The Downside of the Easy Way

A machine is anything that simplifies work. What a definition we had in secondary school Physics. But now I have come to see that still I could have defined it like this: A machine is anything that makes you not do the hard work, Hahaha.

You know even in college we also have machines like these, look:

• Reading slides instead of heavy books with difficult words is a machine.
• Copying, pasting, and editing others' work instead of writing my own, is a machine.
• Using past exams instead of doing other practice questions, hoping the lecturer will repeat them this year too, is a machine.
• Asking for a research title plus their reports instead of brainstorming your own, is a machine.

Anything else that makes us avoid hard work and relax, at the end we are in Mlimani city with our legs crossed getting our degree, is a machine.

What a life!. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

But like all machines, to get them you have to pay. For college machines, the cost is trading your ingenuity (the ability to be resourceful in your career later on) with you getting "no sweat" at all.

Before diving deeper, let's acknowledge a few truths:

• You may not apply what you read from school to your work.
• You won't remember everything you read from college, and as time goes on, the more you forget them.

What remains is what you truly learned; the abilities encoded in your brain from all the experiences you had in school. These abilities are shown when:

• You are supposed to investigate a problem at your workplace.
• Troubleshooting issues.
• Required to know something new and apply it in your work.
• Required to innovate or create something new.
• Writing reports and documentation.

All these prove that school is a training ground for you to think and not merely memorising facts. We are doing this training when practising questions, doing assignments, reading books, writing reports, coming up with ideas, and more. Hence, there is a reason for us to experience everything and not skip anything. The hardships we face are the exact training needed, and by handling them, we gain the right skills, not just facts, which we will apply later on.

I did a somehow complicated final-year research, which made me almost to give up on it. But the experience of making it work well has been very useful in my job now. Without that experience, I guess I would have started afresh at work (I wonder how my boss would have looked at me!). But having experienced something similar, it was easier to navigate through.

If we want to be resourceful later on in our career, we should STOP CHASING THE EASY WAY OUT, it kills the development of skills. We should do the so-called "hard" things (though it is still in your curriculum!). We shouldn't try to find "unnecessary" shortcuts.

One day you will be alone, one day you will be in charge, and those shortcuts are nowhere to be found. What will you do? Or we will be embarrassed with our academic certificates? The good thing is that, now you have the power to choose the kind of person you want to become; an independent problem solver or the one who depends on machines.

The choice is yours, so choose wisely.

#moreExposure #buildUpSkills