Tag Archives: Self Development

Persistence and Sustainability

May 25, 2016 Sukru Haskan

Recently, the above letter went viral on the internet. According to this letter, Einstein had applied for a doctorate in physics at Bern University and he was rejected since the university committee found his theory to be more artistic than actually physical. I don’t want to disappoint anybody, but it is very likely that this document is fake. It does not really make much sense for a Swiss German institute to write back to a German in English, and there are many grammar mistakes which do not lend credibility to authorship by someone at the University of Bern.

Even if it is very likely a fake document, it could be genuine. Many people are rejected in many different aspects of life since the people who evaluate them might be inferior to the applicant. And unfortunately, we lose a lot of talent due to this inefficient selection process.

The key here is the persistence of the applicant. It does not matter how good you are, as it is still very likely that you will get rejected at some point on your life journey. On this journey, no matter what happens, you have to keep a growth mindset and continue to develop yourself while trying to reach your target. By the way, rejection is a confirmation that you are trying for something. If you haven’t been rejected so far, then there is a problem with your mindset.

If failure is one of the key components of success, persistence is definitely also another component of the equation. People like to put people into different folders and label them, just like classifying computer files. For instance, someone may have been a clerk in a bank for many years, and so many people think this person cannot be a good software programmer. Actually the person can be!

If the person is willing to, he/she can be a much better software programmer than many programmers.

This rigid classification makes career transitions very difficult and it costs the global economy billions (maybe trillions) of dollars since we cannot get the best out of people. I see more and more people spending thousands of dollars on MBA degrees just to make a shift in their career. Apparently being filled with theories for two years enables you to make that transition more easily. This is just another form of labelling. An MBA makes the transition easier. Persistence is good, but it is not enough by itself. Sustainability is also important.

Once you reach your goal, you must continue to perform over and over again. This is real success! In Turkey, we say ‘Start like a Turk, finish like a German!’ The logic behind the saying is that, like all Mediterranean people, Turks are hot blooded and enthusiastic at the start, but sometimes it can be difficult for them to finish the job they have started, whereas Germans start slowly but surely and finish off a job within the given time frame.

To sum up, I would not trust all the documents circulating on the internet, and I would pursue my ambitions no matter what people think and no matter how difficult they are. Most importantly, once you have reached your goals, it is important to stay there!

P.S: If you are a clerk and want to switch to software programming, it is far more possible now than ever. Try to have a look at edx.org where you can enroll yourself in a lot of Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley courses for free.

All the best from Singapore.

Sukru Haskan
Twitter: @sukru_haskan

Personal Development

Growth Mindset

March 13, 2016 Sukru Haskan

The definition of the growth mindset for me is the state of openness to continuous development. Because it is continuous, the growth mindset is easier said than done and it is a process that starts when you born and lasts up until you die.

You will never be able to fully catch up with growth. You will try, read and develop yourself up to a very high standard but these efforts still will be insufficient. You will admire the power of the universe because a lot of things are still unknown and you still don’t know everything.

I have argued for long time that this mentality should be taught in the universities, not an abstract course itself. It does not really matter what you study; it matters how you develop yourself to update your operating system.

One of the biggest selling points of smartphones is simple: They get frequent operating system updates that enable the phones to develop themselves continuously. Otherwise you would need to change them much more frequently, and your current handset would be useless more quickly.

Just like humans.

If one believes that he knows everything and that there is nothing to learn and nobody to get to know, the probability of becoming useless in the very near future increases significantly. And there are many people around like this, even in the high levels.

You should exclude these people from your circle because they can be poisonous.

If, after graduating from university, you still don’t have this mentality, you simply don’t have it. You can survive, but you will survive just like any other breathing animal on the planet.

As you may recall, my book review on Homo sapiens mentioned that Homo sapiens start developing because they confess that ‘we don’t know’.

When one believe that he knows everything, he is excluding himself from the outside world and new updates.

The growth mindset opens you for the world of opportunities, and we are living in our narrow world which some of us think is very big.

It is not, especially nowadays.

I wrote these sentences from beloved and cold London. It is always good to be back to London.

All the best.

Sukru Haskan
@sukru_haskan

Life, Personal Development

What is success to you?

November 14, 2015 Sukru Haskan

When you are a fresh graduate from a university, you are young and ambitious.

You definitely want to be successful, but many of new graduates do not have an idea of what their passions are and this fact makes it harder for them to be successful.

In my own and plain explanation, success is an ability to achieve your dreams and it starts with setting your own objectives.

An article published on Harvard Business Review by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams explains it perfectly with a great example.

“A corporate lawyer may work for a highly respected firm and have a lavish compensation package, but if her career falls short of her dream to become a Supreme Court justice, for instance, or if practicing law seems merely a good way to make a living and doesn’t provide an intellectual buzz, she won’t feel successful.”

Success has different meanings to all of us. Success is a continuous journey which includes failure. Richard St. John from Canada explains success as a process of passion, work, focus, push, ideas, improve, serve and persist.

Many people defines success as a bank account with many zeros. Whilst it may be a conclusion of a success, it is not really a mean and it should not be.

From my own experience, people with an ultimate target to have a bank account with many zeros do fail. In other words, they become unsuccessful as passion is not in place in the first instance.

Remember Richard St. John’s ladder of success?

It does start with passion and money is not involved in any part of the process.

And these are the last words of Steve Jobs…

“I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world.
In others’ eyes, my life is an epitome of success.

However, aside from work, I have little joy. In the end, wealth is only a fact of life that I am accustomed to.

At this moment, lying on the sick bed and recalling my whole life, I realize that all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in, have paled and become meaningless in the face of impending death.

In the darkness, I look at the green lights from the life supporting machines and hear the humming mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of god of death drawing closer…

Now I know, when we have accumulated sufficient wealth to last our lifetime, we should pursue other matters that are unrelated to wealth…
Should be something that is more important:

Perhaps relationships, perhaps art, perhaps a dream from younger days…
Non-stop pursuing of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me.”

Who could argue that Steve Jobs was an unsuccessful person? I think he is successful and innovative but does it really matter what i think?

What matters most is what your self perception is…

My own humble explanation of success is to be a purposeful creature during our life span with adding value to many people’s lives.

Moreover, generating innovative ideas and helping to improve living standards of many cannot be more satisfactory than anything else.