Learn from the Best

Learn from the best, and become the best.

Today I met my mom's friend's brother, who is about to graduate and now interning at a tech firm that builds big data platforms for clients. After learning that my monthly pay is 20x of his intern salary and 10x of his fulltime colleagues', I had mixed feelings: I was not sure why we are doing similar stuff but there is such a huge difference between him and me, at least in terms of pay. After learning what he studied and learned, I started to get a hang of the cause of such gap.

Like me, he:

• also studied computer science in college
  • but I got a versatile education that spans from liberal studies to math and various engineering courses
• knows about data structures and basic algorithms
  • but I had the precious chance to be taught by great minds who expanded boundaries of human knowledge, went through the pain of thinking about homework problems for days, spent hours at office hours, and underwent the pressure to submit writeups before weekly deadline
• also does Java Spring Boot development, probably even better than I
  • but I had better English reading ability to read the original documentation instead of the translated version in Chinese

Simply put, he is a hard-working individual and I learned inspiring lessons from him, but I was just more fortunate to have seen a further horizon. Thus, this is a lesson to myself and every reader of this blog: learn from the best, and become the best.