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Tag: opinion

  • Why we should learn to embrace the imperfections to get ahead in life

    Why we should learn to embrace the imperfections to get ahead in life

    Most of us have responsibilities in life where we need to get numerous things done. No matter who we are or what we do for a living, we have those obligations in one form or another. Many of us are working 9-5 in our office jobs while some of us are students studying for exams. Whatever it is that we do, we need to tackle different kinds of problems pretty much all the time to get ahead in life. It can be said that our responsibilities are mainly about designing solutions to tackle problems to progress ourselves forward. However, our tendency to perfect our work could really be time-consuming and prevent us from getting where we want to be.

    In the age of social media, the obsession with being perfect is unsurprisingly common. We have a tendency to hide our flaws in order to appear perfect to gain validations from others. This exact mindset can get into other parts of life and interfere with our decision-making. We may have had experiences such as hiding our mediocre exam scores from our peers, refuse to talk about our failures or other similar experiences at some points in our life. Still, what we have to remind ourselves is that it is completely okay to not be perfect. In fact, being imperfect is part of the progress that helps you grow up and advance forward. Once you accept this reality it is very life-transforming as it makes you less afraid to try out new things that could bring fulfillment to your life.

    An obsession with perfection is very common in every profession. I can say from my own personal experience as a software developer that we deal with problems all the time and we have a tendency to over-engineer our solution that only meant to solve a simple issue. Occasionally, we want to write code that is generalized and works with all scenarios but that “one-size-fits-all” concept could be overkill and unrealistic. The nature of programming itself is about making trade-offs. We sacrifice something in order to get something. Sometimes, we sacrifice performance for reliability. Sometimes, we write less code for conciseness. It is okay for your code to not do everything as long as it does what it supposed to do. You can’t have everything, and everything means nothing.

    A Lockheed U-2 in flight – Source: Wikimedia

    As a lover of aviation, I recently have found a good example of why a great thing doesn’t need to be perfect. It is about one of my favorite aircraft, The U-2 spy plane. It is one of the most widely-known reconnaissance aircraft during the cold war and has a very interesting history. What’s unique about this aircraft is that it doesn’t have enough landing gears to balance itself. It lacks landing-gears mounted on the wings like normal airplanes out there leaving with only one wheel on its belly. Instead, it has something called “Pogos” which is a set of wheels mounted on both sides of the wings but will be fallen after take-off and will be reattached again by ground crews after landing for the aircraft to taxi itself back to the parking. The reason that this plane was designed this way is to save weight for the long-endurance mission. Having a full set of landing gears is definitely not a priority.

    A pogo wheel being installed onto the wing of a U-2 – Source: af.mil

    U-2 is a well-designed airplane. Its engineering is superb. Its reputation during the cold-war is well renowned. Yet, it doesn’t even have a complete set of landing gears. It is evident that in order to achieve greatness, making trade-offs is inevitable. U-2 happens to be a good example of that. If the designer is still worrying about making perfect aircraft with landing gears like normal aircraft, there would not be a U-2 exist in this world.

    Whatever it is that we do, it’s better to aim for achieving a goal instead of perfection. That also means the goal itself shouldn’t be about being perfect. As long as you are persistent enough in working your way toward your objective, that is already a success by itself. The most important parts would be about getting started, your perseverance, and your commitment to achieving your objective. Perfection is not a requirement and is way overrated.

  • How I Learned to Love and Started to Appreciate Old Music

    How I Learned to Love and Started to Appreciate Old Music

    I’m not that old, well, I’m not young, but not as old as someone who would tune the radio to some random oldies. Even with that, I can’t say that I know that much about music myself. It was until recently that I suddenly felt overwhelmed with joy by pieces of music produced decades ago, some as far as those from our grandparents’ younger years.

    I have always been interested in how the world has changed. I often found myself wondering what it feels like to be in the ’60s during the hippie movement. “Were people generally more patient than today?” “What kind of dream and fantasy young people had?” “What an average day of a teenage boy was like” It’s difficult to exactly know the society’s context at that given time from the perspective of today, and one good way to get closer to that is by listening to music that people had been listening to from that era.

    I have been listening to older music quite intensively recently, from artists like Carpenter, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Bee Gees. they all really gave me chilling goosebumps. Those songs, with elegant choices of words and the way they strung together to form lyrics, I can’t help but admire the authors who put an effort to convey such a sophisticated meaning and emotion into music. What amazed me, even more, is that even if I have already heard these songs several times when I was a kid, I have never been feeling so moved by them until now. Perhaps it’s because of my habit which tends to overlook the words and just enjoy the flow of rhythms. It’s common knowledge that even the same book can be different when reading for a second time. To me, music is no different.

    I always feel that older music is more sophisticated, and tends to convey a story more completely and elegantly. The most recent experience that I had is when I listened to “Yesterday’s Once More” by Carpenter. I have been hearing it a lot in my childhood as it was quite a household song in Thailand, but I had never followed and consciously interpreted the lyrics since I didn’t understand English well enough. What I just realized is that it is a whole narration of a story about a woman listening to her favorite song, something I can really relate and feel along to. Other popular songs like “My Way” and “Killing Me Softly” also exhibits similar form narrations that are as well magnificent to listeners.

    Apart from that, I have also discovered tons of music that were unknown to me, as well as rediscovering music that had long been forgotten from my own memories. I even became more interested in a unique genre like ’80 Japanese city pop. One of My favorites is Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love, that went viral several years back. Music didn’t only just get me to travel back to the past, but to the past of a certain culture as well.

    It is true that at some point, we all want to escape our reality. Taking a break from daily routines, sometimes from stresses and worries. Some of us may choose to read and drown into fantasy, some of us may choose to listen and travel back in time. Listening to music is, perhaps, one easy way to change the atmosphere and switch your mood to restore your energy for a brief moment before getting back and continue with your life’s responsibilities.