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...