Protected: April-May Journals 2012

Damn, People Still Think A Day’s Got “24 hours”!

A day’s got 24 hours. There are no doubts about that. But how many hours do we really have for ourselves? The answer is (un)suprisingly not many. To illustrate the point, let’s analyze a normal day of an average person:

An average adult sleeps 7 to 11 hours per night – let’s count it 8 hours.

The same person has 3 meals a day with several snacks in between, which takes up approximately 3 hours.

What’s more, they generally spends at least 30 minutes or so on the toilet per day.

Most of all, they devote 8 hours a day to their works, together with about 30-minute travelling times.

All right, let’s do a simple calculation. We have, people spend, all in all, around 20 hours a day just for their necessary and [working] activities. In this case, I am already generous in calculating the occupied time. In many cases, people spend more than 8 hours just lying on their beds, which I also do sometimes. The travelling and personal hygiene times may likewise take more times than those stated. At the end of the day, they have only got twenty FOUR hours to do what they like in a normal (working) day! So, what do people actually do daily?

Waking up after a long sleep, many people do think that a new fresh day has just started and unconsciously ignore the fact they have just lost nearly 1/3 of their day’s time. After doing some personal sutff, they then go to work and only return home after 8-hour working when the dusk is falling.

So, unless we can spend all the meals at our working tables, unless we can reduce the time spent on the toilet to zero, unless we can sleep 5 hours a day – which, if possible, are not good for us in the long term at all, and unless we work for ourselves – our interests, we spend 20 hours per day for something that’s totally out of our businesses. What we have left for ourselves are just… four – 4 hours only! What can we do with these limited 4 hours? Not so much. And for those whose 4-hour lasts from 7 to 11 or 8 – 12 pm, it’s even worse! I usually call that period as “dead hours” – the hours that cannot be well spent. Which and how many classes, restaurants and malls are open till that time to serve you? Obviously, apart from work, we still have at least our family, love and probably kids to worry about. So, the big question is can we cut down those 20 so-called ‘neccessary hours’? Luckily, the answer is “Yes, of course!” With a good time management, we can reduce those “neccessary hours” to minimum. Ultimately, if we can utilise 8-hour working to do what we want to do, we will save a lot of time for ourselves.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” – Steve Jobs

In short, I don’t mean to worry you, but life is short and time is limited, so spend it wisely!

How to Do What You Love

How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don’t know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you’ll tend to stop searching too early. You’ll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.

Here’s an upper bound: Do what you love doesn’t mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they’d rather do. There didn’t seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I’d prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn’t mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don’t regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that’s pretty cool. This doesn’t mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that’s pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there’s no test of how well you’ve read a book, and that’s why merely reading books doesn’t quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you’ve read to feel productive.

I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn’t start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven’t had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then…”

So why are you still single?

Bức thư tình cuối cùng

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What’s love?

A student asks a teacher, “What is love?”

The teacher said, “in order to answer your question, go to the wheat field and choose the biggest wheat and come back. But the rule is: – you can go through them only once & cannot turn back to pick.”

The student went to the field, go thru first row, he saw one big wheat, but he wonders….may be there is a bigger one later. Then he saw another bigger one… but may be there is an even bigger one waiting for him.

Later, when he finished more than half of the wheat field, he starts to realise that the wheat is not as big as the previous one he saw, he knew he has missed the biggest one, and he regretted.

So, he ended up went back to the teacher with empty hand. The teacher told him, “…this is love… you keep looking for better ones, but when later you realise, you have already missed the person ….”*

“What is marriage then?” the student asked.

The teacher said, “in order to answer your question, go to the corn field and choose the biggest corn and come back. But the rule is: you can go through them only once and cannot turn back to pick.”

The student went to the corn field, this time he is careful not to repeat the previous mistake, when he reach the middle of the field, he
has picked one medium sized corn that he felt satisfied, and came back to the teacher.

The teacher told him, “this time you bring back a corn…. you look for one that is just nice, and you have faith and believe this is the best one you get…. this is marriage.”

You

You are one of few people who can suddenly wake me up at night. This is all my feelings at the time. You know something? You’ve impressed me so much!

01 am, 05/07/2010