If you were given a choice of a super power, what power would you choose?

I watched an interesting movie not very recently “Next” played by Nicholas Cage. I am more interested in his power though. He can actually see 2 minutes into the future.

Don’t think about it too much. you might get headache. Enough to say that he know exactly what will happen to him. And thus he know exactly the right action to do. He can even dodge bullets after bullets as if he were dancing.

In a way, we can apply this power in our life. Are you ready to learn it?

All we need to do is that everytime the minute-hand of our clock strike the number twelve, try to spend 30 seconds and plan what to do in the next 60 minutes.

But first, we will need to know what exactly we want from our time. If for example, you life goal is to earn more money, then ask yourself, what can you do in the next one hour that will help you make money.

Even if you are not doing anything you planned, keep practising it. You will slowly have a more goal-oriented mind each day. And this will help you achieve more from your time.

There’s no need to write what you’re doing. We actually want our life goal to be embedded deep in our subconscious mind. Trust me, the problem with this is commitment. In time, you will start forgetting to practise it, or you find it not practical. Don’t let this stop you. Keep practising it. The whole point is as previously mentioned, to embed it in our subconcious mind.

It will be more effective though if you actually do what you plan.

Tada! Now you have the power to see one hour into your future. Keep doing this, you should be able to see you entire future

You may not be able to control 100% of your future, but you are now controlling 20% of it, far better than the 0% you did previously, don’t you agree?

- I wonder -
How many of us actually plan what to do tomorrow before we go to bed?

——– Personal Note ——–
Believe it or not, one of my most played game during my childhood is a game called “Main-main”. A direct translation would be “The Game”. Filantera and DaPocket can verify this. I believe we invented the game ourselves.

At the start of the game, everyone would choose a superpower, and we would then start telling stories of how we got the power, or what good deed we were doing. It’s very imaginative. However, most of the time it went pretty much the same way, with secret identity exposed, getting the girls, bad guy loses, become wealthy etc

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I was actually writing another post when suddenly I realized something. Most of life’s problem can be settled by the keyword “more and less”. Hopefully this list will help elaborate the idea.

How to have a a healthier body?

• Less unhealthy food, more exercise

How to get things done?

• Less idling, more systematic work done

How to be more understanding?

• Less talk, more listening

How to be a happier you?

• Less negativity, more positivity

How to become rich?

• Less expenditure, more income

How to have a meaningful life?

• Less you, more others

How to achieve dream?

• Less dreaming, more action

How to excel in exam?

• Less wasting time, more study

How to be successful?

• Less mistakes, more results

How to live longer?

• Less dying, more living

/end list

You may be saying… Duh! But seriously when you think about it, it does make sense. It all boils down to these two term, more and less.

Allow me to explain. Let’s take example 2 - How to get things done. Don’t you think that the only thing that deteriorate our productivity is procrastination and lack of system? If we can minimize procrastination and build a more systematic way of doing things, basically nothing will stop us from getting things done.

Once we know this, we must go deeper, and ask how exactly can we reduce procrastination? What other system can we apply? Unfortunately the answers to that must be researched ourself.

So, what’s the importance of knowing this?

Guess what, even in its general form, we are actually halfway from solving our problems. We already know where to start. And knowing where to start is basically a solution to every problems on earth.

Try it with other problems / questions in your life. Maybe you can try to come up with the solution for these questions

1) How to make a person likes you?
2) How to be a good man?

———– Personal Note ———–
I’m currently in Kuala Lumpur, visitting my mother and taking the mrs to her now-weekly medical checkup. She is now 8 months in her pregnancy. We had checked via ultra sound to determine the gender of our baby, but apparently the little one is quite creative in hiding that vital part of his/hers. So we are still unsure of his/her gender.

But, the mrs had bought quite a lot of pink colored baby clothes

Photo Credit : Fran-Cis-Ca

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Summary - Conflict management

Previously I asked your opinion on how a simple imagination of seeing yourself from a third person view can help solve marital problem. And today I will try to explain that claim.

But first, can I ask? Do you able to picture looking at yourself from another point of view? I mean visually. Seeing yourself smiling while reading on the net, or humming your favorite song, It is a very enlightening feeling.

So what does this have to do with solving problem? Especially marital ones?

This is actually the basis of “Conflict Management” practised all around the world, seriously. I actually learn this during my years of studying. Not that they specifically teached you to start closing your eyes when a conflict arises and imagine. That one is all me :).

By conflict, I am referring to an argument between two person about a matter. One thing about argument or conflict is that everyone wants to be a winner and will not accept anything less. For example, arguing about how to do a job assigned. You may have your way and you think that would be the best way to approach it. Your colleaue however disagree. He think his method is by far better and you should agree with him.

Can you guess what will happen if the both of you are equally stubborn? Yes, the argument will last eternity.

This is how conflict management solve the problem.

1) Stop arguing
Literally, you must stop arguing to solve the problem. Both of you. It’s very hard to review the problem when all we do is defending our own view. Just sit down,

2) Attack the problem, not anything else.
Believe it or not, this is where all conflict starts. Yes, people can be so unproffesional sometimes.

It may first start like addressing the problem first, Let me give you an example. There is a machine in my mill (true example) that has been having problem. The bearing kept on breaking and this cost a lot of money, about $5000. And the manager obviously asked what happened.

The supervisor immediately blame the maintenance team, by saying that they did not do proper work when installing. The maintenance team however claim that the supervisor is tempering with the machine and spoil it.

What the supervisor and the foreman should do is to stop pointing fingers and look at how to solve the problem. If only they can see themselves from another point of view, they will see how silly the argument since that personal attack argument cannot have practical solution.

A practical solution would be that from now on, anytime the maintenance team work on the installation, an engineer and the supervisor will be present to help. Also measures will be taken to stop any tempering of the machine, like locks etc.

That goes the same with marital argument. Husband and wife arguing. Both are equally egoistic and will argue to the death just to defend that ego. Maybe the wife want a maid to help her with the housework. However the husband feels that the wife is just trying to order him around by making him do this and that, so instead of agreeing to find her a maid, he just ignore the request entirely.

The actual problem is not the husband’s ego. It is actually the fact that the housework is steadily increasing in number and the wife doesn’t have the time to work on those. In the end, the wife find herself a maid just to show the husband she’s right. And the husband obviously don’t like it. So the argument will continue on, despite the problem has already been solved.

Conclusion - Most of the time, when we argue, there is always a high possibility that the argument will turn to personal attack. This should never happen. A problem is a problem. It will never be solved by attacking other people.

The textbook method of conflict management is actually to take a step backward and view the problem as a wall located in between the two people arguing. The objective should always be to break the wall instead of hurting the two people.

———— Personal Note ————
I know, it is harder to do than to talk about it. People especially during argument will do their best to win. Still, I have to consistently guide my supervisor and foreman to work together as a team instead of trying to kill each other.

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We have been here on earth for thousands of years. (A very cliche introduction, nevertheless..) And we still haven’t figure out a lot of questions. One of which is how to get things done.

We have come up with a lot of theories and practical tips to get things done. In this blog alone, I’ve highlighted a lot of tools to help. Some worth mentioning here are :

• 80/20 Rules of Pareto
• 2 + 2 - 1 = 3 Formula
• Living Life 2 Things At A Time
• 2 Steps To Realizing Your Dream
• The Secret to Washing Dishes

Still with all these tools, we find ourselves not really able to complete our task, or our life is still chaotic. Are the tools not effective? or the tasks are just too many and too hard to complete? Why is it, even with all the tools and tips, we still cannot be organized and finish all tasks assigned?

I seriously think that I have an answer for those questions. The fact is - all those tools were created by people, 80/20 Rules were created by Pareto, Haiku Production were introduced by Leo (If I’m not mistaken). They are of course prove to be very effective for them.. not necessarily for us.

Wait a minute, I’m not saying that we should abandon all those tools. I’m just saying that we should actually develop our own system based on these esteemed tools.

Adapt those system into our life. Make it personal by reanalyzing back the tools and make our own conclusion and formula.

Example 1 : 80/20 rules stated that we should identify the 20% vital task to do first and focus on that one. No flaw to that theory. But maybe some of us are stuck with task that all 100% of them are of equal importance. How then can we choose the 20%?

Maybe for these guys, 80/20 rules must be adjusted to include delegation of work. Delegate some of the tasks to your colleague or subordinate. Maybe improve the system by incorporating other tools like the snowballing effect (Finish the small task first and when it’s done, use the allocated resource to finish the bigger ones)

Simpler example 2 : You know you are supposed to jog daily for one whole month for it to become a natural habit. But you notice that there will always be time that you will not jog.. Even though you keep reminding yourself of the formula.

For you, I would suggest you to come up with a formula on how to restart your habit, instead of formula to force sticking to one. Make it so that if you didn’t jog today, there is a system you already established that will motivate you restart jogging tomorrow. It is so much better than you become frustrated for not being able to form a habit even though one year has passed.

Conclusion - Tools are tools. What make them work is actually you. Nobody else. And for them to work exactly like you want it, you must be able to manipulate or redesign the tools specifically for you.

- I wonder -
Do you agree?

——— Personal Note ———
I am actually in the procecss to form the habit of waking up early. Earlier at least But somehow it is very frustrating when sometimes you just wake up late. These frustration for me is quite dangerous, because in time, I may be giving up the whole idea just to avoid being frustrated.

I then choose to construct my own system to restart the habit. How I do that is quite complex to be written here, but suffice to say that it work. Everytime I woke up late, I will just smile and say to myself “Tomorrow then” No frustration at all…

Photo credit : D’Arcy Norman

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If you read blogs on how to get things done, almost all of them will stress that to succeed you must plan and follow your plan. That you should never do other thing besides achieving your goals.

While there maybe some truth to that, don’t you think life will be very boring if you just read books, or work the whole time?

I mean, there are always other insignificant but nice things to do. They may not be contributing to your life goal, but there are what makes living feel like living. Typical examples are like playing guitar, or cleaning the house, or laughing at jokes read etc.

But how to balance the time between working on our goals and doing these trivia stuff?

I recommend The Great Jar of Life (Yes I made that name up.. but the concept is as old as the first jar created). What you should do is to get an empty jar, preferably made of glass so that you can see the content anytime.

The next step is to sit down and write a list of all things you want to do. Put down playing guitar, dancing with the mrs, watch one movie, etc. After you finish with the list, tear each items on the list so that you will have a paper for each items. Finally fold and put them in the jar.

The list can be anything your heart desire, but you will have to abide to these rules

• No heavy stuff - there shouldn’t be “Solve world hunger in there”.
• The things to do must be easy to do. Do not put “investigate a murder case” on the list
• It can be done in less than an hour. Some exception maybe for things like watching movie, but you will have to pay back the extra time by not doing anything from the jar tomorrow.

Now everyday, fix one time (preferably in the evening) to pick one paper and just do what ever written on it.

The whole idea is to make some time for our personal pleasure or interest. If you spend your whole day doing everything inside the jar, then your whole day will serve no purpose to your ultimate life goal.

Be frugal with your time, but don’t forget to have fun a little

- I wonder -
What do you like to do when you have free time

———- Personal Note ———–
I used to love playing computer games. My all time favorite game is Planescape Torment. One of the reason I bought this laptop is to play games. My old pc just cannot support the new games requirements. However, until now I still haven’t had the time to install any games.

I guess, blogging is more fun

Photo Credit - Indigo Goat<p

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