There Ain't No Mountain High Enough

I was hanging out with my friend, ( L/CPL ) Kelvin Lai the other day in a Christian Bookshop named 'Fu Yin Shu Ju ( if translated, it literally means Gospel Bookshop )' next to Masland Church. We were just checking out a section that sells plaques with inspirational quotes on them.

Kelvin Lai with half his ice-cream cone in hand
Checking out the cool plaques

I came across this plaque with the inscription :

"If you are satisfied with yourself, you better start changing your ideals"

This phrase made me recall a certain part of a motivational book/biography of the late Professor Randy Pausch from Carnegie-Mellon. It's written like this :

"Anyway, so I taught the course. The first assignment, I gave it to them, they came back in two weeks and they just blew me away. I mean the work was so beyond, literally, my imagination, because I had copied the process from Imagineering's VR lab, but I had no idea what they could or couldn't do with it as undergraduates, and their tools were weaker, and they came back on the first assignment, and they did something that was so spectacular that I literally didn't, ten years as a professor and I had no idea what to do next.

So I called up my mentor, and I called up Andy Van Dam. And I said, Andy, I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did stuff that if I had given them a whole semester I would have given them all As. Sensei, what do I do?

And Andy thought for a minute and he said, you go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say, "Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better." And that was exactly the right advice. Because what he said was, you obviously don't know where the bar should be, and you're only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere."

I guess the analogy can be applied anywhere in life. Have you met a person who feels that the thing you do is just not good enough ? Have you ever encounter a person who just have to point a single mistake in your near-perfect assignment and drench your euphoric moment ? Maybe what he is trying to tell you is, 'You're way better than this, and i'm only going to do you a disservice by putting a limit on your bar anywhere ( Or maybe he's just being another grouchy, pessimistic git, but that's outta the point )

You're only going to do yourself a disservice by putting your bar anywhere

Perfection is unattainable, but if you chase after perfection, you can gain excellence. Sometimes, we need people to remind us of that. We have abilities, we all do, but once in a while, we forgot about them, and there is a need for others to make us see that we can do better than what we are currently doing.

Teachers are always like that. They always complain that what we do are not good enough, and we in return always mark them as unsatisfiable. However, the truth behind that is, they know that we are better than that. They have confidence in our abilities. And so, when we so often fall short of our own standards, they have reprimand us with all kinds of not-so-nice language for not exhibiting our full potentials and living up to our names. But behind all these bitter chastising lies a wonderful truth, they have faith in us, and they believe in us.

T minus 13 hours to my flight back to Shah Alam. The phrase,"If you are satisfied with yourself, you better start changing your ideals" has been some sort of motivating revelation to me. I sincerely pray that i will turn out to be a greater man than i am currently, that i am able to live up my name, and my life.

Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things, but in doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. - Angelique Arnauld