In this short blog, I would like to share with you a million dollar life wisdom of mine. You can thank me for my generosity later.
Before I tell you the wisdom, you have to know a little bit of my story before this wisdom was discovered, which helps you understand where it's coming from and why it is valuable.
Back a few years, leaving academia I set out on my journey for my first job as a data scientist. I was like a human sponge thirsty for new knowledge. My eagerness, however, was largely driven by my desire to get things done as quickly as possible with my newly acquired knowledge. Little did I know or little was I willing to admit that I was expecting a pie in the sky. What’s in the way is my lack of experience from practice. I often got frustrated by the errors when running programming scripts, which almost unmercifully destroyed my confidence in myself.
Until one day.
On that day, I solved a problem that had been blocking me from my study in deep learning for months. I won’t go into the details of the problem and the solution here. The moment I saw myself smashed it first of course the joy ran through the body and relaxed all the muscles. Then the priceless wisdom was born out of a thirty-second reflection.
Although in the past few months I couldn’t do what I had planned to do, to solve the problem I had tried to view the problem from various angles seeking a weak link to break through. For each of the views or new ideas massive Google searches were involved for verification or exploration, which turns out to be the best way of learning: trial and error. Looking back I didn’t just solve the problem. I had also obtained a load of knowledge in the same or related fields without even realising it, which is indeed a blessing in disguise.
So here is the wisdom I have promised from the beginning: Learning from problems makes truly perfect.
Embrace the problem you will encounter and learn from them. With this in your mind, you will observe how much more knowledge will be as a fact obtained in the process of making sense of the problem and finding solution to it. An easy run without any hiccups is, counterintuitive to most people, a big loss of opportunity to becoming perfect.
Since that unforgettable day, though I cannot say I never get frustrated once again on agonising problems, most of the time I have a genuine relaxed smile on my face and excitement inside, because I know I have been given another opportunity to become better.
So my dear friends. Criticise me. That's a big help for me. I thank you for that!
