His
success story:
1)
Discipline: He
had no Facebook during his undergraduate years, and probably only went online
for doing homework, assignments or coordinating projects. This reduced his
distraction span to zero.
2)
Emotional Intelligence: He could control his emotional and sexual impulses. He was
very socially intelligent around diverse groups, but he had in mind that having
a girlfriend during his undergraduate years would be a major distraction. Both
he and I when we were freshman knew that we wanted to go to USA for a PhD, so
we were lifelong buddies who always noticed the good and bad things about each
other. While I would sometime complain that he didn't go out on weekends
(because he never did), he would always complain that I cared too much about
appearance, partying and personal marketing. He was not socially handicapped as
some people might think a 'nerd' would be, he was actually a very mature person
who could talk about anything.
3)
Sacrifice: We
came from a place where dogs literally walked inside our classroom, and
cockroaches would on occasion crawl in our backpack in class. He didn't let any
of this get to him. He actually used the poor infrastructure of our engineering
building as a motivation, something like "one day I'm going to get out of
this hell hole, and do something great for science". He also had a great
sense of patriotism.
4)
Stellar passion and motivation: The first semester, I found out that he had the highest
GPA of the whole class, and I immediately called him by the phone. I didn't
understand a thing of what he said because the signal was low. However, the
next day he seemed very depressed and told me that his grandfather had passed
away. His grandfather was like his father to him and he never got the chance to
tell him that he achieved first place in his engineering class. Little did we
know, after a couple of weeks we realized not only was he the first in class,
he was first in the entire campus achieving the highest GPA (grades in Peru are
from 0 to 20, and with no curve). He graduated Summa Cum Laude 2 years ago, and
got the highest GPA at our university over the last 30 years. The other person
previous to him was Barton Zwiebach, a renowned Peruvian
string theorist and Professor at MIT.
5)
No pain, no gain: He went overkill sometimes to achieve his goal. I'm
talking things like not having lunch to study an extra hour, sleep 4-5 hours a
day at least 5 days a week, sleeping on the bus to get extra sleep time, and
most dazzling thing of all was that most of the time he didn't go to class. He
just stayed studying in the library and was at least 2 or 3 weeks ahead of the
professor. Even if he did go to class, he rarely paid attention, he would go
over his books to see what methods other authors would teach. He would buy and
download at least 5 different books per subject and read them all to learn and
to study for the test. He would go over all the proofs and learn them, study
them, do them, sometimes reinvent the proofs or see if he could grasp the
concept in anticipation of what the book would reveal.
6)
Selecting friends: His paradigm for selecting friends (or colleagues) was
impressive. He didn't care if it was me (a spoiled rich kid), or the son of a
blue-collar family that was a national math Olympiad. He valued people for
their ideas and it didn't matter to him where they were from, but where they
were going.
7)
Becoming a preacher: He was never reluctant on teaching. Whenever anyone would
ask him something he would go over the concepts and explain it to him. This was
really beneficial for our closed group of friends, as we each learned different
concepts and he checked with us or we discussed any doubts we had.
8)
Be ambitious: All
of his life, he was the best at everything he did. Before enrolling at our
engineering school, he was making around $3000 a month by only winning Magic
The Gathering Card competitions, and he was Peru's #1 player and Ranked in the
top 10 world wide. *Not bad for a 16 year old, at that time.
9)
He majored in Robotics Engineering: So yes, he did learn Optimal and Digital Control, Fourier
Analysis, Triple integrals, differential equations, etc.. We didn't have
computers for our programming tests, they were all done on pen and paper.
10)
He was incredibly humble.
He
started graduate school at 22
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