I have to say that it didn't struck me when my mom told me: "It's always you, Jeph, not doing things to your full potential."
Because then I confirmed to myself that such is my case. Along my school years, I crawled myself to every graduation. Not because there's some obstacles or anything, just because I don't want to stand tall. It wasn't until I lived and studied in Melbourne that I quite, well, "excel" in what I did back then. The rest of the school years? I was just a boy who always sit on the middle row during any award presentation.
It's just today that I figured out why my young mind subconsciously put me in that state.
I live in Indonesia, a country that is SO full of shit, they don't even know they stink. Regarding this matter of not unleashing my potential, however, I have one problem that the 5-years old me appeared to have it figured out before I even realize it: subjectivity over objectivity.
Fellow Indonesians would agree to my following statement, but I guarantee they never would have figured it out themselves. We (Indonesians) live in an educational environment where our final marks are not only determined by the things that we did or achieved, but strangely also how we behaved in class or (even more importantly) towards our teachers. PAUSE HERE, and read the previous sentence again, thrice if you need to.
WHERE'S THE LOGIC IN THAT?
I'd simply put it in a hypothetical situation like this: if there are two students, A and B who got the (supposedly) same marks, let's say they got a perfect score of 10 (yes, we don't use letters as marks). B would get a 9.5 if once upon a time he told the teacher "I don't like your teaching methods, it slows me down." Do you see how subjectivity rules in this hypothetical situation? Now think back and replay all the educational events in your life that is actually ruined because of things like this.
I was once given a warning in my report card that "Jeph talks too much in class." Back then I thought it was wrong, okay, but when you think of it...... Why would someone who is so eager to communicate with his classmates be refrained from doing so? What does it matter if at the end of the semester that kid got a perfect score anyway?
Don't even get me started on appearance. How you dress defines your personality, here in Indonesia.
So, have I been restraining myself from unleashing my potential? Or is it actually under tremendous pressure from the environment, that my sane mind prohibited me from doing so?
Why would I want to excel in an educational environment that judge a book by its cover?
