I spent a good portion of my life teaching Physics, about 15 years.  I even spent the summers teaching physics teachers how to teach physics.  I love the subject.  There’s always something new, a new rabbit hole to go down.  

Solving a physics problem, or a math problem, or an engineering problem, for me, is more joyful and exciting than hearing the punchline of a joke.  There is something immensely satisfying about a suddenly realized and hard-earned truth.

And all the time I was teaching, I saw a disturbing pattern that I see in electronics engineering as well.  People tend to think that others are somehow “smarter” than them.  I don’t believe that.

I believe some people simply have more experience, more opportunities, and more mental space to absorb it all.  The difference in thinking?  “Smart” is genetic, you’re born with it or you aren’t.  There’s no reason to even try if you aren’t.  “Experience” is earned through hard work and risk.  

Every time someone would say “I’m bad at math”, I’d go to my desk drawer and pull out a copy of the article: “The Myth of I’m Bad at Math” from The Atlantic.  

If your personality and your home and work life allow time and room for hard work and risk, you will look around in a few years and realize that others think you are “smarter” than them, when you are really just far more experienced.   

At that point, you will have made the mistakes they don’t know exist yet.  You will have stretched your brain in new and exciting ways.

Try to redefine your definition of “success” and “failure” as they relate to learning.  Schools teach that success is measured with a grade.  But there are few things in life that are graded with an A-F scale.  So what will success look like to you?  Is it the product that you hold in your hand at the end of a design cycle?  I don’t think so.  In most cases, you can go buy a commercial off the shelf (COTS) version right now and save two months of your life.  It’s what your product represents that is important.  And what is represents is a struggle, perseverance, hard work, and the opportunity you embraced to gain new knowledge and new experiences.  

You will learn more from your mistakes and board failures than you ever will from a board that happens to work right through dumb luck.  I still have the very first board I designed, and all it ended up being was as expensive fire-hazard.

So what again does success look like?  From all of my experience gained in teaching those 15 years, I came to believe success comes from learning, and learning is an interactive process.  

You have to participate, seek feedback, and disconnect, mentally, from the idea that a mistake represents some character flaw, it is not. And questions are not signs of weakness. A mistake is an opportunity to learn.  Interaction might be in the forums, interaction might be in notes or a diary, interaction might be a quiet meditation with an idea at your desk during lunch.  But interaction requires action on your part.  For me, that interaction is with the words on the pages that I write and present to readers.  I am certain that I learn more from writing content than you will ever learn by merely reading it.

Try to redefine your definition of “success” and “failure” as they relate to learning.  Schools teach that success is measured with a grade.  But there are few things in life that are graded with an A-F scale.  So what will success look like to you?  Is it the product that you hold in your hand at the end of a design cycle?  I don’t think so.  In most cases, you can go buy a commercial off the shelf (COTS) version right now and save two months of your life.  It’s what your product represents that is important.  And what is represents is a struggle, perseverance, hard work, and the opportunity you embraced to gain new knowledge and new experiences.  

You will learn more from your mistakes and board failures than you ever will from a board that happens to work right through dumb luck.  I still have the very first board I designed, and all it ended up being was as expensive fire-hazard.

So what again does success look like?  From all of my experience gained in teaching those 15 years, I came to believe success comes from learning, and learning is an interactive process.  

You have to participate, seek feedback, and disconnect, mentally, from the idea that a mistake represents some character flaw, it is not. And questions are not signs of weakness. A mistake is an opportunity to learn.  Interaction might be in the forums, interaction might be in notes or a diary, interaction might be a quiet meditation with an idea at your desk during lunch.  But interaction requires action on your part.  For me, that interaction is with the words on the pages that I write and present to readers.  I am certain that I learn more from writing content than you will ever learn by merely reading it.

“I’m not a real engineer”, “I’m just an ….,”, “I’m not an EE”, etc…  If you write these words in a forum because you are being deferential, and maintaining a polite tone, that’s one thing, and that’s fine.  But if you believe what you are writing, I’d like to encourage you to hold yourself in higher regard.  

Put yourself out there, ask questions.  We’ve got some very smart people in this field, but I assure you, they weren’t always that way.  At some point, they were the scared undergrad — wondering why everyone is so smart but them.  

I truly believe the day you stop pushing yourself to expand as an engineer, a learner, and as a human being should be the last day of your life.

If a problem is solvable, an engineer will find a solution, and that engineer can be you.  Yes, there are geniuses out there, but they are few and far between.  The rest of us mere mortals get to where we want to be through hard work and perhaps a little luck.  So push yourself to learn something new this week.  Ask questions. 

I’ve made mistakes, and I will continue to make mistakes.  Electronics engineering is far too complex a concept to tackle alone, especially when life gets in the way.  Put me in a quiet dark room and leave me to work, and you’ll get a great product in very little time.  Put me in life, where the gardener is outside with the leaf blower, the dog needs to be walked, my wife has been furloughed, thousands of my countrymen are dying, my 92-year old neighbor is depressed, isolated and needs groceries, and I’ve got a child with a fever and possibly the pandemic illness, and I will turn in the work that looks like it was produced by an illiterate high school freshman — that is not weakness, that is life.

Everyone reading this post is on a different rung of the ladder — and some people were born on on different ladders.  The whole point of life is to keep climbing when you can, and holding on for dear life when you can’t.  I’ll leave you with two questions: What does success these next few months look like to you?  How will you achieve it?  We’d love to know, leave a comment below.