Perception

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]

A question posed to Professor Ben in the First Lecture was “What is success?”. If it was meant to falter him, it was an amusing and cheeky endeavour. Else, it was a question that was much too vague and without context.

Professor Ben answers the question with an honest “I don’t know”, and to expect him to come up with a model answer for such a question would be grossly unfair. Quite clearly, success is subjective and everyone is bound to have different notions of it, and trying to establish a strict set of heuristics to measure this term would simply be naive.

To resolve the semantic side of the argument, success is defined as “the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors”. That seems a fair way to put it, and for me this translates to an achievement of goals. Hence, to know what success means, one really has to know what one’s goals are. If your goal is to survive today, then you are successful everyday (until you die, at least). If your goal is to make a billion dollars in profit over the next fiscal year, well, good luck with that.

A fairly good way to think about success is fulfillment, and an appropriate analogy to this would be the state of being full. When a person is feeling hungry, the person eats until he or she is full. Similarly, when one has a desire, one seeks the means to satisfy this yearning, with success being the achieved result.

Physical hunger is a fair metaphor for desire, and to extend this idea further, everyone has different appetite sizes. Success means different things to different people. And just like how it’s natural to feel hungry again a while after a meal, people continuously strive for success, setting goal after goal in life. To lose this hunger could quite possibly remove any meaning from one’s existence.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” This cliche quote is often used to illustrate the importance of teaching, but Professor Ben went one step further and modified the quote to emphasize learning. The second half of his quote went something along the lines of “teach him to learn, and he’ll learn how to find food for the rest of his life” (he actually mentioned learning how to shoot a buffalo with a rifle, but I’m paraphrasing).

His argument for this is that the world might run out of fish tomorrow, in which case the man in the quote would end up starving anyway. It is not feasible to teach him every method of finding food, hence teaching him to learn is quite sufficient and effective education.

How is this relevant to CS3216? One of the learning outcomes for this module is for students to “learn how to learn”, but with reference to the previous context, what’s all this food that we’re supposed to learn how to find?

I believe the fish and buffalos in our lives are the different paths to success, and what this module is trying to teach us is that we not just have to find our own paths, but learn exactly how to walk them to achieve success. Having one fixed route is not enough as possibilities are constantly changing. But by learning how to learn, we will always be able to adapt to circumstances in our bid to achieve success and fill the stomachs of our desire.

Well, I already know how to fire a rifle, so I guess I better go pick up fishing soon. After all, there are no wild buffalos in Singapore.