Thoughts from the High School Musical

I’ve just caught the High School Musical by Walt Disney productions. I do suppose one can say that the target audience is the early teens with the predictable storylines and the feel good effect at the end of the movie.

As with every other book I read, I try to appreciate the teachings and messages they try to convey. In this show, the male lead is the star basketball player of the high school while the female lead is a genius. They’ve been lead by parental expectations to excel in the things they do today. However  when the both of them try their hand, more like voices at taking part in the school musical. Everyone started going at them.

One of the songs went like this, “not another word, not another sound, not another beat, don’t mess with the flow, stick with status quo”.

One may hear that line often from our parents, whom based on their life experiences have their own vision of what constitutes a good life. However if we do not step out of our comfort zone and experiment with new stuff, we may never know what the world has in store for us.

Break Free today!

The 10 second Holiday

While  sitting in a relaxed position, with your hands in your laps or by your sides hanging loose. Relax your shoulders and neck muscles and breath in for 5 secs. Take a full deep breath until your abdomen rises and fills up with air. Hold it for a moment and slowly breath out the air over 5 secs.

Visualizing a peaceful place you are comfortable during this breathing exercise - a misty beach with the waves rolling in or a lush mountain top full of flowers. Repeat for a few cycles to help your mind and body feel better.

What this actually does is when you do breath in deeply, your upper body expands and helps to stretch the spine. Do if as often as you need to!

Intention

I intend to make a successful chain of startups where I can involve my friends into partnerships where I can help us leave the rat race and achieve our desires thru group intention.

Book #2 Think and Grow Rich – Napolean Hill

This book is actually pretty similar to what is covered in “The Secret” but it does so in a series of exercises and concepts that help to prime your mind for the ultimate attainment of goals.

The power of belief! Life is all about energy and since we know that energy can never be created or destroyed what matters is how we transmute our energy to achieve the goals for us.

Great book with a lot of re-read value!

Lessons learnt from a taxi driver

There was a period of time where I was feeling lost. Just so happened that I was in a cab when the uncle started chatting with me.

He gave me quite a lot of insights into relationships and life, especially here in Singapore where housing prices are exhorbitantly high. A famous quote I will always remember from him is where he said “the tongue has no bone, whatever you say, can be forgotten easily. What matters is the action that you take”. Also he mentioned that we should always treasure our loved ones because they are the one who will see us thru our ups and downs.

The material chase is always on – earning enough cash to pay for housing, car, entertainment expenditure that eventually paves the way for settling down when one gets older. Its a pretty known fact that most people pay for their housing through loans with the banks. As a result, the actual owner of all these property are those anonymous lender of money. We do not truely own anything at all. What he said made a lot of sense to me. It’s the journey that counts and not just the ultimate goal. The gold at the end of the rainbow may just turn out to be cereal, it is important to enjoy the journey and also treasure the company that walks your life path with you.

Thank you uncle!

The potential is there – it is up to us to tap it

Let me run a simple analogy. I come by this realization everyday on my way to work, whenever I alight the bus at the stop opposite my workplace, I have to negotiate 3 flight of stairs to reach the inner depths of my work fortress.

Sometimes we are blessed, our bodies are equipped with the neccessary attributes for us to achieve results in life. No one is born equal and some are blessed with greater intelligence, creative flair for the arts or they could simply be physically inclined.

Each and everyone of us have our strengths and leverages, as we progress through our journey in life, we will come to a realization of some of strengths. For example, I am thankful that I am all of 1.87 metres in height and with that height comes a decent pair of legs. Whenever I negotiate stairs, I climb two to three steps with each stride as opposed to the normal 1 step per stride. It is physically efficient for me to do so because of the way I am physically built. I’ve realized this and I’ve never looked back since. So assuming I am working equally has hard as a colleague walking beside me, by walking at the same frequency I climb the “ladder” twice as fast.

There are many aspects of life where this could be applied other than the mini-example I’ve just provided. A talented software developer may be able to churn out better programs for less lines of code, a salesman may bring enough deals to reside in the top 10% every month while others work equally as hard but find it hard to excel.

It is important for us to find our niche and use our strengths to propel us forward.

Book #1

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve done a lot of reading lately but its was mostly on an ad-hoc basis. This marks the first book that I am reading with a definite purpose. My current aim is to at least cover 1 book per week.

The book I finished earlier this evening was “Blink : The Power of Thinking without Thinking” by Malcom Gladwell. What sold me this book was this particular segment in the first few pages where researchers were examining the conversation between a married couple and thru subtle cues in their facial expressions and manner of speech were able to figure out the underlying emotional disturbances in the relationship.

The book focuses on those first 2 seconds of intuition when we come across events. Sometimes we get a gut feeling that something is going wrong but  are unable to pinpoint how we know it to be so. A nice read, makes you realize that our mind forms associations based on the cultures we are exposed to and even if we consciously think that we are unbiased, our judgement is usually impaired based on a combination of visual, aural and various inputs. Try this experiment to find out some of your implicit correlations. Some of the exmaples are really an eye-opener.