It is a very known fact that being merciful to others is a very noble thing to do. Somehow I was reminded of the movie Gladiator where the crowd cheers – “Maximus the Merciful”. Anyway… moving on.

Merciful simply means that we take into consideration our feeling when we can do it either way. For examples, when we wins in a contest. We can be a jerk by making fun of the losers but to be merciful means that we should honor the losers by being humble.

There are some occasion however where we have to be merciless. Meaning – putting aside all our feeling and display less caring about anything. I’m referring to occasion when your time is wasted. Here are some examples:

1) Email
Fortunately for us, Spam Filter was created. If not, I wonder how many hours will be spent just to delete the spam. To be merciless in your email handling is to just read the title and if nothing good can come from reading it, just immediately delete it. If it really irrelevant, put it in the spam filter.

Learn how to filter email properly, and be merciless when deleting emails.

That goes the same thing with writing an email. Email was supposed to be very straight to the point. There’s no need to ask the weather, or how’s the new house. Unless of course the email is meant to ask about the weather and its effect on the house.

Time is everything, and if we can save some valuable seconds from handling email, why shouldn’t we?

2) On the phone time
Unless you are talking to family or catching up with old friends, there’s absolutely no reason you should spend 30 minutes on the phone with your colleague.

Cut it short, just say that you have some other urgent things to do. In fact we really do have other urgent things to do, like living our life 🙂

3) SMS / IM
SMS are generally a short form of short message system, If you are sending / receiving SMS more than 10 times to one person, isn’t it just easier to call that person. I know that SMS is so much cheaper, but is your time just as cheap?

IM or Instant Messaging is very similar to SMS but they are totally free and far more efficient. In fact they are so efficient, I would recommend it. However, sometimes chatting can have a very addictive effect, especially when people are usually funnier in chatroom than when they are in real form.

Log out immediately if you find that your goals have been met, or the whole discussion is going nowhere.

One thing in common with these three points is that family should NEVER be treated mercilessly. In the end, if we neglected our family, what else do we have?

4) RSS feed
This is another time waster. For the benefit of those who might not familiar, RSS feed is basically a method to read multiple blogs simultaneously. The application will retrieve all the new post from the blogs and listed them down for us to read. I am currently subscribed to about 30 blogs and I read them daily.

But of course I am very merciless when it comes to reading RSS feed, I just have a glimpse through what the post is about, and if it is not related to me, for examples, about a convention in Las Vegas or about things I already knew, I will delete it in 2 seconds and move on.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

5) Newspaper
I once a perfectionist, read the newspaper from the front to the back, not missing any news. I was at first trying to improve my English. Then I started to have this desire to know everything there is to know.

It doesn’t take me too long to realize that that is an impossible things to do. And what benefit can I gain from reading about the stock exchange when I am not at all interested in it.

Be merciless with your newspaper reading. Read only the headlines and if anything interest you, read the first paragrapah, if that continues to interest you, scan through the whole articles. Never read it word by word. You may have to start over when you finish 🙂

– I wonder –
Any other things we should be merciless on?

——– Personal Note ———
I am currently the secretary of the Mill’s Safety Committee and we have meetings every 3 months. Generally, the meeting is to discuss any safety related issues.

I have to consistently pull them back to the agenda at hand 🙂 which is not a very popular thing to do.

Photo credit : deonstrauss

Summary – Trying Out New Option Requires Responsibility

One of the most frequently used word of advice from my manager is the words “You Never Know Unless You Try”. This is actually one of the oldest advice in the world, and maybe one of the wisest. But like all powerful things, if not used right, it will become a danger. Please allow me to elaborate on this.

First of all, why is the advice useful? It is because, sometimes we are given a choice like whether to pursue a dream that may not have a future, or do something we despise but guaranteed a future. The keyword is the word “MAY”. We can never know exactly that our dream will have no future. So unless we try, we will just never know.

This is where the danger lies. We can and should never try out everything. Life is full of option. If we want to try out everything, for the sake of “trying itout first then we will know”, we will have a very unstable life. Imagine a student studying mathematics. He actually love everything about the subject, but in the spirit of trying, he drop the subject and start his own business. This may be a good thing, but it turns out, he really dislike doing business in the first place. So that is an example of why sometimes we shouldn’t try everything

Trying in another word is making a decision to do the thing. You will have to be very sure that whether or not you are successful, the choice made is worth doing before you make the leap. You don’t have to be 100% sure. The question you really need to ask is whether that choice is really worth it. If it is, by all means, try it.

you will never know unless you tried, but.. use your wisdom wisely

– I Wonder –
Have you ever made any regretable choice?

———- Personal Note ————
Again, I must stress that it is not my intention to discourage you from trying things out. This is the very foundation of living life.

The article is just to highlight the other side of the equation, to never be stupidly brave to try everything