Skip to main content

Passion and Intellectualism

I recently read The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, by William Deresiewicz, and was struck by how perfectly he captures the thoughts that have grown louder and louder in my head over the past year or so. One of his main premises is that elite education is not designed to produce visionary, independent thinkers, but instead is a system designed to reward people who know how to play the system. It pulls people away from their passions and pushes them instead towards those fields and endeavors that society deems as "successful". It engineers apathetic mediocrity.

As a simple example, when I was in college, it was considered a fine and admirable result to end up with a job at Oracle. I look back on that now and shake my head in disbelief. No offense to Oracle, which has built a quite sizable business, but here I was at the institution that helped invent the friggin' internet, and they were encouraging computer science students to work on billing systems at Oracle. Seriously?

But of course this mode of thinking goes back way earlier than college. I remember when I was little, I loved to write. I thought I was going to be a novelist. I have a 30 page handwritten fantasy short story in a box at my parents' house that I once wrote for an assignment, I think in sixth grade. There was some arbitrary word limit on the assignment, but I just kept going until the story was done. I loved it.

I especially enjoyed writing poems. That same box probably has a few dozen poems that I wrote during elementary school. The wordplay fascinated me. The rhythm of the verses, the clever rhyming, the ability to put words together in a way that no one else had ever before put them together. At that age, no one told me it was a dumb idea to write poems because it had no future.

Then somewhere along the way, I stopped writing for fun. Between loads of AP classes, and my time-consuming extracurriculars, there just wasn't any time for it. But beyond that, there was an implicit and condescending supposition that writing was a waste of time. I wasn't considering majoring in English, but it was clear that exploring the field of writing would just be a distraction from more important things.

Why? What's so bad about writing? Based on the average GRE Verbal scores of Master's students at Stanford, half of our new generation of leaders are practically illiterate. Wouldn't it be good to develop such a unique skill?

I didn't give it up altogether. As an undergrad, I wrote a fictional short story as a final project for one of my General Education Requirements (the professor read the first paragraph and gave me a B). Then later at Google, I rather enjoyed writing blog posts for new features - it was an outlet for sorely needed creativity that never failed to bring a smile to my face.

A similar thing happened with drawing. I used to love art. My middle school was fortunate enough to have an art department, and I absolutely reveled in the different assignments we had. I sketched for fun. I watched Bob Ross painting happy little trees, and locked myself away in the basement for a couple hours to paint my own landscapes. And then I stopped.

Why? Because art was another thing that would "lead nowhere". Because the farther along you advance in our higher education system, the stronger and more adamantly the fear of failure is inculcated into your mind.

I'm happy that the spirit of independent creativity inside of me never died. Whether it be a blessing or a curse, if there's something that my mind wants to do, it runs it as a background process repeatedly. Not for days or weeks, but for years and years. When I finally started listening to what my mind was telling me all along, I started to feel like a kid again. I read purely for the sake of reading. I started exploring a hundred different ideas which were lying dormant in my thoughts for years. I began to teach myself piano, because at one time I loved music, and the world of music exercises a completely different part of the brain than that of engineering.

The more I listened to myself, the freer I felt. Then one day, I swallowed the red pill and took a leap of faith.

You owe it to yourself to remember what it was like to be a wide-eyed child. You owe it to yourself to find what you're passionate about. You owe it to yourself to do what makes you happy. It's your life. Never too late to start making the most of it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

영어가 모국어인 사람들은 왜 한국어를 배우기가 어려운 이유

이 포스트는 내 처음 한국어로 블로그 포스트인데, 한국어에 대하니까 잘 어울린다. =) 자, 시작합시다! 왜 외국사람에게 한국어를 배우기가 어렵다? 난 한국어를 배우고 있는 사람이라서 이 문제에 대해 많이 생각하고 있었다. 여러가지 이유가 있는데 오늘 몇 이유만 논할 것이다. 1. 분명히 한국어 문법은 영어에 비해 너무 많이 다른다. 영어는 “오른쪽으로 분지(分枝)의 언어"라고 하는데 한국어는 “왼쪽으로 분지의 언어"이다. 뜻이 무엇이나요? 예를 보면 이해할 수 있을 것이다. 간단한 문장만 말하면 (외국어를 말하는 남들은 간단한 문장의 수준을 지낼 수가 약간 드물다), 간단한 걸 기억해야 돼: 영어는 “SVO”인데 한국어는 “SOV”이다. “I’m going to school”라고 한국어로는 “저는 학교에 가요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I’m school to go”이다. 두 언어 다르는 게 목적어와 동사의 곳을 교환해야 한다. 별로 어렵지 않다. 하지만, 조금 더 어렵게 만들자. “I went to the restaurant that we ate at last week.” 한국어로는 “전 우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당에 또 갔어요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I we last week went to restaurant to again went”말이다. 한국어가 왼쪽으로 분지 언어라서 문장 중에 왼쪽으로 확대한다! 이렇게 좀 더 쉽게 볼 수 있다: “전 (우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당)에 또 갔어요”. 주제가 “전"이고 동사가 “갔다"이고 목적어가 “우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당"이다. 영어 문장은 오른쪽으로 확대한다: I (S) went (V) to (the restaurant (that we went to (last week))) (O). 그래서 두 숙어 문장 만들고 싶으면 생각속에서도 순서를 변해야 된다. 2. 첫 째 점이니까 다른 사람을 자기 말을 아라들게 하고 싶으면, 충분히

10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else  has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else: 1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. " banchan " (반찬) Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based  on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang , or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). Ther

The King's Speech (and me)

Tonight, I finally gathered the courage to watch The King's Speech . Why did I need courage to watch a movie, you might ask? The reason is both simple and intricately complex: I'm a stutterer (Edit: person who stutters; "stutterer" is not who I am, but something that I do from time to time), and I have been for as long as I remember. Well, there it is - I've said it. To be fair, I actually don't remember stuttering when I was little. My first very distinct memory of stuttering was sometime in seventh grade, when I had trouble saying "nosotros" (we/us) in Spanish class. But I also remember knowing I was going to have trouble saying it, because we were going around the room, and I counted ahead to see what I was going to have to say. Which means by that point I was already stuttering. When did it start? That's a question for another day. So why am I publicizing this fact now? First, I'm in the midst of a lifelong attempt to "cure&quo