What is your #1 priority in life?

1. Why is wealth a bad choice for #1?
   Look at the current’s world economy. If your priority is wealth and your entire life is built around it, then it’ll be quite impossible for you to rebuild it again since you life-long goal has been increasing wealth. When you reset it back to zero, so did you life. Carlos Araya knows this best.
2. What about family? Can my life revolve around just my family?
   On the surface, this looks like a great priority. Using family as your bearing in life is easy. After all, that’s the benchmark you starts out your life with. However, what happens when you’re given a glimpse of heaven and you realized that you’ve been living in "hell” all your life? Azharuddin Ismail falls ill after he has tasted “heaven”. or realizing that the way your dad treated you was NOT acceptable by social norm? What about the Fritzl’s Case. (Kindly note that I’m not saying you shouldn’t put family as 1st. They are equally important to me. I’m just saying that there must be MORE important things beside family being first.)
3. What about Religion?
   All over the world, there are numerous cases of conversions from one religion to another and then back again. Next in line will be cults that ranges from mildly misleading to outright destructive. Just to be cynical, with so many religions in the world, can we have the one true god? Is your god better than mine? (Again, religion has been very important ranking as priority in life but it should not be the #1 priority in life. Think of the differences in decimal of 0.01. Hopefully this will appease those sensitive minded from flaming the site)
4. What about having a cosmopolitan mindset and think of the world globally? Protection of environment or World peace?
   Personally, I truly admire people like Al Gore for his life-long pursuit in trying to create awareness in the global climate change and how to spearhead a movement alongside Greenpeace and TreeHugger, Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks for founding TED in 1984, or the Zeitgeist Movement (and the movie) by Peter Joseph. However, currently I still am not ready to share their enthusiasm in changing the world yet. Why is that so? Maybe it’s because of my selfishness. I have not enjoyed the world enough to start caring for it at the level they do. Maybe after my MBA I will.

Apart from reason #4, the number #1 priority in life ought to be the pursue of independence in life. As per Maslow’s Hierarchy, we need to fulfill our most basic needs. Our individual survival is utmost important above all else. Once this has been fulfilled, we move on to the next stage as per the pyramid below.

 

As each level of fulfillment is achieved, we become more independent in life, all the other aspect and priority listed above will automatically falls into place and it’ll become eventual. Furthermore, upon any setback, we can always take a step back and re-pursue our “independence” toward self actualization.

Creativity Revenge : United Breaks Guitar

When a company damaged your $3,500 guitar, refused to pay and instead, sent you on a 9 months merry-go-around in a “Not me, check with him/her” loop, what do you do?

Well, if you’re Dave Carroll, you will get over your anger, and sit down to write songs about it. A trilogy one. Below is Song #1 and they’re pretty good.

For further details of the incident, check out his site.

Books on behavioral economic

I’ve just finished reading the book “Predictably Irrational; The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariel.

I’m beginning to enjoy books on behavioral economic. So far I’ve gone through “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” by Steven D. Levitt and “The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--And Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!” by Tim Harford

Since then, I’ve been hunting for these kind of books. I find the reference & bibliography part is a bit helpful in guiding me to the next reading materials but mostly they’re quite outdated. Hence, I find this “BookSeer site” interesting in recommending me to the next book.

Got any suggestions on good books?

We all have our moment to shine. We just need to wait for such a moment to reveal itself.

“Hi, my name is ….. I’m nearly 48. Unemployed but still looking… never been married, never been kissed.”

Now, what goes through your mind when you come across this? What a loser huh? Have you wasted all your life doing nothing?

“I’ve always wanted to perform in front a large audience. I’m gonna make that audience rock.”

So you’re basically considered as an underdog… but a hidden gem for 40 odd years? What the heck is going on? Did the society failed to notice your talents? Or you’re just wasting our time.

Q: What’s your dream?

A: I’m trying to be a professional singer.

Q: Why hasn’t it worked out so far?

A: I’ve never been given a chance before.

Let’s enjoy Susan Boyle’s

I personally believed that all of us have some kind of “Susan Boyle” talent in all of us. We just need to patiently wait for such an opportunity.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Below’s example is sourced from Dan’s Presentation from TED.com. You may checkout the full presentation here.

Firstly, try to look at a simple subscription form at Economist.com.

Anything wrong?

There are 3 options here.

1. Web subscription for USD 59.
2. Print subscription for USD 125.
3. Print and web subscription for USD 125.

Now, your immediate attention is drawn to the comparisons of option 2 and 3. What kind of idiot will design this kind of options? It’s so obvious that nobody will ever choose options 2 right?

You’re absolutely right if you think this way. After all, 100 MIT students who were asked to choose amongst the options above, the result is as below:

1. Option 1 : 16%
2. Option 2 : 0%
3. Option 3 : 84%

So, why don’t we just remove option 2?

Well, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist did exactly that and retest the whole experiment again. This time, with just 2 options, the result came back as :

1. Option 1 : 68%
2. Option 3 : 32%

WOW! What just happened?

It turns out that when there were 3 options, the option 1 is mostly ignored. Instead, most people will zoom into option 2 (being the lesser intelligence option) and compared it against option 3. Nobody was actually comparing option 1.

Now, let’s start incorporating Option 2 into our life. (Eg. Bring a lesser attractive version of you to the bar and compare it against you. )

Backup Data

Someone once told me to backup all the data that you cannot afford to lose. What are they? All your assignments, photos, presentations, emails and many other which you may not reproduce again. Well, there are many alternatives available nowadays to backup your data.

1. Burn them into CD / DVD. I believe this method is beginning to get obsolete as I’ve just recently purchased a 1TB Seagate harddisk. Per GB, harddisk is getting cheaper and cheaper almost at par with CD/DVDs. Hence, even I am beginning to re-transfer all the DVDs back to harddisk.
2. Cloud storage. There are lots of storage that are available online. The only problem is privacy. If you don’t mind privacy issues, feel free to consider these alternatives:
1. Gmail (Each email account offers you 7-10GB depending on your usages.) There is even a Firefox add-on (Gspace if I’m not mistaken) that uses Gmail account as online drive.
2. There are many online companies that provide online storage. So far the best I’ve come across is http://skydrive.live.com. It’s by Microsoft so at least you know they won’t screw around with your data. It offers you 25GB of diskspace. It’s not terribly fast but these is meant to be a great site to store your data as backup. Not something you use daily.
3. http://picasaweb.google.com is also a great place to store all your images. I’m hooked onto picasa mainly due to its awesome software. I really should start getting into flickr too but until I max out my picasa storage I guess I’ll stick with picasa for a while.
3. Flash drive. Now this is one device I am terribly worried about. I have personally lost 256MB of data. Mind you that these are text data. 256MB of text data is enormous work and to lose it all like that. Imagine the frustration having to re-search them again. That’s why I’ll only use Flash drive as a transporter. To transport from either office to home or class or another PC. Never use it to store valuable data.
4. If you’re like me using Thunderbird, you might wanna consider setting your email account to IMAP. IMAP leaves the email in the server and nothing is downloaded. However if you use POP3 account, then you may wanna consider using Mozbackup. Try to backup at least once a month. Then transfer the backup file out of your harddrive onto somewhere safe. Like another external drive? or one of above mentioned.
5. Gbridge is a wonderful tools to synchronize data in two separate locations. For example, if you’re at work and you would like to pull a file from your home’s PC, Gbridge will works wonder. It’s more technical to set it up but it’s mighty powerful tools to have. Plus it allow you to password protect the folder too. You can download Gbride here @  http://www.gbridge.com/.

Well, that is all for now. If you need further assistance on any of the above, feel free to email me. Otherwise all your comments are welcome too.

War has always been the ultimate economic stimulus package.

Source : http://www.lfgcomic.com/page/244

Can the CURRENT economic stimulus package helps the world’s economy? The world is running out of time. Pretty soon somebody will get desperate and start getting trigger happy with countries like North Korea, Iran, Palestine, Eastern Europe, Russian, one of the African country,… heck, even Thailand. More and more countries are getting unstable. Civil unrest is expected in China with their short term GDP recorded 6.1% growth. It needs 8% growth to contain civil unrest.

What is the Value of USD$1 Trillion?

So, what can you do with $ 1 Trillion? The folks at www.mint.com has some comparisons on the value in no particular order.

What is the size of USD$ 1 Trillion?

Below is something extracted from PageTutor to illustrate the size of One Trillion Dollars.

Step 1. Illustration of $100. This is the size of the largest US denomination currency.

Step 2. Illustration of $10,000. For most, this is equivalent to few years of their hard-earned money that fits easily into your pocket.

Step 3. Illustration of $1,000,000 (100 x $10,000). Who wants to be a Millionaire? Pathetic in term of size comparison isn’t it? Doesn’t look like a lot of money.

Step 4. Illustration of $100 Million. Now we’re getting somewhere. This is a pallet of money.

Step 5. Illustration of $1 Billion. Now we’re talking. You’ll need a truck to move your billion around.

Finally, an illustration of $ 1 Trillion. This will take you a whole warehouse to store. By the way, please note that the pallet is DOUBLE STACKED!! and the far left blip… is a size of you.

Money as Debt

What is the history of money?

Why is debt vital for the creation of money?

Will current economy crisis reverse this trend? Or will this be prelude for one global currency?

Best Flashlight in the world

If you were given a task to design a flashlight, what kind of feature would you consider? Few years back, my friend, Andrew, used to joke about the concept of solar powered flashlight. My my… what a world we are living in now. Hey Andrew! It’s now a reality.

Feel free to check out this company’s website at http://www.sunnightsolar.com/. I doubt it’ll be available in this part of the country anytime soon. Maybe our China counterpart will assist us with a cheaper alternative.

The awareness test

I thought this was a very interesting message to share. Sometime, we need a few moment (say 5 mins a day?) to take a step away from whatever we do and improve our awareness. It's easy to miss something in front of you when you're not looking for it.

How do you instill confidence?

Answer: TRANSPARENCY!

How I wish more countries and corporations around the world will follow suit. It does not matter if it's truly transparent. It just need to feel transparent. It's the perception at work here. People will follow you till the end when you provide them a convincing "status update" on the current situation.

Visit http://www.recovery.gov/

Silence is golden

I've always wondered why do the lawyers get paid so much....

Now I know. Never ever get interrogated by police officer alone or you're doomed!

Happy Valentine Day

Hidden meaning behind Obama's inauguration speech

Thanks to Jia Yin, here's a peek into the true meaning of Obama's speech during his inauguration.

What Obama meant during his 20 minute's speech

It'll be interesting if we can do the same with our local politician. If only they truly meant what they say and stop flip-flopping.

Breakdown of stimulus package

Anyone interested in dissecting the meaning of this stimulus package?

Implied meaning in our actions & policies.

In developed countries, there is a MONEY BACK GUARANTEE policy. This literally means, "I have faith in myself AND WHAT I have to offer". IF I fail you, I will refund you financially! In Malaysia, we have NON-REFUNDABLE policy. It is as good as saying that "I am selling a reject to you and I DON'T WANT IT BACK!"

Source : Anonymous.

...Until I have time to reorganize the blog, I will try to add some "values" to the blog either via a pix post or a nice quote daily.