Work Hard in Silence, Let Your Success Make the Noise

Last week I bought the t-shirt with a quote as in the title. It is a nice t-shirt and I wore it yesterday for the first time. It reminds me not to talk or hypothesize too much and more of putting energy in work smart and to be relentless in pursuing our calling from God.

I enjoy more and more working at my current role as there are interesting problems to identify the significant factors and come up with the corresponding solutions. Just like what the German professor said in Rudy Habibie movie, if we have one phrase to describe engineering, that would be problem solving. Engineers, unlike scientists, work when there are problems. We also innovate not because of pure passion like artists, but because we see a problem and therefore try to use the existing tools and even create new tools to address the problem. We also focus on the solution or workaround. This means if we can have a temporary or long-term workaround, we consider it as part of the achievements even if we have not fully identified the root cause. In my intern’s world, engineers are about making things work.

I often act being very vocal in a meeting. But when asked whether I have done some experiments with real data to back the hypothesis, I often can’t say further as I have not spent enough time to do them. In other worlds, applying the concept is very important in my role as engineers. It is true that I like to talk. But let’s spend more energy in doing actions including planning actions instead of pure imagination and thoughts exercise.

Silence is not just no-talking as nowadays we can use e-mail or whatsapp to type long explanations and theories. Silence perhaps is referring to the action of holding ourselves from communicating our theories before we do literature reviews or experiments to support our theories. Silence also means to do something to support us in working hard such as doing exercise and writing this blog daily or learning languages daily. Writing in this blog is also perhaps a theory. But at least it is created not to respond to what other people’s thoughts but more of a reflection and an act to create something out of the many different thoughts in my head. And of course, as what I planned last year, this blog is a commitment to do something short but routine.