That, sometimes you end up sinking back into your chair, spewing a toxic air of frustration into the atmosphere?
I know I am.
Hence, I've always admired people like engineers, physicists and scientists for their ability to build solutions quickly discard flawed ones, and work on new ones- impartial towards the amount of time and effort they spent on their preceding work.
How does one withhold so much patience
when you lose something that gives you
so much promise, so much hope
- time after time after time?
How can one continue hoping and believing
that things will turn out alright, or even better?
Like that, Failure can be deceiving.
He'll take jabs at you,
hit you at your weakest spot,
attempt to break your spirit
and he's gonna do it
-again and again and again.
But what you don't know
is that
in you building Him
He is building you.
I'd like to call this skill 'prototyping'.
And I choose it because of the values embedded within this verb; patience, persistence, determination, discipline and most importantly, objectivity. How fascinating that the act of building something, solving a math equation, or even solving life issues, are all subsets of the Venn diagram that is Prototyping, some even sharing intersections.
So let's get to the point- I'm a pretty big fail at the art of Prototyping. I'm impatient, selectively persistent, selectively determined, absolutely undisciplined (should totally be doing my Shakespeare analysis but nooooo, I'm convincing myself this blogpost will improve my writing ability hahaha) and I'm abso-freakingly subjective in thought. Somo work so hard on some projects how la to be impartial towards my babies?!
But recently, a distant memory when I was 13 at some Asiaworks camp came back to life.
"We were broken into teams and told to build card towers out of stock cards. Without being told, we instinctively assumed we were against each other and started seeing who could build the tallest tower. My team built it pretty high and soon left to scout other teams' progress. After 10 minutes, they were convinced ours was the tallest. But with 5 minutes, I kicked it down to try to build it taller because I was dissatisfied with what was and was optimistic about what could be. Kidding, maybe my legs were just itchy."
I guess I was naive to think I could build a taller one with 5 minutes to go. But hey, remember we assumed we were competing? The facilitator didn't even take note of the tallest one. He just recognized my crazy spirit & completely counter-intuitive action.
Without realizing, this experienced has actually shaped my character. I just don't believe in what is. I believe in what can be.
Below is the Selangor MUN logo which was intended to be a dove. See, I'm not a designer. (Heck, I don't even use Photoshop but I'm a practitioner of Paint if that counts )
But despite not being one, after like THIRTYYY prototypes bouncing back and fourth with my most patient and critically awesome Yau Hui (other Yau)
....we arrived at this.
Y'know, it really hurts when something you spent so much time on(I don't regard myself as a designer k so it was an accomplishment) gets torn down apart by being described as 'a pregnant sitting duck trying to fly'.
So when you build a really tall tower and someone says "You can go higher", without hesitation, would you kick it down yourself as a symbol of dissatisfaction with normal, reuse some cards and attempt to build it higher?
I know I would. Skills don't matter, character does.
Happy Days Ahead,
Hui Min
