The power of patient perseverance
#51 - spicy tasty chicken curry
¡Hola!
Might as well use some of my Duolingo Spanish from the summer. ¿Cómo estás?
It’s been a relatively quiet week after a hectic start to the year. It’s mostly been small things like preparing for the Senior Maths Challenge, watching my first-ever game of rugby and feeling lonely in a deserted Woodwind section at Orchestra on Friday 😔
Highlight of the week: getting back to cooking. As I accepted last week, my time management was a little shaky to kick off proceedings this year but I’m getting back into a routine. For the first time, I used a recipe Mum and I had already noted to make a stupendous magnificent Chicken Curry (recipe here for those interested)
I. Puzzled faces, fed-up eyes and panicking minds 😕
The above-described situation has occurred twice in two weeks in our Further Maths lessons, once in both branches of the course.1 They were both the first times when it hit me (and I’m sure all of us) why it’s called ‘Further’ Maths. The brainpower needed to digest what was going on in the examples was at another level.
There were some people sighing in frustration & cluelessness and others glancing at their partners and smiling, sharing a collective sense of confusion.
In both instances, whilst my mind was also saying “What on Earth is going on here??”, I kept at it. I tried to get my head around the logic, got some partial understanding and stayed back at the end to clarify my doubts.
II. I’m currently studying A-Levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Economics. It was a toss-up between Phy, Computer Science and Econ through Year 10 and then a battle between the first two last year. After careful thought and breaking it down to its bones with a good ol’ ‘Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats’ comparison, I went for Physics and am (slightly) glad I did.
What that does mean, however, is that my tech side has been off the boil. No coding, no looking into tech careers, no reading about the latest developments.
So, wanting to keep my tech career options open needs active action towards that. The first baby step was to do a bit of programming.
I opened up a NumPy tutorial that I’d started over the summer and watched it for a few minutes. I didn’t have much of a clue what was going on.
The easy thing to do would have been to close it down and give my to-do list a “Next, please!”. But I thought, “We’ve got to get something done. It’s better than nothing.” Therefore, I remembered a website my CS teacher from last year recommended, found an activity on there and got stuck into it. It was rewarding and satisfying to know how to do something and also successfully complete the extensions.
What do these two scenarios have in common? (Spoiler: the title of this post)
They both make me look like the undefeatable GOAT (which I am not), who will grit his teeth and sprint for 1000 miles if need be.
In both instances, I exercised my “Hang in there” muscle and both times, it worked out well.
As I said to my Further Maths teacher after getting my questions cleared up, the easy thing to do was to say “Screw it. I don’t need to know this absurd proof anyways. Let’s get going to Lunch”. The more noble thing to do is to do everything I can to work it out. Growth mindset, discipline and willingness to learn, all-in-one.
As my mathematical journey reaches adventurous, fascinating and challenging terrain, one of the key skills I’ll need to develop is persistence: the knowledge that even pages of working and hours of thought may not result in an answer, because of how complex and difficult the problem I’m tackling is. But it’s one of those “soft skills” that help us in every part of life, and therefore one worth strengthening.
For ideas on how to, click the hyperlinks to previous posts of mine above2. But a key question with this, when having to choose between 2 avenues, is "Which one will future me be prouder of taking?"
Most worthy things in life have their intrinsic worth or value because of how long and hard it is to attain them. Understanding this brings us to the fact that if you really want something, hard work is key, but so is its sibling, perseverance. “The tough get going when the going gets tough” 💪 .
Book of the week 📖
I haven’t had the time It hasn’t been enough of a priority to read that much this week. I’ll try my best this week as I revamp my time management mastery. A book recommendation however is Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. It really kicked off my financial learning back in Lockdown 2020 and is a great starter in the world of finance.
Podcast of the week🎙️
On the other hand, I’ve been pretty good with the audio medium. Here’s a crazy story about how a quite incredible and nifty tool that Siri and Google use to work out what song is playing was created.
Article of the week📰
Growing green cities: the Dutch expo that shows you how
Another one from the Positive News website about an almost utopic world flocked with green innovations. It really is a great read about the possibilities of scientific creativity and ingenuity.
Quote of the week💬
Money is numbers. And numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end. - Bob Marley
Push hard this week, even when you want to give up.
Adi
For those proficient in the lingo of the maths world, it was Loci in an Argand diagram in Pure Maths, and The order of a Prim’s algorithm in Decision Maths.
That felt so cool and so gangster to say 😁