Living on the edges.

WORK. BUY. CONSUME. DIE. Is this what you really want?

7. Live on the edges.

This is probably the most important quality of the remarkable man. If you’re going to pay attention to anything, pay attention now. You can’t be remarkable by simply “doing what works,” following a pre-made template for life and keeping your head down and nose to the grindstone.

If you want to be more than just a pawn, you’re going to have to take control of the game. You’ll need to decide how your life is played, instead of living by default.

- Seven Traits of the Highly Remarkable Man - www.kinowear.com

But that seems to be what so many people are doing right now, here at university. I see so many following pre-written scripts on how to be successful and make it big at some prestigious firm, so many blindly grinding away at the grindstone just because they aren't sure of their dreams.

I myself am not totally exempt from all this. Sometimes I just wish that my hopes and dreams were just a little bit clearer, and that I have the discipline and courage to chase it.

We only have one life to live, and what a waste if we spend it just living out someone else's life.

Looking forward for the holidays where I'll probably get to live a life closer to my ideal one.

What happens when you have no control over your mind.

The Buddha also once said:

"Use and train your mind to get what you want instead of letting your mind use you to get what it wants."

Realize that you have the potential to live the life of our dreams, only if we first break out of the mental programming that is holding us back.

A lot of the time people are just slaves of their minds, their programming, and we often just go through life as just like robots reading off a program. But we are more than that. We are more than just animals who just follow their instinctual programming because our faculties of reason allow us to think, reflect, and break out of our disempowering beliefs, creating a brighter destiny for ourselves.

And it all starts with the smallest of things, just realizing that we are indeed more than the sum of the programming that we've been through all our lives, that we actually have power to choose the beliefs and thoughts that we carry in our minds. And that makes all the difference.

Remembering why you do it.

The final exams are just round the corner and everywhere these days I see tired eyes due the stresses of exam preparation. It's not unheard of to hear of hermits here in NTU who spend all their waking hours in their rooms studying.

"Too much exam stress leads to the dark side!"

Exams can be stressful, but in university, should it be the case?

Whenever the pressures of my course start to get to me, I ask myself this simple question - why in the world am I doing this?

Nobody forced me into university, I wanted to do this on my own free will. I chose to come back down to Singapore to study, not because everyone else was doing it, but because I wanted an education that will help me accomplish what I want to do in the future.

Which would better prepare you for the future? The degree, or the wisdom you've earnt?

I'm not here so much to chase that piece of paper that they call a degree, but to learn as much as I can about businesses from my professors and peers, so that I would have the necessary expertise to start an enterprise of my own in the near future.

That's what I'm really here for - to learn, to grow and to become a better person, not to join the paper chase just because everyone is doing it.

And with that, the dust just settles and the stress just flows away. The air even smells better. I even start to see how relevant the things I am studying actually are. It all makes studying so much more enjoyable, and something that I am actually excited doing. And it makes all the difference.

Wouldn't it make you happy to study without stress?

Remembering why I am in university has also emboldened me to dare to try the new, even if it means making mistakes along the way.

I have seen so many people who just follow the crowd and just come up with business presentation that just seems acceptable and 'safe' - just because it looks just like the one that the previous group came up with. But I strongly believe that there's just no point in learning through just photocopying.

I dare to come up with different ways to approach a problem and present because I know that it's the best way to enrich my learning; I dare to try my hand at activities I held back trying in the past because it's going to make me a stronger person.

If you're out there, stressed due to your coming exams, just ask yourself why you are in that course of study in the first place. Like for any love affair to truly last, you have to keep remembering the reason you first fell in love to begin with, and fall in love with that person all over again, every single day.

Just remember how it began...

Remembering why you do it makes all the difference.

One small step at a time.

I just feel so overwhelmed right now - I've got two quizzes coming up next week (and one of them is a dreaded statistics quiz!), a statistics presentation and an important marketing project presentation that is worth 20% of my final grade.

"There's so much to do!"

Just thinking about all there is to do gives me a headache, really, but then this whole thing reminded me of how my group for Organizational Behaviour (OB) handled our last 3000 word report.

Everything seemed to have gone wrong with that report. We started late, misread the question and when we finally realised that we had to get it ready within a week, my group members and I found ourselves caught up with a whole range of equally important commitments, making it difficult for us to even meet up and get the report done.

And thus the week flew by, with us just having a few unproductive meetings and a whole big cloud of impending dread hanging over us, and we found ourselves with just three days till D-day. With just three days left, we put in all we could. We stayed over at one of my groupmate's place and worked on the report an entire night. But that just wasn't enough, and after all the work we put into it, the report was still a mess. And somehow we found ourselves with a half done report with only one night remaining. That was Wednesday night and the report was due on Thursday morning. There was just no more time left to waste.

So in a last ditch effort to save our skins, a teammate of mine and I decided to meet at my place and work on the report all the way, and do whatever it took to get it done. So we worked, and worked and worked through the night. That night never seemed to end. Fatigued by not sleeping well the past few days as we spent so much time working on the report, we really struggled to keep working. I just kept reminding myself that 20% of my grade for OB depended on this report and just kept working on the report. There was no time to even catch a short nap. We were really running out of time.

It was hell, but as we really poured our hearts out into the report, the report begun to take shape, and it started looking better. And better, and better. But the report was still too long, and we worked in the early morning, cutting off every single unnecessary word, so that we would satisfy the lean word limit of 3000 words.

And at 6am, after working through the entire night, we did it. I cut down the part I prepared to a mere 1000 plus words and my teammate edited the rest of the report down to 2000 words, making the report just slightly over 3000 words. Or so she thought.

When we put the two parts together, and my teammate did a final word count, all the colour suddenly dissappeared from her face.

"Kevin, something's wrong, very wrong!" she shrieked.

Apparently we were still somehow 500 plus words above the word limit due to some reasons still unknown to us. The time then was about 6:05am, and we had to send the report to my other teammate who lives in Woodlands to print before she leaves the house at 6:30am, or we'll never get our report to our tutor by the 8:30am deadline.

"How are we to remove 500 words in 25 minutes? Is it even humanly possible?" she shrieked again.

We really didn't have a choice, and 20% of our grade depended on this report. We had to get it done, by hook or crook, and panicking wasn't going to help.

And then I had an epiphany.

"Hey, it's alright. Just calm down. See, we have 30 pages in our report, and we only have to cut off 16 plus words per page and we're done. It's possible. We can do this."

And so began the most stressful 25 minutes I ever had editing a report. We ran through the report and cut down as much as we could out of it. It wasn't easy, but we managed to cut off a line or two every page, and make the necessary paraphrasing to shorten our sentences. We even cut of several paragraphs which weren't particularly relevant.

And then after going through the entire report, we did a final word count.

"3014 words."

We did it! At that moment, the adrenaline was pumping so hard in my system that it felt like I just bungee jumped off a cliff, or just jumped off a plane, skydiving. We really did it! We managed to do something that seemed impossible by just doing the best we could, one little chunk at a time.

"We did it!"

By looking at the gargantuan task of reducing the report by 500 words as just cutting away 16 plus words per page, we made it manageable in our minds, and that just made all the difference.

When life's challenges all seem to come at you at one go and threaten to overwhelm you, just remember that it's all in the mind, and we can take things one small step at a time. A large challenge always seems so much more achievable when you split it up into many tiny bite size tasks to be worked on.

So if you're out there feeling stressed and overwhelmed too, just remember that things always look better if you take them on one small baby step at a time, and that if we really believe that we can, we are able to accomplish even that which seems impossible.

There's just so much to do, but I'm going to survive all this, one small step at a time.

Cutting out the Crap.

University sure ain't as easy as I thought it would be. Sure, classes aren't as long as they used to be back in JC, but it only means that we have to spend more time understanding schoolwork on our own; I only have lessons four days a week, but it only means that a huge portion of time is spent on completing assignments or meeting up with project teammates to meet yet another deadline.

"THE DEADLINES NEVER SEEM TO ENDDDDD!"

There's just so much to get used to - you have to get used to learning a whole new subject with minimal guidance, you got to get used to the increased travel times whenever you want to go to town to meet a friend, and you just got to learn how to meet project deadlines which always are conveniently near each other.

Many of the people around me are feeling stressed over university life due to similar reasons too, so I just thought that I should share my insights on a self-management article that I read today.

Was just browsing the Presentation Zen website (an awesome website on designing presentations with the Zen aesthetic in mind) and I was reading this article on how people should keep in mind to cut out the irrelevant and focus on the important details when designing a presentation.

It was a cool post and all, but what really caught my attention and got me thinking was this picture:

"Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."

And I so totally agree.

Most of the time, the reason that we feel like we don't have enough hours in a day is because we spend our time inefficiently. I took a moment to reflect on the way I spend my time and I realize that I spend too much time on crappy, useless activities which are just a total waste of time. For instance I rather frequently spend precious time playing totally stupid facebook games, browsing for esoteric knowledge on Wikipedia and searching for the lyrics to the songs on my iTunes playlist so that I can sing along.

Would I have a lot more time to do the things I really wanted to do if I just cut these things out of my life? Definitely!

And there's a whole long list of crap activities that don't do me much good that I want to cut out!

Crap Activities (to be removed or cut down):
1. Playing stupid games like Elven Blood and MouseHunt on Facebook! God knows why I even started mindlessly playing such games just so I could see my character level up or earn gold to buy bigger mousetraps!
2. Lazing around in bed in the mornings just because I can't bring myself to get up.
3. Spending way too much time being distracted doing other things when I'm trying to reply emails or wall posts.
4. Checking my Gmail, Google Reader and Facebook account just one too many times every day.
5. Googling or referring to Wikipedia the second I encounter something I don't know enough of.
6. Spending too much time just 'cyber-loafing' on MSN messenger as well as allowing myself to be distracted by incoming conversations when working on something.

The thing is that even though the activities mentioned here may have low intrinsic value, the fact remains that removing them isn't an easy task because they have become habits. These bad habits are in actual fact insidious time eroding barnacles which have to be removed on sight!

I believe that bad habits are best dealt with by taking drastic action and 'installing' a new, more positive habit. So now lets just take a look at the things that I would be doing with all this extra time due to better time management habits:

Good Activities (to do more of):
1. Study. Exams are just around the corner and I really need to do well.
2. Exercise. Without sufficient rest and exercise, the stress of never ending deadlines can really get to you and dampen your productivity.
3. Blog. More free time would mean more time for me to keep this site updated, as I always wanted it to be.
4. Read. I love reading, be it fiction or non-fiction. Reading of all kinds stimulates the mind and it just makes me feel more creative and happy.
5. Get adequate rest. When you're well rested and all you are able to be more productive and get more things done. If you're sleepy and all you take forever to complete a task.

I've already taken the first step and deleted my Elven Blood account on Facebook as well as made it a point to switch off my MSN whenever I'm doing something important to help me focus.

Cutting out the crap is good because it allows you to stop doing the things that waste your time and focuses your attention on the things that really matter. Cutting the crap out of your life may just give you that extra time to understand a concept or to complete a project. It may even give you the extra energy you need to prepare a top grade speech for an upcoming national level debate (you know who you guys are, my Wira-ers)!

Cut the crap out of your life today! What are you waiting for?

Static Friction

Today I want to talk about static friction. Yes, Kevin will be a nerd today (yes I know, Nayan!) and revisit his A-level Physics for a good reason.

First up, what is static friction?

Static friction refers to the frictional forces opposing the motion of an object at rest. What's special about static friction is that its greater then kinetic friction, which is the friction acts on the object when it is actually moving.

In simpler terms, an object experiences less friction when it is actually moving, compared to the friction that you would have to overcome in order to make it begin to move.

The science of friction.

That's the reason why you require less force exerted to keep a moving cardboard box in motion as compared to the force required to make a stationary box move.

Why all this physics talk? Cause I have just recently discovered the greatest source of static friction the world has ever seen - the enormous static friction between my bum and my very comfy chair. Must.... overcome..... FRICTIONAL FORCES and go EXERCISE!

A well of enormous friction. It's almost magnetic!

I've also realized that this whole concept of static friction also carries on into other things in life. I can be quite a procrastinator but I realized that after you actually make yourself do something that you've been putting off, your momentum makes it so much easier to keep going.

A strategy to overcome procrastination that I have found quite useful is to push yourself into taking the first step and committing yourself to that first 10 minutes of an activity that you have been putting away. This helps you overcome the static friction that's holding you back from whatever you should be doing, be it completing an assignment or working out.

I've recently tried this and it really has helped me work out those (not so forgotten) abs more these days, and I hope that it benefits you guys too!

Just press through the first few minutes whenever you feel like procrastinating!

***

On a different note, I really hope that you guys enjoyed the first installment of What Women Want! Will come up with an update this coming Friday, so people, STAY TUNED for more!