The story of cover: my vocab test result. I have doubted about my vocab skill, and it just confirmed my assumption.
Casual Talk is a new series of post that introduces my recent thoughts but not limited on any specific topic.
# Fundamentals Matter
As what I said before, I have failed the latest PTE test and decided to slow down my pace. At that time point, I doubted that my English fundamental ability caused the failure and wanted a longer time to improve my fundamental skill and try again. Coincidently, the vocab test I just took showed the same result as I guess.
Just for reference, in China, the vocab requirement for high school students on vocabulary is 3500, for graduates is 4400, for postgraduates is 5500. I should be glad that I pass the English entrance requirement with such low vocabulary successfully. In other word, maybe 66 is already the limit I can get for now, benefitting from my matured understanding of PTE test strategy. I know that vocabulary doesn’t mean all, but indeed it matters. The vocab test doesn’t need to be very accurate, while it just need to indicate an approximate range or trend is ok. If I want to perform better on both English test and academic, vocabulary is the challenge I have to overcome.
It made me recall what my high school mathematical teacher said, “Don’t be attracted by those methods seem fascinating, fundamental and general methods are the essence”. Test taking skills is helpful, but emphasizing too much on them lowers the ceiling I can get. I’m not depressed, on the contrary, I’m happy that I finally realized the thing I should realize earlier, so that I can avoid wasting money and time. Despite this, I’m proud of myself because I took my free time to study and attempt bravely.
I should provide me more positive feedback since I always supress myself before (even for now, I still cannot get rid of it).
# Comfort Zone: garbage in, garbage out
I took a unit called Data Mining this semester, and it told me a famous rule: garbage in, garbage out. Actually, it is used to describe that you should collect and handle the data carefully since your model is based on that, otherwise your data is shit, as same as your model. I think the rule can be applied into many other scenarios, for example, comfort zone.
We all heard that “if people can leave their comfort zone, then they will get improvement”. In contrast, if you stay at the comfort zone, you won’t get anything but time consuming, even you look like a pretty hard worker. Then another concept comes in, “useless effort”, it used to describe those effort that are not effective. It’s a common but dangerous phenomenon, because people including me usually won’t realize they are doing useless effort. The worst, they might be self-moved and ignore advice from outside.
Effort on wrong way is also garbage, as the primary planner of my life, I need to identify which one is garbage, which is not. Since no one has unlimited energy, making sure all your effort is putted on the right thing always can bring your the largest benefit. Look! my life is just like a model I need to train, and correcting mistakes on time and removing useless effort just like data pre-processing! Haha!
I should leave my comfort zone really. For example, when I watch Youtube video that I cannot understand the speaker, I will switch to another one. Perhaps most people will do the same thing. However, as a learner, if I always watch the content I have already understood, how does improvement come? Optimizing the quantitative standard and trying to love unkown things is what I’m going to do. Hopefully time will show me the answer.
# Fears Lead to Delay
For vital things, I always try to arrange them on my later schedule near the deadline. It seems that I haven’t putted enough weight on them, but the truth is just the opposite. I always try to pursue perfect on critical things, if I’m not confident about that, I will prefer to stay where I am. However, when the deadline is coming, I always hasn’t prepared well for that. Actually, I should and I have enough time to get prepare.
“Quick and dirty”, my former boss, Rong Zeng told me that I should apply this rule into my work. optimization in advance is likely pointless since no one knows the expectation from the requirement at a very beginning time. “Quick and dirty” means explore the task ASAP, getting familiar with the outlook of the whole task, which can help you find appropriate global solution.
Oh, I found another thing when I am working on this post, in the unit of “Object-oriented design”, we have been taught that never trust your first design. But even you won’t trust it, your second, third till the final version are all still based on the preliminary one. Anyway, starting ASAP so that getting more feedback to optimize my work.
# Thanks
Reviewing the past, it’s really rare for me to be insulted or hated by surroundings. Maybe I always meet kind guys in my life. All my friends and family members always support most of my reasonable decisions as they will try to understand my opinion first rather than rejecting directly. According to this, I am a lucky one, and I really appreciate all of them.