I am depressed in these days. So I would like to start a revolution in achieving productivity. The first revolution I had made in the first & second year in undergraduate. It was an exciting period with perfectionism and optimism. Golden days were over. As a consequence, I increased in study achievement, i.e I can determine the orientation for myself, and work without supervision. But the unavoidable effect is those stuff is fading out days by days. My weakness, obviously, is no more than procrastination. This is the time more than ever, I realize this weakness most and desire to start a second revolution to get rid of procrastination in my habit. Simultaneously, I have to re-target my goal in long-run plan instead of bullshit weak plans. Does anybody read the book “Eat that frogs,…” ? There are SEVEN steps to sparkle out a good life:
Step ONE. Decide exactly what you want
Step TWO. Write it down
Step THREE. Set a deadline on your goal
Step FOUR. Make a list of everything that you can think of that you are going to do to achieve your goal.
Step FIVE. Organize the list into a plan ( by priority and sequence)
Step SIX. Take action on your plan immediately
Step SEVEN. Do something every single day (keep moving, do not stop)
These steps are quite obvious for everyone but several people do it and few people execute their plan. If you are curious about the book, you can it the most interesting part from Google Book, or download illegally from RAPIDSHARE.
Return to the list. Let’s take the first step, Decide exact what you want. I got stuck at the first step!!! And I think everyone has the same problem as mine. We get frustrated and do not know what kind of person we do want, why, and how. Hence, the my problem goes beyond procrastination, it’s about my career, the most trivial question that all the student in Vietnam have to encounter with. How to solve it?
Anyone who cares about Computer Science should read the article “You and your research” sometime in his/her life. Finally, I read it after knowing about last year. It’s the good news, indeed. It is 20 page long and you can read it online HERE.
The articles is interesting at various perspectives but in order to answer the career question, I quoted here the most relevant information:
Question: Would you compare research and management?
Hamming: If you want to be a great researcher, you won’t make it being president of the company. If you want to be president of the company, that’s another thing. I’m not against being president of the company. I just don’t want to be. I think Ian Ross does a good job as President of Bell Labs. I’m not against it; but you have to be clear on what you want. Furthermore, when you’re young, you may have picked wanting to be a great scientist, but as you live longer, you may change your mind. For instance, I went to my boss, Bode, one day and said, “Why did you ever become department head? Why didn’t you just be a good scientist?” He said, “Hamming, I had a vision of what mathematics should be in Bell Laboratories. And I saw if that vision was going to be realized, I had to make it happen; I had to be department head.” When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, then you should pursue it. The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go. If you have a vision of what the whole laboratory should be, or the whole Bell System, you have to get there to make it happen. You can’t make it happen from the bottom very easily. It depends upon what goals and what desires you have. And as they change in life, you have to be prepared to change. I chose to avoid management because I preferred to do what I could do single-handedly. But that’s the choice that I made, and it is biased. Each person is entitled to their choice. Keep an open mind. But when you do choose a path, for heaven’s sake be aware of what you have done and the choice you have made. Don’t try to do both sides.
It seems that a very natural answer for me (but it may not apply to you). Just forget about constantly asking “research and management, which one is better?”. We aske because of matter of money and position. If you are a kind of egoistic person, means that you feel happy if you can do whatever you want, this answer is for you. Cheer.
