how beautiful your swimming pattern looks, but more about how proficient one can master the skills and whether one can save himself or other people's lives.
There was a saying that"you've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down".There is no other way to master a technique but to try it out by ourselves. There is no better way to train a great leader than pushing him under a very tough circumstance.

  • It's not really about intelligence, but about mindset.
  • It's not really about playing it safe, but about taking the challenge. 
  • It's not really about learning something, but about making decisions.
I'm sure I can learn a lot along the way, teamwork, time management, stress control,etc. But compared with the initiative I take and the courage I make to take the challenge, I think everything else is secondary. 
 

 I don't want to be a chicken. I'd rather jump off the cliff and FLY before I die.

Comments

  1. Very good, glad you figured out that it's about mindset even before you attended the first lecture.

    You have won half the battle already. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you, I'll try my best!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

InnovFest 2015

I attended the innovFest 2015 event. It was quite eye opening. Besides the booth, some topics in the forums also interested me. The first topic I joined was the Kopi Chat with Yossi Vardi, a famous Israeli entrepreneur and investor. He is straightforward and humorous. When talking about the most important reason why people wake up with a great idea but ended up sleeping without executing anything, he collected answers from the audiences. One answer pretty much fitted his appetite-- "People fear about losing faces". He shared his opinion with the quotes from Theodore Roosevelt, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually st

Consistency Matters

I didn't post anything last week, which means consistency has been broken. There's a need to reflect the task management skills, otherwise I'm very likely to driving the wrong road Priority changes. A good exercise would be to list the priorities down everyday and assign reasonable time to the tasks. Then never second-doubt. 100% focusing on the task when doing it. Priority changes from time to time.  Human minds are single-threaded, thus, we'll need to keep focused when doing one particular task. Be Grateful. I received the confirmation from NOC Israel that I got admitted by the programme and I'm heading to Israel next Jan:-) Thanks a lot for Prof.Ben and Karl's help. Ultimately, it might be a plan from God. Thanks every one. The additional interview from Google went well, however, I didn't get the winter intern opportunity this time. Though it's a bit too greedy to ask for too much, I still feel a bit sad after informed that I didn't get th

Super Fruitful Weeks

These two weeks are extremely fruitful. Almost all my expectations for coming to Beijing have been met in such a short time-- to form long term relationship with entrepreneurs here, to work with talented designers, to improve my coding skills, to experience the tech entrepreneur life, etc. I'm loving the city. Though not as clean and nice as Singapore, this is a place for young dreamers to pursue their careers. As a famous song writer wrote about Beijing, " 我在这里欢笑(I'm laughing here) 我在这里哭泣(crying here) 我在这里活着(living here) 也在这里死去(dying here) 我在这里祈祷 (praying here) 我在这里迷惘(confusing here) 我在这里寻找(seeking here)  在这里失去(losing here) ". The extreme inequality creates a lot of diversities and opportunities here in Beijing. The youth have a strong desire to be successful and they form active entrepreneurial communities in cafes, meetup groups, incubators,etc(mostly in and around Zhong Guan Cun). Here is a photo taken in Cheku Cafe which is a tech hub for young entrepreneurs