Photo from istockphoto.com
I cannot stress enough about the importance of inculcating a habit of being disciplined about our life. It is the a priori condition for anyone of us to be successful in everything we do. Yet, it is the hardest undertaking in our life. Take for instance, as a young child, I know the importance of study. I know our society ties study to success to such great extent that we are constantly under pressure to do well in it. Unfortunately, I often don’t have the discipline to see through the hardship. For a long period of time, academic success remains illusive to me until more recently (See my blog entry on how I manage to score A in my study).
We have to be disciplined in everything we do. It is the only secret that I know of extracted from all the successful people who I have the privilege to work with. Let me give you an example to illustrate this, my Hall Master Associate Professor Ho Yew Kee. Before I start telling you why he is an exemplary of successful people and offer some ideas of why he is able to do so. I want to emphasize that I am not doing this to curry favor. I am truly doing this because I believe he is someone who I hope to become one day.
Associate Professor Ho has an amazing ability that I am trying very hard to mimic. This ability is called disciplined focus. This ability has allowed Prof Ho to be overwhelmingly successful in everything he do. Let me just give you an idea of his daily work patterns:
- School works as Chief Operating Officer
- Research works as a Finance Professor
- Community works as Board of Director in several charity and commercial organizations
- Hall works as Hall master
- Family works as father of two sons
Photo from istockphoto.com
Most people can barely do well in one, Associate Professor Ho can do well in every one of them (based on my observations). I believe the reason Prof Ho is so successful is because he has mastered the discipline of setting aside a specific time to focus on doing one thing and one thing only. It is this discipline that gives structure to everything Prof Ho does. Given that we all have a limited amount of time a day to spare, having undivided focus on the right thing and doing this in a disciplined way is the only way that I believe we can deliver quality results.
Applying Prof Ho’s ability to myself, I have achieved reasonable success. In my PhD study, while I may not be able to churn out large quality of research output, those that I do are of high quality (at least I believe it is). Only recently I have one of my paper accepted in a 1st rank conference in my field (if you are wondering, the acceptance rate of a 1st rank conference is 15%). My PhD supervisor, Associate Professor Pan Shan Ling once told me these words to bring home the idea of disciplined focus:
Just like our five fingers that are of varying lengths and purposes, life is similar. We need to focus our energy on developing each one of our fingers one at a time so that we are able to use them like hands to achieve great things.
Are you developing this must have ability of ‘disciplined focus’ now? If yes, share with me your experiences.
Posted by It feels good to feel small and insignificant some times « 牛牛Babe's Blog on December 24, 2010 at 8:32 pm
[...] I suddenly realized how small and insignificant my current PhD achievement is. The amount of disciplined focus that my supervisor has is so intense that it puts mine to shame. As a matter of fact, even my junior [...]