Challenges and Discoveries

After starting into a new job where I need to immediately become an expert in an area that has a lot of nuances and unfamiliar problems, it seems clear that my life at HP will remain challenging and stressful for the foreseeable future. But I'm starting to move from the overwhelming panic phase into the focused and determined phase. Finally I have come to the conclusion that although there may be plenty of engineers in the world who are smarter and more experienced than me, I can be as stubborn and persistent as any of them. Sure, I won't become an expert overnight, but I'm not afraid to ask questions and struggle with problems and figure things out. After all, that's what attracted me to engineering in the first place.

So for a few precious moments I feel like I can conquer the world (maybe drinking Dr. Pepper mid-afternoon is a good idea after all!) If only the program schedules included time for tasks like "learning stuff". At least I know that I have the total support and confidence of my manager and system architect, which is a pretty significant factor.

Sometimes I wish I were the smartest person in the world. But thinking about it more rationally, I suppose that first of all everyone would hate me, and secondly I would probably run out of challenges to solve. There's nothing quite as satisfying as the moment when the pieces of the puzzle finally click into place in my brain and lead to a solution that had seemed completely elusive. I suppose if the world always made sense at first glance there would be no excitement in discovery. So it seems that the relentless and competitive perfectionist in me must continue to cope with the frustrations of not being the fastest or the smartest or the most skillful at everything. Bummer. :)