Tangsheng

Hello. I am Tang Sheng. As my nationality suggests, I come from a family of Chinese origins. Traditionally, Chinese people relied on brute force method to remember things. In fact, the Chinese used brute force to do everything. This was also shown in their education system. The Chinese rely on hardwork while on the other side of the world, the westerners relied on creativity.

Since young, I have been introduced to stories of many great people. I was greatly inspired by the perseverance of Thomas Edison, who truly after many times found the suitable material for making a light bulb. I was really convinced that it’s 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Thus, I still held on to my mindset. However, as I grew up, I was introduced to different stories of successful people who didn’t do it purely out of hardwork. An example is Yang Chen Ning. For his success, he blended the Chinese traditional way of brute force hard work and the Western method of creativity. By then, I was confused whether to be like Yang Chen Ning or be like Thomas Edison. The question for me was – How would I get success? Is it through pure hard work or a balanced blend between hard work and creativity?

The Singapore education system was another stepping stone to my thinking, especially in the Gifted Education Programme(GEP) that I was selected in Primary School(Elementary School for other countries). The GEP encourages critical and creative thinking, and does not need any brute force memorization. Also, in the past I thought the brute force method works, but now I realize that it is uneconomical and is very time-consuming.

By then, I have already made up my mind – brute force is not always very effective. Therefore, when we first met up to discuss ideas, suggestions and our points of view on the subject, I made a point that creativity in effective memory techniques are all the more important. Also, I said that memorizing is an art and not something easily achieved by brute force, therefore smart memory improvement techniques have a place in our society. Truly, my ‘hypothesis’ was really correct and I have learnt what these ‘smart memory improvement techniques’ were.

This competition proved to be a tough obstacle for me - difficulties obstructing my way like huge hurdles that I had to jump over. These includes the web design as I was quite new to it and it was hard learning it with hardly any experience at all. Fortunately, my group members were there to help and support me and we shared some workload which really helped me. Also, although the expectations were high of us, we tackled it as a group and we jumped over the hurdle together with our teamwork bonding us together.