Thought Instrument

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...

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...

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...

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 f...

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...

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. I...

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...