2018 Week 2: What is your biggest failure?

Career
This was my first week at ONI and it was great. The team is brilliant, and represents almost as many countries as it has people. In my previous job, as in this one, a personal blog is not the place to discuss the specifics of work (that might be commercially sensitive), but it is an exciting and satisfying environment to be in.

Languages
I’m on a 14 day streak for Chinese on duolingo. I first heard about duolingo from the TED talk of Luis von Ahn, which is probably a little dated, but certainly interesting from a “history of crowd sourcing” perspective. Notably it seems to have grown to be much more about learning languages than translating the entire internet, which is not to say crowd-sourcing has been unsuccessful (see Niantic and PokemonGO). Freakonomics did a podcast about how (financially) valuable it is to learn a second language,  talking with Albert Saiz who wrote a paper. In short, it’s not particularly valuable, unless the second language you’re learning is English.

Reading
Before we get serious I’ve discovered a guy here called Chris McIntyre writes a weekly email called “Interesting Things I Come Across” and it lives up to its name.

Failing
There are some questions that seem to come up in interviews no matter the position or experience. Having a concise answer to “Tell us about yourself” or “why do want the position”.  One I found difficult is “What is your biggest failure”, and in answering it over and over I’ve started to make sense of it. My failure is quite literal. I failed a number of subjects during my studies at University. Specifically 8 discontinues, 6 absent fails, and 3 fails, from 2014 to 2016. It still stings to look that up, and look at a rather large hole in an otherwise reasonably good transcript. I’m still afraid to admit it.

For most of my life I held the foolish belief that it was impossible for me to burn out. I thought that I was intelligent, but lazy. I relied on the “Panic Monster” to push through days without sleep so I could start a term’s project a couple days before the deadline. I remember explaining the reason I had so overwhelmingly over-committed myself was that “I could never have the discipline to do things gradually over time, but I always managed to scrape through, so the best way to be efficient  was to do lots and lots of things”. These beliefs were so core to how I saw myself that eventually when I did burn out, it was took me 3 years to finally accept and change these unhealthy views.

Thankfully I’ve since learned that I, like most, do not have an unlimited capacity for pressure. That I do need rest. That being smart is not all that matters. That talent is important, but consistent application of effort over time counts twice as much. Perhaps most important of all, that it is OK to ask for help.

That’s an imperfect summary, but it is certainly a good place to start.

Written (mostly) from the Oxford Hackerspace.

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