Marita’s Blog

When I was 17, I came 3rd in an international Japanese speaking contest. However, I don’t do anything about my Japanese studies now. The year prior, I got the highest marks in the state in my grade 7 piano exams. Now, I don’t play piano. During high school, I did 30-40 hours of maths during my school holidays. I finished the KUMON mathematics programme and got the highest mark possible for maths upon graduation (VHA 10. In my two maths subjects, I dropped just half a mark the entire year). I now hardly do any maths.

So, I had it that I was a failure. I had it that I was a quitter. I had it that I was a free-spirit who couldn’t stick through with anything. I had it that I only did stuff so that I could achieve in that area, and that once I had reached a certain level, I would get bored and quit.

If I’d stuck with my Japanese, maybe I could have been a young international diplomat for the government by now? If I’d stuck through with my piano, maybe I could have been a concert pianist by now. In maths? I could have been one of those crazily-young maths geniuses at universities who become tenured by the time they are 25 and spend their life devoted to the art, becoming a historical figure in that field, like Einstein or Newton.

However, while muling over my complete lack of commitment to sticking through with my hobbies, and while thinking about spending my life as Stephen Hawking has, I came to a realisation.

I never wanted to be a young international diplomat for the government. There was so much more I wanted to offer the world than just my language skills. Being a concert pianist didn’t excite me. I wasn’t passionate enough about music to practice for 15 hours a day. And I don’t want to become a professor and spend the rest of my life at university. I want to explore the world. I want to learn as much as I can and give the world as much of me as I can. I want to live life to the fullest.

This conversation came up for me because of programming.

I’m in my third year of a mechatronics engineering/ computer science degree, and passing countless exams and assignments later, I still don’t think I’m very good at programming.

So, over Summer, I plan to do lots and lots and lots and lots and lots (you get the picture) of programming. When I do something, I like to go all the way. I want to be masterful. If I put my mind to something, I can and do achieve it. So, I know that after Summer, I’m going to be awesome at programming.

However, I was scared. I was scared that if I did programming, then I would stop after I thought I had achieved enough to justify that I was good at it. And, as I want to be the CEO of a robotics company, it wouldn’t bode well with me to stop programming when I’d achieved ‘enough’ to prove to others that I was good at something.

But then I realised the difference between programming and all my other activities. Whereas my mum wanted me to be good at Japanese, piano and maths; I really, really, really, really want to learn and be masterful at programming because it fits with my life goals of being a tech entrepreneur. And while I think my mother is amazing for working so hard to provide me with the opportunities to explore and excel in those areas, I know it will make a lot more of a difference if I am empowered to learn for me.

So now, I’m not scared that I’ll get bored of programming once I get good. I’m not scared that I’ll give it up when I’ve achieved ‘enough’. I’m just really looking forward to it, and I cannot wait until my exams end so that I can start programming the things that I want to program.

I’m not a failure or any of those things. I just hadn’t found my passion yet.

So don’t get disheartened if you keep giving up on things. Just keep searching until you find something that truly ignites you, and that you think is worthy of you committing your time to.

In thermodynamics, you can define the state of any simple compressible system by two independent intensive properties. A simple compressible system is one where the effects of gravity and motion can be neglected; independent properties are ones that aren’t related to each other; and intensive properties are characteristics of the state whose magnitudes are not dependent on mass.

What doesn’t define a state though, is the process by which it arrived - the length of time, order the components were added, or the method used for heating and cooling. It doesn’t make a difference whether 4 days or 4 seconds was taken, whether something was frozen in the freezer or given a douse of dry ice. What matters is that the required properties are reached to make it the correct state.

Similarly, you can write a computer program in C++ which does something in 200 lines that Python could do in 40 lines; you can spend 5 minutes working out the square root of a number to 3 decimels on paper that you could spend 5 calculator keystrokes on; or you can either take 6 detours by public transport and get lost, or drive straight from your house via the shortest route in 15 minutes and in both cases, still make the 11am meeting. To the end user, the result of the equation and the other attendees at the meeting, it shouldn’t make a difference.

If you’re accountable for getting work done, it doesn’t matter how long the work takes, what the temperature was while you were doing it (or not doing it), or what method you chose for getting it done, what matters is that you get it done.