What I Learned by Living Through It

What I Learned by Living Through It

I was fairly quiet in school.

And I was intensely absorbed in mathematics.

But I was not good at math from the beginning.

In my first year of high school, I was in grade band 3.

So I dug into it.

And I learned something along the way.

To get good at math, you first need a conviction.

“This problem has an answer.”

That really matters.

However difficult the problem, there is an answer.

I simply have not found it yet.

That belief makes the next steps possible.

You keep thinking,

try solving it again,

and return to the fundamentals when you get stuck.

Then you work through the foundational textbook again.

I approached its practice problems with the intention of solving them a hundred times.

Of course, the number one hundred is not the point.

The point is whether you have mastered them so thoroughly that your hand moves automatically.

If my hand does not move automatically when I see a basic textbook exercise,

I do not think I am ready for difficult problems yet.

Only after that do you tackle difficult problems.

Advanced techniques are the same.

Whatever excellent lecture you attend,

whatever advanced technique you learn,

it only helps when the fundamentals underneath it have become automatic.

I think this applies equally to the college entrance exam and school exams.

I actually went from grade band 3 in my first year to the top band in my second.

I never fell out of the top band on mock exams or the college entrance exam.

So this is trial and error I went through myself.

But living my life taught me something else.

Doing well academically and succeeding in life are different problems.

Being good at studying certainly helps.

But good grades alone did not make you rich.

Once the entrance exam is over, I think it is good to exercise

and pay some attention to your appearance.

Get in shape,

take care of your face,

and look after yourself.

It changes your life more than you might expect.

In business especially, you realize that the impression you make matters.

Because you have to meet people.

And I think appearance can actually influence your prospects in business.

An appearance that others find attractive is especially powerful—more than you might think.

Building products teaches you something else.

People do not always try your product and say,

“This is good.”

They may not say it at all.

Male users in particular may not bother saying so even when they like the product.

But an important moment comes when female users like the product and start talking about it.

Female users like the product,

tell the people around them,

recommend it,

and those people discover it in turn.

In this way, female users sometimes build a product’s reputation.

So in business, I think you have to look beyond whether a product is good

to who likes it, who talks about it, and who builds its reputation.

That is what you need to watch.

Ultimately, this is what firsthand experience taught me.

In studying,

first comes the conviction that an answer exists.

Then

you repeat the foundational textbook until your hand moves automatically.

After that, you solve difficult problems.

In life,

good grades are not the whole story.

Exercise,

look after your appearance,

pay attention to the impression you make,

meet people,

and in business, watch who likes your product and who creates its reputation.

That is what I found by doing it and living through it myself. Haha.