You Can’t Avoid Feeling Stupid
I’ll share with you one of the most important things I learned during 6 years of studying physics in university (BA+MA). I was not the smartest guy, but also I was building my career in parallel with full time studying. So it was pretty challenging just to stay afloat with my studies.
All exams in our university were oral. You enter the class, get your random questions, go and prepare your answers, and then comes the most interesting part — a professor comes to you to discuss your answers. I’m not going to start a conversation here whether exams should better be oral or written, but these guys knew something. They knew that sometimes you can memorize answers without understanding what it really means. So the discussion was necessary to check whether students really understand what they are talking about.
Every such exam was like a torture for me. I knew, no matter how much I try, any professor can ask me a question I won’t be able to answer. Come on, this guy has been doing ONLY THAT for the last 40 years, he’s living and breathing quantum-shmantum & nuclear-shmuclear, and I’m trying to understand things in like 4 months while having a job in parallel. So I felt very weak, unconfident and vulnerable. And sometimes exams last for several hours. You have nowhere to escape, you sit there and you feeeeel this for 4 hours non-stop.
After 6 years of doing that, I can see that I have a superpower now.
Today, I never stress out about not knowing something. I am not afraid to appear stupid. Been there, done that. And I noticed that I am free from this captivity when one has to look smart in order to be confident. So when I’m faced with my mistake it’s much easier to accept it, learn from it and move on. Instead of first wasting time and efforts trying to protect myself from feeling stupid, just to realize that I can’t help it and indeed I was wrong.
There is something so contradictory inside of us that feels like it’s trying to protect us but in reality is dragging us back. I hope we can overcome it.
