Here’s the tricky part. Some part of the world call the game football, while another part call it soccer. To be fair, I’m going to use the word used in Malaysia which is football. Just to be clear, I’m referring to this.

Why I’m writing about football, when I am actually not a good player to boast? I watched a match yesterday on TV and these ideas just hit me. There’s so many things we can learn from football.

1) Only one aim – The Goal
Each team has only one aim in mind, which is to move the ball to the oposing team’s goal area.

Everything the player did from the start of the game to the end is aimed to do this. You will not find a player just squat down and admire the ball’s roundness.

We should follow this example. Figure out our goals in life. And make sure everything we do will get us closer to that goal

2) Own goal happened – life goes on
Sometimes the player accidentally kicks the ball into his own goal. A lot of people will be frustrated especially his team. Does the game stop to give time for the player to mourn? No

In our life, we are bound to make mistakes here and there. Some mistakes maybe critical and some may not. What ever it is, don’t spend too much time mourning it, shake it off and move on. Time waits for no one.

3) Referee solves issues
Just imagine a match without the referee. I don’t think the game will last 2 minutes without a fight. In a case of foul play, both team will never admit their team is wrong. They will fight and in the end, nobody will win the game.

Sometimes, we also will face crisis. A problem where each party will have different opinion. Neither opinion is wrong but still we insist that everyone follows our opinion. In these cases, it is better to assign a third party decider. Everyone must agree to follow what that referee decide. This is because having a decision is always better than no decision at all.

4) The tougher the opponent, the sweeter the victory
Assuming you are a national player, would you play against the kindergarten football team? No? Me too. The victory if any, will be meaningless. unless of course you are playing with your children 🙂

Never expect life to be easy. It’s not. It is full of difficulties and problems any way you look at it. However it is these difficulties and problems that will make life worth living. When you know you earn your life

So whenever you are stuck with a problem. face it like a warrior and if you survive, enjoy your victory

– I wonder –
Any other lesson we can extract from the game?

———— Personal Note ————
I am not very good at playing football. That fact had been tested many times and it always end with the same result. One of the game that I am good with is Sepakraga. Apparently there is no Wikipedia explanation of Sepakraga, however you can watch the video of the game.

can I ask what game you are good at?

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Summary – Don’t lie to yourself, you’ll know

When people actually say “think positive”, what comes to your mind. Let say you were fired by your boss from work, what would you say to yourself?

• Everything will be okay
• I will definitely get another job in a few days
• This is a good thing for me

Any other answers? For me, all these answers are a good example of a more positive thinking. Trying to look at the positive side of things. They are far much better than –

• I’m going to die of starvation
• I’m such a loser
• Everyone hates me

Don’t you agree? However, when you think about it. Do you really know that things will be okay? Do you really know that you will get another job ASAP? And is it really a good thing to be sacked from a company?

The truth is all those words are only words to calm yourself down. It is always better to be calm and positive than panicky and negative. However, they are still basically lies we tell ourselves. And deep down inside, we actually know that.

Now that’s my friend is why positive thinking is always very hard to do, and sometimes it will do more harm than good. Unless of course you know the proper way of positive thinking..

The actual proper way to an effective positive thinking is to acknowledge what has happened first.

In this specific example, we must first acknowledge that we are fired from the job. Never try to comfort us by saying that the company made the biggest mistake by sacking you, or that you will get better job etc.

Acknowledge first that you are fired. It’s real and whatever it is, it’s done. Whether you want to believe it or not, you are now jobless. And whatever future maybe will depend ENTIRELY on how you react to this.

Once you had acknowledge this, I can assure you your fear of being fired will reduce drastically. Because you’ve dealt with the issue. You can now move on by planning what exactly should you do to overcome this problem.

That is positive thinking – the way of thinking that will benefit you. Not the lies you told yourself for comfort. Let say you tell yourself that you will get a job in 2 weeks. And unfortunately you remain jobless for over a year now, just imagine the damage done to your mind with the frustration.

Rule of thumb : Positive thinking is when you said something to yourself that will make good things happen.

Examples of positive thinking words

• I know it will hurt, but I have no time for that. I will fight with all my energy to watch my baby grow. To teach her everything I know about life and see her be the smartest girl on the planet. (To be said when fighting for life during delivery)
• I fail the exam, which means I am given a second opportunity to fix my life. I now know exactly what it takes to succeed.
• Accidents happened to me as a reminder that I need to improve my driving skills. Good thing it is only minor accident

Examples of positive thinking that lies

• This will not hurt.
• I am going to excel next time
• It’s not my fault the accident happened. I’m just not lucky

Examples of negative thinking

• If I die, my baby will still have her father
• I’m stupid
• Some people are just not meant to drive

———- Personal Note ———-
I actually dedicate this post to my wife, the mrs. She is now in her 9th month of pregnancy. And a lot of things come to her mind now, both positive and negative. Can’t blame her since this is our first baby.

Mothers, any comforting words for her? please

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It’s a known fact that we each have 24 hours per day. You can be the prime minister of a country or the loitering teenager at the mall, nothing can change this fact.

Like every rigid rules in the universe, this too can be bent. Here’s 10 method to steal an extra 3 hours from the time bank.

1) Wake up early
Try to find your minimum hours of sleeping needed. If for example you sleep for 7 hours every day, try to wake 15 minutes earlier. Keep reducing it slowly but only do that when you are comfortable with the new habit. Don’t force it.(1 hour recovered)

2) Solve problem while sleeping
What you need to do is simple. Just before you go to bed, plan what you are going to do tomorrow. Try to be as detailed as you can. It is theorized that most problems were solved when we are asleep by our subconscious mind. Imagine going through the day smoothly without having to stop when problems occur. Imagine how much time we have saved.

A more extreme method is to see the future one hour at a time. (0.5 hour recovered)

3) Filter television
Preferably just stop watching. But if you must, only watch what you want to watch. Check the schedule on what’s interesting and put that on your personal schedule. Watch ONLY that. Do not watch television just because you have nothing to do. (0.5 hour recovered)

4) Cut small talk
This is quite critical. You cut too much you are antisocial, you cut too little and it’s just pointless.

When you’re on the phone, try to have something in mind on what you want to know or tell. Unless that person is family or your loved ones, I don’t see any reason why we should be on the phone more than 30 minutes.

That goes the same thing to email, IM and now twitter 🙂 (0.5 hour recovered)

5) Walk faster
This trick is actually introduced to me when I was in high school. As juniors we are forced to walk fast to go to places. I hated it then.

Now however, I find it quite efficient to walk fast. I exercise and most importantly I save quite a significant amount of time compared to walking slowly. (0.25 hour recovered)

6) Avoid repetitive work
Your time is gold. If you need to go buy groceries, try to plan your list and avoid having to go twice. Yes, sometimes we forget. That’s why it is recommended to print out a list of things you always buy. Whenever you are going out, check out all the items in the list first. (0.25 hour recovered)

7) Delegate
Delegation is an art really. To know which task can be given to other person to do, and which to do ourself. The thing is, tasks are really never ending. Start delegating simple tasks like typing, proofreading etc (0.25 hour recovered)

8] Dedicated days
I have a tray on my desk where I put all my receipt or carbon copy of my paid bills in. Those are supposed to be filed. However if I file every receipt everytime I receive one, I will spend a lot of time just doing my filing. So I dedicate one day of the week to do filing.

You can do the same to maybe spring cleaning, or snail mail corresponding etc. Assign one day to do all of that. (0.1 hours recovered)

9) Scrap the seconds
By scrapping I mean to appreciate every seconds of your day. Imagine that seconds are like $1. What would you feel if you are losing $1 every second. Learn speed reading, read only important news in the newspaper (Do you need to know how depressed an actresss is?). Recover as much as possible. (0.1 hours recovered)

10) MOST IMPORTANT : Know how to spend the extra time
Even if you have 100 hours per day, it would be meaningless if you don’t know what to do with it. This is why it is very crucial for you to know 3 things before you start with the list.

• What do you really want in life? (loved ones, religion)
• What are your priorities? (family, job, hobbies)
• What trivia things that you need to do anyway (email lost friends, Jar Of Life technique etc)

By doing item no 10, you are basically recovering the sum of it all – 3.2 hours. Which generally means if everyone else has 24 hours, you have 27.2 hours a day!

– I wonder –
Any other tips to recover that seconds?

——— Personal Note ———-
NetworkBloggingTips is actually putting up a challenge to come up with a list-type post. This entry is my submission to the challenge. Feel free to join in.

In the spirit of the challenge. Here are some of my most recent list-type articles. More of them here

• 4 Signs You Are SIB Immuned
• 7 Ideas on How To Live Differently Everyday
• 10 Motivational Scripts Specifically For Student
• 7 Situations You Should Memorize How To Respond
• 6 Sure Tricks To Overcome Fear

Enjoy!

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Summary – 20% of controlling power is better than 0%

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 🙂

Good times good times

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