Today, I finished the leakage current testing and verification with Xiaobing. It was so lucky that all the sixteen channels of front-end signal sampling and transformation circuits functioned properly. After postprocessing, the acquired leakage current data were consistent with my expectation.

Before today, this testing task was a headache for me, which is quite like the situation that when I have a software bug to solve, I am afraid of wading into the water, making tests and then figuring out what is going on there. This may be due to my inherent fear of chaos, mess, unexpected errors or problems. It may also be due to the lack of self-confidence, the fear of having failure and accompanying pseudo perfectionism and procrastination (Note: this is one of the routes leading to procrastination: lack of self-confidence → being afraid of failure or making mistakes → perfectionism → procrastination). If it had not been Xiaobing’s simple but effective idea, which is actually using a piece of wet paper to directly connect the electrodes so that the current flowing across the sample surface could increase with a large and observable amount, I might still struggle in vacancy with the insignificant and random-noise like weak signals, although I had increased the output voltage yesterday but it was still far from enough to see a large increase of current.

The reason why I haven’t got the idea of using wet paper as a bridge is that I felt this method was not so pleasant and elegant. This feeling or idea is ridiculous! Furthermore, it is because I am too afraid of making mistakes and making everything into a mess, i.e. I’m afraid that a too large current will make the circuit destroyed. This idea is also rootless and funny! Therefore, I just stood and stuck there with a vacant mind, did nothing meaningful or helpful!

After this experience, I begin to realize that if someone wants to be successful, he must be brave enough to do everything that could be helpful and implement every idea he could brew after logical and rational thinking, analysis, estimation and imagination. Moreover, he must be even shameless to make mistakes, from which he can get more valuable knowledge and experiences. When someone knows each road which leads to failure, he is not so far away from his final success.