Posts

Showing posts from 2015

Are You Living With A False Sense of Existence?

Image
In today's information driven society, there exists an illness regarding our existence. We have this fear that our existence are being eliminated by the constant flooding of information coming at us from all direction. We are also afraid of not being able to catch up with the times as technology advances at rapid speed. Those are the reasons why most of us tend to take photographs of our meals, tag ourselves wherever we go, just so that, through social medias, everyone would hopefully remember that we even exist in this world. Human existence in entirety seems to have evolved into a spiritual crisis in modern society. Credit: Zen Gardner Now, imagine your boss asks you to complete a project assignment. You devote to it wholeheartedly but nobody has ever bothered to ask anything about it for 40 odd years, how would you feel? What kind of human existence would you consider it to be if you have put in decades of your life into contributing to an important project assignmen

Our Addiction With The Pleasures In Life

Image
We are all addicted to something. Whether it is for good or bad, we should accept that we almost always do it in order to experience pleasure as an after-effect. If we get what we want, we feel pleased and the pleasure we get as a result reinforces the idea of wanting ever more. That mental representation of some desired state will linger in our minds and cause us to direct our energy to realise it. Life certainly has a funny way of dealing with our addiction in obtaining pleasure. Just when we thought we are smart enough to escape the evil claws of our addictions , we soon realise the resulting pleasure does not last long despite the major events that take place in our lives. We, as humans, have the tendency to focus very much on making changes and it is this ability to adapt that limits our opportunities for very lasting pleasures. We find ourselves quickly conforming to these incoming pleasures that we were once convinced they will bring, only to repeatedly finding ourselv

Delaying Gratification in Today's Culture of Immediacy

Image
In the famous Marshmallow experiment conducted by psychologist  Walter Mischel in the 1960s, he attempted to find out the correlation between a person's ability to wait out their temptations for a bigger rewards and their eventual life outcomes. The children were given a marshmallow in front of them and were told to wait for the researchers to come back before they can eat it. If they were able to resist eating the marshmallow after the researchers came back after a period of time, they would received another marshmallow as a reward. As expected, some children were able to wait and some could not. Over the course of this whole experimentation, Walter Mischel and his team realised that children who were able to resist the temptation of eating the marshmallow in front of them tend to perform better in life when they are older. This is widely termed as "Delayed Gratification", which simply means the ability to reject instant reward in exchange for a larger reward in the

The Difference Between Someone Who Is Successful And Someone Who Is A Snob

Image
We work hard to achieve something for various reasons. These reasons can be generalised into two main types. The first kind is those people who work hard trying to simply impress others while the other is simply hard at work. The difference between these two is that the former is just snobbery and the latter will actually attain more fulfilment in life. In today's capitalistic and meritocratic society, there is bound to be people whose aim is to work hard in order to make lots of money. These people achieve status through their financial prowess and their self-worth is measured only by money (and only money alone). Nothing else matters to them.  The "I-have-much-more-than-you-so-I-must-be-naturally-better-than-you" mentality has brought about a mistaken attitude that a person's character can only be quantified by the amount the money one possesses. There is a reason why some very rich people bring about a character that can be very frowned upon. They enjoy fl

Every Failure = 1 Step Closer To Success

Image
Ever wonder why we are so unfazed by the people who often just stick to the status quo? It is because they choose to avoid failure by choosing not to start on it. These people treat failure as the end. In short, those who have it easy live an unfulfilling life.  Truth be told, we must always regard  Failure as a source of valuable revenue in life. Life is so short that we ought to regard the experiences we go through seriously. Let us stop looking failure as something that will pull us away from our ultimate goal but rather start seeing that failure is something we will all encounter along the road to our ultimate success. Nobody who was ever successful in this world had it easy. They all certainly had days when they doubted the outcome but what differentiates them from the rest is that they are not afraid of failures. They will come face to face with failures at times, but they are not hindered by them. This is because they know that  NOT starting on it is also pa

Let's Not Rush To Become A Fool

Image
We often just let life happen to us even when the things in life start to go awry and fall out of pace. In essence, w e have the tendency to have the passenger mentality in life. We succumb to what life has on offer through actions of our own and nobody else.  There are three key points about life we ought to adhere to: Choice, Self-belief, and Determination. There is a short story I like to share: Once there was a girl from the rural part of Russia whose dream is to become a ballet dancer. In order to fulfil her dream, she practiced day and night. She eventually performed very well, and was placed well above the ballet dancers in her age group to succeed. However, as the dance moves got more complicated, she started to experience failures at a higher rate. As a result, her self-belief faltered and doubted her ability to perform at the highest level.  One day, a world renowned ballet dancer was invited to perform in her village where this girl was from. In order to judge her ski

Piecing Up Life's Puzzle

Image
You must always learn to be frugal in life. This is because saving up money is like piecing together a puzzle. You save up a little piece from here and a little piece from there just so that one day, you can finally piece your way up to achieving the freedom that you always long for. You should not be afraid of making financial mistakes, or any mistakes in life for that matter, because mistakes will eventually pass you by. What is left is that these mistakes will teach you the importance of proper financial management.  Never mind the returns may be low in the beginning because you can always learn to pick up higher returns along the way. More importantly, it is how frugal you can be. Without frugality, no amount of money in the world can satisfy your insatiable appetite for spending ever so more.  Lastly, never forget the little footsteps that you make at every step of the way. With patience, every step can let you finish the longest of roads, just like how little sum of

Life's Journey is Like Traversing a Mountain

Image
Life is akin to climbing a mountain. The easy part is always the down slope. Whenever you are facing a problem in life, it means you are likely on your way up slope. Credit: sunrise666 It may feel like two steps forward and one step back many a times when we are going through life. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it: "...Whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward." We always face pressure from all around us and the first thing we do is we tend to find comfort in the things that we do. More often than not, these things that we fall back on do not help us move forward. The funny thing is about life is, although the pressure may vanish, it does not mean that they are completely gone from your life; and while money can always be replenished in many ways, the time and effort that we put in to earn it will forever be gone. In this one life that we live in, we must learn to handle pressure well. You must support yourself wholeheartedly no matter what because

The Frame of Your Life

Image
I have learnt to live with the belief that all the things that each of us do in life are never in vain. Everything we have done in the past eventually led us to where we are now in the present. When we choose to accept or deny something in our lives, we are forming a frame on how we are living it. We get a college degree because we trust that it will  somehow  lead to a higher paying job thus increasing our standard of living. Choosing to help someone may fall into the frame of wanting to serve the people for the betterment of the community. We invest our money in hope that it will fund the things that we have always wanted to do. We may defy social conventions because we feel that the world should be free and not be bounded down. Fundamentally, all of us hope that everything that we do in the present will mould each of our future closer to where we feel is desirable. So, in order to find out what you want to do in life, take a snapshot of the life you ultimately desire and

What Is Your Worth Outside Of Your Job Title And Salary?

Image
Have you ever asked yourself who are you outside of your day job? Have you realised that very likely the only time when you bother to pen down something about yourself, it is probably updating your résumé listing out your past experiences working in a job that you thought would add some worthiness in your life? Have you also realised that probably when you talked a stranger up to get to know him or her, the first thing that is brought up, more often than not, will be linked your role in a job and the salary that is being drawn? Summarily, most of us seem to be "exchanging our time for money"  doing a job for a company that does not define you as a person.  This is very aptly depicted by the cartoon strip by Cat and Girl. Credit: Cat and Girl  So, let us stop wasting our time on working for things that don't matter to us deep down inside and start building your own future by defining your self-worth that is unique to each and everyone of us. Start by asking y

My Freedom Fund

Image
As I embark on my journey for the betterment of myself and the world, one of my plans is to get vested in what I call it as "My Freedom Fund".  Part of this journey is for me to share with everybody my frugal way of living as well as other ways to supplement my work income.  This Chinese Idiom, 開源節流, tells about opening new incoming source and reducing outflow. In order for me to optimally increase my wealth accumulation, I have to find ways to generate the wealth as well as reducing my personal expenditure. Hence, I started this personal fund, named "My Freedom Fund", at the start of 2015. I feel something is indeed missing with my life. I was not born with a silver spoon and certainly have no inheritance to take over from. When I graduated from a local university in 2013, I thought everything was all set in stone and  would be rosy . I was so wrong. At that moment, I was in debt with literally no savings in my bank account. I realise the need to have in

Labour Day 2015

Image
Labour Day, synonymous with International Workers' Day, is an official annual holiday in Singapore that occurs on 1st May. This is in honour of the mass workers in the workforce, inclusive of myself.  My ultimate goal is for everybody to celebrate everyday when you and I are alive in this world, not just to celebrate this day because we do not have to go to work. I know of many people who are working just to make ends meet but we need to acknowledge that life does not have to be this way. You yourself chose to ride down this path and only you yourself can make things right. Nobody can ever do it for you. Always remember, we have only this one life we are given s o let us aim for a future where we can wake up  and celebrate  everyday, not just the days when we are away from our dreadful work .  My personal rule of thumb: "Always validate your own life on your own terms. Do not ever let others define you because you are not their possession." Finally, whatever it ma

Road Signs For Your Life

Image
How often do you wish that you could go through life having it your way? How often do you wish that at every crossroads of your life, you get road signs to tell you where to go? I know I did. Many things in life I hoped I could have done it another way but not anymore. Let us define our own road signs from now on and set ourselves up to achieve more than we ever could.