The lessons which make an impact to our lives can come from unexpected teachers
Instead of trying to plan a perfect skillset, treasure the lessons and teachers that fate puts in our path.
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Both my parents worked pretty demanding jobs. Day to day childcare was left mostly to my grandparents. My grandmother spoke no English, and only a little Chinese. To communicate with her, she taught me our dialect, Cantonese. As I never used it in any other context as a child, and was only taught by my grandmother, my Cantonese is quite limited. I definitely cannot watch a tv show or movie without subtitles, but I can have simple conversations about everyday things. Things a grandmother would find important.
I commonly hear people spend effort to learn new languages because of their utility for work or leisure. In this case, it was simply a by-product of living under the same roof as my grandparents. I never thought of it as a skill with any utility beyond my daily family life.
Funny how, as my grandparents stopped living with me, and I have less interactions with them, knowing this dialect has found itself to be useful for me elsewhere.
Starting my career as a corporate lawyer, going to Hong Kong for work is pretty common. Knowing the local tongue made it easier for me to get around when I go there, and to connect with fellow professionals I had to work with. In my first few months in Lazada, I had a work trip there with a group of colleagues. Being able to speak Cantonese let me play a role in helping everyone else get around. I think this contributed to building my credibility and forging better connections among the team.
It recently occurred to me that knowing Cantonese likely made it much easier to learn Wing Chun too. My school has its roots in Hong Kong, and we use Cantonese to describe names and concepts. Being familiar with the language makes it easier for me to remember and understand all these terms.
If I thought about what is considered to be an important skill today, I would probably have considered learning Cantonese a poor use of my limited brain space. On another hand, many of the things I learnt at school had little application other than to secure grades in my exams. I have become skeptical about attempts to try and plan our learning and build a perfect skillset. These days, buzzwords like “re-skilling” and “future-proofing” are popular. I wonder if these do more to distract people by making them paranoid, and getting them to chase trends. It might be better to focus on leveraging off our circumstances and interests, and finding ways to apply the things that come naturally to us.
Who is worth learning from? We want teachers who have succeeded, having earned lots of money, built companies, or earned titles. We want proven methods of instruction, with various tricks to accelerate learning. These are not the only way to learn, and not necessarily the best. I learnt something useful from someone who had none of these. A simple elderly woman, with no education, but who wanted to care for her grandson. This taught me how we can learn from anyone and anywhere, that we should never discriminate.
We never know what will be useful to us, what is the best way to learn, and whom we might end up learn from. Trying to take control of life, to design and execute some perfect plan for success, is likely to be futile. It only distracts us from properly recognising that there is something to learn from everything and everyone around us, and to treasure all of these.
I mention usefulness several times, how I had learnt something useful for my career and my hobbies. Measuring usefulness against these individual goals is rather shallow though. I had learnt something that I could use to connect with and communicate with a person who loved and cared for me. This is a far more meaningful use of any skill.
James
In memory of my grandmother - 10 Nov 2020
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