Gilbert L 梁敬暉

In four months, I will be graduating from University of Waterloo. Without a doubt, the past few years have been formative if not life-changing. In this and future posts, I want to bring back memories and perspectives before they become murky. Hopefully, you’ll find them as interesting as I do.

Almost everyone who meets me presumes my streaks of high achievements began when I was young. They didn’t.

By the end of elementary school, I was, without a doubt, intelligent, but hardly accomplished or ingenious. I liked math, basketball, and nothing else. Grades were above average. I had more Bs than As; I was a “B-sian.” =|

Academic success and self-esteem reached a low were I got rejected by Churchill Secondary school’s pre-IB program and Eric Hamber’s enriched program. To add insult to injury, both the girl I liked and a guy who liked her made it to Hamber. That was a  giant hashtag FML. This pattern of not being accepted into the most coveted programs would repeat itself in later years.

To David Thompson Secondary School I went!

Grade 8 and grade 9 were lost years. On one hand, I had a “I’m too smart for this subjective bull-crap” attitude: for example, I received a 6/10 on my enriched sciene class’s title page assignment because I “didn’t put in enough effort.” On the other hand, I felt that I wasn’t smart enough to be great: our math team’s coaches assigned me to our second tier team. Demotivated and dejected, I squandered my time like the average high school student.

At one point or another, my typical day resembled the following:

1. get home by 3:30pm
2. play Counter Strike and/or Ragnarok online for an hour or two
3. practice piano (because piano was one of the things you can’t pretend to have played…)
4. watch TV
5. chat on MSN
6. sleep
7. finish homework at school five minutes before class begins

Of course, I didn’t let my parents know about #2 and #5. Listening and “Alt-Tab”bing like a ninja was part of the routine.

Things tipped the other way starting in grade 10. A number of teachers were heavily influential in this matter, but I’d like to single out a my English teacher here since I never got the chance to thank him.

Simply put, the man coerced everyone into 20+ minute reading sessions every class (in addition to the school’s mandatory silent reading sessions). There were classes where we spent more than half the class silently reading. At first, I was antagonistic to the exercise; most people (including me) goofed off during silent reading sessions and I suspected that this teacher was just being lazy. The man was adamant though, claiming that, “Everyone should be able to find a book they enjoy reading. *looks over to the goofballs in the class* If you like basketball, find an autobiography of Michael Jordan. If you like fighting, find an autobiography of Mike Tyson. The school has a library, so does the city.”

Results were evident: by the end of the term, even the idiots in the class were (perhaps begrudgingly) reading. For the first time since elementary, I started borrowing English books from the library. 

It’s not a coincidence that I started finding my passions that very year. In a series of strange events, I went from playing MVP Baseball 2003 to learning programming in C++. I fell in love with baseball as much as I fell in love with programming. In a berserk epiphany, I decided MIT - the prestigious engineering college with a renown baseball team nearby - is the school I want to attend.

The  goal was hardly realistic at the time: my grades would’ve barely gotten me to SFU, never mind MIT. But that’s why passion is so important: it gets you do things you didn’t think you could do and gets you to places where you didn’t think you belong.

I began my quest believing that my grades would skyrocket if I started taking school seriously. I vowed not to write my English essays the same time I chatted with girls on MSN; I promised not to finish my assignments five minutes before they were due. For the first time since grade 8, I started filling in the planner which the school gave me. Initial results were good, but not impressive.

Grade 11 involved (arguably) the most difficult course at my high school: Physics AP. Despite an improved attitude towards all things school, I flunked my first Physics AP quiz. When I say flunk, I don’t mean “omg, I got a B+”. I mean I got ~60% and was several marks alway from failure. Faced with these results, I couldn’t help but question my own abilities: “I’ve put in a change in attitude; where’s the results? Why am I still falling behind in Physics when the Russian guy at the front of the class is excelling? Why - after I’ve done my homework - am I still significantly weaker than a number of my Calculus classmates?”

These types of mental walls appear in everyone’s life at one point or another; the realization that one isn’t the smartest person in the room is tough and demoralizing. Confronted with such realities, many people give up and excuse themselves with, “Oh well, I guess I am just not as smart; I’ll go do something else now.” I didn’t want to give up.

The brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want it badly enough.  - Randy Pausch

I spent a day reconciling the fact that I may never be the best at anything - that this world will always present someone better at X than me. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t or couldn’t become better at X relative to myself. If I want to be a more compassionate person, the fact that I can never be as world-loving as Mother Theresa shouldn’t deter me from becoming more compassionate. In any case, I wasn’t thoroughly convinced that my tank was empty; I could improve.

Doing only what the teacher assigned and suggested was clearly not enough. I decided to look at extra material; I bought a prep book called “5 Steps to a 5 AP Physics”. 

At the same time, I started looking into ways that could improve my learning and efficiency in general. I wanted to learn more and do more in less time. From Grade 11 onwards, I became obsessed with self-improvement and productivity concepts. Lifehacker, Scott H Young, Steve Pavlina, GTD… I read them all. What I learned was that there’s always a better way to make things simpler and less stressful. Many people’s lives would improve significantly if only they were open to changing their ways of life.

Back to school: I ended up getting a 5 on my Physics AP. By the end of grade 12, I had earned AP 5s in Biology, Chemistry, and Computer Science as well. Sadly, none of that impressed the folks over at MIT and Stanford.

Contrary to what one might expect, I was hardly devastated. Although my initial goal was MIT and Boston, I had developed a love for self-improvement and learning that far surpassed the arbitrary goal of an Ivy League school. Two years of hard work did not leave me with nothing to show; I had transformed from a demotivated slacker into an ambitious self-motivator.

I was ready to flip the page: University of Waterloo!

See the next part “Mountaintop.”