So do I. [Read more…]
What I learned in 2014
As all years, 2014 was one of ups and downs, with more mistakes than successes made in this one, but one that I was happy to pass through.
I look back at the past year and take note of all the lessons I learned. It was not such a bad year after all. [Read more…]
On Death and Living
The death of my colleague and friend had come as a surprise.
No one had expected this at all. Her spirits were high, even as she stayed in the hospital and had not seemed to be getting better.
She was only 56.
At 58, she was one of the longest serving persons at the organisation in which she worked. Started out as a technician, and until recently, promoted to a director.
It seemed like she worked hard to reach there. It was something she wanted to achieve in time.
I couldn’t help but think how it must be to work all that time, only to not live to enjoy retirement? It got me thinking about my own life. The way I work and want to work so that I could enjoy later. And that my family can be well taken care of.
I’ve been taking in the 4-Hour workweek and I’ve been questioning the wisdom of just that.
Why can’t I enjoy life now? Why must I sacrifice to enjoy life later on?
I’ve questioned it, and questioned it, but have not come to believe that it can be done.
There is a fear that if I do stop to enjoy life now, even for a bit, that things may fall down. That I would miss deadlines. That projects would fail. That my business would collapse.
Perhaps if I keep questioning it, I would come to believe that I can stop and smell the roses once in a while. Perhaps…
Or I could keep working and die an untimely death, losing all the time that I had “saved” for the future enjoyment.
Rest in peace Carol my friend. Rest in peace.
Do your children inherit your fears?
Can your fears and personality be passed on to your children?
I’ve often wondered about this, and even more so as I’ve noticed a few things in my own children that makes me believe that it can.
I suffer from fear of failure, so I tend to procrastinate when faced with tasks that I may fail at, or don’t do anything if there is the possibility that I may fail at it. I see this same behaviour in my eldest child. If I saw it in my youngest one, I would have thought nothing of it, and that it was just something that the children go through. But the youngest is quite brave and would do something and fail, and then go back and do it again.
My eldest would also stick with easier tasks rather than trying very difficult things (a symptom of fear of failure), which is something that I used to do, and still do to some extent. I continue to work towards overcoming my procrastination and other fears that keep me back, so I’ve been able to overcome this to some extent.
I used to believe that this problem was due to the fixed mindset. But I’ve tried from since birth to not instill a fixed mindset in my children, but the growth mindset instead. For example, by praising effort and not intrinsic talent like “being smart”.
So if it is the fixed mindset, where did it come from? School perhaps? If so, then we need to review how our school system is educating our children.
But if we were to consider that it’s not that, and it is an innate personality trait, then our children can inherit our bad traits.
Fortunately, I’ve worked out some of my bad traits and found ways to reduce their impact, so I can help my eldest overcome hers (one was the issue with mindset). Then, we can work on the others together.
It may not then be a terrible thing that you can pass on your bad habits to your children, once you believe in self-development and improving yourself.
And, on the plus side, it also means that you can pass on your good habits too.
By the sweat of thy brow, thou shall eat bread
For those of you familiar with the bible, you would know that the title is taken from Genesis 3:19.
I’m no bible beating person, heck, I follow no religion, but I do follow some of the teachings taken across a multitude of them. This one verse (or half a verse) I’ve always taken to heart.
You see I’ve always believed that you need to work for your gains. It doesn’t have to be back breaking work, but it has to be work. And that’s how I live my life. I work hard, sometimes long hours, in the expectation that I can make a proper living (eat food).
But looking at much of the world’s wealthy, many of them are becoming wealthier merely because they are wealthy. Now I have a problem with that.
I have no problem with them becoming wealthy from the work they did, but to afterwards put your money into some “wealth management” company to “make your money work for you” seems to be going against the grain of what we should actually be doing.
Having your money work for you, is just making you richer because you were rich to begin with. Shouldn’t we become richer by providing more value to the world in which we live. By being productive and getting a return on that production?
Perhaps I’m thinking with a scarcity mindset when it comes to wealth, but I do think that when wealth is skewed towards the very wealthy, then what happens to the very poor?
Then there are times when I do question the wisdom of “sweat of your brow”.
There’s a man who walks up and down the street by me selling belts, undergarments and other things, in the hot sun all weekend (and probably weekdays, but I’ve never noticed). I’m sure he’s doing a lot of sweating; is he getting a proportional gain in return?
I know the value of that service is not as great as a doctor’s or an engineer’s (although it’s probably more that a politician’s). But it serves to point that some of the disadvantaged may have to work many time harder just to survive as compared to the very rich, who need not work at all (because their money is working for them) and is just becoming richer by the minute.
I don’t know why I have a problem with the super wealthy. Have you ever considered that if I gather lots of newspapers in my house I’m a hoarder, but if I gather lots of money, I’m a success story?
I just think it’s wrong to have massive amounts of wealth, and using it to make even more massive amounts of wealth.
Perhaps there are people out there who can change my mind, but I think it would be better if there was a far more equitable distribution of wealth. Of course I expect everyone to be working equally as hard to achieve whatever wealth that they did get.
The Judgement of Parenting
In the news today, a man found a toddler near a highway in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
The toddler’s parents were outside while the toddler was napping and asked their 12 year old son to keep an eye on her. Sometime during the period, the toddler awoke, got up and wandered out of the house, towards the highway.
The parents are now being charged with neglect. [Read more…]
If I won the lottery…
Another millionaire created this weekend. The lotto winner went away with TT$15.9 million (US$2.4) in a few blinks of the eye. [Read more…]
What my final year university project taught me about failure, perfectionism and handling stress
I came across my old notebook that I used for my final year undergraduate project in Electrical Engineering. Going through it I felt a sense of nostalgia as I remembered those days — all the days and nights spent in the labs, the camaraderie with fellow classmates and the excitement in the air as people got their projects working.
But what I remembered the most was… how much I crumbled under the stress during that project. The project was simple. I could have done well, but my quest for perfection got to me and eventually I was overwhelmed by the pressure of the many failures and coming deadlines. [Read more…]
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