Summary of This Week

It’s very tense time the other days in VPO, though I didn’t show anything to my boss until the last day of the week, there were many things I had to learn, but all the other staff are always very busy, so I had to get my questions prepared, once any of them got a minute’s idle time, I seized it and popped up my question. On the first day in the office, Didier gave me some documents to read, it’s part of the department’s business, but not complete. I finished reading them very quickly, of course I didn’t read them precisely, just a general scan, then Didier asked me to have a meeting with him, he started to give me assignments, he talked for about two hours, there were many terms and expressions I didn’t understand, because I was not used to his accent and those business relative terms didn’t appear the materials I read, so there were many unclear points, but I always nodded my head and said “yeah”, I don’t know why I said yes when I actually didn’t understand him very much, the reason may be that I used to say yes most of time, so the answer to no matter what question is always yeah. A series of “yeah” caused a lot of problems latter, the director thought I understood what he said cause my answer was “yeah”, but actually I didn’t, after our meeting, he left me alone and gave no instructions any more. I stared at my key points paper he wrote to me (he kept all the key points of our meeting on a paper) but got no idea how to start mywork, his handwriting was totally different from the way Chinese write English, I don’t know if it’s also very bad when compares with other French handwritings, anyhow, I can’t understand those words on that piece of paper. I didn’t want to ask him again about my task, that may disappoint him seriously and make me stupid, I tried to ask Bing about my work, he is a Chinese, I though he may knew what I should do and where to start, unfortunately, he didn’t know it, and neither did other colleagues, then I started to think that I have to understand the system before I can classify those files and build a perfect folding system, in the following three days, I did nothing but reading those files and documents, and tried to figure out how the system works, the procedure of the whole department business, the role of the department in the whole group, the relation between our department and it’s divisions and suppliers, etc. After I finally got a little clearer about my work, some unexpected thing happened, I asked for leave when the end of August, Didier got quite angry like I said in my former blogs, the most impressive thing he said was that I had been in the office for four days and showed him nothing but was already asking for leave. I was a little surprised at that, I thought I was working so hard, I asked so many questions, read so many files, if I score my performance of those four days, I would gave 8 in 10, but he said I showed him nothing, which means my performance was very poor, the reason maybe that I gave him no results about my work, and that’s true. He told me not to think about doing big things all day, just do little things, and improve it day by day, then that would be a big thing. He was right, I was thinking about creating a perfect folding system by first understanding the system expressly, but no results came out. Learn while doing is always the best way.
OK, for summary, there are two things I think I learned this week:
1. Never say yes when you don’t get it, there is a Confucius saying in China: “知之为知之,不知为不知,是知也” which means say yes when you know it, say no when you don’t know it, that’s real know.
2. Never dream doing great thing or do perfect thing without start to try it. Never mind making mistakes, try it, and then improve it, that’s the way how big thing is accomplished.