Be brave, acknowledge the gap!

Not very long ago, I met someone in my work place which till now I have a lot of respect. From this friend I have learnt many ways of looking and reacting to issues and problems not just in my work but also in life. Taking a quote from him, this is what he said:

"Acknowledge that we have a gap
between where we are now and where we want to go,
we can either do something to close the gap,
and end up achieving our objective or maybe fail short,
or we can do nothing and never find out.
Which path will you choose? "

Too many times, things happen in our working or personal life that we always try to find excusses for failing, or for things that never goes well. Too many people have been trying not to face their problem head on, eventhough they know that it is only a matter of time that the problem will catch up with them.

In life nothing is certain beside death, in the short span of few decades, we can either live to the fullness by trying to achieve our goal or we can pass away with a lot of regrets. The way to try to achieve our goal is to acknowledge that there is always a gap between where we are now and the end we want to achieve. From acknowledgement, we plan and take actions to move towards the direction of our goal. Regardless of how far and how big you have set your goal, most important is that we need to acknowledge the gap between. Plan out the process of closing it.

When we aim for a star, we can at least reach the moon.
-- T. Harv Eker.

Do you want to be rich?

What would you think the answer will be if I will to ask the question to 100 people I meet in the street? The answer should be clear, it has to be " I want to be rich, of course". So the question is if all of us wanted to be rich, why is it that only very few have done so?

Many of us are confused on how we answer the question because how we answer reflect the thought that we have. "I want to be rich" is nothing more but hoping the dream of getting rich will come true to us in the course of our life. That is why so many people are at the Singapore Pool outlets everyday, betting their way of hoping to become rich one day. You named it, 4D, Toto, horse racing, or even football betting. I have known someone who actually bet thousands of dollars every time he walk into the outlet. They are merely wishing for the lucky star to fall upon them.

The better word to use to answer the question will be "I choose to be rich", even better "I commit to be rich". Many of us do not understand that what we said, make a great deal of how we behave and how we will act upon. That is because what we think can be done, will become the believes in our mind, eventually the reality for us to take action. So it is important that we must constantly have the positive thought as we go through our daily life. Negative thought will kill us, demoralize us, and taking the energy away from us. Positive thought on the other hand will charge us up, boost up our spirit even when situation don't seems so good. So merely wishing for things to happen to us, is not something we want to do if we want to be rich and successful.

Everything we do must be committed towards the goal we have set for us to be rich and successful. Everything starts from the thought in our mind. Quoting from T. Harv Eker who wrote, The secret of the millionaire mind:

Thought leads to Feeling
Feeling leads to Action
Action leads to Results

Everything starts from how we think.

Is 0.09% better important to you?

Most of us have heard about Lance Armstrong, the 7 times tour de France winner. The last time he won the tour before he retired was in 2005 at a time of 86 hours 15 minutes two seconds, over a course of 21 stages. Now, do anyone know who is the runner up and by how much time did Lance win the race? The answer is Ivan Basso from Italy, and Lance won the race by a mere 4 minutes and 40 seconds, that is 0.09% ahead of Ivan. 0.09%, that is the difference between the best and the 2nd best. And in every case, in any competition, nobody will remember who came in second, but everyone know who is the first.

In most cases, the margin of winning is very small, is just like the case of 2005 tour de France. And the first win it all. In the world of competitive racing, a mere 0.09% make a great difference between success and failure. It is important for a person in a competitive race to do the very best and win it all.

However, in the private world of personal growth and goal achieving, that is not the case. Who came in first and how much faster the other person achieved his plan, has nothing to do with your own plan of personal growth or person goal. The whole point of goal setting is not to realize your goal ahead of anyone or to beat anyone in term of the size of the goal. Instead, the best way to measure the success of your plan is not by whether you are beating the mass but by whether you have put in place a sound plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go. In the end, what matters isn't crossing the finish line before anybody else but just making sure you do cross it.

Money can't buy a Grand Slam title!

I was surfing thru BBC sports on my computer this morning and happened to come across an article on Maria Sharapova winning the US Open on Saturday. Something she said below captured my thought,

"You can't buy a Grand Slam title. There are people around the world that have billions of dollars but no matter how much they want a US Open title, the only thing they can do is buy some good tennis rackets, the best trainers and work very hard."
"This beats any sort of money, any sort of paper."

How true is it? I have no doubt that many of us will agree to what she said. If we have all the money in the world, we will not be able to buy many things that are of great importance to us. Just to mention 2 of them, health and love. But many of you should also agree that between having no money and a lot of money, we will choose a lot of money. At least I know that's what I will choose.

I know many of us when come to the subject of MONEY, we feel very uncomfortable. I was brought up in an environment that talking about money is prohibited in my family. Until now many of my friends and relatives are still having the concept of "MONEY is EVIL" and "MONEY is not Important". However, I have changed my perception of the value of money for the last few years. With my wife and my 2 sons, we discussed constantly about money because I believed that money itself is not evil, the evil lives with the people who uses them.

Money is not everything, but without money we will not have many things we need.

Many of us work very hard, we actually spend most of our time at work than we spend time with our love ones. The purpose of our work is to ensure that every month we make enough to meet our needs. Since we have spent so much time to gather so called "sort of paper" as per Maria Sharapova, so how can we not discuss about it in our family? Be brave and face the fact that money is the one of the most influencial element in our life. We have heard of many families breaking up because of money, they are all over the news. What we do with money have a great deal to us and to the people around us. Money needs to be respected, they must be controlled and not the other way round. Many people are controlled by money and that is the root of all the problems.

Money itself is not important, what's important is what are we going to do with it.

Foundation of our character

The five people you meet in heaven, a small little book I almost finished reading, written by Mitch Albon. Mtich is an author who works as a newspaper columnist and a broadcaster, and serves on numerous charitable boards. He is also the author of his best seller, Tuesdays with Morrie. In The five people you meet in heaven, Mitch give us an original story that change the view of how after life will be! Reading this book gives us another meaning of our life on earth will be. A very different perspective you will look at how you react or managed incidents that will happened to you in your life.

Now these new realizations of life are knowledge to me, and these new knowledge are wealth, which will never be taken away from me. Knowledge is the greatest wealth that one ever received. My point is that knowledge comes in every form, in every moment of life and it definitely comes from anyone you meet. Taking a quote from Brian Tracy, one of America's leading author on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness. In his audio, Thinking Big, he made this statement,

We must always ask ourselves these 2 questions after every event or incident that happened:
1) What have we done well in this incident?
2) What can I do differently to improve?

So in life, every second, every event, regardless is good or bad, we can learn from it. Learning is an on going process, learning gives us knowledge. We transform these knowledge into something that worth a whole lot important to us in our mind and also in our heart and soul, which will never be taken away from us. These knowledge lay the foundation of our character of who we will become.

And these are real wealth.

What wealth mean to you?

Many people associate wealth or wealthy to purely monetary term. They relate wealth to only having a lot of money, being a millionaire, a billionaire who is having unlimited cash to spend. To me, wealth is more than money. A person can be wealthy in emotion, knowledge, culture or even principle. A man who is weathy in sharing, will always unconditionally share his wisdom with as many people as he can meet. If we are willing to share our knowledge and experience with as many people as possible, we will receive from as many people we shared. Sharing goes both ways. At least this is my believe and my experience. In asian culture, many of us are taught from young to keep things to ourselves, or at least within the family. There is such things as family treasure, which we will not reveal to the world outside of the family cricle. That in many times, become the culture or selfishness, unwillingness to share. I started at this stage of unwillingness to share at the very begining. But once you open up your thought and start sharing, the benefit out strip the pain of exposing. The more you share, the more you will learn. the faster you share, the faster you will learn. This is the reason I created this blog.

Why I want to go blogging

I have been thinking of having my own blog for quite some time. Finally, tonight after months of consideration, I have registered and posted.

But why do I take so long?

While I spent my childhood and teenage in the pre-internet era, and the first time I came in contact with the computer was watching my National Service camp mate (For those who are not familiar with Singapore, all males in our country need to serve the Arm Forces for at least 2 years. --- is a national service) playing "Space Invader". For many of you must have not heard of "Space Invader". Well, is an ancient computer game which became popular in the late 70's and early 80's. So I am "not good" in computer and internet. For simple surfing and usage of Excel will do, but programing............?

So finally after attending a pre-view of an internet business bootcamp which I will be attending at the end of the month, my decision is set to start regardless if I am ready. Thanks to the instructor showing us how to create a blog and what a blog can do.

So this is it, my 1st posting.