On my first steps of building good habits and my being-smart-trap

This morning, my husband sent me an article titled “Avoiding the trap of low-knowledge, high-confidence theories”. When I had just looked at the title, I was wondering “what am I doing? What am I going to do? And what is my big goal in the future?”. Honestly, I think of tons of things to do in the future, i.e., writing books, helping mental sick people, doing research, etc, but I DO NOTHING now.

I was struggling weeks on just installing Linux, GPU, etc (for building a deep learning environment), I was wasting days surfing, searching on the internet, meaninglessly. I WORK AROUND, REALLY!!

I trapped myself by the fallacy that everyone takes weeks for that installation when I saw only one comment of one guy who also took weeks on that. I cheated myself that I am lame on those computer stuffs because I am a woman, woman isn’t good at engineering stuff. Wait…WTF? So, what are you doing engineering for, Lua? For being lame? Ok. I forgot the fact that I am an ENGINEER, who already got the bachelor and master degree in engineering, who is currently doing Ph.D. in engineering. There is no phrase LAME WOMAN ENGINEER in the world, for truth.

Yes, I intended to forget that fact. The truth is I WASN’T DIGGING IN. I didn’t do exercise when I studied python recently, even I hadn’t known anything about it before. I totally rely on Google.

I procrastinate everything. I decided to write Morning Pages each morning from today on but I woke up later than my little 10-month-olds baby this morning and didn’t write a word. I postpone my paper until my blog post is done, and now I’m still writing this, without getting the final result for the data analysis. Even with the thing that I think I like, this blog, there are almost 10 posts that are not completed and surely not posted, and you really can see my procrastination on this blog if you check my timeline posts.

I reinforce my belief that I’m not unproductive by the 80/20 principle. But you know what? People really works and they have got 20% of working time effectively. I work 20% of my time and I fool myself that I worked effectively all that time (WTF?!?), ‘cause “I’m smart” (WTF?!?). That is the BIGGEST TRAP OF MY LIFE THAT I’VE MADE FOR MYSELF. What an honor!

Since I was a kid, everyone shot that smart shit to my face (maybe because I can make the addition operation well?!?). I was truly into it. Even sometimes I was trying to analyze that and get the conclusion that I am not, but when I focused on learning something, I got that, then I thought “Oh, I might be smart, I got it fast”. The fact is I didn’t dig in, I stopped at that point and enjoyed it, bathed in the STUPID smart sunshine. Another fact is everyone can do it well like me, I just avoided that.

Ok. I’m done for my confession. What’s yours?

I make my commitment on this blog for keeping it updated every Tuesday. I would like to build my good habits to get out of that self-deceiving circle. I think it would also help me to overcome other hurdles in my research life and also my mom-to-be life.

I would like to build a new me and show my progress in this blog.