Jobs

In the near future, you are just a freelancer - directly marketing one's skills to the world via the internet. Competition for the same projects will be tough as your competition will also be the world. The only way to survive is to be a specialist or an expert.. hmm

How to Change

From Switch by Cheap Heath and Dan Heath

On making change.. To change behavior, you've got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant and shape the Path

1. Direct the Rider
-Find the bright spots: See what's worked before and repeat it
- script the critical moves: Make crystal clear directions
- point to the destination: Make the end result or the destination clear
2. Motivate the Elephant
- Find the feeling - Make people feel something to embrace the change
Shrink the Challenge - Break down the change so it seems not too daunting
Grow your People - Cultivate a sense of identity, instill a mindset
3. Shape the Path
- Tweak the Environment - Change the environment to change behavior
Build Habits - Make things automatic
Rally the Herd - Re-enforce good behavior

The takeaway: If I have to sum up the above, first, is to recognize that change is needed and second, to effect change, one must make change simple and automatic.

2011 Books

Non-Fiction:
1. Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon
2. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
3. The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris
4. Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Belief

Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings

-From End of Faith by Sam Harris

Success

8 Things That Lead to Success by Richard St. John
1. Passion - Doing what you love
2. Work -
3. Focus
4. Persist
5. Ideas
6. Good - Being good at something
7. Push
8. Serve - similar to compassion I think

Happiness

These are two TED talks that I think are really most helpful and most concrete in understanding happiness

Belief in Your True Self and Your Dreams

"Being absolutely true to yourself is freedom."



Being Compassionate

Moral Landscape

This is a talk by Sam Harris about the Moral Landscape where science, thru the study of the human brain, can answer questions about morality - whether one action or deed is right or wrong. Mr. Harris also contends that science is a better foundation than religion for answering questions about morality.

Still reading on the book with the same title but this video seems to be its summary.

God Debate Series 2 Does Good Come From God?

I've been watching a lot of talks on video lately and video is I think a medium that is fast catching up as one of the better ways to reach out to an audience.

This is the first of hopefully, a lot of videos, mixed with text, that I'll be uploading here.

This is a debate about the source of goodness - whether it comes from God or not.

Finding success

I noticed that the more successful or popular broadcasters/TV personalities are the ones that have their own shows. Similar thing can be said about columnists, op-ed writers where they have their own columns, blogs, etc.

It seems that these personalities partly define their own jobs in that each show has the host's personality, opinions, style. These people have carved their own niches by showing their own personalities and by simply being just themselves.

I think the lesson here is that by being true to who you are, by following your own drum beat and having that awareness that it is better to be honest and fair than by trying to please everyone at the same time, there will always be a crowd out there among the 6Billion who inhabit this world that you will connect and resonate with.

This seems to be the time that jobs or work start to become less confined to the dreary cubicle of the office and become more virtual or connected to reflect the information age that we are in nowadays. Work seems to be more defined just as much by the personality of the individual than by just the skills that go along with that job.

When looking for a job, the job that you know you will be good at or you know you'll do better than others is the job that leverages your strengths and personality. It is this that you know you'll have a good 'fit' in and that you know you're going to do well from day one. I think I had this realization as I applied to a bunch of jobs in which my qualifications match but the nature of the job doesn't really suit my personality and strengths. For these jobs, I really didn't feel that strongly and I felt as though I'm applying just for the sake of applying and not really feeling full heartedly for the position that I'm applying for.

10 Signs you need to leave your corporate job

Below is taken from this article. Somehow I need to take note of the below signs really carefully.

10 Signs you need to leave your corporate job

A) You can’t wake up. You need 10 extra minutes to get up. Then another 10.

B) You get physically hurt while on the job for no real reason (subconscious at work).

C) You don’t feel like returning emails or phone calls. When the number of un-returned emails or calls hits 20, you need to leave.

D) You are unsure about your compensation (with the private equity firm above my compensation was very unclear).

E) You are afraid to run into people in the office for no real reason.

F) You are not creating any additional value for yourself. View yourself as a business. Is the value of “your business” going up. When I was at the fund of funds, the fact that I could only sell my fund of funds if I signed a six year employment agreement, showed me that I had not been creating any additional value in my business.

G) You are thinking about selling diet pills. Tim Ferris aside, nobody in their right mind should sell diet pills.

H) Someone yells at you. You’re not a kid. Yelling is abusive. Nobody should ever yell at you. Ever. But that’s a hard habit to break if you are used to people yelling at you.

I) You think about office politics more than you think about how to do your job well. Never gossip at work. Ever.

J) You date someone at work. One of you needs to leave. Pronto. Or else, work, relationships, life, gets ruined. Don’t shit where you eat.

I think 90 percent of people should quit their jobs right now or do something utterly drastic to shake things up. “What would I do?” People ask. “I have responsibilities, mouths to feed, mortgage to pay. You don’t get it.” Yes I do. You throw yourself into the abyss. You get scared. You stay up late at night thinking and thinking and thinking. You feel like the death of emptiness is worse than the slow death of your job. But you’ll figure it out. One by one all of your old colleagues will disappear from your life. They will die.

You’ll still be alive.

As a side story, once I was at the second wedding I ever went to. It was a lesbian wedding, so we had to go out to sea in a boat. I saw this pretty woman on the boat. She started talking to me and I still didn’t recognize her. Finally, she realized I didn’t recognize her and said, “James! It’s me, X!” And I remembered the last time I’d seen her. It was six months earlier. I used to work with her every day. Then she had been fired. She had been ugly then. I mean, hideous. Now she was beautiful and unrecognizable. Six months is a long time when you are free from prison.

Ricky Gervais on Not Having a Real Job

Ricky Gervais talks some sense..

What matters is pride in your work..

If you're fair then you can't go wrong..Fairness is the most important thing in managing a team..

I don't try to please anyone but myself. If you second guess everyone, then you'll end up with something safe and watered down and people wouldn't really like it...The most important thing is to make a connection..

Morality & God

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed" - Albert Einstein

From the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

God Delusion Insight

The idea that God or God's will is the reason for anything that we cannot explain or comprehend is absolutely contradictory to the essence of science and logic which is to discover and explain through reason and (scientific) evidence the workings of life and the universe. It is this surrender to faith and to non-reason when we are confonted by seemingly incomprehensible phenomena that is not acceptable to Richard Dawkins.

When we do so is to stop doubt and reasoning. If people would have completely lived in faith long ago, science wouldn't be what we know it is today, and perhaps we would still be living in an agricultural state of society.

Looking Forward and Reasoning Back

Looking forward and reasoning back is one of the practical and most useful strategies in The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life. Almost done with the book and this particular strategy has been the most relevant so far.

Depending on the nature of a goal or a problem, one useful strategy, as the title suggests is to look forward -see the desired end result - and reason backwards as to how to reach or accomplish that goal. For example, if you want to finish a 10 mile race in 2 hrs, you can reason backwards and know how fast your pace must be in order to accomplish your goal, or if you want to catch the 8 am train, you can reason backwards and have an idea of what time you should set your alarm clock to. The book has more complicated examples but that's the general idea more or less.

Sounds like common sense right? It is but it's not always put to use as it should be. I have one very recent experience where I should have applied this strategy but failed to do so (Hint: I was in a race) I just thought during that time that I'll know what to do when I cross the bridge so to speak, only to find out I have come up short of my goal. It has been a very memorable experience so I'm writing about it now so that I won't forget.

We often come across this strategy when we see advertisements of investment banks on how much one should save if you want to retire with a million dollars, how many more years one should work in order to retire comfortably, etc. The math can be done and we often ignore the results thinking it's unrealistic or it's something to worry about later on. There are a lot of variables of course which one has to consider when thinking of goals like this. This example just shows one crude(?) application of this strategy and why many just ignore or take it for granted.

Still, this doesn't make the case that life's problems -mundane or not- couldn't be solved or approached using this very powerful concept. I've had one recent real-life learning experience and hopefully one that I would keep on remembering.