Confessions of a researchaholic

When I was younger I always thought if I am smart enough I ought to be able to learn everything faster than normal (e.g. trying to pick up calculus at fifth grade but did not succeed until ninth). But as I grew older I gradually discovered that there are things that simply cannot and should not be accelerated. The universe moves at its own grace, and sometimes it is best to decipher its mystery simply by playing along.

Smart people can go faster, but intelligent people know when to take their time.

If you were an unusual and eccentric kid growing up in a culture that encourages harmony and conformity, you might have been taught, either implicitly or explicitly through the family and school education, that you should hide your peculiarities and try to appear as a normal person.

Please do not heed such advices. Always try to be yourself as much as possible, up to your personal threshold of withstanding societal pressures that try to “hammer down every nail that sticks up” (a Japanese proverb).

In retrospect, this is a major source of unhappiness in my early life. And I did not fully realize it until very recently. I guess one has to grow to be extremely confident to be able to identify this issue and choose to disobey such social norms. (It also helps that I have been living under a more individualist culture later on.) Without being fully myself, I simply cannot wield my full power. I remember I did not get the job for one of the first interviews upon graduation. I was trying very hard to behave like a normal job candidate. Later on, that very same hiring manager saw a more true-to-myself performance in a conference, and told me that he would have hired me if I had performed that way.

So from now on I will be true to myself and do what I am destined to do. Get in my way at your own peril. Life is too short otherwise.