Reading Notes on 'Hidden Potential': Growing Through Imperfection

Recently I started reading “Hidden Potential,” recommended by Ray. I decided to try listening while reading, also to practice my English. Memory is connection—inputting audio and text simultaneously creates links between them. I’m starting with WeChat Reading’s AI feature, and will see if I can find better audio later. But no worries, let’s just get started~

By the way, the Tetris mentioned in the book—everyone can download it here, I think it’s pretty good~

https://github.com/26F-Studio/Techmino?tab=readme-ov-file

Survival of the Fittest: Pursuing Excellence, Not Perfection

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest. The species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt.

Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory is quite inspiring as a mental model! After all, humans are also a kind of animal, wanting to survive, wanting to thrive.

I’ve always been quite a perfectionist. In this AI era, I often feel like my coding intelligence can’t keep up, and I don’t have the physique to be excited for 16 hours a day, making it easier to fall into a state of survival burnout. Although “things have priorities,” I’m still learning to internalize this attitude. Even for some low-priority miscellaneous tasks, I still expend energy, and the results are still mediocre, even though I consciously schedule them for afternoons or evenings when I’m not at my best.

Back to this passage—the book also mentions that getting 10 points (full score) isn’t because of perfection, but because of excellence. This is actually quite an important mindset. I think this way, you can accept a mode of making mistakes and learning, and find a sense of growth in life. As meaning-seeking creatures, we really should follow our neural structure!

Chatting with friends about this topic, everyone deeply relates. If you focus too much on “perfect,” you might drift further from “excellent,” because perfection itself is a vague vision, and chasing an unclear goal makes it easy to fall into an abyss. Moreover, this easily puts me into a super “binary” mode, seeing the world in black and white, very extreme—if one problem isn’t solved well, then you’re a loser. That makes it really hard to get 10 points, but really easy to get 0.

So, let’s embrace the uncomfortable feeling! There’s so much in life to explore. If you get stuck on the pursuit of perfection and neglect everything else, exhausting yourself physically and mentally, that’s really not worth it!

Deliberate Play: Enriching Life, Not Controlling Life

Instead of controlling your life, practicing enriches your life.

I just happened to see an interesting expression in a friend’s Coffee Chat post—nourish your body/soul—which reminded me of the poem from “Dead Poets Society”:

“I went to the woods

because I wished to live deliberately,

to front only the essential facts of life,

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,

and not, when I came to die,

discover that I had not lived.”

I don’t remember the movie plot clearly, but this poem that I encountered during a time of confusion often comes to mind. Sometimes when I’m in a bad mood, especially irritated, or thinking “fuck, why do I have to do this thing,” I remember it.

Perhaps it’s the pursuit of certainty and explainability that unknowingly makes me have obsessive demands about every detail of life. But why not adopt a “deliberate play” attitude to explore life’s possibilities, returning to my original pursuit?

Although everyone has different aspirations, I still think viewing your own life from an open perspective is more “anti-fragile” and comfortable. These past few days reading “The Black Swan,” it also mentions that the sense of control we get is just self-deception, an oversimplified result, and not reliable. Whether it’s civil service exams, staying at university to work, there might not be a smooth sailing path. Anyway, I feel like I’ve become more unconventional and don’t really adapt to that style of “Okay, now let’s welcome XXX to give a speech.” Also, there are only 24 hours in a day—choosing to spend time entering one door means giving up other doors.

The True Meaning of Teaching: Igniting Passion, Not Instilling Classics

A teacher’s task is not to ensure that students have read the literary canons. It’s to kindle excitement about reading.

When people used to ask me how to learn (especially under exam-oriented education), I’d always go on about reading more (Naval also mentioned that reading enough will naturally guide you to books suitable for you), and explain various reasons. Now I just say directly: read more. Because many people seeking advice just want a topic to discuss, not actually wanting to solve the problem.

If I had seen the chapter on Finnish education in this book before, I would surely have gushed with endless envy, but now I’m more interested in studying the reasons behind it. There’s a lot to ramble about—like what “Outliers” says, just “growing rice” alone has quite a significant cultural influence.

Let me just talk about what I’ve observed: taking high school teachers for example, they’re not encouraged to establish stable emotional connections with students, often separating after just one year of teaching (with very few exceptions), which reduces coordination between teaching and learning. Many teachers are in middle-age, with elderly parents and young children, more focused on their own families, plus inadequate medical care for the elderly and all sorts of worries about children’s extracurricular activities. The most important point—we’re taught for exams, hahaha, there’s really no way around that.

The Value of Rest: This Is an Investment, Not a Waste

Relaxing is not a waste of time—it’s an investment in well-being.

Looking at rest from an investment perspective! After being pointed out by Ivan, I realized I really need to do some life subtraction. I’ll definitely rest well in August, investing in my own happiness.

Although from my past experience, when resting I’d still always think: “Hey, I should use this time to learn something,” otherwise there’s a guilty feeling of “didn’t do anything today.” This is also quite interesting, probably some psychological blockage accumulated from before. I can only say I’ll reduce the intensity when the time comes, haha—everyone’s rest sweet spot is different, no need to deliberately compare with others~

Like my friend said, there are often times when the body is resting but the brain is exhausted—how can that be called rest? On the contrary, during exercise, the body is tired but the spirit is incredibly relaxed. Maybe our understanding of “rest” has always been biased. I think truly relaxing, having enough sense of security—that’s what rest is.

The book mentions “deliberate play,” but we also need to learn “deliberate rest”! The feeling of controlling your own time to rest is really wonderful.