Accountability

I know I missed posting yesterday, but that wasn’t entirely my fault. I did have to pack, and I also got home at 11 PM.

Today was my final day at Feature Labs, and therefore I realistically didn’t do much genuine work. However, I think that’s fine, and today was a fitting end to a great summer. I genuinely had a lot of fun this summer in Boston–it was an awesome experience being somewhere besides NY or the Bay Area. And it’s not exactly like Boston isn’t in the middle of nowhere–I found plenty to do over the summer. I’m realizing that I really enjoy diversity of experience (as long as each I find each individual experience enjoyable).

Productive Thinking

My friend Tae recommended to me a very short book, “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” by Carlo Rovelli. I just finished reading it several minutes ago.

I have to admit, at first, even though I didn’t mean to, I approached the book skeptical of what it could offer me. This isn’t entirely due to my ego–I’ve studied physics on a daily basis since the 6th grade, and I’ve enjoyed the success and status of consistently being the best at physics among my peers ever since. So when presented with this short book, I didn’t expect much.

The skepticism did continue through my initial impressions–the book starts out by claiming that no prior knowledge is required to understand the discussed concepts. The descriptive language and overhyped connotation gave me more of an impression of a epic fantasy novella than an informative physics textbook. Yet, somehow, the more I read, the more engrossed I got. I realized in half an hour something that I’d turned a blind eye to in all my years of physics.

In high school, I didn’t respect people who collected knowledge like this as much as I should’ve–it seemed bizarre to me that one could claim to understand all these big picture, complex ideas about physics without being able to solve a relatively simple mechanics problem. And, to claim that these individuals, who could just pick up any book like I did and read for 45 minutes, could be considered as smart or even smarter than people like me was a major threat to my pride.

Reading this “beginner” book made me realize how much I’d been missing out due to my ego. Despite my mastery of being able to solve nearly any physics problem you throw at me, I didn’t really know the layman concepts of the most modern physics theories. It was a humbling moment, one that exposed how arrogance, no matter how well justified, is going to blind you to at least one other aspect that you ignore out of contempt.

Even though this aspect was something that only took 45 minutes to correct, I learned how much I’d been limiting myself to new experiences because of my perceived opinions on what was more important to do with my time. Especially now that I’m being more cognizant of my time, I will have to start making more and more decisions on what to focus on. As an engineer/STEM student, I will need to be extremely specialized in my chosen profession. This fact does not mean that I cannot continue exploring a wide variety of things to continue growing as a person–I used to believe that I had to pick between the two since the engineer stereotype of being one-dimensional has to come from somewhere, right?

I didn’t get to talk at all about the things I wanted to touch upon in this blog post, but for the future, I’m planning to talk more about the ideas I gleaned from the book as well as engineer/Asian male stereotypes. Funny how much I learned from 45 minutes of a non-technical book after already spending thousands of hours on the subject–I’m excited to see where this new perspective takes me!