My time in Malaysia, from 18, to 22, to 32, to 40, reviewed from the point of view of 42.
Cognitive dissonance is a thing. Many people have spend 5-10 years of their lives on things that were quite redundant, which they believed were valuable at the time they did it. Some can admit that, some cannot, in retrospect.
18yo. I attended a 4-year college in the US, on financial aid. After 2 years I had interviewed many professors, and found that the university system as a whole, beyond this specific college, was not designed to provide a comprehensive architectural view of the body of human knowledge, to date.
So I thought I was wasting institutional resources, as I might as well study that outside college, and leave the scholarship opportunity to someone else. I discussed stopping my studies with James, the dean of international students. James said the institution expected me to complete the course of study, so I stayed, but spent most of my remaining time on my own, in the library.
22yo. I remained anxious to begin work, and to learn about commerce, so after college I embarked upon commercial fieldwork in my home country, Malaysia, where I got to learn about commerce over the next 18 years, from 2005 to 2023.
Commerce in Malaysia was, as expected, primitive, so I struggled to find environments which would maximise my opportunity for learning, while sacrificing most opportunities to simply increase my rate of pay, since the pay in Malaysia was not competitive on a global scale anyway.
I took breaks, of course, to try and keep up with subjects completely absent from the Malaysian commercial environment. Over 18 years, I took parts of the 3rd and 7th years off, to be nerdy, and after that I decided to lock myself into commerce for 10 years, as a sort of "minimum lock-in" to fully experience life as a commercial person.
32yo. Of those ten years, I spent 6 years running a small business, funded by a small pool of 19 investors. This was a great opportunity to study the regulatory environment in a third-world country, and the risk appetite of investors was very high.
Small businesses, particularly restaurants, generally faced incoherent regulations, poor enforcement, and therefore an industry norm of non-compliance under operational pressures.
40yo. After the 18-year period of fieldwork, I decided to take a long break to catch up on my much neglected STEM studies. I felt I had done my time in commerce, and it was then appropriate to reacquire some balance in the allocation of my time.
I do not feel that my time has been wasted, but many people I met over the years, told me that I wasted time. I think, each of us valued different things, and so we would each have allocated differently.
At 42, I feel blessed with the opportunity to continue with the design of my life. That is pretty much the line I used to describe my plans to the honors society, when exiting college at 22.
