When I was a kid, I ran away from what I wasn’t good at but excelled at what I was good at.
I was good at a few things. Mostly, I was really good at reading people’s nonverbal cues and reading between the lines.
That means I was good at listening and observing. I was also good at speaking in front of classmates.
My mom was a bribe.
Mind you, this was 20 years ago in South Korea, when giving a “gift” to your teacher was the norm.
My mom went to my homeroom teacher at the start of every semester and gave that “gift”!
(Okay, it wasn’t like a thousand dollars, but probably a fifty-dollar gift. At least that’s what my mom told me.)
It turned out that when I raised my hand to answer their questions, there was a reason teachers always gave me a chance.
I was also considered to be good at English. My mom sent me to this English kindergarten—not many kids did back then.
In first grade, I was already ahead of everyone else because I knew the alphabet.
But because everyone thought I was really good at English, I felt even more confident, and that made me want to engage more.
How do you define that you’re good at something?
You just compare yourself to a certain group and decide it.
Of course, there are a few people in the world who are genuinely talented or genius.
But my point is: the things I’m good at now aren’t because I’m gifted or talented or have that “brain.”
I was just in an environment where I happened to be one or two weeks ahead of other students.
So, what did I do in the classes where I wasn’t ahead of other students?
I failed so hard. I didn’t even try and totally gave up before midterms because I was so bad at it anyway.
The pattern looked like this:
I wasn’t good at it compared to everybody else in the class, so I told myself I was bad at it. Because I felt bad at it, I became less confident and stopped paying attention. And by the end of the semester, I hadn’t made any progress because of this insane spiral pattern.
You are good at what you like, You like what you are good at.
I had no desire to be good at what I wasn’t good at in the past—because it was fun working on the things I was already good at and making them better.
Unfortunately, now I want to be good at what I suck at.
Because, one, it’s pretty limited what I’m good at. Two, doing only the things that make you feel good is an insane way to live.
I’m at Fractal Software Engineering Bootcamp with twenty other engineers.
They’re certainly way better engineers than me, and now I’m back in fifth-grade history class, where I felt so stupid because everyone knew the answer and I didn’t.
Except this time, I can’t give up and I won’t give up.
I just have to break this pattern, see myself being bad at it, and work hard without getting sucked into that spiral.