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.