Tonight is the last night of this chapter of mine. A lengthy chapter, filled with hopes, dream, laughter and most of all, love. But it was also filled with anger, disappointment, tears and most of all, pain. All things must come to an end, eventually, and so will this chapter of mine. I have to admit, I am getting misty eyes just thinking the end of this chapter.
Tomorrow it will be a new chapter, and hopefully, a better one.
From Harvard Business Review:
1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.
I have been stagnant too long. I have not put in enough effort and time for self growth. I was hardly reading any books, let alone spending time to improve myself.
I asked myself why that it was possible for me to spend hours a day previously, in front of my PC, farming* while I can’t spend any effort to improve myself? That was when I realised a change in mindset was necessary. I need to think of life as a game. Hours spent farming* basically means hours spent reading a book, going for a self improvement course, or getting some certification in life. The only way to see if this new view of life was going to work for me was to put it to the test.
I decided to get my driving license.
Now, most people around my age will have obtained their driving license long before me. The thing was that I didn’t have the money to go for my driving lessons last time, and when I did, I really didn’t have the time. Of course, the fact that it was a chore going for the driving lessons didn’t really motivate me. So putting this new view of life to the test, I went for my driving lessons. It was really no difference between game farming* and going for driving lessons. I went to the driving centre for my driving lesson once a week, during the weekend. It was a 2 hours to and fro journey, for a 100 minutes lesson, for 6 months. Doing the same activity each weekend was really a chore, but by treating it as a real life farming*, I held on.
After spending 2500+ minutes on driving lessons over a period of around 6 months, I went for the driving test, which only lasted 30 minutes, and I passed. Driving license obtained. Achievement obtained.
Viewing it like a real life farming* really makes it easier. On those days when I just want to skip the lesson, I just told myself that if I can spend hours in a game doing the same task again and again, then I am sure I can do it in real life. It helped me to stay motivated. I am definitely going to use the apply the same mindset from now on. I will take a little break, before deciding what to go for next. The Project Management Professional certifications looks tempting.
*farming in games means repeatedly doing a boring mundane task to gain a certain object over and over again.
What do you do when you encounter an obstacle?
Do you run away? Do you pretend it does not exist? Do you find another way around it? Do you try to solve the problem and make the obstacle disappear?
I notice that each time I encounter an obstacle, I do not talk about it. I try to avoid the subject. To others, they think that I am pretending it does not exist. In fact, it is the entire opposite. I run through the obstacle in my mind all the time, probing, finding various ways to overcome the obstacle, and visualising the consequences, outcome of each one. In fact, this can take a long time, and it weighs so heavily on me that I go to sleep thinking about it, and thinks about it the first thing when I wake up. On the outside, I seem to be ignoring the obstacle, but underneath I am examining all the possible ways, workarounds, in overcoming the obstacle. The moment when I arrive at what I think is the best way to overcome an obstacle, I will go ahead and do it.
Perhaps I need to come to a decision on the way to overcome an obstacle faster, else people will think that I am procrastinating, sitting on it, and pretending the obstacle is not there.
Found this somewhere:
the brief guide to life:
less TV, more reading
less shopping, more outdoors
less clutter, more space
less rush, more slowness
less consuming, more creating
less junk, more real food
less busywork, more impact
less driving, more walking
less noise, more solitude
less focus on the future, more on the present
less work, more play
less worry, more smiles
breathe
Excellent read on how modern life is like a zombie:
My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead
This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long we keep deleting whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid.
Battling zombies is like battling anything … or everything.
For me, I think life is like a roleplaying game.
“How do you get over it?”
“You don’t. When one day you’ll wake up you find that you don’t mind carrying around with you, at least that’s as far as I’ve come.”
– Castle Season 1 Episode 7
Caught this off Twitter:
I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade… And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.
– Ron White
It was the time when everyone rushed home from work. The train was packed. I waited patiently for the passengers to alight before entering.
A burly guy also entered the train at the same time as me, trying to barge me aside. However due to my weight, he did not succeed. His eyes widened, and perhaps embarrassed, he lifted up his land and tried to elbow me.
Fortunately for me, I had stopped to let him enter first, and the elbow missed its mark. Discovering that he missed, he decided to try one more time, swinging his heavy laptop bag around, hoping the bag will hit me. By this time, I had given him ample room after realising what he was trying to do, and again the bag missed its mark.
It was not possible to make any more attempts as the people behind entered the train, and he was surrounded by other passengers. As the train moved off, I looked at him and smiled, amused at his behaviour. He refused to look at me, preferring to stare at the neck of the passenger standing in front of him.
It was then that I realised I must be really getting old. The younger fiery version of me would have retaliated, most probably by stepping on his foot and pushing him aside. Instead, the current me is actually smiling at his actions.