This is the first blog post I’m writing since coming to MIT and I think it’s a really good way to kick it off. Basically this is me explaining how I realized how arrogantly ignorant I was towards the fact that I have so much more to learn and how little I know.
I dedicated two years of my high school to physics and astronomy and I graduated high school with medals(plural, 4 to be exact) in 2 olympiads. I had people shooting me praises right and left and constantly going on about how smart I was. Telling me that I had done something great or blah blah. I rode that wave and maybe there was a point in time for a split second when that was an accurate predicate. But as I have now come to realize, this predicate becomes False the second you believe it. You can be proud of the velocity or acceleration at which you’re learning and improving but never the accumulative distance. There is a very famous persian poet, Rumi, that has a genius verse in one of his poems and it goes (and btw it pains me to see how awkward the english translation sounds like):
One who doesn’t know and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know, He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion
One who doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know, what a waste of life it is, for such a creature to even exist.
And boy have I been lost in my ignorant oblivion at some points in the past two years. I took a gap year before starting college to “figure some stuff out” and “Do some cool stuff on my own”. And to be fair, I did do a bunch of random shit that I am to somewhat extent proud of (I’ll write about my gap year in another post). However, it is only now that I realize the true value of the time I had back then and how much more productive I could have been. How I idocilly believed that I was really good at the stuff that I thought I was good at. And this went on halfway into my first semester too, in which case I used to think that the reason that I don’t have work to do is because I’m just so smart that I can wrap up my work by spending half hour a week on it and not even considering the possibility that the reason that I don’t have work is because I’m taking all the FUCKING EASY CLASSES or I’m mostly interacting with people who were just learning most of the stuff I had learned in high school. However, at some point in the past months some combination of the new people I met, my inherent inner nerd and just existing made me see the truth clearer than ever. There is so much more out there in the world than I ever had imagined. And I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know shit and I’ll never again be dumb enough to believe the opposite. I will no longer let a day go by without me learning something new.