Tag: self

To law or not to law: End Note

When I started this series, Dean told to me right away that I am not the lawyer type. He is right. But at that time, I said, even eventually I decided not to do law, at least I want to know why I am not going to do it. This is a big decision, and I don’t want to rush it through without knowing exactly why. Looking back, I think figuring out why is a pretty good experience. I went through the analysis of myself by doing personality tests and examining personal values. Also I analyzed the job market by looking at prospective career paths, comparing incomes and work environments.

I have to say that my biggest motivation for considering doing law was the high income and the social prestige associated with lawyers. I realize that those things are from outside of myself. On the other hand, the biggest motivation for pursuing a scientific career path is simply that I enjoy it. And I know that I enjoy it. Even it does not make much money, at least I will be happy going to work every day in the rest of my life.

People say that those things that you do not do are the ones you regret the most. Fifty years from now, when I look back, I want to say to myself, I do not regret not doing law.

To Law or Not to Law: The Pursuit of Happiness

…I don’t know if Momma was right or if, if it’s Lieutenant Dan. I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.
— Forrest Gump, in Forrest Gump 1994

Kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and now grad school. Every stage of my life seems to be a preparation for the next. Such preparations are necessary in learning, for one cannot learn calculus before knowing how to count, or cannot read before learning characters or the alphabet. Preparations imply a goal, and all the trainings I receive seem to be just milestones in a long journey that eventually will lead to a destiny. But after years of training, I look into the future, still with doubts about where my destiny is. And this feeling of doubt often creates worries and sometimes fears, which for the most times are unnecessary.

Luckily, there is another perspective of life, that life is a journey, and that it is not about the destiny, but about what is on the road. This perspective is relaxing, comforting, often joyous, for anything that happens on the road is interesting if one is curious enough. But since it precludes any fulfillment of  predetermined goals, it can be aimless and sometimes wasteful of energy.

Now I think that a certain degree of doubt is inevitable and necessary, but at the turn of life, when a decision is to be made, I learn to trust my gut, and ask myself, “will you be happy doing this?” And if the answer is yes, I will do it. And I also realize that enjoying the journey is as important as achieving goals. And from time to time, I ask myself, “are you happy at what you are doing now?” If the answer is no, I will start to make changes.

Tinnitus

The doctor said it is an infect inside the middle ear, and he gave me antibiotics.

One choice: take the antibiotics. It is going to affect my stomach and my normal life.

Second choice: take more rests and let the body immune system takes over.

I am going to take the second one. My experiment is one week. See how things go.

7 Days to go.

To Law or Not to Law: Values

They are the hardest things to figure out, and yet require the least amount of thinking. Steve Jobs’s resounding statement “you know it when you find it” makes it sound so simple, but it does require quite certain amount of inner struggles, as Jobs himself exemplifies. Knowing whether or not I love what I am doing now isn’t hard. Intuition, gut feeling, or inner voice can readily tell me the choice. But projecting whether or not I will love what I will be doing in the future requires a certain amount of foresight. Circumstances can change, priority in life can change, and personal experience will also continue to influence the choice. But there are certain values that have repeated influenced my choices in life, and they lead me to where I am now. Figuring them out will give me a better chance in predicting where I will be. So here is the list.

Curiosity. I always interested in new things, be it new places, new people, new food, or new ideas, new experience, new challenges. Finishing something is never as interesting as beginning something new.

Honesty. My parents have taught me the lesson well. Even one can lie someone else, one can never lie to himself. And it is the latter that is going to kill oneself in the long run.

Fair play. It is the lesson learned from soccer. It is also about one’s self-respect and dignity. This value extends to any kind of competition I have been involved in.

Making a difference. To do something no one else has done before, to be somewhere no one else has seen, and to see something no one else has seen. It is not the egotistic desire that is trying to prove I am better than anyone, but rather a way to distinguish myself from others, to fully realize my unique potential in order to achieve something new in the world.

To Law or Not to Law: Personality

  1. Accountants: 64% ST; 23% SF; 4% NF; 9% NT;
  2. Bank employees: 47% ST; 24% SF; 11% NF; 18% NT;
  3. Sales, customer relations: 11% ST; 81% SF; 8% NF; 0% NT;
  4. Creative writers: 12% ST; 0% SF; 65% NF; 23% NT;
  5. Research Scientists: 0% ST; 0% SF; 23% NF; 77% NT;
  6. Law students: 31% ST; 10% SF; 17% NF; 42% NT;

–Gifts Differing.

I am a NTJ with a median value of E and I. This confirms some of my personal convictions: for example, I dislike sales or customer relations or accounting. More importantly, this finding simplified my career search by eliminating a large number of negative options. As a result, I concentrate on two categories mostly: scientists and lawyers.

PS. This post should be the first one in this series of posts in terms of logical sequence. And in fact it is the first thing I investigated, see my previous posts on MBTI theory and applications about two years ago. To re-post it here is to put all relevant information together in order to gain a wholistic viewpoint before reaching a conclusion.

To Law or Not to Law

On May 21st, I will have my PhD oral exam, which means I will graduate in one year. Once again, I am put on a crossroad. There are several options. Two stand out. First, do a postdoc and pursue an academic position. Second, do a Law degree and find a legal related job. It is a decision that is better to be made sooner than latter. But I find myself often swaying between the two options, preferring one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. So now I am going to write about it, hoping that I will try to figure it out in the process of writing.

Missing a flight, again

I was 10 minutes late for my flight to San Fransisco this morning. The flight was on 9:30am. I know that I have absolutely no excuse to miss a flight not so early. But…. So for the second time in my life, I missed a flight. It seems to be the kind of mistakes that I need to make regularly in order to remember the consequence. The last time I missed anything was a flight from Bangkok to Singapore in 2005. The year after that, in 2006, I missed a train in Shanghai. Well my record wasn’t too bad from 2007 – 2009. And then probably this good record created a sense of complacency and neglect, which turned into another miss.

I was trying to figure out why I was late today, and all sorts of reasons come to me: weather, flight time, work, email, or just a familiarity with travelling that breeds neglect. I guess I just wasn’t in the travel mood yet. So while I am waiting in the airport for my rescheduled flight in the evening, I decided to compile a list of things I need to do before travelling. So here is the list:

For flight, remember the cut-off time for check-in. It takes about half an hour subway and 15 minutes shuttle bus to get from graduate house to Tonroto airport. In addition, there could be up to 15 minutes connection time between the subway and the shuttle bus.

Here is a list of things I found either very handy or essential to my travel in Brazil, in addition to the list I have before:
– passport, id, credit card, cash, location of where you stay, and invitation letter if traveling to the states.
– Visa Pin
– Medicine (cold, stomach)
– VC
– Phrase Book, if not an English speaking or Chinese speaking country
– Local airplane company information through Lonely Planet Travel Guide
– Sticky note sheets
– Locks

– toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, washing powder, bath towel, and slippers ( for hostel)
– paper towel

– cellphone, camera, watch, sun-glass, face tissue

inside Laptop pack: increasing number of hostels offer wireless access.
– laptop and electric chords
– cell phone battery charger
– some food
– ipod – music, audio book
– a coat, to keep warm while sleeping on the flight.
– umbrella
– bend-aid.

Critical Self-assessment — Spiritual

When I tell my parents that I have advanced to another belt in TKD, my father likes to remind me that the purpose of martial arts is not to get a belt or even to know how to fight. Instead, it is a way to keep fit and to discipline the body; it is to better oneself.

The club I am in runs color belt testing every two months. In the first color belt test, the yellow belt test, they ask children under 5 or 6 years old to practice a series of punching and at the same time shouting out loud “TKD, yes I can; TKD, yes I can. I respect myself; I respect my parents; I respect my masters and teachers.” For kids so young, practicing martial arts is also a process for character-building; and character, as Theodore Roosevelt said, “in the long run is the decisive  factor in the life of an individual and nations alike”. Mind you, not wealth, social status, family background, or even intelligence. It is character.

When a martial arts becomes a sport, competition becomes routine. Talent will definitely play a factor when people are pitted against each other. However, the true essence of martial arts is not competition, not about fight, though competition and sparring are central parts of it. When I practice TKD and Taiji, I always feel there is another side of those martial arts that balance the brutal side. And that is the side that gives the martial art a spiritual aspect. Louis Cha (Jing Yong) resorted to Buddhism. Right now, I simply feel it gives a comforting effect and gives  me a calm and peaceful mind.

Critical Self-assessment — Professional

Having the first paper accepted, published, and printed, naturally I felt a sense of relief. When I started out, I was told that if one didn’t get a paper out after the second year, the pressure would mount quickly. It surely did. Now after the first project, I am more or less free to do what I want to do. So at this turning point, I feel the need to reflect my past habits, and to keep the good ones and discard the bad ones.

First, reading. There are two types of reading. One is fast and rough; the other slow and in detail. Browsing ASAP papers belongs to the former while reading those I intend to reproduce is the latter. The latter requires a higher mental concentration than the former, so naturally the latter deserves quality times such as mornings. Other reading such magazine browsing and newspaper reading also belongs to the second category. So the general rule of reading is simple: read important papers in the morning. (An important corollary is that do NOT read newspaper in the morning.) If there happened to be important paper coming up while I browse the journals, put it in the ReadMe folder for later reading. And for those interesting but not immediately relevant papers, store it in Connotea.

Second, literature research. This activity can be quite time consuming, and at the same time also requires a significant level of mental concentration, sometimes just in order to keep focused. It is also better to be done while sufficient alert.

Third, experiments. It might sound odd, but experiments are actually more time-intensive than mind-intensive, especially those routine experiments. But the interpretation of experimental results is a different story. It is mind-intensive. If one thinks about reading and experimenting as ways of data input, then the analysis of these information is data processing. Both are important. The first stage requires constantly asking myself what I am looking for in order not to get lost, the second step requires answering the question why it is so.

Fourth, multitasking. Swift switch between minds is necessary. What I find particularly helpful is to have a short period of buffer time, usually 5-10 minutes, to review what has been done previously and to prepare myself to get into the mood of a specific task.

Fifth, knowing where the end is (or seems to be). Whitesides’ recommendation, using a paper to organize a project is immensely helpful. No project ever ends. But papers do. Writing the outlines of a paper as early as possible can help keep the project focused and efficiency high. And writing an outline is a mind-intensive activity.

Finally, about balancing experiments and thought. Bruce Albert wrote in a Science editorial on Becoming a Scientist, “An enormous number of different experiments are possible, but only a tiny proportion will be really worthwhile. Choosing well requires great thought and creativity, and it involves taking risks.” Everyone can do systematic work; but for creative work, work that explores a new frontier, picking the right combination of conditions is where the genius’s intuition lies.