This might be one of the most heard piece of advice you have ever heard, whether you are watching some Clickbait YouTube Videos, some shallow student presentations that fail to deliver a good advice, or in some “be successful” illustrations, you often hears:
This advice is so overused to a point that it has became a Cliché, but… how much of it is really true? Perhaps let points out a few situations:
“I like sentient robots and grey goshawk, I shall become one in the future, and no one will stop me from doing that until I have achieved it.” Well, technically, this statement has a tone of “Never Give Up”, but… If I told to people like that, obviously, people would without a doubt questioning about my mental status.
Well… as you can see. Just tell people to never give up their ideas or actions reveal the first problem: if your idea is unrealistic in a practical, scientific sense, it is ridiculous to put the times in because it is known to be impossible to achieve. You may argue: “But hey, there are a lot of technologies was known as impossible back in the day, like airplane, quantum computers, and all those medicines used for combat diseases that was known as incurable”. Despite the complexity of the mentioned inventions, they are all backed by many scientific research, and they all have equations and proofs to support the theories so that the solutions can work effectively. On the other hand, my “hawk-ish” idea never works here because it is clearly denied by a few physical laws: Square Cube Law, Aero Dynamics, and Conservation of Energy. From my impression of mecha, they are huge metallic robots that fights to other enemies in a agile many, rapidly accelerate to move from place to place, so I see no way how such idea can be brought from the fantasy in a practical manner, other than seeing some burning metals across the sky due to the air friction acting against on some blockly metal objects resulting in high amount of heat.
Even if we can violate some of the physical properties, it brings into another problem: Ethics and Morals. The point of my “statement” is to “be” a mechanical bird, not to pilot one. Just like any experiments involved in animals, is it ethical to let someone to be any non-human object? It is clearly not because the experiment is inhuman that you have to risk lives to take one consciousness into a machine, and even if such “experiment” succeed, all we have is just a cold and deadly war machine that crave for destruction. (The birb: Why… master… why have you described me like that… Me: well, this is just an example, don’t take it too personal, okay?)
Perhaps, my statement is too ridiculous to describe the issue, so let’s move on to a more realistic scenario. Try to imagine there is a person who is emotionally unstable, antisocial, and entitled. One day, he found out he was poor, and hated to see everyone else being more successful than him, so… he decided to plan to commit a crime just for sake of doing destruction to all the company and properties he hate. In spite of his attitude, he still have a couple of friends and their friends were keep on persuading him to stop doing such a mess, but because of his “never give up” mentality, he insist to commit such crime. As a result, his plan unfortunately worked, and he had vandalized many properties without leaving a single trace. Morally speaking, what he has delivered? Nothing, besides releasing his anger, and wasting more resource on recovering the destruction.
Moreover, even if the task is realistic and moral, it is okay to give up the task if the advantage cannot out weight the effort. Let me tell you about one of my experience installing dropbox on linux. Two years ago, I joined the linux gang by installing linux mint onto my desktop. The experience of the os was great, except for a couple of problems, and one of them was to use cloud storage: I have been searching for a cloud drive that can also support Cryptomentor which can also be used on my mobile phone and tablets, but there wasn’t many choice because Mega is not available for Cryptomentor, while onedrive is not available on linux, and I don’t want to use Google service of any kind; hence, dropbox was my only option; however, whenever I install dropbox, it always crashed at the near end of the installation for some unknown reason, and the time, I don’t seem to find any good solution. Meanwhile, since I already have Mega, what really is the advantage if I can use dropbox? It turns out, I found none because Mega also have end to end encryption without rely on a third party software, while I just want to ditch some google services. Strategically speaking, if there is a better and easier solution that can fulfill the goal, I see no reason to keep insisting on using the worse plan.
Maybe, these illustrations are just badly designed which their tone might just want us to never give up on our (realistic) passions and dreams because being a master at a skill or making a fortune are difficult, and they require much time and effort before one can accomplish it. Clearly, if we think in this way, this illustration make sense. How came people would give up their dreams and goals just because they don’t find a fortune? However, most of the “Never Give Up” illustrations are far too over-simplified to a point that they always lack context such that we can always impose the wildest, craziest, or probably an impossible scenario into the idea, or people just blindly trust such quote, thinking that they should never give up on everything, even their worse plan. Majority of the self help illustrations have the same issue, and we may discuss more in the future series with different examples.
Thus, don’t just blindly follow the “Never Give Up” advice because they have over simplified, and use your reasoning to evaluate if your actions or ideas really worth for an effort and brings some values to others.
Update 1:
I know this article is a bit wild, but on the way on withdrawing my Master Degree, I have something to update: It is okay to give up, if you know what you are doing and have a clear plan.
Not all successful people have attended a full degree, but because they know what they are doing, they manage to make a fortune. I do understand why some people want to quit their uni since their learning style is not for everyone. I am not fond of learning by attending lectures and call it a day, followed a bunch of assignments with unrealistic goals or arbitrary rules set by the professors just to deduce marks, not to mention their use of questionable teaching materials where they have taken from free websites or simply, well, YouTube Videos. Why should I care a master if I can access information same way I did before?
Most of the time, I have been questioning the content of the course. What are the odds I will pull out Juypter Notebook, and prolog for my future project if I am not going to see AI as my future career path? Very likely, I will delete anaconda after I leave the university because my goal won’t use this bloat in any time soon. Prolog? I might have some ideas in generative music with it, not sure if that works, so it might stay. Because of the lack of value to my own values and goals, while lost the interest on staying Mel because of home sick and some big and small issues on adapting, I decide to let it go.
Hopefully, my decision is right because it is a hard choice… or is it? No one could tell anymore because there is no solid line of being a hard choice like I have said before, and only time will tell.
PS: This University is one of the reasons why this series exist since they have promoted the idea of “growth mindset”, yet… they have fix time slot which nullifies the power of such mindset.