Many shared the horrors of parenting.

The screaming child who can’t be reasoned with.

The seemingly never-ending nights of interrupted sleep.

The mess (poop) that you never get used to.

The realization that almost all your attention and free time is dedicated to this tiny human being.

But not enough is shared about the gifts that our little ones give us. Maybe it’s too hard to put into words. Maybe it’s so obvious to those who are already parents that no words are needed. Maybe everyone experience it differently.

I can share mine. At least to my Emma. The joys that you provide without even knowing it.

The feeling of connection when I understood what you wanted or what was making you cry. It was just you trying your best to communicate with us adults. We are the ones that don’t get it.

The sense of awe when you pick up some of our words or even seemingly understanding our conversations even when you have not been taught them at all.

The feeling of comfort when you randomly ran over to give me a hug.

The bond as I pat you and sensing your feeling of safety in my arms after another bout of nightmares.

The rekindled curiosity about the world as I watch your intrigue in seemingly everything.

The joy when a smile lights up your face.

I even cherished the moments when you had to hold onto my hands as you try to poop!

Perhaps the best gift of parenting is making you realize there really is a lot more joy in loving others than attaining all your selfish wants.

Is having your own opinion and insisting on them a virtue or simple a form of stubbornness?

Don’t great people challenge conventions along their way to greatness?

But don’t great people also open their mind to the possibility that they are wrong and are willing to seek criticism to get better?

Do we have to insist that everyone else sees our way for us? For what end?

But then again, if we are to waver whenever any external opposing points of views are proposed to us, then we will never get anywhere.

Balance. Moderation, as of everything else. Moderation even in moderation.

Be self-aware, be open-minded, consider the possibilities and be flexible.

Choose your battles wisely. We don’t have to convince everyone that our views are right all the time. Sometimes, we may even be wrong.

 

Effort is overrated. Success is inexplicably linked with effort. Almost no success comes with the lack of effort, but for every success story, there are many more failures that do not lack in effort.

Do you know anyone who tried to become a professional athlete, musician, or start a business? You probably know several and have heard of many more. And do most of these aspiring people succeed? Most of them don’t. Did they put in effort, did they work hard, busting their ass to achieve their dreams? Most likely the answer is “yes”. So why didn’t they succeed even after all the effort they have put in?

It is difficult to understand. Luck is definitely one of the many factors but can’t fully explain why most people fail than succeed at these endeavours. Yet it is so common to hear that if we want something, we have to put our back into it, throw in the hours, and sweat for it to get the success. It has even turn into a narrative that glorifies such hard work, such ‘hustle’, that it is something to be proud of and even boasted about.

But that’s just not how things work. Perhaps the ‘effort’ shouldn’t be directing at brute forcing your way to success, but rather into discovering the ‘easy’ way to your goal. To have reasonably sustained effort towards success, the effort should feel rather ‘effortless’.

An example can be seen when talking achieving a fitness goal . There are many ways to achieving a healthy body. If one is to persist in performing a particular form of exercise like weightlifting, but do not find much joy in it, the effort will feel incredibly ‘effortful’ and your results may not be sustainable. Instead if one were to seek a sport or a type of exercise that one finds enjoyment in, say in football or yoga, one still needs to engage some effort into the activity but that ‘effort’ will feel relatively effortless, thus more likely leading to success.

It is common to hear among entrepreneurs to keep hustling if they want to grow their business. In this context, if things feel difficult, it shouldn’t necessarily be that the correct action is just to simply ‘work harder’. It should instead be taken as a sign that the market and your product may have a poor fit. With a poor product/market fit, simply working harder is not going to cut it and will just result in lots of wasted money, time, and demotivate the team.

We have to be wise enough to differentiate between persistence and mis-directed struggles. We should persist in chasing our goals but take the ‘effort’ instead to seek the most ‘easy’ path. We can learn more to be like water – ever-flowing but flexible and effortlessly flowing down by following the contours of its terrain.

‘Be water, my friend.’ ~ Bruce Lee

 

We all live in a hallucination of our own. It is almost impossible to accurately say that we all see, feel, and hear the same reality. Even our physical senses are tampered by our emotions and perceived beliefs at the time of interaction. Hence everyone perceives the world differently and creates their own ‘illusion’ of reality.

However it is most likely that we perceive a reasonably accurate version of the ‘actual’ physical reality since we are able to share and conform to many sets of rules and behaviours. Our perceived reality guides our everyday actions and our beliefs. We as humans like to seek the truth, but we don’t realise that we are mainly only chasing our own kind of truth, not the universal truth.

Deeply entrenched in our psyche is also our desire to belong. When the desire to belong and desire of truth conflicts, we get stuck, but I think it’s safe to say most people default to the desire to belong. We don’t always believe things because they are correct, but rather because they allow us to look on favourably by others and retain or even improve our status in the group. This is probably why many of us try to be ‘politically correct’ at social events.

So how then to convince others of a truth that you know but not easily accepted by others? Perhaps it will be easier to befriend them, ‘join their group’, then to convince them with hard facts. These are why charismatic leaders are popular but can also be equally dangerous. They are able to inspire and draw people towards them forming a group bond, and get them to accept his perception of truth.

So is it better to be popular than good? Why not both? And be responsible as well.

There’s really no better way to understand differences in culture across countries than being physically immerse in the environment. Spend some time with the locals, try out their cuisines, learn their language, and simply just observe them in their own backyard. And be open to the possibility that many of our pre-conceived notions about others are simply wrong or not entirely accurate.

So much of our perception of others are influenced by the media, by the noisy minority that manage to capture our attention, but they are not usually representative of the whole nation or society. This is one of the great benefits of travelling – finding out for yourself how others are really like. Are they as different as we thought?

Ironically, we will find many differences in some of our beliefs and habits, but we will also find that we are also very much the same. We share many similar human values. At the end of the day, we are the same, just that we grew up in different environments.

Our limited and precious commodity, attention, is in short supply these days. It’s in short supply because there’s simply so much demand for it in today’s technological and social media world. People are becoming billionaires because of their ability to build products and services to capture our attention constantly.

We can only be aware of things when we pay attention to it, but we can also be paying attention when we are not aware. For example, think back to the time when you whipped out the phone from your pocket and start scrolling through Instagram? Probably just in your previous spare pocket of time. Like waiting for the bus, in the queue, or even just a moment of uninteresting conversation when with a group of friends. All these is due to us willingly giving away our attention to these cleverly-designed attention grabber. And they make money off it.

But what do we get out of it? Sure, we enjoy looking at nice photos. We get updated of our friends’ latest happenings. But are they truly so urgent that we need to check them so often, and at the expense of what is right in front of us? We developed habits of simply paying attention without awareness and we find it harder to pay attention on what we really want or need to. There’s a reason why it is described as ‘pay’ attention. It is a price we are paying, as it takes something else away.

To protect and develop ourselves, we need to be more stingy about giving away our attention. Stop paying out attention so cheaply. It is much easier said than done given our lives are deeply entrenched with the very same technological tools that helped us in work and life but also have features meant to distract us. It all comes back to our ability to generate self-awareness and control our actions after the initial stimulus.

On the other hand, if you are able to develop the skillset of capturing and steering people’s attention, you will likely find some semblance of success. This is the reason for the rise of mini ‘influencers’ and many of the social apps. They knowingly or unknowingly discover ways to capture your attention, especially when you are unaware. Magicians are the master of capturing and diverting your attention too. I was fascinated by magic largely because of this reason.

There is a struggle from all major corporations for our attention as they recognise it is the most precious commodity. It’s like oil but much more subtle and yet dangerous. Unlike oil however, there’s no discussion that an over-consumption of this commodity will be detrimental to us. We simply try to milk as much attention as possible from people, and many times from ourselves too.

So, what will you do with people’s attention if you are able to capture it? And what would you choose to carefully pay attention to?

Moving into a house that was someone else’s is a peculiar feeling. You look at the walls, the furnitures, the floor, and bathroom, and you feel like you are living in someone else’s skin. Sometimes you are baffled by the logic of how the previous owner had placed their stuff, sometimes you see the brilliance and thought behind it.

You start to piece together what the person could be like, and how they have lived. And now you go about wondering how you meld the existing with your own. There is a sudden invasion of your belongings, and you wonder if the previous owner would have approved. There is now a need for co-existence between the past and the present. But slowly and surely, you will start removing pieces of the old and adding your own flavours.

Such is the passing of time and impermanence of life. As we ourselves move on, another owner will come in and the process will repeat. Even if the building is torn down and something else is rebuilt, the land, the space, is still loosely tied to the past. But eventually all will be slowly overwritten.

Impermanence is permanent.

Emotions. Emotions are our very own messengers trying to tell us the truth about ourselves.

When we are angry, irritated, or resentful, this anger messenger is trying to tell us that some beliefs or standards that we hold are being violated. Yet many times we are just so focused on the messenger itself or the trigger of the emotion that we often do not hear out the lesson behind it. If we have heard the message, then we could do either of the following:

1. Change our perspective. Perhaps trying to see things from another angle will help us understand the underlying cause of anger better. For example, I can get annoyed when my wife don’t make the bed, but I realise it’s just me trying to impose my standard and years of habit on her. That’s not fair.
2. Change our system. If we have been doing the same thing and getting the same result which makes us angry, may be we should change the way we are doing things. For example, I have been pretty annoyed recently because I kept getting parking fines because I always forget to register my digital parking coupons. Hence I have since moved the parking app right to the front page of my phone which is more likely to remind me of parking since the phone is usually the first thing I look at after I parked. Not a perfect system but it’s working so far.

And we can apply these also to other emotions that we face such as guilt, frustration, regret, fear, discomfort, jealousy etc. All these emotions are trying to tell us that something is not right, most likely either the mindset or perspective we have, or the actions that we have been doing, or a combination of both.

In our heads we hold a particular set of rules and ideals about how our world runs. But in reality, the world likely differs in many ways to what’s in our head. So either we adjust our heads around it, or take the appropriate actions to adjust reality to bridge the gap.

Of course it’s not that easy, we will need to learn the difference between acceptance and taking action, just like the famously known serenity prayer: “… grant the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. ”

But first, listen. Listen to our very own messengers. Our emotions are here to help us, not just to piss us off.

Being reliable is the most important trait you will look for in someone on your team. And being the opposite of it is likely to make you very unpopular with others.

Being reliable means managing commitments well and always delivering. There is an implicit obligation to be truthful to others and/or yourself when making and accepting commitments. It means that we will deliver, come what may.

In the event that something throws us off course, we will do everything possible to get back on it but we will also truthfully assess our abilities and limitations in fulfilling the commitment, and clearly communicate to the parties that we have made the commitment too. If this happens too often, then you are likely unreliable in selecting and accepting commitments.

Being reliable to others is also being reliable to ourselves. We must be self-aware of our locus of control and understand our desire and motivation to complete a certain obligation. If we can’t fully trust ourselves to complete a project or deliver a certain task, do not promise that to others. That’s just being a jerk.