Challenge and Surpass Yourself
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
I’m not gonna tell long-winded stories here, so here’s the deal: how do you differentiate between learning and experiencing? The amount of time I spend on my assignments really got me thinking: what have I learned from them? Do I benefit from them? Well of course there are benefits: I don’t fail my coursework. Haha.. but that aside, I really can’t tell you ’bout anything great I’ve picked up this semester, especially through the previous two assignments: Flash and ASP.Net.
Dictionary.com defines experience as:
The observing, encountering, or undergoing of things generally as they occur in the course of time: to learn from experience; the range of human experience.
Knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone: a man of experience.
Working on my ASP.Net assignment is arguably and experience. But then again, I didn’t learn anything significant from it. Does that really count as an experience? Probably.. but the key here is that nothing much was gained from it. Thanks to my previous PHP adventures, completing the assignment is practically a process of coding out logics that comes to mind in seconds.
What I’m thinking about now, is if something similar comes my way in the future, should I spend as much effort on it? I gave my best for ASP.Net (given the time constraints). I would feel bad if I didn’t. But was it worthwhile? Should I have spent more time studying networking and object-oriented?? I sorta think so.. especially so as my team members didn’t contribute much to the project..
Throughout this semester, I think I’ve learned an important lesson: always give yourself challenges. If you don’t, you’ll never get better. If you keep sticking to familiar things when doing assignments, you’ll be stuck at that level forever. I’ll try my best to remember this, especially in future assignments. Why bother doing things for the sake of some “experience” when we can try push our limits and learn new things? If the assignment was a flop, hey, at least you learned from your mistakes (hopefully). I’m sure the lecture won’t fail you if you made a valiant effort in your assignment.
Note: “Challenge and Surpass Yourself” was the “theme” for Leadership Training Camp organized by First Aid Unit in year 2004. One of the nicest themes FAU have ever came up with..
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m gonna try some really coll stuff with my assignment: a timetable arranger. It’s like, your “staff” submit times when they’re free/available for “duty”, and then the system arranges a suitable “duty roster” automatically, taking into account a wide range of priorities. ;)
So remember folks: Challenge and Surpass Yourself!
Tags: life
One Response to “Challenge and Surpass Yourself”
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Ben Says:
August 26th, 2006 at 3:50 pmThat duty roster thing can become very complicated, especially when you say you want to take into account a wide range of priorities. Not only you need a duty roster, but you’ll want an ‘optimal’ duty roster. You’re dealing with an optimization problem. Perhaps you should do some reading on optimization, which may come under the area of Operations Research. Good luck!
