Color of Childhood

I walked outside for an hour and noticed a children's playground. I wandered around the colorful slides, monkey bars, and swings. Why are things for children so colorful while the same things for adults are so colorless? Perhaps the answer lies in the difference between the mind of kids and those of adults. When we're young, everything is new and fresh. Once we grow older, we no longer care to see the world as a new thing every day. Our senses become dulled and what used to be alive and interesting to us becomes a colorful splash of eyesore.

Entrepreneurship: Not Just Dreaming

From reading the book Linchpin by Seth Godin and talking to Nishanth earlier, I understand that I should start working on my dreams and actually finish them. Otherwise, I should just suck up and get a mediocre job. It has been clear to Nishanth for a while that I say the words "I am going to do <something>..." too much and actually do too little.

Frankly, what I have achieved so far with projects and ideas have mostly been of other people's origins. I have many original ideas not conceived by others but I have yet to reach a satisfied level of completion in my view. The reason in the past was due to a naive assumption that I can just work on something for a month or so and the results will be there. Over the last two years since graduation, I realized that anything worthy of doing takes at least half a year or more of persistent effort. For this reason, in recent times, I have done less with my own ideas and concentrated working on group projects.

In other words, the reason today for failing to accomplish my own ideas is because since I know how hard it is and how much persistent effort I have to put in, I have been reluctant to start with the fear that I won't have enough time or energy and will merely get disappointed and give up like in the past. Yet, from talking with Nishanth today and reading the book by Seth Godin, it's clear to me that I should pursue my own ideas and not give up. If I decide to choose the more difficult path of pursuing a dream, I should have enough willpower and persistence to both start and complete it.

As Nishanth said earlier today, "Too much dreaming is when there's no work. Even if you just have two dreams but don't do any work, that's still too much dreaming. Realizing a dream is hard. Realizing a normal life (a defined job) is relatively easy."

My Rocket Journey

My journey towards my dreams is like a multistage rocket heading out to space. First, I set my coordinates and then the path to get there. I made sure that my dream was higher up than many so that my trajectory would be more inclined towards the vertical than the horizontal. I would like my rocket to spend most of its journey heading up instead of horizontally.

Unfortunately, over the last years, I have uncovered that one of my rocket engines on the second stage are failing. A failed second stage prevents the third stage or any stage after that from firing. The spectators believe this is since I haven't fired my engines with full thrust. Since they are not the chief engineer in charge of the rocket design, they don't know that one of my engines is misfiring in the opposite direction of flight. Tired of trying to explain and not seeing continued results, I informed the spectators that I'll be taking a break from test launching rockets.

Instead, I retreated to my machine shop and thoroughly examined the malfunctioning engine. Previously, quick fixes were applied to satisfy the launch dates set by spectators. Now, I decided to work on my own schedule and repair the engine as much as possible before continuing. In the coming months, I hope to recover it well enough that I can once again launch.

Literature: Sky (天空)

觉得从未用中文写过诗就试了一下自己的文学：

千里旅途，停留湖静，

低头饮水，水清如镜。

云朵如羽，层层漂浮，

微风拂过，水乱云散，

一片水光，五色灿烂。

举头一望，碧空万里，

光线刺空，刻上天衢。