As you might have guessed, this entry on the 'reflections' has no direct connection with the last (when theres a continuation, the title of the entry will be the same)
A long time ago I first heard the social psychology lecture about the power of the 'first impression', living through its consequences on the other hand is quite a different matter. Going through a period of your life filled with great upheaval -> you might be living away from home for the first time, you might be forced to pick a career for the first time, you might be fired for the first time, you might lose the love of your life for the first time, you might lose your friends for the first time etc. It is not unreasonable to expect that a person's character (and everything else) might change quite a bit during this period (undergrad). Yet what does this imply in a world where it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for people to shake lose their first impressions of others? Even if these first impressions are accurate, it would probably mean that quite a few people will eventually end up having delusional thoughts about someone they know.
especially, if a person's first impression of someone puts them into a position of power over that person in some way...
I recently read a book that spoke of this exact issue. Even if a person were to become extremely rich and powerful, his childhood friends will be unable to stop perceiving that person as 'just another Joe Blow'... in some ways rightfully so, but in some ways to their own detriment. It's not as if they can help it...
...and thus dictators (those who've risen up from obscurity) are sometimes forced to kill their own friends (sometimes, the closer they are, the faster they had to be gotten rid off). Since they are the ones who recognizes his mortality, they realize that he is just another human being, they realize that he also suffers from stomach aches, they realize that he also gets lonely or feel afraid. But more importantly (and more to the point of this blog entry), they will probably not pay him as much respect as he might deserve (as a success story prehaps, not as a dictator)...
How many dictators (metaphorical of course) are being forged by the ironworks of undergrad as we speak? and how many future victims are crafting their own doom as we speak? It would certainly be interesting to find out in about 20 years time...
Friday, June 11, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Reflections on Undergrad - Strategic Considerations I
I felt inclined to write a general reflection ever since the final term of my undergrad at Waterloo ended in late April. After much delaying, thinking, re-thinking, and over-thinking (-_-;), I've decided to publish this (what might be the first of a series of) entry on my thoughts of my undergrad experience. (I've written this damn thing a few times already)
Looking back, undergrad was the opposite of high school, it is less about learning technical content as it is about learning how to live as f--king human being. On a broad level, if I learned anything useful in undergrad, it is that life is like a war. No, this is NOT about to turn into a rant about how life "sucks" or life is a "struggle" or life takes "money" or life takes "the approval of the UN Security Council for moral superiority keke!". What I really mean to say here is that: most (if not all) processes in life is about having a simple strategy and optimitizing its execution. (now if you paused to think about this, you migh realize that it is possible to view a strategy as the optimizing component of a greater strategy, thus optimization and strategy becomes interchangable to some degree, but I dont think this poses a problem for what I'm gonna talk about for the rest of the blog entry)
It might seem counter-intuitive to some people, but strategy (for wars or most things in life) doesn't have to be extremely fancy or clever to produce good results. Of course it is possible to use something fancy, we've all heard about how General X used crazy strategy Y to win, or how Industrialist X invented genius produce Y to become rich, but I would argue that the reason we tend to hear about these sort of stories is exactly that: they make entertaining stories. Check out this strategy as a counter example: I want to have my retail store sell it's products just as I receive them from the suppliers. This way I can save money by having less storage space/operation and thus produce more competitive prices... (this is called Just-in-time inventory). 40 years ago a small store owner had this simple idea, this is the store today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart
So what the hell am I try to say with this blog post? Life is to a large degree merciful on the brain, your strategies don't have to be complicated to do be successful, it is the optimization that tends to be more difficult. Looking back on undergrad, I think almost all of my social experiences can be viewed through this lense. Instead of giving you a compilation of all the techniques of optimitizing the execution of strategies (I might do it in a later entry), I was gonna talk about the various types of failures that I've witnessed and how these can be visualized as failures to optimize good strategies... but it turned out I could not do this without sounding lame/insulting to a great host of people, thus I've decided against it (maybe I'll talk about some of these in a future post as well).
(I hoping to extend and then end this entry with some indepth examples/case studies of what I've just talked about, but as I've said, I think I'll leave those for another day)
Stay tuned for Part II...
Looking back, undergrad was the opposite of high school, it is less about learning technical content as it is about learning how to live as f--king human being. On a broad level, if I learned anything useful in undergrad, it is that life is like a war. No, this is NOT about to turn into a rant about how life "sucks" or life is a "struggle" or life takes "money" or life takes "the approval of the UN Security Council for moral superiority keke!". What I really mean to say here is that: most (if not all) processes in life is about having a simple strategy and optimitizing its execution. (now if you paused to think about this, you migh realize that it is possible to view a strategy as the optimizing component of a greater strategy, thus optimization and strategy becomes interchangable to some degree, but I dont think this poses a problem for what I'm gonna talk about for the rest of the blog entry)
It might seem counter-intuitive to some people, but strategy (for wars or most things in life) doesn't have to be extremely fancy or clever to produce good results. Of course it is possible to use something fancy, we've all heard about how General X used crazy strategy Y to win, or how Industrialist X invented genius produce Y to become rich, but I would argue that the reason we tend to hear about these sort of stories is exactly that: they make entertaining stories. Check out this strategy as a counter example: I want to have my retail store sell it's products just as I receive them from the suppliers. This way I can save money by having less storage space/operation and thus produce more competitive prices... (this is called Just-in-time inventory). 40 years ago a small store owner had this simple idea, this is the store today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart
So what the hell am I try to say with this blog post? Life is to a large degree merciful on the brain, your strategies don't have to be complicated to do be successful, it is the optimization that tends to be more difficult. Looking back on undergrad, I think almost all of my social experiences can be viewed through this lense. Instead of giving you a compilation of all the techniques of optimitizing the execution of strategies (I might do it in a later entry), I was gonna talk about the various types of failures that I've witnessed and how these can be visualized as failures to optimize good strategies... but it turned out I could not do this without sounding lame/insulting to a great host of people, thus I've decided against it (maybe I'll talk about some of these in a future post as well).
(I hoping to extend and then end this entry with some indepth examples/case studies of what I've just talked about, but as I've said, I think I'll leave those for another day)
Stay tuned for Part II...
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