My Biggest Personal Struggles
Hi,
In this post I want to share some things that makes me uneasy most of the time. I have considered these points as my weaknesses since my active study year and I haven’t found any way to combat this effectively except by changing my way of life completely or self motivating myself in an extreme way. It’s not that severe, but sometimes it do affect my learning pace and performances.
Okay, the ranting start after this line,
1. Easily reach self-satisfaction
Maybe many of you heard of The Dunning-Kruger effect, if you google it out, probably that is what describe this point the most. However, it’s not about I’m feeling superior than what I believe, but It’s about how I find it satisfying after spending definitive amount of time learning.
For example, I felt that after reading a book for about 2 hour, I feel that I have just enough knowledge to not continuing it any further. I read some parts intensively, while put some parts with much less attention. This cause me problems some times, I often need to revise my statements I gave to people because of this. Well it’s not wrong to admit your mistakes, but you need to be careful because people may judge you hasty with you work or reckless. Currently, I don’t have any silver bullet for this problem of mine, as many times I revise my actions I always take notes to avoid doing the same mistake again, that’s all I do.
2. Inferiority complex
I often compare things, even for things that I don’t have that much interest to: salary, status, education, privilege, family, skills, etc. I suppose one of the root cause is overthinking.
This problem has been around since I was in college and contributed to my blues back then.
But now I managed to take it easy a little bit, perhaps it’s because I’ve been released from such responsibilities like GPA or getting good result on exams. Also it’s thanks to self help book that told me to not think too much about something that wouldn’t matter for 5 years in the future and instead start to polish yourself in a way that only you can do. That helps, I should say.
Although, I still fears that one day if that sense of responsibility will come back, this problem will come back too. Well, let’s just wait and see.
3. Expecting too much
One thing that we always meet on our journey, it is none other than expectations. It’s normal to have expectation whether low or high, but not on all times.
I’ve making plans and thinking that the output will always be the best output and then making plans based on that. What do you know, I’m an optimist after all. After all things that I’ve experienced, my guts tells me, not to learn to manage my expectation but to learn how to not have any expectation at all when planning anything. But, that would be impossible to plan something out without any hypothesis, even food sellers has their 10% cut from their fund as “unexpected” budget.
It’s hard for me to start with zero to low expectation, so instead of learning unimaginable way to manage expectations, I try to come up with many alternatives, as many safety nets, as many escape routes I could think of. In the end of the day, I still think that someone who can manage their expection is an ideal person. Expect too high and I will end up disappointed, too low and It will me feel unlucky and contemplates unproductively, guess I still got a long way to find the sweet balance between both.
4. Difficulty understanding questions
This is a more technical problem which I found most of people, at least Indonesian people face. Well, English was never my mother language and I often need more time to think about arranging proper sentence if someone ask me using any other than the Bahasa. Sometimes I misunderstood because I’m reading too fast, you can’t take that much time on exam, so it would be troublesome if I still possess this issue.
This issue is the one I’m working on right now. I’m training myself to solve mathematical problems from a math competition of noobs. The questions are necessarily complex, yet still understandable, even If I need to read it more than 2 times. Wish me luck on this.
Epilogue
This is the end of the post, please bear with my rant for now. You know, I think you should converse with yourself like this. Like, knowing your weakness is one of must haves, right? Isn’t that the reason why some of interviews asking for your SWOT. Think about it.
See you again, readers.
03 June 2020