As a person who follows the economy closely, the wait to get my copy of “on the brink” was insufferable. It allowed me to go through the crisis chronologically from the regulator’s point of view while reminiscing my own experience and anguish felt at each major event. that led to the fall. First, some quote from the beginning of the book where Hank Paulson shared his insights on life which I find myself agreeing with more and more as I age.
P23: Real happiness, my father liked to say, came not from anything that was given to you, or that was easy to get. It came from striving to accomplish things and then accomplishing them. You had to do things right. If you left grass tufts sticking up when you mowed the lawn, you had to do it again.
P28: Never be awed by title or position.
P29: My time in government had taught me that whom you work with is as important as what you do.
P31: Remember, you are not going to get ahead, in any case, being a grunt.
P39: There are no dress rehearsals in life. Do you really want to be 75 and telling people I could have been treasury secretary?
P40: My epiphany came while I was flying out to the Microsoft meeting. As I thought through my decision, I recognized that it was simply fear that was causing me such anxiety. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown: the uncertainty of working with a group of people I had never worked with before and managing people I had never managed before.
The nature of a democratic political is such that nothing can be done until a crisis happens. The deadlock between two major political parties of equal influence means that nothing can get done during time of peace when problems are only just brewing. Everything has to wait until the last minute, until your arteries are cut open.
The congress is a glamorized version of high school popular kids who often make decisions not based on what is good for the country, but what makes them appear good in public. Or, what we want them to do to appear good. They are a reflection of our internal desires of what someone in power should be like and it doesn’t necessarily mean in depth knowledge of the economy when it comes to making economic decisions.
I’ve always wondered why the government doesn’t just go ahead and do what I think is right. What every trader in the market know they should do and eventually ended up doing too late. This book explained it all. The amount of political, legal and personal restrictions on any action that is to be taken at all makes it impossible for the ruling party to react in a fast enough way facing a crisis. We are doomed to the cycle of boom and busts and we just have to accept it as it is.
I take note of the stages I go through, the enlightenments glinted from day to day living. That is how I noticed the current stage that I am in. Perhaps a consequence of the quarter life crisis.
Ever since the depression started in 2007. Or at least, since I started tracking it and forecasting it in 2007, I have been leaning heavily on the spirituals to calm my nerves and ease the stress. If anything, the economic problems turns life into a constant stress, au lieu de the normal up and down swings between stress and relaxation.
Sian, or rather, Zen in its mispronounced state, offered but temporary comfort on the surface. In the end, the erosion that I felt everywhere corrupts the temporary aura of peace from whatever meditation I emerged from. I feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with the teachings of any Buddhism based ideal. In that, they feel so disconnected with my self discovered meaning of life. Life is change, death is sameness.
All my efforts to calm myself down, to logically reason myself to passivity and to ascend the current state of understanding were all eventually destroyed by this one underlying question:
ARE YOU SATISFIED?
That is the root of all my conflicts. Every excuse, effort and action to calm myself are all because I am trying to smother this question without answering it. It transcends morality, loyalty, legality and any form of restriction that I placed upon myself. Till I eventually have to face it and answer it only to be propelled into action.
That is the current motto that I live by. I don’t try to apologize for what I say or do, I don’t take time to think about a person’s possible negative reaction to possible implied meaning that I didn’t think about.
I noticed that I go through cycles of over thinking and over doing where I touch both extremes before pulling back. Usually as a result of too much negative response from people I interact with. With time, I started calibrating the type of extremes to the type of person I am interacting with.
Thinker
When I am in the thinking extreme, I write a lot, I am also quieter than usual as I turn everything in my mind 3 times to tune it to the new personality trait I am aiming for. I read, I look for things that attracts me and analyze why they attract me. I absorb whatever comes my way and try to interact with people to find out their opinions/reactions.
Achiever
After times of thinking, comes the doing phase. I take care to completely cut myself off from influences during the thinking phase, subconsciously due to a genetic trait that makes me easily addicted to anything. I detach myself so I can create my own style, because I realize that only after finding my own equilibrium and my own way can I grow the confidence that my decision will eventually work out. I also need this so I am not forced with the dilemna of having to choose whether or not some idea is right or wrong.
Fluid self
The basis of human nature is such that whenever an opinion is presented, the self generate a very strong sense of agreement and disagreement. It strip away the choice to observe and then decide which way is best suited for your own person. This process is usually done for the other person’s benefit. So that they can have a clear mental image of who you are. The truth of who I am or who you are is fluid.
From time to time, I meet up with people I know from my past and always, I try to uphold the person that I am today, instead of the person ingrained in their memory. So far, the interaction have always fallen back to the old ways. Perhaps because my newer self is always weaker or perhaps because to communicate with that person, I have to fall back to my former self that is already molded to their liking in their memory. This is why, I always dress up during my first encounter with strangers. It is better to be known latter in a football game as dressing comfortably in a t-shirt than to be seen as in my usual attire in my Ts.
On the subjecting of pursuing your passion
The latest personality battleground for me has been the matter of a pursuit in my passion. I have been discussing this with several people who are both in pursuit or have given up their passion. I will leave this to my next post since I have ran out of motivation for writing. The zone has dissappeared, but it will make for an interesting discussion.
When the universe called me by my name, I have always answered its call without fear nor doubt. Hesitation is all but disappeared in my book of life; if only life is that simple. You see, what is vehemently frustrating about life is the fact that you can answer the calls to your heart’s content, but you are not always the chosen.
Yes, because when the universe spells out your name, or describes you in your entirety, there will be someone else with the exact same background and experience, vying to be the hero of the day. You often end up fighting a mirror of yourself in order to be the hero chosen to die for a cause. If you win, you get to die in glory. If you lose… well, you get to live, but forgotten.
My greatest rivals if life have always been someone similar to me. Similarity means we have the same goal and fight for the same limited resources. I have always known this subconsciously which is probably why, I always disliked men who are like me. Each conflict teaches me something about myself, allowing me to see who I am from the outside.
It feels as though I shouldn’t be going against myself, that I should be befriend those who are similar to me. Creating an army out of thin air. Alas I have no reached that state spiritually. So until then, I will fight and fall back with each failure in the hope that I will learn something in between battles. One day, losing will feel like winning, but until then, I will lick my wounds.
An acquaintance once tried to convince me, after I have explained to her why I sleep on a wooden board, that constantly training myself for the worst case scenario is not the way to go about living life. It pissed me off at that time and stirred some of my beliefs. Since then, I have swung into both sides of the extremes only to settle back in the gray area in between. I understand now that the truth is transient, that she’s not absolutely right, nor is she absolutely wrong.
Still, the fact remains that I am thriving because I prepared for this worst case scenario. Several years of abstinence from wasteful spending and dedication to the improvement of my skill culminated in success when everything around me is crashing and burning. Sure, it was tough watching people splurge and get ahead while I trail behind and grind away at life, but for some reason that seems to have added to my ability to get ahead when the situation turns around. I have less of an ego to get in the way and recovers faster when things don’t go my way. I am just used to it. My way has always been that of a less traveled road, because of that, moments where I can benefit and enjoy are far less frequent, at the same time and more intense.
I had always doubted my way, never fully believing that it will work out until it actually did. This crisis taught me that there is no correct way of living life and I am glad that I did it my way.
I started to compare my skills against that of my peers agian. For a different reason this time. For people who knew me from long ago, you probably felt that I used to be very competitive person. To a point of absurdity now that I look back. I believe that it is the reason which lead to me asking myself: “What is wrong with my personality?”
The adjustment
I believe I went through a period of adjustment and have come out completely opposite of what I used to be. Not wanting to come out first in anything nor looking at anyone as a rival anymore. There are only people who I can work with to achieve goals together and those who don’t.
Mind you, I still get pissed off inside when someone takes something as a competition when I don’t want to do that. You know, those who taunts you in an attempt to get into a race so they can win and feel better. In that sense of view, I am still very much controlled by competition. Controlled in the sense that this type of person majorly pisses me off. I still need to work on not being affected by them.
Reason why I need to compare
So why am I comparing myself against others again? This time, I am glad that it is for a greater good. I need to do this so that I can accurately judge the facts that people spills out. Watching the news, I realize that there’s a lot of people out there who are just parrots, repeating others where in fact they have no idea what they are talking about. It is important for me to be able to accurately differentiate this so I can determine whether or not to actually consider what the person has to say or use it as a model to understand what the general population is thinking about.
What changed
To do so, I have to shed the passive aggressive mantle that is favored by my humble fellow asians and actually consider the realty that I might be better than most people at certain tasks. And that I can do things that they cannot just because of the way I am.
To be able to admit this as a fact and not do so blindly out of pride is a major step in my life.
You need at least 3 generations of hard working descendents for a family to become prosperous.
The first generation, founded in poverty uses blood, sweat and hardwork to build the foundation. So that an industrious mind and the desire for a better life drives the generation to follow.
The second generation steps on the stability of the first in order to receive a higher education and become a specialized professional with high earning power. Making way for the third generation to eanble them to dedicate their time fully to the pursuit of their goal.
The thrid generation, the easiest to falter is the decisive factor. Born rich and well fed, does not know the meaning of hardship. It is mostly a gamble here on whether or not the son will use the money to just live comfortably and fade away, or if he will take advantage of an absence of needing to fend for his bread in order to dedcate to his cause.
It only takes one generation that slacks off to destroy all the previous efforts.
My dad was the first generation and I am the second. This is my generational strategy.
One of those once a year enlightenment. Sort of a culmination of understanding that started with the game POrtal. Something clicked in me, I just didn’t understand what. Now I do.
What POrtal revealed is that I should cut through debating and instead just imagine whatever issue that we are debating to be either true or false. Often time, I find my mind caught up in the argument on whether or not something can even be true that I never had time to think about what the world will be like if it is true.
Once I realized this, I had a lot of fun revisiting all the extreme possibility of past debates and recently the possibilities of traveling forward in time OR predicting the future. Let’s cut the debate and just say that time travel is possible. Which of the multiple infinite future universe will you end up in? How is that determined?
First of all, the possibility of universes for the next second will not be infinite since the one you are living in at the current moment has already locked in quite a few possibilites based on physics. Things such as an asteroid at the other end of the universe killing you on the spot at the next second is impossible and therefore won’t happen.
So, the ability to go OR predict the near future increases as the computational ability of your device’s power increases and the power needs to increase exponentially as the amount of time you need to project into the future increases. This is because the amount of atmos entering the physically possible range to interfer with you increases.
To do this, we cannot base a “tick” of computational time base on seconds or atomic vibrations. It will have to be based on a unit of time which indicate the physical impossiblity for an atom to change its course. The flaw in this is that the computer that you need to compute this cannot be a matter based computer since it abides by physics law and hence are part of the physical reality that can possibly interfer with the subject that it is calculating.
I found my answer within a 15 minute meditation. Starting from my childhood and working my way to the present time. During this time, I discovered that I am a pretty shallow person. Let me explain.
You would thought that where I get the feeling of self worth changes over time. As my familiar world is constantly shattered and relocated so too should the reason for my pride. But that is not the case. From the day that I was born up until about the year 2006 I constantly strived for the same thing. Something that is so worthless in my point of view anyway. I get my feelings of self worth and importance from knowing more than others and from being better at something.
At least, I don’t get it from the amount of money in my bank account. Fast forward to today, I get my sense of self worth from interactions with people with the same interest and hobbies that I have. Which explains some of my recent behaviors. This, to my own evaluation, is perhaps a more harmonious approach to life and one that I should be able to thrive in. Someone once said: “When we were young, we seek to be independent, and as we grow older, we seek to be inter-dependent.” Maybe this shift is a result of that biological change.
Funny thing is, the change was triggered by a moment of crisis about two years ago. That crisis is caused by the shallowest of things: Money. Which also tells you how shallow I am for a decision to change to be because of money.
So there you have it, I give you the key to understanding me.
Today, I finally realized this fact. I do not love engineering. I mean, I am good at it, but I do not want to be in it.
The revelation came when I thought to myself while analyzing stocks: “Man I can do this all day, not get bored and feel like I have achieved something.”
This revelation is so big that these simple lines deserves a post by itself and is filed under Lifemark.
I am less and less of a believer of the long held belief that success is a matter of effort. We human, have a tendency to define things in black and white forgetting to include all the other conditions that goes into the biggest odd for a success. Yes, I am going to start calling that now: “Odds that might lead to success.”
We often fail to factor in, the opportunities, economic conditions as well as age into account. Also failing miserably, to account for the possibility that maybe, just maybe. Some had it easier than the other. Something I am still bitter about and finally recongnized as a fact so I can move on. The fact of the matter is, due to a difference of 4 years, my friend Frank had it waaay easier than I did.
Think 60% higher starting salary at no experience needed to be hired as a programmer vs my 2 years of perilous search for a tech job. The only difference being simply when he graduated.
I have to admit this fact and forget the bitterness. I have to admit to myself that I was foolish not to study the society as a whole and that I went into this domain whole heartedly without pondering the repercussion first. Just because it is the hardest program and the most looked up upon job, doesn’t mean it’s the greatest. I have to admit that I made a mistake. Yes I MADE IT, so that in the future, I WILL take it into account.
Moving on, the most sensible thing for me to do, is to look at the future. What will emerge out of this mess that we are in and what will I have to do to catch the wave.
I have dedicated all my efforts to a project ever since I came back in May. Before that I have dedicated my life to the trip that I took in May. So I haven’t had any chance to take care of everything else in life as evidence by my surroundings slowly breaking down.
Little things here and little things there did register in my subconscious even though I try my best to ignore them. To leave it until the project is completed. Well they are done now and I kept wondering if things would’ve been more pleasant if I had spared some time to maintain other parts of my life. Would I have been able to concentrate more if everything is clean and orderly?
In any case, now that there are no grandios goal to reach, I seem to draw some sense of accomplishment out of slowly improving my quality of life little by little. Yet at the same time, I know that these won’t really contribute to the grand scheme of things.
What would accomplishing this bring? Just a sense of “I can do this”. Not something transferable or favorably looked up upon by anyone else. I sometimes question the logic behind my wanting to do certain tasks. In any case, I have dedicated my whole income to accomplishing these projects now so at least we will see some progress.
I felt it. Something snapped inside me. It happened as I was mentally preparing myself to face the worst of all possibilities in order to accept failure in everything. Part of me was still clinging on to the belief that this isn’t happening. OH but it is. Every indication points to the worst.
For a brief moment, I allowed myself to accept that fact in order to analyze the repercussions of such a reality. I didn’t know, that the brief moment was enough to break me. It broke me because suddenly, everything became crystal clear. Today, I understand that for my particular life: effort = failure.
It might not be true for everyone. It defies logic yet the facts are overwhelmingly against me. For every great project that I set my mind to. Projects that requires long term planning, resources and research always fail. While, at the same time, the random undertakings usually succeed. I denied myself this conclusion because I’ve been brought up in a society where I was taught that effort = reward. Patience, stability and hard working means a pat on the back.
Life doesn’t work like that. At least, not in my life. It makes a perverse sense logic now that I looked back on my life. My exs leave me when I started getting serious about the relationship. Graduating into the high tech collapse with no job and recently, starting stock investing right before the mother of all bubbles.
So, once I accepted this as a fact and accept that effort is not equals to reward, I decided that since the current lifestyle doesn’t work, the opposite must be true. No plans. Just pure randomness from now on. My heart has never felt lighter.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!! I was shocked when I saw this. Even though I am nearing the completion of the secret project and should be focusing on that instead, the implication of this refusal is too big for me to remain calm. This is very bad.
The worst of my predictions are coming true one by one, the failure cascade has been set in motion and with this decision, it can no longer be contained. We are entering a period of cash hoarding and capital preservation. Basically, the denial of the $700 billion cash injection means one thing: Freezing of all loans and credits.
Unlike what TVs, DIGG and REDDIT or any news outlet has been pitching to the population. This bailout is not about punishing wall street or investors who gambled. It’s about preventing them from going into cash hoarding mode so that normal people like YOU AND ME can continue our little life like normal. If all you can see right now is how to teach them a lesson… well, understand that the lesson will come back to kick you in the butt too. You cannot decimate the wealthy without the poor taking an even greater sacrifice.
Before that, please have a look at this video it explains the current monetary system. In sum, the bankruptcy rate is maintained at a low level by the annual creation of credit (inflation) to pay yesteryear’s loan interest.
For the file and rank employee
That said, here’s how my train of thought goes when thinking about a freezing of credit market. Loans are made to businesses to facilitate the day to day operation of a company so that they can work on 120% of the capital and hire more employee to expand the business. When you take about that 20% of leverage of most companies, they will be forced to come up with a way to pay the loan back (as banks stops lending) or in a desperate situation, accept inexcusable terms to keep themselves from having to pay the total capital back (usually resulting to bankruptcy in the end).
The end result of this means that pink slips are going to be delivered and people’s heads will start to roll. For most small businesses, the owners can usually just fold themselves without any repercussion (If it is incorporated) because all the loans are entitled under the corporation entity. Maybe less easy on the big business, but it will end up being the same thing if this continues long enough. The ultimate losers in the situation are your file and rank employees.
Now the firms that actually have enough cash hoards to weather this will not be hiring new people due to a reduction in demand of material goods from a reduction in employment. Even healthy companies that did not borrow to expand might close down due to a lack of demand. The question you have to ask yourself is this am I ok with losing my job?
The responsible savers
You will have to start playing the “Guess which bank is going to fail next” game. Chances are, it’ll fail and when it fails, you are only insured for $100,000. Ask wallstreet and see how many of them see their $1 million reduced to $100,000 in one night.
Pensions? Guess what, they invest in all these big banks that just failed. Why don’t you call up your fund manager and ask how much you’ve lost and if you should keep on working because your pension fund is now worth nothing.
RRSP? 401k? Yep that got decimated too. Well, that is if you invest in mutual funds anyway. If not, then you also have to play the “Guess which bank will fail next”. Rest assured that when the cascade of failures start, FDIC will be tapped out of their reserves and they will have to go to the government for an infusion of money… Oh wait, you just blocked that $700 billion infusion of cash. Tough luck then.
The home buyers
Ditto. You were already in shit, now the fire sale of properties will make you go into even deeper shit.
The winners
The “living pay check to paycheck” crowd. No savings no anything and converted all their cash to material objects. Which is probably the best investment strategy ever at this moment.
Return of the troops
I don’t think it’s wise to bring back your troops during a great depression. However if things goes according to schedule, the time for troop’s eventual return trip to home will coincide with the peak of the depression. Get a bunch of hardened trigger happy soldier coming back home with nothing to do and you get dissent, resentment, not to mention over breeding.
Student
Nope, you are not insulated either. That student loan that’s been supporting you? Well, you won’t be getting one next year and since you can’t go to school without the loan, you will eventually become a non-student, at which time you will be required to pay it back.
The worst case
2nd Great depression is about 70% likely and riots about 50% but since my worst case scenarios have been coming true, here’s my recommendation. Stock up on food, buy a shot gun with lots of bullets and convert the rest of the money into gold for the eventual return of civilization.
My first date with cultural shock was quite harsh. I wasn’t slowly introduced into the culture. Didn’t join any program for temporary stay where other foreigners are with me. I was dumped in it, balls first. It won’t be surprising to you then if I tell you that the first and most vivid memory of the alien culture (and still remains so because of the sense of hopelessness I felt afterwards) happened on one fateful day in Auckland, New Zealand. An interaction between me and my first English teacher in an English classroom.
She was repeating her name time and time again in front of the class and forcing me to do the same. I kept trying to the best of my ability until I can’t tell why she asks me to keep on repeating even though it seems that I had already got the name right. The whole class was watching I felt embarrassed at failing such a simple task.
“Mrs. Hanneck” I’d say “No, it’s Mrs. H a n n e c k” She’d repeat impatiently.
There must be some intonation that I can’t hear, or some sound that is hidden from my ear because it doesn’t exist in the culture that I was born into. So this is how it happened for me. Nothing exotic, pas romantique, nicht leicht. Quite traumatic if you ask me.
How did she look at me back then? Did she think I was stupid? Was I nothing but annoyance for her? What goes on in an adult’s mind in this situation?
The problem is beautiful in its own right. It combined both death and birth. Everything that constituted me died that day giving way to the birth of a new self. It played a major role in shaping the “all or none” approach I later adopted in life. For me, this is how transition have always worked.
It doesn’t happen often, but it happened enough times that I have to stop ignoring it and face it with my full attention. The seemingly random occasions when I can hear and reproduces sounds of the words spoken by people but fails to comprehend the meaning. Or, in most cases, fails to grasp the correct meaning. It happens more often when I am with people I am really close to.
The mentat side of me deducted the facts and came up with an interesting theory which I am ready to entertain for a while. The fact that I try to predict what people are going to say based on the context and the situation at that time. Whenever someone suddenly go outside of the predicted outcomes, I will have trouble hearing the words.
A reason question by stranger made me reflect upon my life and in doing so, the purpose of this blog that I am maintaining. The name fits my ideology and I feel right in maintainig it to stand as a witness to my life and job down the moments of extreme duress.
The question was: “How would your friends describe you?”
“Serious” was my immediate answer without reflection. True, it is a declaration that I have heard over and over, but not one that I am internally at peace with. Seriousness often brings about the impression of boredom and in doing so, decreases the interesting factor as a person overall.
I’d like to be known as the person who is “Fearless in facing the unknown”.
Among other one time descriptions, I’ve so far heard the following as well:
Persistent
Intelligent
Smart
Which is generally true, although my humble self cannot fathom the acceptance of “Intelligent” without retorting with some lame excuse.
With woman, they all unanimously agreed upon one description after the first date. That I think in weird ways and that I think “Outside of the box”. Whether or not it resulted in good feelings, I don’t know. I don’t believe that it is what a woman looks for in the general definition of a man. It is not necessary for the continuation of genes.
The reason why I write this post is because I’d rather be known as something else and am surprised that it is not shown more prominently in my character to eventually become the first words that people describe me by. I’d like to be known as the person who is “Fearless in facing the unknown”.
The reason that I am not THAT is probably because the things I’ve done leading up to this point in life have not been anything unique that haven’t been done before. I don’t openly brag about them because I know them exactly for that: things that others have already done.
Perhaps I am just not being wild enough or loud enough in stating that fact. At least, I finally remembered why I started this blog in the first place after losing my way for a while.
It’s been going around in my head for a while now. Why am I writing? Why is my writing style so inconsistent and why am I writing for different reasons all the time? The majority of the time, I hear the answer echoing back from my own subconscious.
I write so I can be read.
Information overload
But I don’t need that. At least not anymore. I admit it now, it more of a case of fame envy and different contributing factors. For one, I now have a personal wiki where I store all the informations, relevant or irrelevant to anything. Because of that, I no longer feel the need to blog about what I found out. Frankly put, the things I find out are in a constantly flux so it doesn’t do them justice to set them in stone in a blog post. The advantage of this is that I can forget about copyright and just copy/paste whatever I find on the web. When I do find something, I enjoy taking the time to write a long post, polish all the pictures, correct the grammars and reducing the post’s complexity. Which inadversely affected my ability to post frequently.
What was I blabbing about?
Which brings me to the other point. I’ve been organizing my blog posts recently and saw a weird trend. Actually, I felt weird inside. I started writing in year 2000 and continued till today non stop. The archive only goes back to 2003, because the previous one was done in a special database I made myself and that hasn’t got ported over yet. It started with me writing down the daily happenings in my life to transition into a period of reflection and enlightenment. Recently, it’s presentations on things I do and events I go to. Most of these are written without thought and refinement which really made me wonder. What am I trying to say? Who would want to read this? I don’t even want to read them. My original entry about my daily life is actually more interesting.
Essentials
It has something to do with a change within. I find myself reading and skipping lines in posts that I read. Disinterested by the repetitive information that the mass is producing on a daily basis. I started finding myself doing the same thing. Add to the fact that I have finally realized that my life is nothing special and that there really is no need to broadcast every achievement I have. Thanks to a certain person who does exactly the opposite, I was able to see how meaningless such a gesture is. I am great! So what? You just showed everyone that you are a moron.
What does this mean?
So you are probably going to get less and less posts like this one. Writing for writing’s sake or getting something out of my chest. Instead, I decided to use the time to actually work on the stories I’ve been writing and getting those photos up on the web. Less frequent posting = more time to work on fewer articles.
I always had problems of putting my 100% on the job. I do enough plus a little bit more to complete and impress the customers and nothing else and life has been like that for a while. The nine to five job doesn’t motivate me nor teach me and I come home everyday exhausted from the effort to keep up.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the skill I have to keep up with, it’s the sheer number of distraction that is wearing me out and a lack of a clear defined goal. Ever since my investment returns have come close to the limit where I can be self sufficient without needing a paying job I have started to wonder (no tempted even) about what it will be like if I work for myself? I took a day off to find out.
The good
First and foremost, motivation and focus. I was able to wake up at 8AM, get to work right away and stop at 6PM. I literally had to tear myself away from my desk to eat lunch because there were so much I wanted to do.
The bad
Like a new kid on the block, I was not used to the freedom and am still influenced by my current job’s need to multitask. As a consequence my mind wandered and I spent a significant amount of time trying to stay on one task at a time.
The ugly
There’s nothing that I wanted do that can be completed within a day. So by the end of it, I had to do swap all the effort into a pagefile. Another fragmented effort. The awesome day, also gave me a huge adrenaline rush which lead to insomnia.
The conclusion
Because of motivation and the interest in the work I was doing, I became a super worker able to give 120% of my time without complaint and feeling fufilled at the end. It made me feel better because I’ve started feeling like a slacker. I also proved that a long chunk of uninterrupted time is more productive than 1.5 times the same amount of time spread out or interrupted over several days. At least for me.
I have been chasing the idea of simplicity so intensely that I overlooked some of its fundamentals. For example, does the new change require extensive research and work? Is letting things as is a problem with the normal functioning of daily life? Can I pay someone to do it faster? Most importantly of all, does simplicity actually convey the right message?
I have been brainwashed by the knowledge of “less is more” ever since I started dancing. For certain things, it is justified, but at the same time, how many instances of “More is MORE” am I leaving out and ignoring? The easiest example, is practices of any skill. I would never say to myself that 1 minute of complete submersion in the art is enough from “less is more” and “keep it simple stupid”.
More importantly than taking the saying at face value, we should instead look at why people sometimes need to say this. Imagine a situation where you feel you need to say this to somebody else, go through the scenario once and reflect at the end of it, why you feel you need to say it?
No matter how many time I go through the same scenario, the one conclusion I can draw from it is that the person has gone overboard into an obsessive compulsive behavior. “Less is more” should only be repeated when you’ve lost your way and couldn’t see the sweet spot of price vs performance anymore. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve finally arrived at in life.
Everyone has a tail. Signs that shows irritation or discomfort when you are not perfectly aligned with the world. I am no exception despite great efforts to eliminate these tics. When I get irritated or annoyed, I tend to sigh alot (recently replace with exhalation) or shake my legs like crazy. On different occasions, I’ve been observed to use the table as tam tam. When I lie, I always have problem looking people straight in the eyes.
They are all perfectly logical reactions, at least to me, they can be easily explained. Sighing is an attempt to get rid of that heaviness I feel in my chest so that fresh air can get into my lungs and chill the boiling inferno that is inside. Shaking my leg represent my desire to do something, however, the situation does not allow me to exhaust my physical energy so I shake, in an effort to get rid of the excessive build up. Not able to look at someone in the eyes is pretty self explanatory. The day that I am able to do that is a day of reckoning. You can be sure that I’ve completely gone over to the dark side then.
In the past few days, I’ve observed myself exhibiting all the bad tics. Which is usually a sign that things have turned to the worst, but in reality, not much has changed. I have simply built up too much hype in what’s to come and in turn, had fallen hard when none of the efforts turned into fruition… yet.
Everyone defines success in their own way and just the same, everyone has their own reasons to be tied down to a place. The thing that intrigued me the most out of all these questioning is a lack of emotion right after I came out of such discussions. There’s only this cold, calculating mind trying to learn from what they’ve said. This detachment took a few days to sink in before I realize the implication of such a detachment.
Have I finally subdued my competitiveness? Am I finally free from the lures of chasing other’s dream just to show I can beat them? Am I finally walking on my own path? Yes, yes and YES!. No more jealousy, no more envy and no more sinking heart feeling. Just a constant tugging towards a direction. Unwavering. No matter how many times I fall on the path, I see now that I’ve been following myself unconsciously wavering here and there. But it has always lead me towards the North of my world.
The first time I tried to put my prediction of the economy in words was in February when I said that March should see the worst of it and indeed we did. Now that we have safely survived that moment, I have to hammer in an even worse prediction. September will actually be the worst. Why? Because the oil price increased by 50% from February till today. The slow ripple effect means that we won’t see this reported in companies financial until the 3rd quarter report. i.e September. At which point we’ll see some panic.
It is wrong to exclude volatile food and energy inflation out of the inflation data they use to see the health of the economy. After paying mortgages, food and energy combined occupies about 1/3 of my spending and I believe it is about the same situation in every other household. How come business reports simply take it out of the equation to measure inflation?
Because of the above mentioned point, economy deterioration will continue which will force Bank of America (the only bank that hasn’t cut dividend) to cut its near 9% dividend payout. At which point, I will buy that stock.
“Caffeine is the only drug that is not considered a drug.” ~Some random dude on the web
The topic of addiction always sends me back to a trip down memory lane. The numerous conversations I had with Miss Z are at the same time nostalgic and sentimental. One day, I innocently asked how she managed to finally quit her addiction. To which, she replied with: “I replaced it with another addiction: coffee.”
Miss Z was had always been a paradox to me. Even though younger in age, she was, in every which way you decided to look, the more mature person between the two of us. Her solutions to life’s problems bored the mark of adulthood from an inchoate sense of sadness that exists because of life’s true lessons. In contrast I was still a young man who thought of the world as black and white. That is why I am quite amused by the fact that I actually took after her advices and replaced my coffee addiction with tea. Something needs to be consumed when I think and if that something cannot be coffee, another substance needs to be found.
Truth has a funny way of throwing people off. It hurts, it is often politically incorrect and most importantly of all, it reflects back from another person in their ways of looking at the world. It is the principle with which I test others. I don’t plot, I don’t scheme and on top of that, I don’t lie. I believe in my truth, but even more crucial to that, I believe in the good intention behind it all. Once I accepted that fact, I am also able to live with the consequence of “My truths”.
Granted that this truth is constructed out of my own reality, but in the absence of an absolute truth, it is the only thing I have to test against the world. That is, your world. In the process of finding my own style, I discovered that the reaction from you to the revelation of truth by me gives me a good idea of who you are compared to me. The content of your reply doesn’t really matter much because during the time you are responding, I am merely observing your body language and the way you behave.
You can be uncomfortable, pissed off, offended, cracking up, defensive, superior, judgmental, evasive or you could be like me, firing back another truth and observe my reactions. Either way, the most important thing for me during a conversation, is to find out what you really stand for, whether or not you’ll agree to go with my idea and not to talk about who I am (That is the job of this blog and friends.).
I am making a habit of cooking something different every weekend now. A hobby that I have come to enjoy and love. There are times when I failed miserably and have to admit complete defeat, then there are times when the failure actually creates a result completely unexpected. It is this unknown that drove me into experimenting with food in the first place. The fact that every recipe will come out differently when a different person makes it is amazing.
Even that complete failure gave me insight in making something new, just as this week’s baking failure has given me a completely different bread than I originally planned. My failure at making Secret dish #3: Focaccia bread because I did not let the dough rise a second time resulted in a type of bread that is crispy on the outside yet has a firm and spongy texture on the inside. That failure, along with greasing the pan with too much oil created a “semi-roasting” condition which is the cause of the crispy outside.
Baking is so much harder to control than normal cooking and it has proven to be a an intricate world that stimulates my mind indefinitely. A field that enlightens and calms my mind. I feel at peace with my Zen while I am cooking. My back doesn’t get as sore as it used to, my movements has gotten more efficients so I don’t spend more energy making the meal than the meal gave back. I’ve also moved low enough in the food chain that I started using fresh ingredients. Going fresh is more healthy and reduces the cost considerably (Although I am still guilty when I am going all out on making an expensive dish.)
An unexpected result. When I thought up this particular rule in the Grind List, it was intended to act as a cool down so I don’t overwhelm myself when checking the list. A 2~3 days cooling period in which I am banned from performing a particular task. The consequence of this self deprivation manifests itself into a pleasure. Making me look forward to the task again because I am barred from doing exactly that. Reverse psychology working in all its glory.
Having to tear myself away from the task at hand when the time is up also helped in creating the obsession as well. Usually, I’d actually woke up wanting to go back to the task the next morning, but at the same time, I understand that it’ll be even sweeter if I waited.
The best part is, understanding the psychology of it doesn’t take away the fun. I am actually surprised and proud of the system I thought up and implemented 2 months ago.
I can feel the tingling sensation of change in my body. A sort of pent up frustration of how things stand currently in my life. Things I want to accomplish, skills that I want to improve on and new unknowns to explore.
I get frustrated at my need to relax after spending 3 hours on a personal project after work. There just isn’t enough time per day to do things without sacrificing quality sleep. Sleep that is essential for absolute concentration. I want to achieve these goals, I know I can achieve them and I have the ability to pick myself backup even after defeat. The only road block ahead is time. Either increase that, or reduce yet again the amount of projects I work on in parallel.
I know that this frustration is the first step towards change. My subconscious has already formulated several solutions, my conscious just isn’t ready to weigh in the pros and cons yet. After that, it’s simply a decision followed by action.
“Peeked at the watch, 30 minutes has already gone by so I just left.” ~Causalien on what he did after he got stood up
Reflection
My experience with cold calls shielded me from getting really down because of a failure. I am actually happy that I didn’t feel anything at all throughout all these events that’s supposed to put my ego on the line. Or perhaps I am still numb from the setbacks. Suffice to say that I didn’t feel anything when the possibility of being stood up becomes greater as time goes by. It further strengthened my belief that in the world of venture capitalist and angel investors a “yes” means a no and a “no” means a no while a “definitely yes” still means no. It’s never a yes until what both party agreed on is physically in front of you and you are holding it in your hand.
The facts
I met Surjit at the mall while typing on my Asus eeePC laptop while waiting for my mechanic to change car’s rear wheel mechanisms ($590). He seems generally interested in my small and ultra portable laptop so we chatted. He turns out to be one of my big boss’s classmate in Engineering. With that, we talked even more and the conversation veered into starting my own company and some of the ideas I have. By then, his wife came by having finished with her medical exams and they got ready to leave. So, not wanting to miss any opportunity, I asked for his card. I knew that he was probably just passing time, getting some ego boosts while waiting, but the final comment he dropped encouraged me to go to the next steps. He said: “Call me.”
“What the fuck am I doing? What if I sound stupid? What if he thinks I am stupid? What if my friends find out of this shameful moment? Am I annoying if I call him now? Why would he want to talk to a nobody like me? What am I going to talk about? My ideas are not fully developed yet. What if he laughs at my naive idea? What if he rejects me and tells me I am worthless? What if I start stuttering again? Am I going to say something that makes me sound stupid? Will my mind be blank when I need ideas?” ~Causalien
Two days later, I called and setup a lunch between us at an expensive restaurant across the street. I also promised that I would call him the morning of, to confirm the meeting. Which is why, today I got suspicious when I couldn’t reach him on his cell phone in the morning and get his voice message when I attempt to call his home. The facts are there. Everything seemed so positive until today I even excused myself out of an important in house training to meet him just so that I can tell myself that I’ve done all I can. I waited and waited, indifferent of the prime computation my subconscious spewed out from all the facts. I don’t care either way. This is just another step to get through, I will learn from it no matter what the outcome is.
What I benefited from this
I noticed that I have more confidence in calling up strangers now, a side effect of my current job. It is also better than having things bite me in the behind when it doesn’t go according to plan. At least for this, I only wasted 30 minutes.
The second thing I noticed is that I should trust my gut feeling more. Right away I have this feeling that something is not right. Looking deeper, I noticed it’s because that everything I ever earned up till this point in my life, I had to fight long and hard for it. This is simply too easy.
The third benefit is that I get to sit down and look at my long list of ideas accumulated since year 2000 and filtered through them. Some of them are already in place and some are just outright ridiculous. I managed to narrow it down to 8 ideas in the end. Four that are more mature and four that are wild and unknown. I also took some time to evaluate how their financial modal should be and marked out their potential competitors and niches. And finally, some time to practice pitching it to people.
2008 marks the year of blog deflation while 2006-2007 sees the peak of blog creation. A quick analysis of any bubble-bust cycle says that you can tell it’s a bubble when every other dump human being is doing it and trying to make money off of it. Just like you can tell a housing bubble burst is imminent when your cashier hands you a business card and tells you that she’s going to be a real estate agent next year. Nevertheless, it just proves the basic theory of “how to get rich”. 1. You inherit it 2. You win a lottery 3. You do something well and you do it again and again.
Signs of the Bust
I’ve been surfing through Blogmad and Blogexplosion in an attempt to bump into some random quality blogs. In 2007 I see mostly blogs that are devoid of content and filled with ads that no one ever clicks. In 2008, it gets even harder to stumble upon some quality blog because I keep on hitting deleted or abandoned blogs. Based on the statistics obtained while cleaning up my archived bookmarks, 95% of the sites I used to visit in 2000 have disappeared off the face of earth.
I also saw the demise of PayPerPost (now IZEA) as Google demoted most of the blogs that got paid to write about whatever the advertisers want. I am guessing that the name change to Izea is another failed attempt at avoiding the Google hammer. In the beginning, it was used by bloggers as a fast way to get incoming links and in turn, increase a blog’s google page rank.
People also started grabbing every domain name they can find as if they are hot real estate. I am pretty sure that at the time of this writing, every word in the English dictionary has already been taken. There are news that Network Solutions actually grabs and registers your domain name once you searched for it so that you are forced to register through them at 6 times the original cost. Google is putting the axe on this practice by not allowing adsense to work on domains less than 5 days old (You can cancel the registration within 5 days)
Implications
What will be the negative consequences of a blog bust? I think the immediate impact will be on these domain name hoggers because it takes money to keep these registered. Then a few startups that relies on blogging.
Web design and web hosting companies are next in line to see some earnings decrease and we will see a cool down in demand of web apps. Seriously I think I am just about saturated by web 2.0 applications. There’s almost a new tool everyday that help do the same thing but in a different manner. So the software industry will go down along with it and we’ll finally see a cease in hot demands of software programmers.
Since SEO only represent a tiny part of Google’s searches, I believe that even if that notion got wiped out, it still won’t affect Google, so google stays.
Ever since I started engineering, I’ve been fascinated by the inner working of our brain. Thinking that there might be a correlation between computer brain and the biological brain. One of the mysteries that needs to be explained before I can reach that ultimate solution is: Why do we need sleep? It’s been on my mind forever and is the cause of my 1 month fiasco in a Triphasic Sleep schedule. I will attempt to write down.
One possibility is that the conscious and unconscious can be explained in terms of Hard Disks and RAM. My theory is that consciousness (RAM) resides in the RAM part of our brain and a copy of it is loaded each morning from the subconscious every morning when we wake up. The information is then sorted and written to the subconscious (or hard disk) when we sleep. Since the amount of information is equal between subconscious and conscious, we need sleep to “write” to the subconscious.
It makes sense because the sleep state shuts down the need to be conscious so that the brain can take advantage of the extra space in “RAM” space to do the sorting and linking before comiting the “write” to the “hard disks”. In computers, if RAM and Hard disk have the same size, then it’s most efficient to perform the copy this way. It would explain why the last information we try to learn at night is usually reconstructed best the next day and also explains why we are sharpest in the morning. The dream state can store the most recent information directly to the “hard disk” to free up “RAM” space since they suffered the least distortion. Then use this space to sort and make sense of the rest of the day as it traverses the informations backward in time to the morning. Since this sorting and making sense happens in the part that are usually associated with consciousness, we experience dreams.
This will mean that the brain needs two different type of matters. One specialized in long term storage with one write per day and numerous read and another temporary state that’s good at fast operations and communications, but requires daily recharge. No problem, it’s been long known that we have both Grey and White matter in the brain. One for “hard disk” (Subconscious) and the other for “RAM” (Conscious).
The above mentioned theory is mine and mine alone. It is how I, as an engineer, would go about designing a brain with the hard constrain that the size of memory has to remain the same all throughout life.
Just another prediction that I want to write down for verification purposes.
AMD is developing a lot of processors to be embedded into TVs. This could only mean one thing that the plan is to bypass the traditional desktop + monitor and shift to entertainment system + big screen TV. I agree. Why stare at a small monitor when you have a big screen HD TV?
This weekend, I was in flow state for two days straight. It was an euphoria of continued creation as well as progress in life. I might have viewed it as having no life once, but not anymore. Going out is not the be all and end all of life at this stage.
The sore muscles all over my body comes as a consequence of staying in a flow state for two days straight though. They added to the unexpected drowsiness I felt today when both the mental exertion and my body’s need for repair clocked in a great 3 hour nap after I got home from work. This coming from a guy who’s record for staying awake is 52 hours straight (The most recent all-nighter was one that clocked in at 38 hours). It seems that I can survive mental and physical exertions by themselves, but when both happens together more sleep is needed. That’s a downside for going into flow state that I have to consider from now on. It makes sense when I look back on my life on similar days. You can go on staying awake, but it’s not really efficient.
At least I learned one good thing out of the physical exertion. Swinging a baseball bat should be able to increase your wrist girth. I found it out after inspecting all the sore muscles today and found soreness in a place I thought only tendons and bone exist. It is a good exercise for the whole forearm in general and works the inferior rotary muscles in-between the two bones.
So between baseball and bowling, I might have a chance to actually increase the girth. Which is when I decided to log my progress. I measured my wrist at a specific point based on skin wrinkles and logged it for future references. Today, they are 16.3 cm in circumference.
I like to make predictions of the future. An act of vanity I enjoy entertaining in order to challenge my analytical side. I also write these predictions down on this site so I can look back in a few years to see how accurate my predictions were.
This one is the result of a conversation at work and showcases a part of me which isn’t normal. The fact that I am not constrained my normal morality.
“Looking for a hot a steamy night? Bored of your companion doing whatever you ask it to do? Try out our revolutionary new personality firmware. Guaranteed to turn your sex bot into the goddess of karma sutra.”
According to the advancement in sex doll development. This will eventually come true within my lifetime. Which brings up a good question. What will happen to all these porn sites serving pictures and movies when everyone can just get a robot? What will happen to email spams about penil enlargement, become an animal in bed? Well, this is one possible scenario.
“Even though you don’t act intense, I can see that the core of you is very intense.”
I was still taken aback by the first remark while Sae continued to dissect me under his easy-going guise of his. It stroke fear into my ability to act out the role of the biggest slacker. Am I that transparent or is he just that good at seeing through people? But before I can say anything, he added another knocker that rocked me off my feet.
“Whatever you do, find something to focus those intensity on soon.”
But avoiding being too intense was exactly what I set out to do 1 year and a half ago. The day I stopped dancing. I value Sae’s experience and judgment. So am I going at improving my life in the wrong manner?
Ever since that time, I’ve branded the intensity with which I go after anything as the major reason for some big mistakes. The fact remains that my tendency to go all out after one thing needs to be balanced out by the eyes that sees opportunities. What an interesting year this will turn out to be.
Been dreaming quite a lot lately. Interesting ones serving as a great fountain of enlightenment. For starters, I noticed that the dream self has become more direct and with a commanding presence. It doesn’t run away from troubles, but doesn’t attack either (I secretly wish it’d be more predatory). It doesn’t feel scared when people harass it either which accurately reflect my real world response. I used to have to suppress the fear and embarrassment in a difficult situation first, now I feel more anger and righteousness which doesn’t get so overwhelming that it prevents me from thinking.
I still have some relapses of waking dreams in which I was aware that I was dreaming. The problem with waking dreams is that they are very mentally taxing and gets even more so as the objects and events you try to influence in your dreams increases because your conscious mind has to track them and check against my own preconception. “The feel of skin is this way, the sound of a train is that.” But I learned the the biggest lesson from these waking dreams only when I meditated one day and reflected on some of the unconscious dreams I remember. There were no sensory inputs. Everything that happened in dreams were just perceived events. I realized that it was after I woke up from the dream that I associated sensory information to them. If I look deeper at moments I thought I had “seen”, “heard” or “felt” in my dreams I couldn’t remember exactly what was felt.
It is passed on to me from a more experienced dreamer that with more practice, I should be able to put things on automatic but the eventual outcome of that is boredom. You can’t learn or experience any unexpected things from your dream if they are all under control. The trick is to let go, but remain conscious enough so you can reflect on the experience when you do wake up. Dreaming is a learning experience to perform the unexpected, it is also a window into your true self without the bravado and stripped of any armor you have. It is your naked self in its ugliness and glory.
I didn’t notice it till after the fact is set in stone. The spirit of change has recently adapted to the new strategy of steady corruption me instead of the the blatant assault. Doesn’t mean that I dislike the metamorphosis. I am just rather intrigued by memories of good old times. A time where gaming is the totality of my life.
I mean gaming as in playing video and computer games. With the kind of insights I have now, they are simply a sequence of button pressing required at certain critical time of a strategy. The refinement of the strategy is something that can be carried forward to other games and key areas of life, however, the expertise in the button sequence is lost when the smallest of the input method is changed.
The Alex One brought up a good point in one of our mutual deep probing of our own psyche. In which we discovered that I have not quit gaming all together, but simply decided to take on life as the greatest game of all time. I mean, think about it. Ultra realistic 3d view, 150~300 milliseconds total maximum lag, surround 3d sound, thousands of degree of freedoms in movements and a complex reward system which takes a lifetime to master. What else do you need?
Looking back, I can see a hint of the present from the games I’ve been playing. The fact that I choose games based on how close they come to real world is most likely caused by the subconscious needs to process more data. It was the constant desire for more challenges that pushed the limit from simple games to complex simulations and eventually end up where I started when I was born: the real world.
It doesn’t mean that I stopped the practice of playing a certain game for 2 days straight without rest or purges all the gaming devices from my life forever. I still have these insane all nighters (more for the practical reason of getting it over with in a short period of time vs dragging out the gaming over time) and I still purchase consoles as new ones get released. The difference is in the choice of games I play. The games are more integrated with other areas of my life and are only taken into consideration when I see some benefits to life. Which is why I bought a Wii instead of a PS3 and Mario Party 8 instead of Resident evil 4.
Gone are the need to get something as it comes out and the constant indulgence in the fantasies of RPG games. In its stead, there’s only me. More mature and devious as I plan to apply the knowledge to my own corrupted plan.
As you know, my mother visited me for a week. The outlook was grim and I was pushed onto the edge of implosion. In the end though, she left, a better person. Perhaps because I’ve gained a more authoritative presence or perhaps because she realized that I have life experiences that she doesn’t have thus making me worth listening to. Whatever the case, I am glad that she slowly started to see things from my point of view.
It was a rough week, as I was forced to interact with remnants of my past. It came at me through the expectations of mother, the tone she uses, the nagging and most importantly of all, a constant reminder that things should be done differently. Things were never up to par with her expectations, such is the way my childhood self interacts with her. It also brings a stark reality into view. That I am still conditioned to accept it. To submit means it’ll never end and to rebel only serves to strengthening its hold.
I was under her control again. I fell back to my old habit, fitting her image of me because her reality of that image is stronger than anything I’ve dealt with. I think that I am particularly vulnerable because I don’t have any deep rooted reality that holds me down to one pattern. My life has been in a constant flux up until now. Even after losing myself, I still managed to come out victorious (a way to put it if you want to deal with absolutes) because of a primary difference between our established reality. You see, I chose my reality while she settled into hers. My desire to change eventually found an exit strategy after examining the situation.
My failing lies fundamentally with not understanding the nature of opposites. Ying and Yang serves to strengthen each other, forming a whole circle by interlocking their connections. What is often forgotten during frenzied efforts to wipe out the ying is that a bit of ying is inherent inside your yang. When one dies, the lack of its opposite can only serve as its eventual rebirth.
To struggle against it is to ensure its eventual revival
With that realization, I completely changed my attitude. Opting instead to lead our interaction to places where I wish to go rather than letting idle chatter fall into old habits. The result, well, it’s work in progress, but at least, we were able to focus on the positive side of life.
“Too much fluff in articles. Questions self about my own perception due to this belief. Will experiment and contemplate its application from now on. Cut the crap.”
Back to basics.
I have been greedily acquiring information at an explosive rate ever since I stopped living a dancer’s lifestyle. The result of which gave me more free time than I thought. It’s safe to say that I am fed up with this much freedom to read. Now that ads are everywhere in the world, there’s an even greater need to control the information I come in contact with.
Realizing that most articles are padded full of fluff, I begin to realize the same happening to my own blog post. I mean, why do you, the readers, need to know this journey that I have to take and the reasoning behind my choices? Is it because I feel that it is important? Or is it actually helpful for people to read. Am I seeing all these fluff because that’s what my mind made me believe? I’ve already tried cutting down on most of the crap in my recent posts, but still, there always seem to be an even shorter and to the point version possible. Should I commit to this? We’ll see as I test it out in the future. Rest assured that I will be applying my minimalist ways to my writing as well.
On the flip side, an extreme version of this post can be summed up by the lines at the beginning of this post.
Finally, I see my flaw. It started as a fleeting sensation during one of my morning meditations: a glimpse of a feeling similar to a random heart murmur. When it came to me, I wondered briefly if having only 3 hours of sleep caused this before disregarding the possibility. I have become too good at controlling my alertness after my previous experiments. This feeling, of self induced censure along with the total lack of words to describe, made me realize that I am looking at one of my demons. Back track a bit through the trails of thought and the show got is suddenly interesting. The discovery is a result of my awareness of my weaknesses and my lifestyle of truth saying.
I thought that with this skill, I can understand people.
The problem is, this reliance prevented me from exploring other skills critical to understanding people. Looking back, there are numerous times when I managed to observe the body language, but didn’t know how to react. What I failed to understand is that even though I can see the present, I cannot predict their future thoughts.
I lack the ability to follow other people’s state of mind, to see what they will be thinking and this prevented me from being able to bring people from one state of mind to another and lead a satisfying interaction. It also prevented me from understanding why people get offended by things that are so insignificant in my life. I can’t feel their state of mind, or rather:
There are a few trends forming in our lives which might be coming true within the next 10 years. As a believer of my own judgments about the future of our world, I decided to adjust my life accordingly. I’ll start with the least crazy of all these predictions. Based on statistics of my predicting ability in the stock market, please take into account the fact that my predictions usually takes about 6 months longer to realize than what I originally thought.
Groceries:
Walmart groceries. I did a quick check of staple grocery items between Loblaws and Walmart and found that Walmart’s offers are generally cheaper than the giant grocery store except for fresh produces which Walmart doesn’t offer. Loblaw’s stock has been declining and I doubt their distribution network can be as cheap as Walmart’s. Walmart is also showing a lot of intelligence in selecting the produces that they wish to compete with.
Connected life:
With Google’s online storage option only few months from release and the current trend of extremely cheap and basic laptops for $200 (eee PC for example). My dream of a mobile and connected life from a small and portable terminal laptop can soon come true. I’ve also started using Google Notebook for most of my online needs, replacing word, bookmarks, small personal diary, reminders and to do list. Once I get my hands on an eee PC and hook up my skype, account, I will be selling my cell phone and switching my calendar to google. I do suggest holding off on uploading any copyrighted material on google for now. Wait a bit and see who’s suing who. Google will be the Microsoft of tomorrow, but with a better conscious. They haven’t pissed me off in anyway so far. I am also freezing my project of turning MyBookWorld into a small server for now since reviving the hardware will take a significant amount of time (usually involves spending a whole weekend by myself, which I am really not looking forward to).
Switch to 3d movies:
The future lies in downloadable movies as home theaters become mainstream and equipment costs decrease. I recently browsed online for equipments and realized that it will only take about $1000 to setup a home theater. But going out to movies as a social activity will never die. It will simply be replaced with something that we can’t have at home: IMAX. If you haven’t seen the recent Beowulf movie, I suggest you do that now. The bottleneck of 3d movies used to the equipments needed to film them. Now that we’ve proven close to real life films are possible to create digitally and make profit, that bottleneck has lifted. This is a game changer.
Design focus:
Unless the 3d initiative kicks in, the computing power will be able to generate contents closer and closer to real world. The industry is less about new features that was previously impossible due to computer limitations and moving towards the territory of whether or not the consumers will pick it up after a short demo. This is where design and user friendliness reign as the major factor of a purchase.
Blog Libel in full effect:
Enough people will sue for defamation that we’ll all start watching what we say or taking the blog private. Enough with the junk already.
Chinese as the official language:
I still have the dream of “teach chinese overseas” as a job to get paid and explore the world at the same time.
My mother came over for a one week visit so I’ve been sleeping on my Fuff chair and Klik Klak for several nights now. The morning feels rough and unshaven. Stock market is free falling and I had to refuse a few social calls which overall, makes me grumpy. But the nagging is what makes work more pleasant than home.
It was the change over the year which transformed our interaction. I can read my mother like an open book and she feels like a fountain of negativity. Her mind is trapped in an ever ending cycle of worrying between self sacrifice, traditional values and money. Some of them from the society she was born and some of them from her marriage to my dad.
I tried to change her point of view, to make her see how pointless these pursuits are and why she needs something else, but the effort usually gets interrupted by the criticisms she expressed at the way I arranged my furniture, or how I left my workshop in disarray and my apparent lack of social life.
Nothing is ever good enough. I had to stand my ground several times in an attempt to stop her incessant questioning. Questions that criticize my decision, questions that demand my attention and questions that probe my secrets.
Living with parents is supposed to better financially as you share resources and support, but now that I’ve been independent for a decade, I am glad that I left my parents when I did. The benefit of growing up without their influence far out weights the benefits of home made meals and free rent.
Mom. Even though you did it unconsciously, I can’t help you if you direct your negativities towards me. I wish that you can step out of the role of my mom and find yourself.
If you’ve read any tips by the inspirational speakers, you will find this catchy term resonating between all of them. “Delegating your tasks to others.” It’s a simple idea, leverage other people’s time to do your own bidding. I call it a poor man’s dream of imitating the rich.
Have you ever try that yourself? What happens in reality when you try to delegate some of your tasks to others? They resist right? Not only that, your position will instantly decrease in the social ladder which they measure against. Unless your skill and the amount of tasks you have to perform is incontestable, you’ll be seen as a lazy bastard who’s just looking for a quick way out of an otherwise easy problem.
It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t delegate, by all means, if you are a boss of the company, delegate. You are paying your employees for something right? Try and imagine the situation where everyone in your company listened to the same speaker and suddenly choose to delegate all their tasks the next day. What would you get? All the work get handed to the sucker who didn’t go to the seminar the day before. Is it productive? Does it benefit the human race?
Which is why, I believe, that people with the power to delegate, should do so with considerations of others in mind. You should evaluate whether or not to delegate based on a few criteria, I can only speak for myself and list the ones I use for your amusement.
Determine whether or not I more efficient than others at this task and based on this efficiency, evaluate the amount of time and the cost of my time against the others. Choose the cheapest route.
Will I miss out on a great learning opportunity? Am I trying to delegate because I am afraid of the task?
How many times will I encounter the same task in the future? Is the time that it takes to find/persuade someone to take the task better spent on actually completing and perfecting my own efficiency on the particular task?
Is it a time critical task? Will the person be able to complete the task within the slack time I give to the task?
How much effort do I need in maintaining a good relationship with the person I am delegating my tasks to?
These points are all valid points based on human nature. When people preach a great idea, they often forget about the basic human nature and when you take that into consideration, you will see the risks associated with it. In the case of delegating, you have to understand that human, by nature, will:
Resist deadlines
Slack off from time to time
Feel injustice
Get bored
Become greedy
So the next time you hear someone preaches how he got to this point by delegating, ask yourself this question. How old is this person? Could it be that they accumulated all these wealth because of compound interest with time?
I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, but refrained from doing so because it sounds cocky. Yet it’s growing more and more puzzling to me how I manage to achieve what I do.
I will have to give a little background on an incident today which means disclosing the fact that I am the Linux specialist in my department… And since I am in the department which I am in, I don’t have access to the source. You all know how important that is from a debugging point of view. Alas, it’s only to settle the fact that, before today, I have never seen any of the codes themselves.
So some two experts were with me and I was just standing there watching them go through codes trying to isolate why any command sent to the shell returns a “Bad Command” error (no more ls, cd, man or anything). They debated, searched and debated again till finally, one of them left because of the futility of the search. This is to set the theme.
So I get this feeling of where the problem is, yet since I am with two experts who know more than me I properly shut my trap and just listened. When it’s just me and the other guy though, I slowly brought him to where I think it is (just a passing glimpse of a few lines of code which he scrolled through while doing page downs) and asked him to change a few things. It worked and we fixed an otherwise disastrous bug (actually, it was 3 bugs in 1). How did I do this?
And this has happened quite a few times now. Is it possible that i can debug by feeling alone?
I was lounging contently in my IKEA Karlskrona chair doing nothing and contemplating about the possibilities of multidimensional implications on life, when my mind suddenly opened itself to a new possibility!
I was looking at the 4th dimension, time, in particular and wondering to myself why we can only travel in one direction when it occurred to me that I was thinking linearly. The immediate thoughts that followed are these:
Why is time only forward and backward?
What is two dimension?
How is a dimension defined?
Is the definition right and include everything that’ll give a clear cut difference between dimensions?
Our definition of dimensions is limited by our mind
The time dimension (a.k.a the 4th) can possibly have multiple directions
Any dimension can possibly have multiple directions
The concept of direction is a made up concept in the 3d world we live in
You cannot define direction in a dimensional sense
Human grow up believing that there are only two directions to everything
A problem is either solved or still causing trouble. You go forward or backward on the road, you enter or exit a door. Yet, there are lots of interactions you can have with each objects, yet it is our own upbringing that put a constraint on our thinking. Limiting the possibilities in the directions of your thoughts.
I feel enlightened as if I found a new hidden muscle in my foot that I’ve never used before, but could possibly have the potential to solve all my balancing problem while spinning and Rumba walking once strengthened.
I’ve re-asked myself this question several times and the answer has always changed in the past year or so I take it seriously.
At first, I was motivated by getting traffic, then the prospect of some cyber-girl oogling after me and later lulled by the potential to gain money.
My site has been dwindling in traffic for the past month ever since I started moving. That’s understandable due to the layout and less effort putting into writing an article. I no longer write with the intention of attracting traffics. I checked with myself and didn’t flinch a bit when the past weekend became the first one where I got 0 traffic.
Cyber-girl oogling? Ha! Nope, but I discovered that it doesn’t change anything
Potential of making money? Nah, the answer is still no.
I realized one thing when I am surfing now. That is, I immediately question the contents of a site once I see the appearance of an ad on it. It’s an over reaction of the current ad filled web. So for that, I shall never subject others to the same question. Their motivation is money and their opinions will be steered by money.
So what is the hidden motivation of my site when you read it? What should you take into consideration when I present a side of the coin? That will be to help others learn as I’ve learned. What you should be aware of when reading, is that I assume I know more than you on the subject and that you’ve never had the same thought in your mind or done the same things before.
Which will be central to the next few site update. After getting my ass handed to me by a few site designers and some community posted questions, I know what needs to be changed in my layout. I also noticed how long it loaded after I switched to Roger’s Portable Internet (This is a neat service, I should write about my experience later).
Once I get my computer desk delivered, I can finally start using pictures, restructure and work on creating a new subset of my site. My best friend Kirk and I wants to pursue our interest together and write about our culinary experiences in Montreal. His cooking style focuses on modernizing (i.e. making less expensive) traditional food while I veer off towards the realm of saucière. I didn’t invest in all those expensive kitchen appliances for nothing.
I always try to be humble. Forcing myself not to exaggerate my results and findings to stay to the course of honesty. Honesty brews understanding of the self and attracts people who are realists like myself. I’d like people to like me for the real me instead of my glamor persona.
I thought that everyone else is more honest than me until a day at work when my colleague decided to bloat about his stock market expertise. xxx stock went up by $11! Today.
Now my reaction is actually something I should be working on to improve. When faced with an interesting phenomena, I often ask several detailed technical questions until I unintentionally corner the person into facing his own lie. I need to stop doing that and reconsider my questions so that the person can still exit gracefully. For the moment, I can only do so by blaming my failing memory, but in the future, I’d like to be able to avoid the tension in the first place while still fulfilling my own thirst of knowledge.
So my question is, how much do we exaggerate? I got my exaggeration down to twice the actual amount when I am talking without thinking and kept it at a moderate 1.25 times when talking honestly. The person mentioned here has an 11 times exaggeration. Which resulted in this particular contemplation.
Is it possible that we are too attached to this image of a soul. Of a central consciousness that controls all above else. The one self dialog of me. Have we diagnosed multiple personality disorders as an attempt to ward off the possibility that every individual is a group mind? What if, we let go of that fear and let go of the very concept of individualism and collectivism? What do we get?
I have less control of myself during my drugged stupor. Less attention dedicated to the governance of the whole creating more instances of funny behaviors. One interesting behaviors of my body I observed is that it’d start rearranging things or cleaning when I am in some sort of deep conversation with another person. Some adopted children of my optimization effort. I didn’t know it has a mind of its own. If left uncheck, it tends to get stuck on certain mundane task, like trying unsuccessfully to unscrew a screw, or open a bottle and putting the same dish back and fourth.
As I write this, several feelings of fear coursed through my thoughts. Including that of the MPD, maniac or ODD, but they no longer stops me from thinking the thoughts I want to think. I have accepted the fact that it is a human concept and it fails to describes us in totality and instead, hinders our mind from free thoughts.
I was thinking about the chaos theory when a particular property gave me an eureka moment. I knew I am on to something good and there’s this budding sensation within me that screams of sudden crystal clarity. My mind is just too slow to set the logical foundation to understand. I suffered a moment of confusion as my subconscious cried in joy while my conscious struggled with the answer to a big mystery.
Random event happens randomly, but when occurred enough time, consecutive random event will bunch together to form an orderly event. Vice versa. When I realized that the opposite statement is also true I understand the nature of the opposing forces, the ying and yang, the good and evil. That wasn’t the whole picture though.
Events of the same property (let’s call it fundamental property) will tend to happen together until it create a massive event of the same property. At which point the nature of the event itself will change from the fundamental property to evolve into another property. This is the nature and the basis of everything.
The moment I understand this, I understand I have taken a step forward into better understanding. I think, this is the next step up from the understanding of the co-existence of the opposites. If you look at it from this new point of view. You can clearly see that co-existence is the simplest form of the new unified theory, where one state evolves into another and back. The states are defined by our own limited mind. In reality, each iteration of the state gives you a different opposites. It is our brain that forces it into good vs evil or ying vs yang.
As most of you already know, I went through a period of self doubt and questioning while my dancing reached its peak. The dilemna that faced was whether or not to pursue that path with everything I got. I had reached a skill level where to go on means I have to dedicate my whole life and any money I earn into dancing, otherwise there’d be no point to continue. The plane cost of plane tickets to other countries and lessons from world class instructors will cost a fortune.
It is in that situation when I asked myself if specializing in one field is the answer to a great life? The conclusion I reached is a No. Being human means that we are able to process and perform several tasks at the same time. we do that on a daily basis. That is, genetically speaking. When you tunnel and think only about improving one aspect of life, you forget about the other, ignoring the fact that other parts of life will contribute to the improvements as well.
How so? You ask? It’s all in the point of view. When you are focused in overcoming one thing and one thing only, its importance became overblown. Sometimes magnified to be greater than other important part of life. People who are in this situation cannot realize it themselves because they don’t have an outside objective view, or rather, an outside objective view does not exist in the world for them. The possibility is simply not there.
Yes possibility. That’s what it comes down to. When you generalize and know a bit more of the different areas of life, you began to see different possibilities and are better equipped the social skill to mingle and meet the right people, will forever be subject to the whims of “getting discovered” by someone who knows art. But when you have the right social skill to meet the right person and are able to orchestrate an accidental showing of your art while inviting the person to your place, you have a better chance.
“YOU ARE NOT THE CAR YOU DRIVE. YOU ARE NOT THE HOUSE YOU OWN. YOU ARE NOT THE PAINTING YOU PAINTED. YOU ARE NOT YOUR FUCKING BANK ACCOUNT.” You are the decision which made the choice.
From a society point of view, you can see that it is also how human innovate most of the time. A lot of the time, the next piece of gadget is just the same gadget with certain functionality added that somehow improved its usefulness by more than double in a different domain. That’s because the person who thought of adding the function, sees the old gadget and a new way of using it. Is it copying? Yes. Is it innovation? Yes.
As I grow in self control, I started to understand that it is important to let go of the concept in which we are the master of our own mind. In favor of accepting the fact that the brain and mind together have certain tendencies and behaviors out of our control. In order to better direct ourselves towards the way we want, we have to understand these tendencies.
Here are a few facts that I know through experiments, experience and increasing my own awareness on every thought that appeared and the reason why I chose the path to becoming well rounded instead of specializing and excelling in one area.
1. The brain has specialized areas that takes whatever input that comes and process them. Including junks that you don’t want.
2. Every time you pay attention to a thought, it gets reinforced and further integrated into your personality.
3. The reality we are in are limited by the few sensors that we posses.
4. The concept of “I” when you talk to yourself internally are made up of different personality from specialized part of your brain.
5. The overmind that controls everything is very inefficient and can only function correctly during consciousness. Think of the overmind as the total vote of all individuals
6. Specialization in one area makes that personality dominant.
7. Part of the brain can shutdown and sleep while others continue on to function.
8. Brain energy has battery like property. Think of the different wave patterns as different clock speed. Consciousness requires overclocking.
Here are some that I am currently contemplating
1. Brain is capable of functioning at higher speeds and escape the limit of the 30fps imposed by the images from the eyes. We need to prove this by hooking a 120fps camera to a recently blinded person (A conversion method need to be made to change the camera signal to brain visual signal ) .
2. Time is a relation of how fast we can perceive reality, therefore the overall speed at which we function will increase(see above)
3. Certain frequency pulses does different things to brain neurons. (A basic first example is demonstrated by shining special frequency of light on brain matter to shut it down, others need to be tested)
None of these are conclusive and are only from my own world. If you agree, great, if you disagree even better. I’d like to read the research on your reasoning.
When I just finished reading a certain novel, my writing style will match that of the author for a while. Mimicking the structures and words that they use, it is a natural ability of mine. Same thing with gaits and voices, although it is harder for me to reproduce the sound, it is easy for me to understand movement and pinpoint which part is important to copy in order to achieve the same effect. I admit that I’ve done nothing but trying to mimic someone else for a greater part of my life. What can I blame? I had no idea where I stand i the world.
That being said, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel revulsion the first time someone tried to copy my lifestyle. After the initial rush of superiority, I just get annoyed at the person who constantly observed me, cause I know when I turn my head, he’d become a mini me. Other than that annoyance, there really isn’t anything else, for a fact remains clear. A copy can never surpass the original therefore the original has nothing to fear from the copycat. While the person is trying to be you, you remain ever so elusive, because the you in yourself is constantly shifting with new ideas. A copy can only remain a snapshot of what you were. I know, because I’ve been copying someone else’s movements.
Because it’s a challenge
The goals of my life have never been about money or owning anything in particular. This is because I am the witness to a life driven purely by money.
My parents were born in poverty, where watered down rice ganjee with sweet potatoes is the every day norm. Where a feast means a chicken leg added to the mix of otherwise hunger inducing meal. My dad’s life has been driven by that of money and business. He started out penniless and built a company of his own in pursuit of financial security, neglecting his familly in the process. You really can’t blame him for this though. It was a harsh world back then, some would argue that once your account balance reaches zero, you are as useful as a beggar. No, there’s no social insurance at all.
Trip to Africa, trip to Europe, scuba diving, bungee jumping, sky diving. I don’t want to do any of these a second time. I own a car because it gets me to work on time, otherwise I prefer to bike and run. I want a house because I am sick of having just one bedroom that multitask as art center/machine shop/storage/bedroom/study.
The last goal I can think of is to not having to work and be able to support myself from the interests. However, this one is debatable because I love working and creating something beautiful. Be it a state of the art 3d laser scanner or a simple real time camera.
Hence I am stuck, unable to justify the need to be a millionaire. It is something I know I will become in my lifetime, just as natural as owing a house at one point in my life. I just can’t find the why.
I came full circle to the missing ingredient. I must not think of an object or event as a separate parallel entity that moves beyond my control, but to see and accept the fact that everything’s being start with human interpreting the object and event. I’ve tried too hard at ascending the understanding of life, seeking a higher order, a higher level incomprehensible by human that I took it out of the search all together. If I write a story, human are going to read it. If I create an art piece, human are going to admire it. If I experienced an extraordinary event, I will share it with human.
This knowledge enabled me to see what I am doing. I was tackling art the same way as I would tackle an engineering problem. Inclusion of all information. Details to the thinnest hair. What I was missing was the art of missing. The fact that human are not machines. The absence of an object plays an equal importance to the presence of another.
What followed after is the deletion of numerous unfinished posts, erasing of parts of my drawings and “missing” the complete picture in my photographs. It feels good to be incomplete. Even better to feel good about it.
I wanted to come back with a bang. With some profound revelation about life and its intricacies. Instead, I present myself humbly before you with nothing, because I have gained nothing but ideas.
It always irked me that I can’t feel as purposeful as when I was dancing competitively. Although my overall life is better now compared to back then, they seemed pointless. I am rapped in a state of constant yearning for something more colorful or anything that can make my heart beat faster.
I knew that it wasn’t right for me. To be chasing after the dreams of others and the goals that others defined for themselves. That is when It occurred to me that I wasn’t living consciously with my choices and my efforts are spread evenly between both the important and mundane.
Salvation came in the form of pen & paper producing answers at an excruciatingly slow pace that seem to last forever. Each word ladened themselves with responsibility to be etched onto paper like carvings on marble. I felt weights lifting off my shoulders. Clouds that originally blocked my vision began clearing themselves. A transformation within remolded me as I trace each lines of each letter in ink. They told me that this is the piece that I’ve been missing.
And this is how the story came to be. Of a man finding himself in dreaming of the future. Feeling overwhelmed by terrible purpose, knowing that the dream of who he is going to be is greater than himself. Yet he must follow it or perish following it.
The story starts with: “A man sat down one day and made decisions of who he wants to be.”
To grow beyond understanding, one must first embrace one’s own devil child. It took me a long time, but I have finally reached a stage where openly admitting my own weaknesses is as natural as breathing. In the wake of this revelation, I realized that I never took the time to follow the trails and obtain new enlightenment. The thought just occurred to me and what you will be reading, is enlightenment in the progress within myself as it gets revised in my mind. I decided to blog this in real time for a change.
Primary devil: Honor
The one main theme that has prevailed through my father’s teachings as well as the Chinese cultural influence is the notion of honor. It explains why I’d always show up if I say so and give some insight into why I used to get pissed off if a person is late when they agreed to meet at certain times. I also keep track of the nice things people do to me so I can reciprocate accordingly. Honor makes my word a binding contract no matter how much I ended up not wanting to do it.
The weakness of having such binding honor allows anyone who manage to persuade me in the moment a chance at what I’d never agree to. It also made me do more than what I should have. Some usually think of that as me trying to be nice, little did they know, I am just abiding by honor. I’ve since taken actions to deviate from honorable behaviors into other ways of being. To be more true to what I feel I want to do, instead of letting a notion drive me.
Two things made me realize this:
Honoring a contract is based on human. A contract is still a word, when all hell breaks lose, a contract won’t matter and the lawyer will be happy.
Being honorable all the time doesn’t bring people to you. It is doing the right thing at the right timing that does.
Secondary devil: Challenge
We want what we can’t get. An idea that’s echoed by many and quickly adapted by me once I understood the concept. This change, by far is the hardest one to reverse because it came to me as a revelation to what life is. Yet the very idea, is contrary to a different concept from the Buddhist path of Wu Yu (No desire). I have but a glimpse of understanding of why this is not an absolute to abide by. That understanding comes from the knowledge that in order to ascend as one human to the next state of being, the whole human race needs to improve as a whole. A great question I often amuse myself with is if I can arrive at these same conclusions if I were born in the medieval times.
The challenge confirms with a few psychology principles:
The more one do for another person, the more one like the other person.
If you pull back, it creates an awkward vacuum. We as human wants to fill that vacuum by nature.
I’ve since intentionally create such vacuums during interactions with people and have since refrained from trying to fill in the void when others create such vacuum. I don’t have a concrete conclusion yet, but it has been interesting observing my own raging emotions as it happens.
Tertiary devil: Change
Touted the strongest ability I possess by myself, is also a big hurdle in my life’s way. I want too much and try to be too much. Being good at adapting ensured that I’d get hooked to most of the things I set my mind to do. It is great if time is infinite, however I’ve soon realized that the reverse is true and I need to focus on a few if my life’s plan involves becoming really good at something. It is certainly where the human race is heading to, with so much new information being discovered at each second.
I’ve decided to settle down in Montréal to reap the benefit of growing roots, yet at any given time during my stay, I’ve often considered the following:
There’s a work exchange program with country so and so, I am going to take it!
There’s a job offer from this other city, I should consider that.
There have enough money to last me a few years, I should disappear and backpack for a few
I can’t speak French that well, I should move to an English speaking city.
This is still a big problem for me and I have been managing to keep it down by analyzing each action financially. However, it’s getting harder and harder after the discovery of a partner in crime with the same mindset.
Following the trail of reasoning from a popular question: “Did a tree make any sound when it falls if there’s nobody around to hear it?”, I started to ask if God can exist if we are not around. Or put it more vaguely, the existence of the concept of God without human. It did not answer the question directly, but rather, it put the question in a different perspective for me which made me see God for what it is. The existence of God depends as much upon us, as our survival upon God. Without our realization, God isn’t even defined or put into a role. When left alone, it’ll continue to just exist. Just like space has existed and created all these awesome events. Collapse of the stars, space folding, light, heat and cold. When seen this way, the yes or no answer I’ve been seeking ceased to be relevant to me.
It also allowed me to resolve a conflict of self that’s been bothering me. Are we an accident? Or are we God’s children with a purpose?
You see, we are limited by the words we use to ask the questions and the idea of a question itself. A word represent a concept of an object defined by our experience and evolve overtime. Every question’s concept shifts and there’s nothing definite. There are only, the relationships between the questions and their words.
The last part is the recent blurry revelations that I haven’t had time to contemplate on. It happened during my German conversation class when the teacher mentioned how North Americans don’t expect you to actually answer the question to: “How are you”, whereas Germans will think this is too personal of a question, but actually fill you in on their well being. I always thought that there’s something wrong with me after some people gave me bad looks or giving me the feeling of impatience when I actually reply with something other than “Not bad and you?”. I know I should stick with it, but I never understood why till now. All these time I thought they actually cared about me. HAHA.
And that will have to conclude today’s contemplation here, as I’ve reached the limit of my own understanding. Food for my thoughts later. One does wonder, what one’s thought will be like when the brain is completely cut off from any sensory inputs.
Sometimes I hate myself for not being emotional or impulsive enough. Otherwise I would’ve bought a house already. But I did not and do not plan on buying a house until maybe mid 2007.
The biggest reason supporting moving out on my own is to get away from my flat mates. Since we co-signed the lease, I can’t really force them out and am too comfortable in a below average monthly rent in a huge room to justify the hassle.
To give you an idea of what’s bothering me. I would like to enter exhibit A for case of Peter vs flat mates as a benchmark to measure mess.
Based on your expert opinion, would you feel good living in this environment? ….
Your honor, I would like to enter exhibit B as a clean kitchen created by my client after 3 days of work.
As a human behavior specialist, what would you say is the length of time that should elapse, before the kitchen returned to the previous state to indicate that a minimal effort has been made by the rest of the tenants? Or rather, any effort at all? …
Please witness exhibit C and D. Shots taken 3 and 7 days after.
Your honor, I would just like to enter into evidence that none of my client’s utensils are in these pictures beside the bamboo table mat. And the prosecutor rests.
The current economic condition of Montreal island indicates a below average housing price in the year of 2007. With the new release of the Canadian census for population and superimposed with the 8 previous year’s, I should be able to pinpoint the location of the most profitable area. For those of you interested, this is the link I used to further find the city of my interest. I then used the population density map based on age to determine where the population is shifting to. All points to a favorable buying time for middle of 2007… except of course for the issues against.
Increase of house value has to exceed certain percentages. Mainly, Mortgage rate + selling comission + housing tax + inflation. Assuming 5% mortgage, 4% comision and 2% inflation you have to surpass a 11% possibility at selling time. Looking at the past fluctuation graph, assuming history repeats. It’s less favorable. THEN!!! The government has to stir up another referendum to declare Quebec as an independent country. This, after promising that the last one will be the final referendum, which ended with a 50.5% against separation.
Never mind my complain, I I’ll need a good excuse for me to move away from Montreal. As the investor’s instinct take firmer hold on me, I am more and more frustrated at the double tax the government imposes on its population. Despite the socialist society that provides equal opportunity for everyone, the double tax means it’s harder for business to flourish. The margin of income has to be extremely good, but how can you do that with such a high cost of labor.
Before one can travel the 8 fold path towards Nirvana, one must first accept the 4 noble truths. The first of which, the Dukkha, dictates that we are here to suffer. Try as I may, I could not bring myself to accept this fact when there are so much joy to indulge oneself with in life.
Later, I read a story written to help people understand the concept of heaven and hell. What baffled me about this one is the fact that it is a Christian religious view that fits perfectly with the way I see the world. It is not hard to gather from this statement that I’ve clashed against people with Christian beliefs several times in the past who had a different understandings. Heaven and Hell is a state of mind.
Incidently, “The Alchemist” chained all these together for my further understanding of why it is so. “This is a copy of the perfect world that is to embrace us.” Why a copy? Why not just put us there right away? The Buddha in my mind replied:”We cannot understand perfection, until we’ve experienced imperfection, just as there are no good without evil.”
My second revelation is in the understanding of freedom. While enjoying the material freedom by letting go of all possessions, I always get this feeling that there is something more to it. That the happiness achieved through this act is simply too easy. I wondered often if I only feel free because I wanted to feel free. There is always a second level of meaning that I cannot quite grasp yet because I know that a simple answer to a need always has another deeper teaching.
I found this deeper teaching while reading Warren Buffet’s struggle with the Institutional Imperative; the biggest difficulty in his life that he had to overcome. He suffered from his success at the young age of 26 by being the first to use value investing and by being the best investor in the market… Until everyone caught on to the same technique. He was locked into a trap created by his own success. If you’ve read Dune series, you’ll find some similarities here with Muadib’s Legacy.
Distinctively, I came to realize that there are 3 states to anything I do. A beginning, the journey and the end. Like all the trilogies you see in the movie market now, life works best in 3s. Bruce Lee’s famous quote:“I know no moves, I know moves, I know no moves.” Further echoed this belief. It makes me wonder, is there a 4th that I am disregarding because of this belief? What happens after the end? What happens after the mastery of the act which leads to integration of your being?
My mind seems unable to process this possibility right now.
I didn’t enjoy beating others at anything. I’d always end up feeling bad for humiliating the person. As a consequence, I lost on purpose in head on clashes. It was asubconscious mental block that I had no control over. Yes, it seemed simple to just decide one day that I wasn’t going to be controlled by this, but the path I had to take to reach this state, twisted and turned in a frustrating dance.
I used to puzzle over this when i won dancesport competitions and spent the night mulling over why shame hadn’t taken over all my other emotions to make me screw up the routine. In simple terms, I was fine at winning against a group, but felt guilty when winning against one opponent. That explained why I dance best when up against a large competitor base while I performed the worst when there are only 2 or 3 couples. However, I still couldn’t figure out the root of it and I used it as a scapegoat for not achieving anything great.
Perhaps the few years I spent being ridiculed for my Chinçais during high school has taught me to be kind and never make another feel that way. Perhaps it was my ignorance in believing that there are no better or worse person in the world. I was never able to completely shut the feeling of shame and kindness away even though I was constantly aware of it and anticipated its arrival. Perhaps in saving others from the humiliation it soothed over my past experiences of the same.
The complete realization that it dissappeared from my character dawned on me during a quick match of UT2004 at lunch. In its stead is the raging beats of my adrenaline filled heart. This state didn’t just switch on like transistors, it lurked around the corner of my vision during the paintball match, raced through my veins in a head to head match of chess until finally, it filled me with joy when I lifted my self-imposed handicap through a left handed configuration and decided to take the crown during in a death match. What changed? I asked myself several times before arriving to the conclusion. I have stopped dreaming and started choosing.
The improvement of physical ability and sharpening of senses has been proven over and over again through numerous cases with hard scientific evidence to back them up. The mind however remains a mystery to most with intelligence as the only rough estimation we can find.
I want to establish the fact that it can be improved by learning something can be scientifically tested. The one thing that comes to mind are the retard savants who are able to perform incredible mathematical calculations in their head. There exists method today you can learn to help with memories and they use symbol association to represent a string of information to be remembered. A simple process of converting what is usually stored as auditory memory to image memory.
During one of my deep probing in the workings of my own brain, I’ve come to the realization that memories are accessed and stored through our sensors. It feels to me to be a painfully slow and cumbersome process with the kinetic memory that remembers the least to the visual memory that remembers the most. Oftentimes, I find myself thinking a thought through the form of sound in my head in order to make it concrete. Yet it always feels unnecessary, as if I have hidden mind that’s thinking in hyper mode. I am simply repeating the information so I can remember it.
Until I can firmly grasp the workings of the hyper mind, I will contend myself with creating a simple calculator in my brain that can do addition and substraction of large numbers automatically.
Just a way to make you feel better as you start out doing something new.
Potential says that you have the possibility to do it good, once, under supervision. That you understand what needs to be done in order to perform the action perfectly.
Sadly, being able to is not equal to potential and I think, we put too much emphasis on potential and not enough on what people can already do. It’s that little annoying “hope” in the back of your head acting up. The little sucker has strong forces with it.
Real life, requires you to perform an action, under no supervision, perfect each time, under great stress, combined with other actions to perform, under great emotional turmoil and most importantly of all without complaint.
