Thought Instrument

Perhaps you could have come up with other issues that matter more "freedom", like your personal health, your wealth accumulation, your amazing family or love relationship. However, if you are not able to face your personal health, wealth, or any of your relationships with a heart of freedom, all these seemingly beautiful and enjoyable things in life can turn out to be a unbearable burden. You may be physically very healthy but you could persistently be upset by some of your internal troubles and conflicts, to a point where constant depression and worries are slowly eroding your own will to even live. You sometimes may even wish that you could be the lying on a patient's bed, at least there will be someone who can comfort you and take good care of you. Having abundant wealth may not bring you happiness and a sense of security, for you may have to cast your worries everyday on the many eagle eyes preying on your wealth. The same goes for relationships, m...

Ever since the dawn of mankind, we have an innate tendency to attach a reason to everything to make sense of the world that we live in. We take a shot at contriving meanings for everything. We conceive theories in order to justify any patterns that we recognize amid all the noises in our everyday lives. In fact, what we do not realize is the downplaying on the element of luck and the role it plays in the eyes of those successful people. "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" ~ Seneca When we see a soccer player scoring goals and winning the game for the club, we conclude that he is the best player in the world. We spot a classmate scoring high marks on a test and we presume that he is one of the smartest in the class. We certainly expect the same kind of performance for subsequent tests. Anything less than a stellar result would be considered as something out of the ordinary.  If truth be told, it could simply be the soccer player or the student has g...

Do you ever have somebody around you who spend most of their waking hours at work? Whenever you try to ask them out, they claim to be always very busy and have seemingly never-ending work waiting to be completed. However, when you ask around their colleagues and bosses on how they are performing, they shake their heads in disbelief, like they have numerous untold stories to tell. In short, they are really busy, but the work they produce are not pretty. You may wonder, so what are they really busy at? It seems strange that if they were really putting in the hard work, why aren't the work done nicely? Where in the world could be the problem? The problem lies in them not really striving hard. They were simply toiling aimlessly.   Remember an instance when I was still in school, there was a classmate of mine that did the same things that many of the better students did. He spent his time studying whenever he could and he played hard as well. However, his school results were not...

If you never strive to live life your own way, who's ever going to live for you? You are not born in this world to satisfy other's expectation. Neither is anyone else born to satisfy your expectation.  If you insist on the things that is right for yourself, you should not be afraid of being hated by others.  If we care to stop and imagine for a while, for most of our waking hours, we constantly toil hard to maintain good people relationships; we thread cautiously in our speech for fear of offending others; we dare not speak up the truth since we are apprehensive about being condemned by the small social circle that we depend upon. This will not only cause us to concede the very principles that truly define who we are, and we may also make others think we are just being pretentious. Too concerned about what others think to a point where you lose yourself. Similar to what famous psychologist Alfred Adler has mentioned, in our interactions with other humans alike, w...

Always remember this: Never try to live a life afraid of making mistakes. For when you are afraid of making mistakes, you will have literally closed the doors to infinite possibilities. For when you are afraid of making mistakes, you will have missed a lot of beautiful scenes along the way. For when you are afraid of making mistakes, you will have missed the chances to create beautiful memories. For when you are afraid of making mistakes, you will have missed many opportunities to become a better version of yourself. For when you are afraid of making mistakes, you will have missed that dream of your lifetime. When the befallen mobile phone giant Nokia was acquired by Microsoft in 2015, Nokia CEO famously ended his speech by saying: "We didn't do anything wrong, but somehow we lost." Everyone from the management team began to tear sadly following that speech.  Indeed, Nokia might not have done anything wrong. But, clearly, doing nothing wrong was not enough. ...

If we care to step back from our daily worries and think deeply for just a moment, it is easy to conclude that we exist in this world to live out a certain purpose. To any other living organisms, protecting and ensuring the survival of their species are their only instincts. However, out of all living organisms on this Earth, we, as humans, seem to take Life most seriously. Throughout history, we have evolved and have become so sophisticated that worrying for our own basic physiological needs has simply been reduced to a small footnote in our lives. We have explored ideas and along the way, spawned so many activities (Sports, Politics, Hollywood glamour, etc.) that are seemingly unrelated to simply protecting survival. This is essentially tied to one thing: To live life happily with a sense of satisfaction. We have reached an age where we are able to make many choices in Life. However, we are, by nature, denied the information we would need to make the best choices with ultimate...

With today's increasingly connected society, Time has been an integral part of our lives in synchronizing tasks. The flight is scheduled at 9 am tomorrow. That basketball match is taking place tonight at 7 pm. No matter what kind of activities we involve ourselves in, getting to know the Time is certainly of utmost importance in navigating through our lives. Our incessant need to keep track of Time sort of beleaguers us to being slaves of our own invention. In olden times where Time was presented in a different texture, nature was our only calling in life. The movement of the Sun and Moon was our only way of telling the time. Time used to be a commodity which is seemingly in abundance and endless. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, our relentless race against the literal and our biological clock to try and amass ever more has sparked a phenomenal growth in amazing technologies that aim to surpass the current limits. Over centuries, we have made use of technologies to e...