Pitstop along the journey

What does it take to achieve what you should be doing?

This is a question which has been invading my conversations, my thoughts, my dreams. What is that stirring in the heart that tells me I need something more than a day job, more than an occupation, more than a monetary obligation? What is that which keeps me awake at night, tossing and turning in my bed, causing my mind to tick non-stop, in search of an answer, to find that which would consume me with passion and purpose and drive? That is what has been driving me to question people and their motivations for their search for the ultimate goal (what is that goal, by the way?) and why they have chosen that as the final destination. It is also that which makes me ponder in deep desire of knowing, why others don’t seem bothered by a mundane and unmeaningful contribution as much as I am, if even at all. Why does the final goal have to be some place high up in the ladder, no matter which ladder you are climbing, and why do you even need to climb a ladder in the first place?

One year of work has passed, and if not for anything else, it has made me understand myself just slightly better, and each day I find the lack of purpose and significance more and more replaced by the push and urgency of a need to do something which contributes and adds value, more than just through counting of millions and the impact on a region, a division or even an entire corporation. Lehman is the best proof that an entity once hailed as an infallible god can overnight turn into shambles, its employees displaced from their previously enviable jobs. In just a few days, it turned from leader in the forefront to name in history, all for the wrong reasons. An organization whose power and might diminished and forgotten, is now substituted by other companies who have, because of the way things have fallen in place, happen to be at the right place at the right time. Corporations come and go, and employees, are similar to cogs in the machines, replaceable and easily disposed of. I don’t see myself as an employee; the word is too short-term to be of any deep significance to the people around. I have always wanted to be a value-adder, a contributor, but not just work-wise, but in all aspects, especially in the area of relations. I want to leave impacts which are lasting, and respected.

Maybe for some, this seems like a lofty notion, idealistic like a schoolgirl, silly and impressionisic. A year ago, some people told me very blankly that I am like that because I come from a pretty well-off family and did not have financial worries to tie me firmly planted on the ground, and so think and feel that notions like these are most important in a job. They said that one year later, when I had worked longer and interacted more with people who have worked for a long time already, I would withdraw my fluffy and frivolous ideals and realize my place in the practical ground, and stay there firmly rooted. I said that I hoped I would never become like that. They said let’s see. A year later, more questions pop up in my head, and instead of feeling more at home with my job and being satisfied with what I do (despite enjoying some of the tasks I have), I have gravitated more towards an immense desire to rethink and draw a new direction in my life. Technically speaking, there is one more year to think through what I would like to do, which path I would prefer to take, among the many. Yet I have a feeling leaving the pondering till a year later will be unbearable; I have already begun to consider many options that might make me feel more able to impact and influence people, in the ways that would count and last.

There are about 4 more months left of the year, and knowing how time flies, I dont suppose it will slow down anytime soon. The last 12 months have taught me a couple a things. That some people are friends right from the start, friends who encourage you and give you advice willingly, and there are some that will always remain colleagues and nothing more. And I was fortunate to have a manager who was also a friend, at least for once. Thankfully, when she changed jobs to be just a colleague, I lost a great manager, but I still have a great friend. I also learnt that most bosses do not stand up for you nor praise you when you have done something well, but that if you ever have the great chance to work for a boss worthy of your respect, you will praise him or her and their reputation will far exceed their areas of responsibility. I also realised that alot of times the limelight doesnt shine on people who have worked so hard to enable things to run smoothly, and that hard workers aren’t necessarily the most appreciated, but these are the unsung heroes who everyone else hail in their hearts and minds. I have also discovered that while many people do not personally impact your life in the long run, we take their impressions and thoughts of us much too seriously that they deserve to be taken; but the worst thing is that we realise that their opinions do not count, because in the first place they did not care two hoots while making the comments that bother you for ages. It has taught me to think carefully first about who honestly matters, not just because they give you your performance ratings, but more because they shape your life and it’s values, and because they truly put in effort and thought into what they do and say to you. And I know for sure that if you treat others with sincerity and respect, they usually reciprocate.

I still haven’t figured out a whole lot of things; I think the journey thus far has showed me I need to impact and influence people, but I am still wiping the mist off the windscreen in order to see clearly. If anything, the last 12 months have not been a waste of time, although I still am unsure about the career path I would like to take. The path less travelled, it may be, but till I can decipher the direction of my inner compass, I will try to appreciate the best of any situation I am put in. And the best are the lessons learnt.

Where You Lead Me, I will follow

Mercy Me– Undone, “Where you lead me”

What is life?
A thousand roads, a thousand ways
Why am I so afraid to move
I crossed the line
I’m stepping out so come what may
I give it all cause I’m drawn to You

As long as my heart is beating…
Where You lead me I will follow
Where You lead me I give my life away
Where You lead me I will follow
Forever and a day
Forever and a day

I can’t deny Your very presence is my life
And why would I ever turn away
Cause deep inside I know that I cannot rely
On anything less than faith

As long as my heart is beating…
Where You lead me I will follow
Where You lead me I give my life away
Where You lead me I will follow
Forever and a day

This is all I’m dreaming of
To live completely in Your love

So this is life

Where You lead me I give my life away
Where You lead me I will follow
Forever and a day

Where You lead me I will follow
Where You lead me I give my life away
Where You lead me I will follow
Forever and a day
Forever and a day

The past 10 weeks

After my 10 week internship stint at BBG ended, I realised that while I still have yet to decide for myself what I really want in a future career, there are certain things that I would want to take away from one, and there are others that I would not.

BBG’s culture and vibrancy as a fast paced multi national company was one of the pull factors that I honestly enjoyed. While some of the tasks may be repetitive and at times boring, the environment is always on the go; there is no time for slowing down, no time to say I’m tired, but it is this quick movement that makes you want to go even faster and work even harder.

BBG is also world famous for its staff welfare; parties, drinks, champagne flow freely on most Friday nights; any occasion to celebrate will most certainly be taken advantage of. Within my 10 weeks there, I had already attended 3 parties and 2 wonderful lunches. Of cos, I dont even have to mention the renouned pantry, whose hourly stock up by the pantry aunty puts most supermarkets to shame. We had the luxury of kettle chips, turkish dried figs, salad greens, a large variety of cereals, yoghurts, chocolates, even pocky strawberry and chocolate from our childhood memories! It’s truly amazing the amount of welfare BBG staff get to enjoy; but also something that we tend to take for granted until there is no more of it.

Yet apart from all the enjoyment experienced there, I also realised what I most certainly do not want from a future job– a mundane and routine daily work life that will bore me to tears, and that will not push me to stretch my capacity. While it may be tiring to be constantly pulled to expand, the end result will definitely be worth it.

As with any other company, politics is definitely there at BBG, where the most outspoken and most ass-kissing persons rise up the fastest, while the others who are simply themselves and refuse to do te boot licking wil remain in the lower ranks until they get tired of it.

All in all, it has been a terrific experience; 2 months that has been such a whirlwind of fun and memories. Of course, the wonderful people I’ve met there –all the way from the security guards to our direct supervisors who always go out of their way to help us get used to the environment– I definitely wont forget any of it.

Time for a wake-up call.

I need DRIVE.

I need friends who will drive me and motivate me to push myself beyond the limits set by others. I need people who I see myself growing together with for years ahead; friends whose constant aim to improve themselves and development of character spur me to better myself with each passing day.

The past 6 weeks have been repetitive and humdrum; I do the same data entry work everyday; I rotate between meeting friends, trying to catch up with what each of them are doing in their internships; but I feel so empty and unfulfilled; like a huge crater in the middle of the desert; dry and desperate for an oasis.

I am sick of conversations that lead nowhere; of constant discussion of the same old issues; I feel that with some people I am forever stuck in a rut; a same cycle of topics that I dreadfully want to stop discussing. I crave a new burst of enthusiasm and encouragement; I want to meet people who have so much passion in them for all the right reasons to make me want to burn with fire just like them. I need a goal with a proper target that I can focus my attention on and know that at any point in time, I am nearer to that goal than I was before.

I want to make every day an improvement to my life; not one day a waste that I will look back and waste more time regretting. I want to live a life, each moment moving forward with the exuberance and adrenaline rush that comes with knowing where I am heading, and so very excited at reaching there because I know I have come so far and put in so much.

I decided today to embark on a tangible project– research on poverty and income disparity in Asia; and how microfinancing has helped to eliminate a tiny bit of that. I hope anyone of you who has information on that will be kind enough to share your knowledge; let’s be iron sharpening iron. To contribute is to give a part of yourself, and in doing so, is to learn much more than you would have keeping it to yourself.

Dear friends, I honestly need encouragement and motivation from you, and if you think you would like to be that one person who would want to push me further, to help me and to help yourself, please, by all means do so. Thank you.

Snakes and ladders

We were told to climb the ladder of success
They called it the corporate ladder;
But those who tried to climb it know best–
Beware the snakes that slide and slither.

Perception is more tangible than reality?

This is the phrase that danced around my mind the past one week. I think it represents that life that we are so caught up with, and in a conversation with youyi, I suddenly thought that hey, people are obsessed with the superficial. That is why what people perceive can be deemed to be more real than reality itself, and also why we end up using every means possible to create the image of what we expect people to see us as.  Very often, we succeed at doing that, so much so until we get mixed up between who we are perceived to be and who we really are.

It doesnt matter what you try so damn hard to be, becasue unless it relates to a portrayed vision of what you want to become, no one will ever take you seriously. No one, that is, that only looks at the thin porcelain surface and never bothers to look beneath. No one, that is, whose obession with what can be seen overrides the desperate need to comprehend and understand what needs to be felt. Even if you are the poorest person on earth, but give people the false facade that you are actually quite well-off and can afford the luxuries of life, you most often can succeed in fooling the man in the crowd, who doesn’t care to see past your carefully crafted masquerade, who only views you as a sum total of how you look, speal and behave, whose only interest is how of how much benefit you can be to him.

Marketing, no matter how much of a smokescreen it is, requires knowing this truth that perception is more tangible than reality, and that is why marketing gimmicks often fool us so dreadfully easy. We are suckers for anything that looks good, gives the impression (and note the term “impression”) that we will be better off without it and should just die without it, and that enables us to show off to our peers that we are something they are not because we possess something that they do not.

It is this truth that corners so many in fear of exposing their honest faces and stricken tears, and pushes people to an edge that overlooks nothing but a deep dark valley. When people know how much their outward expressions, appearances and behaviors tend to be judged and how they are unwillingly bestowed upon with false accusations and judgmental untruths, they sink into a cycle of trying to change themselves outward-in, as opposed to inside-out. 

So many management theories and MBA courses keep drilling in our heads that we must appear a certain way in order to maintain order in the office; that in order to manage the people at work, we cannot be honest about our feelings, but we must be politically correct all the time, and that we should try our utmost to network as much as possible and give the impression that we are happy with all we meet. All these only leads to an outward change that never truly flows into the core of our being. Corporations write long corporate charters about the values and morals they embrace publicly, but mostly for show; corporate social responsibility often tends to be end up being used as a way to boost publicity and increase their ailing share prices. Today I learnt that “Intergrity” comes from the greek word for “integrated”, and essentially “integrity” refers to us integrating our moral values with the way we operate and live our daily lives. how unfortunate that we don’t really integrate our true character and values with our work, since most of us only dare to live lifes following the manual that teaches us to be politically correct and to network with the high and mighty.

I know I’ve been on this topic on quite a number of posts; but it’s such an important issue of discussion that its importance has to be realised. I hope you took something away from this; I hope you aren’t one of those Im talking about.

Are you concerned with the big or the small?

Do u talk about the big things or the small things in life? Do u consume yourself with the minute details that make for little consequences, or do you concern your thoughts and plan your path so that you deliberately aim to be a part of the influence that matters to those around you?

On the way home today I found myself pondering over this question, and in my continuing quest to arrive at an answer with regards to what my life was created for, I realised that the past two weeks of just slacking my life away (which was good therapy for the tired physique) was all that I mentioned– simply good for a short while, but never something I could imagine doing for the rest of my worldly existence. I realised that I could never just watch an entire drama series in one sitting, because as opposed to finding fulfilment in the apparent joy of watching brainless, easy on the mind shows, I find myself frustrated and subciously desperate for something more meaningful and materially significant.

If we all went through life churning away at the mundane tasks and daily routines that we have protectively wrapped ourselves in, very soon, we lose the love to live, that love that as children we embraced when we envisioned ourselves changing the world we were born in, believing in the hope that one day, we would do something substantial to mark our short span of time on this planet called Earth.

Today, Youyi said something that totally made sense, in such an easily understood yet often overlooked way– that careers are not just a series of jobs to climb up that impossible-to-scale ladder; instead, a career should be a means to helping us define our lives as we improve ourselves every step of the way. Easier said than done I know, but retrospectively, shouldn’t that be how we perceive the next few decades of our lives?

For something that we plan to devote almost half our lifespan to, and that I foresee will give us troubles, headaches, fatigue from the whole package that life is renowned to douse us with, it makes logical sense that we use this journey practically and put it to good use. I suppose there are many out there that just hope to make it through life one job to another; perhaps their circumstances deem that to be the only possible way of living; but for those of us whole future lays unwritten on that clean page waiting for us to unravel through the dreams and aspirations riping in our potential, I think that a career should be life changing both for our character as well as for our minds.

I don’t quite yet know how to engage in this lofty vision that is so intricately appealing; but I will just start taking it one step at a time.

Life is short/ Hope is free/ Love won’t shortchange you/

Some people make no sense at all, others so much sense that you wished you could take notes as they speak.

Indeed, we should never ever stop ourselves from hoping for a better tomorrow,  or from hoping that our dreams will arrive just in time, in a carriage rolling on faith and determination; because,

Hope is free.

Indeed, somethings cannot be postponed; things which are dear to the heart of my very soul. And life is short enough that we have to keep asking,

When was the last time you did something for the first time?

Indeed, the people we love the most are sometimes also the people we are the meanest to. What is stopping us from opening the windows of our still, hardened hearts from showering those we most care about with our concern and affection? It is fear, of rejection, of seeming foolishness, of awkwardness. But why can’t we embrace unabashedly and drink in reciprocated trust, respect and indulgence?

Love won’t shortchange us.

The Pursuit of Contentment

I was in 4.9 today, having a conversation with some friends; Ben, Changqi and Youjin, having a discussion about the government, the education system and whether the way you speak dictates the way you behave.

 I suppose there is some truth to the last point; that you speak the way you speak because of some ingrained culture that has played a major role in shaping the mind you now think with, the logic which you banter with, and the way you choose to portray yourself.

Perhaps it is very much so a form of identity that we try to create when we end up speaking in a particular way, identifiable only to those who we choose to impress and to move in the same circles with. And in a naturally progressive manner, we find ourselves gravitating towards a lifestyle that we deem desirable and becoming, something tangibly intangible, that we can embrace and wrap ourselves in.

In labour economics, Yip made a statement that the upperty-up class can choose to speak-down, but they often don’t wish to; doing that would make them synonymous to the the crowd that did. On the other hand, the lower classes couldn’t speak-up even if they wanted to, and find themselves resigning to a fate that left them in a way relegated to a life they probably wouldn’t have chosen had they been given the chance to choose for themselves.

 Can we ever be contented with the lives we live? It’s a question that seems easy to answer morally– That we should be, even if we can’t. But it certainly requires that much more patience and contentment. An internship comes along and we feel good about ourselves; then the next time if there isnt something better to top that, we think life hasn;t improved, and that we have been de-graded. If we’ve always been the best in class and suddenly we ‘re just average, it’s a blow that’s not too friendly to our egos.

That’s the way we’re made, it seems. To hardly be content, to always be unhappy with what we have, to suffer from a special kind of colour-blindness such that the grass always seems greener on the other side. No wonder the Bible had to explicitly state as one of the 10 commandments that “Thou shalt not covet.”

The pursuit of contentment is never easy. I think i’m guilty as charged for always falling off the track to that. Yet each time i see someone my age but not as fortunate, I’m reminded to be thankful and content, just because I have.

Where life is a game of focus, and we CAN win.

I was deeply inspired and stirred in my spirit during service on Sunday morning. It was about a very simple message, one I had heard more than 10 times (just in different varieties and sizes), but it pierced deep into my heart to catch me where I thought I had been falling.

Pastor Casey Treat told us to speak to our future. To “call those things that are not as though they are” and yes, I know its simple, and I know you’re probably shaking your head, wondering what on earth I am getting so very excited about. But, its a message that taught me how important faith is and how important it is to act on your faith.

God puts visions and dreams into our minds so that we can “receive so that we might know” what our future may hold. Just a glimpst of it to keep us longing for more, and to keep us headed on the right track. More rightly put, to keep us on a track at least. I feel that most people my age (including myself too) are often so distracted by much that we aren’t even putting ourselves on a route that leads us to where we should be heading, precisely because we cannot see any destination and hence there is no motivation.

Pastor Casey mentioned something that I find has absolute truth to it– that whatever you focus on you will move towards. In the very bones of my being I know this is one law that is true both in the physical and the spiritual, and I dare you, anyone of you who dares to take up this challenge, to envision yourself (the type of person you want to be, the type of job you want to be in, the people you want to impact, the life that you want to live) and think about it everyday. Proactively seek to achieve this and tell me if it does not work.

You know, if you were to ask a psychologist what the effects of negative focus are, I suppose his answer would sound vaguely similar to this — that if you choose to keep worrying and thinking that something horrible will happen to you, and you try all means and ways to avoid it, you will most probably attract it to you. because the power of our focus is so strong, such that our minds and behaviour will subconsciously entice and draw us towards the objects of our concentration, and vice versa.

Imagine, if we could use this ability in a positive way, and that our items of focus actually become our reality. That would be mind-blowingly simple, a mere following of the laws of nature. I challenge you. Do you dare to take up this challenge?