I have always wanted to do things my way. I have been stubborn and sometimes it has gotten me into trouble. It made me stay in college much longer. Somehow, I am trying to make sense of it all now that I am 30. It all started down to the good intention of knowing how things work. That is what always drives my imagination nuts.
I am always against forming a bureaucracy about anything that sets the rules on how to do anything. “No, you do it like this. No, you do it like that.”, eventually you’ll be too much of a conformist rather than realizing the how the whole gearwork of how something works in a larger perspective. One must learn how to connect the dots, and each one of us does it at his own pace until eventually we will get the bigger picture of which the connected dots mean to portray.
Imagine a person who loves to bake. Then, suddenly a group of people who love to bake congregate together and set the rules on how to bake. They would then set certifications on how good you are at baking. It is the same thing with talent shows. You do what you want, but then suddenly you are being told that you are not good at what you like to do despite giving it your all. The judges of these shows would evaluate you based on their own preferences. People would then form certifying bodies and exams for all sorts of things. As for me, this is a waste. The same principle applies when our educational system is missing out on a lot of potential candidates at certain professions just because they do not excel at the theoretical side. Some are better at the practical side of things because they were doing it all along, but they just do not use the same jargon as that of a certified expert. We often fail to take that into consideration.
We often rank people based on how good they are at something and put them on a pedestal. We tend to look up to them and do things according to how they do it. I refuse to do so. While I do not want to disregard the learnings and experiences of others, I would rather amaze myself on discovering things on my own and draw my own conclusions. In this way, we might see something that the others might have overlooked all along. For instance, before Einstein, time was considered fixed until he figured out that it could be warped. Sometimes, it takes a view from another perspective to notice the obvious that can be otherwise be obscured if everyone looked from the same point of observation.
All the course of my life, I have met many competitive people at the excuse of wanting to be the best at what they are doing. To me, competition is a hindrance to discovery. This leads to useless pressure. This is not the way to be the best in your craft. Well, in the end this is a big bad world and life has always a competition, a race of some sort that it should not be that way. Life is to be savored and enjoyed, as you connect things to one another at your own pace. That to me, is how you become the best at what you do. This is what makes me who I am.
To wrap it all up, not everything applies to everyone. I do not look up to anyone and I do not encourage anyone to look up to me either. People are imperfect despite the medals that they hang around their necks.