A thorn to one's flesh...

I remember once when an acquaintance mentioned that once you have achieved the ultimate goal in one life, you can just slide into complacency and no longer worry about achieving excellence. Meaning, as long as the status quo is maintained, there is no need to worry your head about looking for new and greater challenges.

Well, this seems to haunt Malaysia nowadays, in all fields, and especially in academia, where the ethos has always been to strive to be better and better in your field and your job, whatever post you hold. But here, it is a matter of buttering up just to maintain your position. So, all talks of excellence are rattlings of empty vessels, made worse by a fawning media who seemed to take over the roles of spin doctors.

So, has the fact that system make it so easy for one to stay in one position without continuously proving oneself been a source of many flowering talents that just disappear, or has the system actually been the source of the creation such "flowers" who wouldn't had been there in the first place? This seems to range from excelling in public school exams all the way to the top positions in the country.

Even for those with grit and determination, it seems to now require a more extraordinary sort to actually go beyond complacency and delusion of self-grandeur...