An Examined Life: University Part 1

After four years of university education at one of the most rigorous academic institutions, I feel it is time to reflect back on the knowledge, thoughts and skills I have learned and experienced. I am not going to talk about the technical skills like financial modelling, business strategy formulation, corporate communications and marketing, but life skills that would make me street-smart.

Hopefully, this would become a series of reflections taken from an important chapter of life.

Lesson 1: Make conscious and explicit efforts to reflect frequently.

An examined life is a life worth living. And frankly, I did not examine my life well enough for the past four years.

I am jumping (almost blindly) into the world of Digital Marketing as I was not trained in that discipline. I had dealt with numbers and process improvements, but I did not listen to my head and heart when they told me to pursue what I really liked as opposed to what was practical. I only realized that Marketing was my forte only on my final year, after an enriching experience at a tech company, but again maybe this was a hindsight bias - I didn't know what I wanted before that experience, and had I not gone through that internship experience, I would still be lost.

And this was primarily due to lack of curiosity and self-reflection.

I knew what my parents wanted for me. I knew what my brothers expected of me. I knew what my friends thought of me. But I did not know what I wanted for myself. And this became a giant wall of unmoving bedrock, blocking me from self-reflection and self-discovery.

When learning should have been motivated by passion and love, I was motivated by fear; fear of disappointing everyone, of letting my parents down if I had taken a different path than I did now, and of falling short of my friends' expectations. It costed me my well-being; the first two years of my 20s became the most stressful period I experienced as I had to conform to expectations that alienated me from myself.

But more importantly, this fear and expectation made me complacent. Fear became an almost-permanent occupant of the mind that shut down any cognitive discussion of passion and desire. Fear made me afraid of talking about what I really wanted to study, or do, because everyone (including myself) had committed so much time and effort in achieving a certain goal.

Academically, I still did relatively well, but I felt that studying became a burden, a type of work that Karl Marx would say alienated humans from themselves. I seldom thought about what I wanted to be, what problems I wanted so solve, and what my strengths and weaknesses were, because I focused too much on things I did not like but were expected to do well in. Carrying this burden stopped me from being true of and curious about myself, and from examining life.

I won't delve into every little detail on how I should have lived my life the past four years, because that would take a 1000-page autobiography and a movie trilogy. What I can say is that I should have spent some time to reflect on myself, be selfish and think about what is best for myself.

So I guess this first comeback post serves as a start to self-reflection, so that I can continually examine the self, and life in general. Hopefully, when I look back 50 years from now, I could say that this series of reflection has helped me live a worthwhile life.