Summary – Help balance between achieving life’s goal and having fun

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

Summary – Top 5 skills all students must have to survive the world

Thinking back when I was studying, nobody had actually told me what to expect and what exactly I’m supposed to do. The truth is, once you started studying at tertiary level, you were expected to be independent and figure this out yourself.

There are actually a lot of skills you must master during your studying. And you will notice how useful these skills are immediately after you finish studying 🙂

Allow me to list the top 5 skills you will need and how to nurture them..

1) Stress Management
The world is cruel out there. People screaming at you all the time, impossible deadline, back-stabbing etc. Believe me the time will come when you are so stressed that you get up and start walking very fast without realizing it. That is the early sign you are under stress.

• Learn to be ignorant. Learn to listen with one ear and let it pass by out of the second ear. Somehow we can do that perfectly in a lecture, why not try it somewhere else? 🙂 Of course this is specifically for stress related talks.

• Find your inner peace. I personally walk or run to calm myself. Find yours.

• Learn to file the stress away. Set another time to worry about it. For example, you heard the news of computers being hacked, just worry about it when you are in front of the computer. Why worry now when you can’t do anything about it.

• Start meditation. Meditation doesn’t have to be a complicated thing. You can actually just do the basic of meditation.

• Apply the Donkey’s Famous Lesson. Read the story here

2) Leadership
Everyone will be a leader in one way or another. Actually for you to be promoted, people will be looking for this quality in you.

• Be a good follower first. Join clubs if you can. There, observe the leader of the club and see how effective he is. Learn from him.

• Be charismatic. Would you like to be led by someone who look like an addict? Behave like a leader. That means well dressed, confident and charming.

• Decide confidently. Practise this, but remember.. the key to good decision is firm, fast and justifiable. Now decide on your choice of dinner for the night.

• Learn to identify strength and weakness. Pick 10 friends of yours at random. Secretly identify what are their strength and weaknesses. Maybe Ali is good with grammar but are to shy to give presentation.

3) Lifelong Learning
If you think all the learning stop with your graduation, think again? It’s a typical wrong assumption made by students. Learning never stop.

• Start with one. Choose one subject that you love the most. It must be something you really love. Go to the library or surf the internet and research everything there is to know about the subject.

• Learn to speed reading. You will learn and focus better with this technique. One method is to scan the articles for points like what I’m doing here.

4) People Skill
Communicating with people may be one of the hardest thing to do. Everyone is unpredictable and to make sure everything is going according to plan requires specific skill when it comes to people.

• Plain talk. When you are on a bus, try to talk to the stranger besides you. But please don’t just talk to only those of opposite gender to you. That would be unfair 🙂 Here’s some tips to avoid being clueless in a conversation

• Plain listen. Once a week, make time to listen to your friends talking. They may be sharing their problem. just listen. You don’t even need to give your suggestion.

• Public speaking. I’ve actually wrote an articles on some personal tips to be better public speaker.

• Haggle / Arguing Skill. For a start, always try to haggle when you buy something. You may not get that price you want, but at least you will get the experience. Not haggling is one of the 5 mistakes we did unknowingly while shopping

5) Self Motivation
The time will come when you are down from failure etc. Who will you call? You can’t expect your parents or lecturers to motivate you. Pick yourself up.

• List down your three motivation keys. Everyone has their own method to get motivated. Maybe a quote or a story. Establish these and remind yourself of them everytime you’re down. My personal key is the quote “Shake it off and take a step up”.

• Bookmark motivational websites. A shameless promotion would be bookmarking LessonInLife.com 🙂

• Achieve mini success everyday. Nothing more motivating that success. So set easy goal to achieve everyday. Once you succeeded, it will give a positive remark on you. Maybe aim to save $200 every month for 3 months. That should be easy.

• Get up from your mini failure. Remember those easy goals you set? If you fail to achieve them, I would call it mini failure. Get up from those failure. Start again if you must. But remember to write down in writing every details about your come back. When you need motivation, you can always refer back to that record.

– I wonder –
Anything else you might want to add?

——- Personal Note ——–
Speaking of finding my inner peace to calm my stress level, I first noticed that I need to walk it off when Filantera (my younger brother) had an accident back in 1990, if I’m not mistaken. I automatically walked around my house again and again while praying for his safety. Alhamdulillah, he’s safe 🙂

Summary – Only do one task at a time

Today I took medical leave. Actually I was given after I went to the dentist and had one of my tooth pulled out. Just can’t stand the pain.

Having a day off from work, I planned to clean up the house, blog maintenance, maybe start a new exercise routine, watching movie with the mrs etc etc.

That’s where I made a mistake. There’s too many things to do, and I end up just half cleaning the house and watching the movie the rest of the day:)

We always think that we have the time to do 1000 things in our days. Everything is equally important and we have no choice but to do it all. In the end, other urgent things may come or more popularly, we just do what we like, and in my case watching the movie.

How can we fix this?

If we can’t shoot for the stars, aim lower. I should have just list one thing I will definitely do today. What ever happened, this one thing must be done. In 7 days, there will be at least 7 things done. Instead of trying to do it all, I may end up NOT finishing anything at all.

However, this should not be my permanent resolution. Once I have get used to this habit, I will need to increase the number of things must be done per day. The most important thing is still to be consistent with the habit and as long as I strive to be consistent with this, I’m already on the right track.

Why I’m telling you this? Well, I too am still in the journey to better myself, and by publicly sharing this, I am committing myself to the program.

Care to join me?

– I wonder –
What one thing do you want to do tomorrow?

———– Personal Note ———–
I heard somewhere that toothache is the second most painful thing in the world. The most painful thing is delivering baby. I wonder if it is true?

Today’s Sunday, and here in LessonInLife, we tried to make your Sunday as relaxing as possible. Thus usually we will only post light entries for the day.

Listed below are a joke I received via email on the top 10 things to say if you get caught sleeping at your desk. Enjoy!

10. “They told me at the blood bank this might happen.”

9. “This is just a 15 minute power-nap like they raved about in the last time management course you sent me to.”

8. “I wasn’t sleeping! I was meditating on the mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm!”

7. “This is one of the seven habits of highly effective people!”

6. “I was testing the keyboard for drool resistance”

5. “Actually I’m doing a “Stress Level Elimination Exercise Plan” (SLEEP) I learned it at the last mandatory seminar you made me attend.

4. “I was doing a highly specific Yoga exercise to relieve work related stress.”

3. “Darn! Why did you interrupt me? I had almost figured out a solution to our biggest problem.”

2. “I wasn’t sleeping, I was trying to pick up contact lens without hands.”

1. “Amen”

Moral of the story : Sleeping on the job will definitely get caught 🙂