Confessions of a researchaholic

During a physical training exercise today my sifu pointed out that I haven’t been making as much progress as I should have in all these years, because I haven’t been putting in enough focus and effort.

This triggered me to realize that this generalizes to other areas of my life as well.
I was very motivated and hard-pushing earlier when there were specific goals and expectations, such as getting good grades, attending prestigious schools, getting posh jobs, publishing top papers, and such.
However, as time went by, the goals and expectations became less well-defined and the pushing became less intense.
Eventually I just took it easy and settled into a cruising mode without realizing it.

Thanks to this wake-up call, I am getting back to my previous self, starting from this physical training class, and other areas of my life as well.

During my morning Caltrain rides I often see a guy waltzing across the train fist-bumping and chatting with passengers. Today I came to meet him again, and I took the chance asking him why he is so cheerful.

“I am suicidal” was his reply.

The conversation was overheard by a nearby train conductor who later brought another conductor towards me and asked me to repeat what I heard. Turned out that they need to report such cases to the police to prevent suicide attempts.

Professor Yen was one of my favorite teachers in NTU EE. I really enjoyed his discrete mathematics class and a special project on reading computational theory papers. In my eyes he was a very smart and caring professor. He even went to the same junior high school as I did.

I learned that he has passed away from a recent department newsletter. I couldn’t get a chance to say goodbye to him but I will always remember his kindness and appreciate his teaching and guidance.

Visiting the Picasso museum near the end of the day in Barcelona I was struck by the sheer number of drawings and paintings that he has created. This is probably another evidence that excellence is not just about talent but also a lot of practice.

The swimming pool was cold, no longer heated after the winter heating was turned off due to budget cuts. So he did some high-intensity exercises for about an hour to warm up before spending fifteen minutes (about a quarter of his usual swimming time) in the cold water.

The initial shock felt more like pain than cold, but it subsided after a few laps. It felt rewarding afterwards, especially with the hot spring soaking.

He then took a cold-water shower while waiting for the hot water to gradually arrive, experiencing similar cycles of sensations.

After a holiday, he returned to work and started with implementing a new feature as a warm-up.
After merging the first pull request, he realized it was buggy — he had forgotten to test another major aspect of the prototype — and ended up needing three more pull requests to complete the job.