Leadership

I’ve been thinking about what Jack Sim, founder of World Toilet Organization, said at the SNF. While it takes significantly lesser effort to endorse, criticize a movement once it has started moving, it takes tremendous inertia to get a project moving. Not many people can appreciate the power and inspiration of a new idea. They are met with dismay because we are still used to what we know how to do. Change scares us. And since things are not broken, don’t change it. But without change, there can be no improvement. There is no inspiration in staying the same.

The world needs leaders. People who have enough passion and gumption, commitment to see that
“hey, that’s not right.” or “I know we can do better” and….seek to change it. Lord give me the courage to change what I can. Its just that sitting down on your butt and looking as if you are frantic takes much less of an emotional leap to do than standing up and saying “All right. Who’s with me? Let’s get it done.”.

I will spend more time to find out what are people already doing in singapore and if one of them strikes me i’d consider contributing to it.

Aged perceptions

When you place a curious booklover in a book sale, he gets crazy!! Expo had so many many books, I just had to take a look at each trolley to see whether they had anything i wanted. And smartly, they’re adding more books to the existing books though i think that was partly cos of space constraints. But i realized after a while that i would never be able to finish looking at all the books given the rate of adding and flipping through all of them so I had to take a more “leave it to fate” approach. What i saw, i liked, i took. If it didn’t catch my eye, i’d pass. That strategy saved my neck as well as tons of time. Went off about 3 but really could have stayed there the whole day. Its just like putting a child at a candy store and telling him….”you can take anything you want to!”

Went back for a visit with my shifu and she’s about the same. Jocelyn joined her agency also, which was quite surprising. Well actually not quite. Another newcomer, stacey, was in the office too. Both are 21 and really good-looking! ok that wasn’t my point. Wesley was there too and seemingly he either did not notice me or he was avoiding me. well whether or not that is true, it brings me back to my point. Perceptions that people have are enduring. While I was pleasantly surprised to see the bunch of NTC people at the seminar, it didn’t feel right.

Next

So I rejected the offer.

Eventually it came down to dual objectives.

1) To do work that is in-line with future of starting a business. This means that work with regards to business development, strategy, consulting, marketing, or anything that I may be passionate about maybe even advertising

2) To get certifications in marketing.

Yes I could have achieved 1 with the job. But it left little in the way of the second. And like i reasoned, after a year, i would be pretty much in the same place supposing little changed. No certification, no savings, and still in debt. There are much better options i believed.

And, who knows? This might not turn out to be the best option after all but to have considered all round and choosing to stick to my objectives means that THAT in fact is the decision. Anything that came from that could have been a hit or a miss.

Today’s news cast included some nuggets about Freddie and Fannie Mae and how it has affected our stock exchanges and ST index. Yes all the usual. But then, a spokesperson from Fundsupermart starting giving his views on the long-term or short-term outlook and giving encouragement somesort to go into the market. Highly unusual if i may say. Investment advice, to what i remember is not part of the scope of the programme of news. In my opinion, it should stay with Channel newsasia. Why? 1 reason is that alot of the public, some of which do not invest, and worse, some of those who think they know something about investing, watch the news everyday. Leaving the nature of his recommendations aside, which was to look at long-term, albeit taking some risk (what am i saying, there’s always risk) to buy in now, its something which the public can easily comprehend differently from the intended. And besides, there’s so much things to cover in the short period of half an hour, i really don’t think we shud have a problem of filling in the programme schedule.

But then think again, why the sudden inclusion? Could it be a deliberate attempt to salvage the market from panic selling? This could be a propaganda effort to gently manipulate the investors. If so, then i must say they are learning fast.

Research from consumer behaviour journal: Consumers who have a more expansive time-horizon think better of rational approaches to advertisement while those with shorter outlook are swayed more by emotional approaches.

Thinking hard

Its the 11th July and i finally found the will to write again!

There’s a lot of stuff that happened since then.
Asset-Based thinking(ABT) is a way of looking at life through a positive, do-able mentality that can energize your life. Well, the point of view is not really new though the presentation has been made engaging. The book is very colorful with humorous pictures and photos that help to empathsize the points being made. The only other book I read which is also very readable is “Be Happy”. That was a book meant for juniors. Or so they thought. It seems that even at the ripe old age of 25, the colorful presentation, albeit more professional for some reason grabs attention. This, no doubt, is partly because of the team behind it. Concept farm, which is a renowned agency based in UK is involved in the book’s production. I especially loved this quote
” To acquire knowledge, you must study.
To acquire wisdom, you must observe.”

–Marilyn vos Savant

Pretty easy to be understood huh? Its the same theory with how is it that insights cannot be done through questions and answer and looking at what others write. As mentioned in a presentation by Malcolm Gladwell at TED, nobody knew that they actually loved their pasta sauce to be chunky. Thousands of customer surveys, none of which revealed that. It is only through observation, that you can learn of such insight.

I have been offered a job for 1.8k. with erm, a one month guaranteed bonus. Pretty paltry, if i may say, especially after i’ve spent 24k on this piece of paper and 4 years of my life. I know that with this job, alot of things will start to open up, my options, etc. But still…1.8k. I mean, without even considering the relativity with others’ pay(which i have wisen up to) its a very tight salary i’m running on.

1.8k – CPF = 1,440.

Supposing my expenses = 300 food + 150 transport + 200 insurance + 150 bills, personal learning

and family 300 + laptop 100 + studies 300 = 1500.

wow i can’t even cover the basic stuff. i need to think.

Its time

Havent posted for quite a bit of time but still surprised at how WP still sends traffic my way. looks like tagging really is pretty useful.

Zhanjing and Hwee Lee asked me to drop by their pasar malam store so i’ll probably head down there after the interview.

While i’ve been wallowing in WOW for these few days and with the announcement of Diablo 3….(seriously blizzard are u trying to get us killed playing ur games) sheesh. I was kinda worried of losing the edge, the desire of work and my passion in marketing. But when i got the call… my brain just snapped into action. My mind disconnects from my lvl 20 rogue. Instead of running around others back and stabbing them once or twice, i remember my days during entrepreneurship minor. I check out its website and what they’ve done so far, which is pretty much ineffective so far. I see improvments to be made, campaigns that I can hold, fresh ideas to implement, and i get so excited! so much to do. to use my knowledge, in a quantifiable way. And THAT’s what you call passion. Being able to wake up and be excited to go to work. Money is really not the issue as long as you pay me enough to make my mental threshold 2.5k satisfied. Man as mentioned many posts earlier, cannot make objective assessments about anything. Everything is relative and as such, without a comparison, 10k is meaningless. Just like 1K is also meaningless. Which explains why people love to compare. Its an inbuilt mechanism for judging the value of STUFF.

As always, i believe that as long you follow your heart, the money will come. Sounds idealistic? Not at all. To me that’s the most practical thing. How realistic can you be if you’re doing something you don’t like 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, 25 days a month, 300 days a year?! And telling yourself, that…”this too shall pass”.
Come on MAN?! That’s called being unrealistic. Face it. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. There’s little two ways about it. Maybe if you haven’t found something you really like yet then that sorta gives you an excuse, but really, we should all have a passion for something. It gives you the fuel to keep going in the morning and to sleep a fulfilled man.

Rachel just started teaching and its her 2nd week in school. Seems like she’s not that happy there but then again maybe its just me. Hope she’ll be happier after getting used to the work and environment and kids.