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GreetingsHi everyone, welcome to my channel, quarter-life crisis, this is Max.
In this video, I』d like to chat about understanding. In my opinion, understanding is key to achievements. And to be more specific this is not about understanding other people’s feelings or situations, like empathy, this is about understanding the complexity of a multilayered challenge, or a big system.
[Why I talk about that]In both work and life, I frequently feel pressure when I run into something challenging. Especially at the beginning, I feel at a loss, hence lacking confidence that I worry too much about how to act and proceed. Over time, I have realized that this is a very common issue, and there’s no perfect answer to it. However, after I put some thought to it, I think there might be a first general step that we can take, which is to enhance our comprehension of a task or situation. And as we understand these better, we become clearer of what action items the task requires. And this gives us a better sense of control, hence more confidence. As we are more aware of the internal logic of what we are working on, our worry and pressure decrease.
Think about those successful people we look up who talk casually in every forum and conference. They either have amazing achievements, or insightful thoughts, and it is all because they have a very deep understanding of the topic they are talking about. That said, we don’t have to admire, when we ourselves reach that level of understanding, it will no longer be a hard thing for us to do as well.
[At work]Let me share my own experience at work. I myself am not someone who has extraordinary powers of understanding. When I started my career as a software engineer I felt it very hard to tackle certain problems at work. Even just discussing with my teammates or reading technical docs about them were challenging. Frankly speaking, I didn’t know how to understand them. Back then I experienced very heavy 「imposter syndrome」 and worse, I felt that what I couldn’t understand was actually very easy for others to grasp.
But I still tried my best. With a lot of help from team members and some luck, I nailed a couple of projects which proved to be great contributions to the team. But later on when colleagues from other teams became interested in projects I had worked on, as a person of contact, I found myself not able to answer those deep questions from my colleagues. I realised that my understanding of those projects was not profound enough. In other words, I just delivered the projects without fully understanding them. And even worse, due to my shallow comprehension, I run into the same kind of unaddressed problems as before which then lead to some unnecessary hard time in my future projects.
After a while, I decided to make some changes. I reviewed the previous projects, the documents, the links, just to think deeper. To my surprise, I was able to gain more insights every time I looked back. With those insights, I felt more confident and capable of tackling harder problems.
[In life]Not only at work but in life we face the same issue. Nowadays, when we open the browsers, there are deluge of news over the Internet everyday, when we check out social media, there are countless articles posted and a lot of those are not very easy to understand, medicines, finance, bitcoin or some other techniques, to understand those we actually need a lot of context. As we want to catch up with the world, we try to read as much as we can, however, it turns out to be a pure waste of time since we cannot understand.
Another example would be, to learn another foreign language. When you are listening to the material in a foreign language that you are studying, sometimes you feel you hear everything but you hear nothing, you just cannot get the idea. More than often this happens when you cannot even read the material itself, in another word, you don’t understand the topic at all, so sometimes when we are learning another language, instead of the language itself, we should get ourselves more familiar with the content of the material, the stories or the culture behind, and all of these at the end boils down to understanding.
[How to enhance understandability]Next I』d like to talk about how I think we can actually enhance our understanding. First of all, we have to admit that it’s not an easy task.
In my experience, a useful trick is trying to re-think about complicated things that you have done before, such as your previous working projects or some difficult tasks that you experienced in your life. Usually complicated things mean to have many details involved and we』d benefit a lot from revisiting some of those every now and then just to help our brain connect those individual nodes. Other than our previous experience, if time and energy permit, we also need to get as much new information as we can. We can either read more books or talk to others. The purpose is to train your brain to understand the new information faster.
In my opinion, understanding has two directions, horizontal and vertical. Horizontal understanding means when we try to understand something, we find the other things that share similarity with it and we try to connect the new one to the old ones to gain comprehension through the connection. Vertical understanding means that there’s a chain of things that we need to keep in mind and to understand something, we need to be aware of the cause and effect of that thing.
To be more concrete, for example, if we need to design a project at work, from a vertical thinking perspective, this project can be split into 3 parts: 1) the reason for doing this, 2) how to do this 3) what’s the consequences after this. And we need to justify each part so we get support from other people. Here comes horizontal thinking, for each above-mentioned part, we need to enrich their content by finding relevant items. For the reason part, we need to figure out all the valid reasons A, B, C and prioritize them so that we decide A is more critical than B and C. For the execution part, we should think about all different ways to deliver the project, say D, E, F and we need to set a preference of which way is the best and illustrate why it’s the best. Same for the consequence part, how many pieces of effect this could cause, say G, H, I, then why the good outcome G is helping us, and why the side effects H and I are acceptable.
EndingI believe there are thousands of hard things like designing a project or delivering a project in our daily life. Here I encourage everyone, next time when you feel pressed about some uncertainty, don’t panic, try to understand it, once you start the thinking journey, your brain will surprise you! Thanks for watching to the end, I am Max, see you next time!