07 [Grit: The power of passion and perseverance] by Angela Lee Duckworth

I first heard about the word “Grit” when during a dinner on a weekday’s night, a friend of mine said that she had not yet seen any grit in her second daughter who was in secondary school and she wondered how she could do to make her grittier. Then, she expanded the topic by saying more about the existing educational system and how the government was looking to teach the young generation who were the future pillars of society to be grittier in facing challenges. And all of these because of a book called “grit” that changed people’ thinking about the necessary conditions to succeed in life. I found that book in the library and then spent another two weeks listening to the 9hours plus audio book and I must admit that I learned many things from this book that I wanted to share some of them here.

We all face limits in our lives, not just in talent, but also in opportunity. But more often than we think, most of these limits are self-imposed. We try something but fail then we conclude that we have bumped our heads against the ceiling of possibility. Or we change direction because of the enormous obstacle right in front of us even though we are only after taking a few steps forward. In either case, we never venture as far as we might have and put in as much effort as we could. To be gritty is to invest, day after day and week after year, in challenging practice relentlessly and to be gritty is to fall down many times but each time to be able to stand up with great fortitude and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I don’t think I am a very gritty person based on the tests given in the book but I want to make myself a grittier person and thus better prepare myself for the possible changes that may happen in future, be it in my career or other aspects of my life. I always want to step out of my comfort zone but I don’t have a clear idea about how I am going to achieve that. Now, I have a better idea. I need to find out the real extent of my comfort zone then deliberately manufacture situations slightly outside of it. After that, try my best to overcome them through trial and error and through doing them repeatedly. By keep on pushing myself, the zone is more likely to get bigger and once an uncomfortable thing may become something that belongs to my comfort zone and I don’t feel reluctant to do it anymore. In order to do that, I must surround myself with people whom I want myself to be because by doing this, I tend to fall in line and following along what the people are doing.

A quote from Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” There are always setbacks in pursuit of something and we should not let setback to hold us back and discourage us from moving forward, even though we are in fear and trepidation. We must be positive enough to think nothing is impossible and no goal is beyond reach. The most important is we must give it a try!


I am going to use the ideas I learnt from this book and apply it in my daily life to see how big the difference that I can make.


**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance.




(577 Words)

Power of habit

Cravings are what drive habits and a new habit can be created if we know exactly how to spark a craving. Basically, the process within our brains can be simplified into a three-step loop. First, when there is a cue, a trigger tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. With properly selected cue and reward in the end, a habit can be cultivated and by understanding how the whole loop happens, we can rebuild those patterns in whichever way we choose. A good example of the application of this theory is the adding of chemical that generates foam into the ingredient of Shampoo – something expected by people it each time they wash their hair. Another example, it is the tingling feeling that reminds people to brush their teeth every day.

By creating the necessary triggers to make something a routine, we can make everything a nearly effortless thing that we can do it every day. I would like to try out on this theory and see whether I can somehow change some of my bad habits. When I reach home after work every day, since dinner is not ready yet and about 30minute is needed to prepare it, usually I snack a bit even though some time I am not really hungry but I simply have an urge to put something into my mouth and I cannot fight the urge, it is just like a roaring monster inside my mind that make  do something unthinkingly. In order to stop snacking, I need to find out the cue that triggers my craving for snack. The cue may be the omnipresent snacks on the cabinet that triggers my craving for something sweet after a long day in the office. Keeping all snacks in some hidden places may prevent me from being wanted to eat the snack. Also, if there is a new habit to take over the time slot and shift my focus to something else, I am more likely to stop snacking. Perhaps I can add in a small podcast listening session using my mp3 player. It sounds like a good idea; perhaps I can try it out tonight.    

“Sometime a change is able to touch off a series of changes that would ultimately radiate out to every part of one’s life.” This sentence makes me think twice about the number of habit that I want to change to maximize the possible impact on my life even though it is something of a rash decision to change lots of habits in a very short period of time. Perhaps I should give myself some time, start with one or two habits first and see how well I can change them before proceeding to change some other daily habits. Let make February 2018, a month for changes and will be here to write something about what happen this month later.

**With ideas and lots of quotes from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

(517 Words)

Some thoughts

No road is without bumps and no matter which road you have decided to take. Lots of detours and unexpected events are expected in the journey. Some people may travel in the same direction as you but they move so fast that you simply cannot catch up with them. However, you must know exactly where your final destination is and make every step confidently. A lack of intellectual ability should not be used as the excuse for most of the problems that we are facing, a lack of effort perhaps a better explanation why we cannot achieve what we want in life but stagnate at a middling level of competence after so many years of hard works. Or perhaps the approaches that you have been using so far are not effective even though you are a supermotivated person who works to exhaustion everyday doing what you really want to do.

I am pondering a lot on how to keep myself motivated and continue pursuing my career objective in spite of everything that has happened in a year's time. I must admit that it is not easy to be confident when there are thoughts deep inside your mind telling you that what you are doing now are not practicable and changes are of palpable urgency. Without many people to talk to and without access to the helpful resources that may help you to move forward, very likely you may choose the easiest way out and save yourself from all the challenges that can make a difference on your current situation. After one or two times of taking the easiest way out, it is very likely that it becomes a vicious cycle that you simply cannot pull yourself out and instead, full of all kinds of negative thinking that hinder you for any possible changes.

To stay positive and to stay on track towards the direction that I set, I should try my best to challenge myself every day. Be it rain or shine, whether or not there is support or encouragement from others, my attitude and what I do play the biggest part in changing the current situation. If I keep trying to search ways to change my situation for better, I stand a higher chance of finding them. If I stop and pessimistically think that they cannot be found then possibly nothing would happen and everything remains the same. A person’s mind set is important, a fixed mind set doesn’t help in making the existing situation any better and you are  more likely to interpret these setbacks as evidence that, after all, you don’t have “the right stuff”— you’re not good enough. By blaming on others, you can get yourself off the hook, stay contented with the status-quo without forcing yourself hard enough to make a change. On the contrary, a growth mind set always encourage one to look at everything with positivity and go all out to work and learn when an opportunity is given with the thinking that if you try hard enough and if you believe you can do it, you can achieve what you want.

**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance.

(519 words)

A calling

“Thinking about how, in small but meaningful ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core values.” I think that this is one of the best ways to relate the current work to the core values, even though the work may not seem to be the something that one would call it a calling. Perhaps a perfect job doesn’t exist in the working world, more or less, one needs to do something he doesn’t like even though one has his dream job. For me, a job is idealistic if it can provide me with daily bread as well as daily meaning of why I spend the majority of my waking hours. It is always good to wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and know exactly what you are going to do and achieve every day, even though you know that you would be, more likely, exhausted or exasperated at the end of the day. The despair of spending every single hour in office doing nothing meaningful is simply terrible and it may change how a person think of himself in a long run. And therefore, it must be avoided at cost.

Have you ever heard a parable about three bricklayers? Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God. Even though they are doing the same job, the way they see their jobs makes a different in their working attitude. Perhaps for some people, a job is just a necessity of life, much like breathing and sleeping.  For others, they may view their jobs as a stepping-stone to another job. However, if you view your job as your calling, you are more likely to be happier in your life. In reality, many of us would like to be like            the third bricklayer, but instead identify with the first or second. It may be true that some of the jobs are more difficult to be viewed as “calling” as compared to jobs that can leave more impactful influence to others like teachers, doctors, soldiers etc. However, a genuinely positive and altruistic purpose in carrying out daily work may make a difference. An altruist is more likely to help new colleagues who are slow learners in learning certain skills or adapting themselves to the new environment out of altruism.  Putting it more succinctly, if you are not sure whether what you doing now is your calling, please try to think what are the possible ways of helping others through your works and how big the impact could be. On one hand, it will somehow help you to think whether you can find something you want in what you are doing now. On the other hand, it makes you keep thinking for ways to change your situation for the better and thus, you stand a better chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.

Never waste the time that we have in office, even a second. Instead of making zero progress and threading water at the same place, perhaps it is better for us to find ways to get ourselves energized and  take a step forward even though it means we need to push the boulder up the hill….we just need to do it relentlessly.

**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance.

(575 words)

06 [Veronika Decides to Die] by Paulo Coelho

When I looked at the book title “Veronika decides to die” at the very beginning, I really wondered what the book was about. A teenager girl that wanted to commit suicide because of the disapproval given by her parents in maintaining a relationship with a boy who is from different class of society that the parents frowned upon? My curiosity got the better of me and I started reading the book soon I got free time. Later on, only I found out that I was wrong and the story was not so shallow and easily predictable. In fact, the background and the ways the writer presented the story were quite unique to me. The story starts with a scene in which a lady from Ljubljana, whose name is Veronika, is trying to kill herself. She has a very special way of seeing life and feels that everything in her life is the same; mundane things are repeated days after days where one day is exactly like the other. And, once her youth has gone, her life would go all the way downhill and increase likelihood of suffering. She does not see the objective of living in this world even she knows that suicide is an affront to all religion code and man should struggle to survive, not to succumb.

After her failure of committing suicide, she is sent to a mental hospital called Vilette and in this place he meet with the others who have very own reasons of being admitted to the hospital. Some of them are schizophrenics, maniacs or lunatics who could not really distinguish the real things or a hallucination. Some of them are simply tired of living in outside world and want to get rid of everything seems unnecessary in their lives. Going through a period of time in which she always want to kill herself, Veronika grows to understand better what she is looking for after her interaction with the doctor and the patients. Each of the patient just like Veronika, has a long story about why they are here and whether or not they want to leave the hospital to return to the normal lives outside.

It is a bit difficult to write about what I really learnt from this book but I like reading the stories of each of the characters because what happened in their lives are different from the people that I can meet day in and day out. Perhaps I should spend some time to think about whether or not I live in my very own world --- with minimum desire to let others neither step into my zone nor become a part of my world. Also, I am curious to find out whether people in modern society nowadays experience more despair, pessimism and a sense of futility if they cannot do something in the ways they want the things to be. Whether or not they would take immense pleasure in the suffering of others simply because that make them believe they are happy and that life has been generous with the certain group of  people like them.

Society always imposes on us a collective way of behaving, and most of us never stop to wonder how our behaviors are influenced by people around us. Most of the people just think all these are norms and follow blindly without asking simple questions like why the keyboard is QWERTY but not ABCDE or why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not in the other…perhaps we simply accept the fact that when a lot of people think something is right, and that thing must be right.

(608 words)

Mythologizing natural talent lets us all of the hook

My lacks of confidence, determination and ability to express myself seem to be the biggest obstacles at my current stage of life. I don’t have the courage to try and do lots of things due to the lacks and indirectly I put a low ceiling on what I might do for my life. 

 

The younger generation is a generation that is full of new ideas and know perfectly well how to express themselves, thanks to the development in the teaching approaches and educational system. Gradually, the younger generation will occupy more percentage of job market and perhaps after 5-10 years, some of them will be in management or decision making roles. As a middle-aged man who was trained under “spoon-feeding” and less idea-oriented educational system, how I am going to survive and continue fighting for what I want in the coming years? This is a question that I really need to look into. It’s not too late to start thinking about ways to deal with it now instead of thinking about it 10 years later when I will be forty plus and any abrupt changes in life are more difficult. At that time, the competitive and winner-take-out working environment nowadays will surely become tougher for people like me, it will be hard to survive without the ability to quickly climb the learning curve of any skill, be it a technical skill or interpersonal skill.

 

I think that I am not talented or perhaps I am just a borderline gifted person. Sometime people tend to mythologize natural talent and tend to praise someone because of his talents in performing something phenomenally well so that they can get themselves off the hook and relax into the status quo without thinking of the possibility of performing as well as him. By letting themselves be persuaded by the word “divine”, they are more willing to accept the fact that they are simply lacking of the natural talents to do what the talented people capable of doing, no matter how hard they try, since they are just ordinary human beings.

 

Everyone has his very own yardstick to measure his achievement in life and one’s achievement may be nothing in the eyes of others. One should not overemphasize talent and underemphasize other things which are as important, like efforts and hard works. The fact that there is a gap between potential and its actualization and most people always behave below the optimum cheer me up a bit. I ask myself “Am I possible to do something by pushing my potential (if I have) to the extreme use?” After many years working in the industry, I came to appreciate in doing something over and over again, and enjoy seeing something that was never natural become almost second natural. I think I am not lacking of the capacity to learn something new and then perform it well. What I need right now is better strategizing my plans to better prepare myself for the challenges ahead. Of course, absorbing more ideas and make them part of mine is one of the practicable ways to go ahead……

**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

 

(517words)

Passion

Am I following my passion and doing something that I really want to do in the rest of my life? The moment I graduated from University, I didn’t know what I exactly wanted and how I was going to do with all the time that I had but deep inside my mind, I had a simple thought to earn sufficient money to buy my parents a better house in which they could enjoy their retired lives. I achieved it after a few years working in an industry that I never thought I would be working in. And until today, I am still in the same industry and with all interests and passion to bring my career further. In fact, I always believe that interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The more we interact with others,  the more we absorb new ideas that help us to know ourselves better what we are interested in, even though the process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient, in large part because we simply cannot predict with certainty what will capture our  attention without giving it a try. However, my past experience told me that lots of things seem uninteresting and superficial until I take my initiatives to learn and discover. After a while, only I realize about the different facets which I didn’t know at the start and the eagerness to know more push me forward to dig deeper. And after a period of years, it eventually helps me to foster my passion. The process is not a passive discovery, like unearthing a hidden gem in my psyche, but rather of an active construction over time.

“Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.” I really agree with this sentence, something that one has passion in should be something that one never get tired of doing it and something that one allows to occupy all the waking moment. However, some time people are just overwhelmed with all kinds of goals that they want to achieve and cannot exactly tell what their real passion is. For them, perhaps the metaphor of passion as firework is correct – erupt in a blaze of glory but quickly fizzle, leaving wisps of smoke and memory of what was once spectacular. It is understandable that a human being always has the desire to learn new things, to seek novelty, to be on lookout for change and variety – it is a basic drive that we, as a human being, have. However, the more important thing is how we commit to something we have passion in and stay there for a very long period of time to achieve mastery, instead of moving from a place to another doing different kinds of new things that look more appealing.

**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

(475 word)