This is the 100th post on Passionate Living, and coincidentally I have been meaning to make a change of plans. The writing projects I’m doing will be on hiatus as I take this time to focus on music projects which deserve priority for the moment. Therefore, this blog will also be on a hiatus, and the 100-post momentum seems like the appropriate time to stop for a moment.

This is not however the end of everything: let’s call this the first semester. The blog will continue at a later time, after a phase of relaxation and a recharge of creative ideas; also coming back with an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Thank you if you’ve been following this blog for however many posts ago. I don’t think this blog has many readers, so for the small group of you who do, you have my gratitude. I hope the ideas and insights I’ve shared have been valuable to you as they have been to me, and I pray that life holds more change and progress for all of us. Let’s look forward to the future, to the second leg of this blog that will meet you at a future time in your life where things may not be comprehensible seen from the present but is nevertheless good and welcome.

The final, 100th thought for you to think, and I think is the basis of the first chapter of this blog, is most appropriately conveyed through this little parable:

The Puppy, The Pillow, and The Dark

A small, white, furry, bubbly little Puppy is playing around. Its jumping and rolling and scurrying around and wagging its little tail like it’s having the time of its life. Its playing with an innocent joy that it’s getting from the only other companion around: a fluffy, soft, lifeless white Pillow.

The Puppy is prancing and preying, running around The Pillow, barking its little tongue out as it plays around The Pillow. The Pillow, of course, just sits there lifeless and motionless as The Puppy grabs the edges of the pillow with its teeth and drags it around. The Puppy, even though receiving no response from The Pillow, just continues playing around, lost in its own little world.

The Dark, surrounds The Puppy and The Pillow. There are only the three of them in their universe of existence: the white Puppy, the white Pillow, and the pitch black Dark. The Pillow is lifeless and feels nothing: it is there because it is only there and would still be there even if The Puppy disappears.

But The Puppy is unaware of The Dark. It is unaware that around it there is nothing else but The Pillow, which is his source of happiness, joy, and everything else in life. The Puppy is unaware of the danger and the change about to happen, as everything in its world falls apart.

The Pillow suddenly disappears one day. The Puppy, not knowing anything in its life other than the Pillow, is now made aware of The Dark. The Pillow, as it turns out, has only been in its imagination all this time, and it is The Dark that is real and is the place The Puppy lives in.

Now The Puppy is alone with The Dark. Its obliviousness to The Dark before, because it only knew The Pillow, leaves it completely vulnerable and unable to deal with the reality of the situation. Everything it believed in: Its Joy, Love, and Happiness, has all disappeared together with The Pillow. The only thing that’s left is the looming Darkness that surrounds The Puppy in every direction it sees, and as far as any distance it goes.

—

Our reality in life is subject to be proven. Our beliefs that we believe to be true and unchangeable, are in fact as easily changeable and vulnerable as a fluffy white pillow. The danger we can make, the mentality of a little puppy, would be to build our lives based around these superficial beliefs because one day – since they are superficial – these beliefs will fade and fall apart and reveal the truth of our real reality: the darkness that we have avoided acknowledging this entire time.

If there is one question we should ask ourselves right now, it should be: but is it real? Are the values we believe in real? Are the things we say real? Are the ideas with which we build our lives on real, and will still be real tomorrow?

This question is for you to answer: is what you are doing right now real, in the sense that it will still be part of you ten years from now? Are the relationships you are in real, in the sense that the love will still be there twenty years from now? Is your identity real, in the sense that you still uphold the things you say now, even until the very end of your life?

-END OF CHAPTER ONE-

Plenty has been said about how TV is bad for you. In the modern Web 2.0 era, several digital media experts even say that broadcast is obsolete. With the advent of online programs, now you can choose what to watch, when to watch, and where to watch it.

Fatty watching himself on TV by Cloudzilla

The generation that grew up sharing a culture – everyone watching Happy Days or The Brady Bunch – doesn’t apply any longer in the digital era. Each person tailors her own consumption of entertainment, everyone having their own versions of top hit singles and favorite TV shows. The possibility of us all going “Hey, I haven’t heard that in a long time!” in the future is a small possibility.

Yet, in the middle of this rapid digital distribution, TV can be good for you. The uncontrollable aspect of major broadcasting can sometimes lead to serendipitious discoveries. The things you discover while watching uncurated programs or mindless browsing through the channels just might inspire you with something new.

Here are 3 ways that we can all do to make watching TV in an internet era be good for us:

1. Keep an open mind

The basis of this is for us to be open to new possibilities. TV programs are less specific than niche websites, but they are diverse enough to display several topics within one hour of programming. Simply tuning into several different channels for 30 minutes or 1 hour and interpreting it with our own minds can lead to some interesting discoveries of our own.

2. Don’t watch the news

The programs produced on TV can open our eyes towards new things and new information we might else not discover in our curated internet world. Yet, the danger of uncurated information is that it can be negative and affect how we feel throughout the day. Therefore, it’s better to avoid definite sources of negative information, such as news channels, and spend time on the positive information channels, such as:

3. Watch community programs

This is the most important aspect of watching TV: if you have a local channel, or at least one that is broadcasted by your city for your city, community programs are an excellent way to learn about what’s happening in your neighborhood. You can learn much about your environment, what is the primary concern of the moment, what kind of hobby groups and activities are going on at the moment, and whether you are interested enough to join in the activity or not. Also, plenty of entrepreneurs can make a comfortable living establishing a community based business: a small business that caters to the need of a limited community. Therefore, knowing about the needs of a community is important if you are interested in developing a business.

Serendipity is the name of the game. You can do this also with magazines and radio. Just because the internet is there, doesn’t mean we should abandon all other media channels, even though we could. The curated nature of broadcast programming subjects us to the personal flavor of the program producer, music director, and magazine editor and can expose us to new information that can be good for us.

So, start exploring today: watch a little more TV, buy one or two local magazines, and listen to the radio on your mobile – you’ll never know what you’ll discover.

—

How many times have you been worried about being ill?

Having a health condition can be nasty because it interferes with your productivity. You spend time and probably money in order to gain your health back. Not only that, you also need extra time to regain the balance you had prior to falling ill. Falling ill is not a good business.

Sunrise on the Boardwalk by Arturo Donate

Or is it? There’s a lesson behind every disaster we experience as human beings. There’s a benefit to every adversity we endure in the journey of our lives. Humans grow from these difficult times, although we would mostly rather avoid them.

During the recovery process after falling ill, you develop a more delicate sensitivity and objectivity towards what you see and hear with your senses. You are more open and appreciative of the small details in life, and you can absorb the moment with greater proficiency than when you are in full health. In fact, sometimes being in full health can make you drown in your business and take the finer details for granted.

There is a TED talk but I fail to remember the title or the speaker. In it, she mentions the importance of disease. Would she rather have people stay healthy and disease free all the time? Not necessarily. She says that it is because of these diseases, these life changing maladies, that occur in the first place, that have made most of the greatest people in our society become great people: after their heart attacks or cancer diagnoses or other life threatening illness, their priorities were shocked into place and they pulled their act together. Lawyers become social workers, engineers become designers, accountants become community managers, and other more fundamental changes of characters.

This story shows, that although we might prefer to have a smooth and happy life all the way, it is the tough times that make it all worth while. No life was ever worth living if it never was worth fighting for: the struggles, the (non-personally invited) drama, and the battles that need be fought are the ones that make us change to be a better person. It is during hindsight, that we gain the clearest perspective and know then which step to take next.

Therefore, there is a benefit to falling ill: you stop being busy, you stop being part of the beehive, you stop being distracted by the hustle bustle and noise of city life. You start to notice the stillness of the clouds, you start to see the light of the sun, and you start to stand still be one with nature as you ask yourself, “Where have I been all this time? What have I been doing? It feels like I’ve done a lot but accomplished little in reality.”

Enjoy the process, absorb the experience. Before you lose grip of it and fall into the vortex of superficial living again.

—

[1] Photograph by Arturo Donate

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to learn? Ever desire to be fluent on a subject but don’t know how to start? Accumulated a wealth of information from magazines, websites, blogs, and twitter feeds more than you can digest?

St Margaret's Steps by Neosnaps

The world wide web is the one stop shop for finding anything and everything on any subject that might be your recent fascination. From fashion to food, cars to cooking, music to self-motivation, the web provides us with more information that we can shake a stick at. The problem today then isn’t lack of information – as it maybe was back in the pre-web eras – but management of information.

You’re a sophomore student majoring in biochemical engineering who also has a serious hobby in digital photography; so you subscribe to a physical biochemical journal and also several free photography tutorial blogs from various great resources on the web. But between the time you need for actually attending class, digesting the journal, being involved in social activities in campus, you may end up using more time reading than you do getting things done like photo hunting or making a discovery in your experiments. The old adage – take things one step at a time – then becomes a serious application that holds true today than it did centuries ago when it first came up.

You might think “Yeah sure, I know to take things one step at a time. What’s new huh?”. But are you sure you actually apply what you know? The mistake with most of common knowledge today isn’t the effectiveness, but the efficiency of all the famous sayings that have come into our collective consciousness: we are lacking in the execution of our knowledge (also known as xQ: Execution Quotient).

Taking one step at a time does sound easy, but how can we truly apply it to our daily activities? Here are 3 tips to help you be more efficient in learning things one step at a time:

1. Decide on 1 source. Period

Yep. Not exactly the easiest thing to do, but it sure get’s the job done. Humans have the tendency to collect things, so practicing limitation is going against your natural inclinations. By limiting your source to 1, it doesn’t mean 1 for the rest of your life, it means 1 for a certain limit of time: for example, go over to Digital Photography School and spend maybe 2 to 3 weeks just learning from that site alone.

2. Practice 3 to 4 tips every 2 weeks

When you’ve decided on a source, make sure you practice at least 3 to 4 of the many tips contained in that site. The above site is one of the leading sources for digital photography, so there are abundantly more tutorials than a couple. But in order to not overwhelm yourself, just choose a few and practice them out in the course of 2 weeks. You might think this is getting little done, but in the course of 3 months, you’ll have developed 48 new techniques! If learning piano is your pursuit, you’d have mastered all the basic chords on all the white scales! Huge improvement!

3. Be involved in the community, if there is one

The DPS site is community powered: it’s huge because it has one of the largest web communities around (for any kind of site, not just photography!). Granted, participating in an online community takes more of your time than simply reading, but the rewards and lessons you acquire are worth the time invested . You might even be able to get a quick tip or two, speeding up your learning curve greatly! Humans learn best from each other, so talking to a fellow enthusiast or professional is often the best way to go.

An adage is an adage because everyone needs to re-learn it as a principle for themselves. This is called here Re-Incarnation: or why we need to learn things for ourselves, even if it has become common knowledge. Taking things one step at a time is old advice, yet it is always new in application. So let’s get started!

What’s your take on the old adage? Are there other principles you’ve rediscovered for yourself in life? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments:

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[1] Photograph by Neosnaps

Have you ever felt like you’ve run out of fuel? You feel like you’ve done so much that you couldn’t possibly do more? Like it’s finally time for you to take a break and relax?

compass by ^@^ina

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey points out that the 7th Habit – Sharpening the Saw – is as important as the previous 6 Habits. Sharpening the Saw is more closely related to keeping balance and doing the activities that don’t bring you results directly, as opposed to the other activities of the 6 Habits that aim to help you achieve your goals with accuracy and efficiency. Nevertheless, without Sharpening the Saw, executing the 6 Habits would be very difficult indeed.

Stephen brought up this concern lightheartedly during one of his seminars where he asked the audience, “Have you ever been so busy driving that you ran out of gas?” – and surprisingly a lot of the audience raised their hands. The aspect of Sharpening the Saw, called here Re-evaluation, is not as sexy or glossy as other catchier more beautiful management techniques that promise you better results in faster time. However, keeping balance is very important to maintain momentum in the long run.

If you’ve been on a prolific spree for six months; you’ve set your goals and you’ve sped on fifth gear on a highway, maybe it’s time to slow down to a lower gear and check the engine for repairs and maintenance. True, the road may still be long and there is still plenty to do, but taking the time to rest is also an important part of the journey. Let’s look at several ways we can re-evaluate our goals to help us regain our energy and excitement for the next leg of the race:

1. Keep your journal

A journal can help you document or record the progress that you’ve made. Not everyone is diligent enough to keep a periodical journal, and that’s mainly because you might think it has to be a daily or weekly journal. In fact, it can be as simple as you need it to be, such as Gretchen Rubin’s one sentence journal. By keeping a journal, when it comes time to stop and assess your progress, you will have a better clearer picture on the paths that you have taken and where you want to go after this.

2. Summarize your progress

If you haven’t been keeping a journal, then you can re-organize for the future by summarizing the progress that you’ve made thus far. Whether that be financially, in family relationships, or your education, write down all the progress you’ve made, no matter how small it seems. Studies show that when we learn of the progress we made, even if it be trivial, we gain a boost of energy knowing we’ve got something done.

3. Restructure your goals

From the information contained in your journal, and from the progress summary you’ve made, you can then find out and sketch out which goals are the top priority for the next phase. What was the top goals six months ago, does not necessarily have to be the top goals for the next six months: things can change, and priorities can change also. Restructure your goals to know which ones are most important, so you can allocate the most energy for these goals.

The next step after the three above is: execution. The beauty of execution is that it will NOT go according to plan, no matter how meticulous your plan is. All smart planners understand this inherent property of planning, so they are not surprised when the execution falls slightly short of the original design.

It’s alright, because all of this is part of growth. If you don’t plan for a target in the beginning, you won’t reach anything anyway! So the worst part is that you don’t make anything happen, whether you plan or not plan, whether you take the time to re-evaluate or not re-evaluate.

To achieve the goals we want to achieve – and to create the change we need to create – re-evaluation is an important part of keeping ourselves healthy and sane. Understanding our limits and working around them is intelligence at its finest. Therefore, let’s take this time to stop and re-evaluate our progress achieved so far and our progress to achieve in the coming months.

What about you? What are your goals for the next six months? Do you feel it’s time for you to stop and take time to evaluate? Let us know your opinion in the comments.

—

[1] Photograph by ^@^ina

Sanguine means being a person who celebrates spontaneity. Sanguine means being a person who is cheerful most of the time, and is quick to forget upsetting matters. Sanguine means being a lighthearted, easygoing, free spirited soul that becomes the center of attraction and spreads joy and contagious laughter to as many people as possible.

Shiny Happy Birthday Girl Smiling by D Sharon Pruitt

Being a melancholic [1], I appreciate very much the sanguine quality in other people, and especially the small amount there is inside myself. Because being a melancholic is often the opposite of sanguine – the opposite of spontaneity and bright cheerfulness – the simplicity and authenticity of the sanguine spirit is truly attractive to me. Since I made the distinction between the two, and learned which one I am more, I’ve been trying to be more sanguine everyday: trying to be more humorous, easy, laid back, and light as possible. The world needs more sanguine people.

But sometimes, sanguine isn’t always charming. Being sanguine takes trust, because the charm lies in making certain small mistakes and flaws that would be irritating and upsetting for other people if there is no trust there yet. The charm lies in being slightly oblivious to your surroundings, slightly suffering from short term memory loss, and slightly considering most things with less weight than other people. For someone to appreciate a sanguine person, there needs to be an established relationship between them in order for the joy to be comfortable for both people.

The littlest mistake

This thought crossed my mind the other when I was driving in traffic: a silver hatchback sedan was driving more slowly than all the other cars, and it was driving hesitantly in the middle of the road – there were lanes enough for two cars, but the silver hatchback took up both lanes so everybody behind had to drive as slow as it did. In another case and another scenario, this might be a nice sanguine experience: sometimes we need to learn to light up, enjoy the moment, and just let it be without thinking about it too serious. In the case of the silver hatchback, just let it drive obliviously like that, and love the charm of how the driver is clueless about her surroundings.

But traffic is the last place you want to show your sanguine side. Traffic is the one place where we interact intensively with each other, without there being trust among us. Most of the people on the road have never met, talked, or shared, so when the littlest mistake is made, the biggest consequences can arise. Therefore, being sanguine in traffic is like asking someone whose urgencies you don’t consider, to consider your urgencies without any benefit for them.

This is why sometimes jokes can become misunderstood. As I wrote before, comedy needs trust in order for it to be comedy. Else, it would just be a very irksome and disturbing behavior from someone whom we will think to be childish and irresponsible.

Welcome comedy

There is a time and place for everything, and to know which is when is what we call wisdom. It’s possible to be sanguine in any place and time, and spontaneity and lightheartedness should always be welcome in every environment. But that’s the point right there: it’s needs to be welcomed first, for it to be accepted.

We can’t simply stroll into a party and start being sanguine; we need to be invited. We can’t immediately explain why a person is wrong; our judgment needs to be requested first. We can’t put and enforce principles on the public, without them understanding the principles behind it beforehand.

Trust is imperative in every relationship. The problem is all of us think we are important enough for other people to understand us and give us permission immediately. But, like driving in the middle of the road and forcing everyone to play along regardless of each individual’s different urgencies, exercising the rewards of a relationship without building the trust first will only hurt the connection further – like drawing money out from an empty back account.

Are you a sanguine person? How is your trust in your relationships that matter? Let’s discuss about this in the comments.

—

[a name="95_1">1] The terms “sanguine” and “melancholic” is borrowed from Florence Littauer’s book “Personality Plus”

Episode 1: Running Away From Your Problems
Episode 2: A Millionaire Affair
Episode 3: Romance in Marriage
Episode 4: An Undoable Mistake
Episode 5: The Cost of Negative Energy

Looking to the past by ~Butterfly-HC

Cecilia and I didn’t exchange many words on the way to her studio. The positive energy that was previously there between us had been drained away by the negative energy of her fiance. Both of us had things on our mind, and it prevented us from talking to each other.

During her phone conversation, Cecilia did her best to defend me as a friend who is truly just a friend. She tried to comfort the anger and jealousy of her fiance by reassuring him there is nothing between her and I. Cecilia also mentioned that he didn’t know what I was like, and if he did he would understand that I am really no threat to their relationship.

But Cecilia also mentioned I didn’t fit with any of her other friends. I suppose she said this because her fiance might have suggested or asked why we couldn’t meet up in the company of her other friends. Her statement made me think about the truth to that question: Why are Cecilia and I friends?

Lonely excitement

When I think about it, her fiance does have a point: Cecilia and I share almost nothing in common, and we come from almost completely different backgrounds. The only similarity we shared was a moment in 2001 when we were in the same room, doing the same thing together. Is that a strong enough bond to justify a friendship?

I’m quite convinced I like seeing Cecilia not because I have a secret agenda with her. I like having conversations with her because I believe there’s much value to be created. The synergy of her character with mine, often results in inspiration good for the both of us.

But sometimes I wonder whether Cecilia doesn’t feel the same way, and the excitement is mine alone. Her fiance might be right, in that she and I don’t have a strong enough reason to see each other. And for a moment, I believed that thought.

Mrs. Cecilia

It made me upset, knowing that I won’t see her just as a friend anymore. Cecilia told me that we might not be able to meet up without her fiance – soon to be husband – there with us. She politely asked that I understand and I replied that of course I do.

On the drive back, I thought about why this was irritating me. Then I found out it was because I was accused of being a man I wasn’t. Her fiance’s response was as if I was a man who might try to steal her from him; and that made me furious.

Then I realized, I don’t have time for his childish behavior. I don’t have time to be involved in his game of jealousy and self-satisfaction. The drama their playing, is so 25 years ago for me; and that’s what made me upset.

Still, I hate missing out on an opportunity to create value.

—

THE BLACK SWAN theory is based on the previous English belief that all swans are white; this was accepted as unquestionable truth by the British from “thousands of years of observations”, until they landed upon the shores of Australia where, lo and behold, they found a black swan. In modern terms, the Black Swan is a term used to describe an event that is very unlikely to happen (in the magnitude of almost impossible in statistical terms), yet happens anyway and has a significant impact in human history and society, whether politically and/or culturally. The Black Swan, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, is “the impact of the highly improbable”.

THE BLACK SWAN book became a Black Swan experience as I read it; I didn’t expect to learn so much from a field of study that I rarely read about. Originally, I was considering buying one of Malcolm Gladwell’s book (particularly Outliers), but I felt I already knew what Gladwell talks about – so I decided to take a chance and see what would happen with the Black Swan. True to the Black Swan theory, this unexpected event became a positive experience for me, because I learned much about philosophy through the eyes of the empirical skeptic Nassim Taleb (or NNT as he abbreviates himself), and also learned a beautiful term for something that has been on my mind for some time: DOMAIN DEPENDENCE.

The meat of The Black Swan talks about “how not to be a turkey”, where NNT emphasizes the importance of the things we don’t know yet let this unknowledge take control of the most important decisions in our lives. But for me the greatest lesson was hidden in a two word term, mentioned only once throughout the whole book; a term that gave me a eureka moment where pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fell into place and the light to the answer became brighter. Domain dependence, is the lesson for this month.

I used to call it COMPLIANCE; and to better illustrate the point, let’s take an example of a story. There are many personal development and motivational seminars nowadays, ranging from FREE to full-fledged limited-gala-dinner VIP packages, and many people interested in participating in these events. A person may come to a seminar, obtain a new paradigm, experience good change within him – change that gives him more strength to strive for his dreams – and get a boost of positive energy for days maybe weeks to come. Yet, after some time, that energy dissipates and he returns to his previous condition, where he is without the focus and courage he felt during the seminar. He then goes to another seminar, repeats the process, experiences the same emotions, gains the same confidence, and returns to normal life with a new found energy again. But the cycle repeats, and after some time, he runs out of energy, again.

This person may attend enough personal seminars that he knows the material off by heart and may even be able to become a speaker himself. Yet he keeps needing to come back to the same seminars, the same experience, the same keywords, the same charts and explanations, the same homework to do when the seminar ends, and the same motivation to do what needs to be done. He can’t keep the energy he grew at the seminar, and keep it also at the place where he needs to make a change. This is called DOMAIN DEPENDENCE; the inability to transfer our powers in one domain of our lives (for example, confidence during motivational seminars), to another domain in our lives that need work (for example, a broken or stagnant family relationship).

I used to call it COMPLIANCE, because this is my belief: after attending a motivational seminar, our minds think we have done enough, our energy feels used and satisfied, so we are compliant when we return to our natural habitats. We are compliant, because we think we have already become part of the change and part of the solution. The truth is; developing our paradigm is only the first step – after, action needs to be done, and that can’t be done if we are still COMPLIANT or DOMAIN DEPENDENT.

—

Photograph by Magdalena

TECHNOLOGY is the tools we use to help us achieve our goals. The purpose is to help us be able to manage our priorities and become efficient in working towards our goals. Proper understanding and use of technology is a highly positive value in a person’s life.

OUR MINDS work the way we order them to; if we don’t keep our minds neat and structured, then our thoughts will be dirty and unkept. If we let our inspirational well run dry, our minds will be prone to negative information and perception shaped by the bombardment of propaganda in the form of negative news and advertisements. It’s the responsibility of a person to keep his mind clear from clutter and focused on priorities.

HUMILITY is a character that has to be learned first hand. You cannot develop humility without first experiencing adversity; and not everyone wants to experience it. Only the persons who manage to overcome their obstacles, learn the key to life is being patient and understanding there are purposes bigger than our individual parts.

Several weeks ago as I was with my parents eating out, my mother commented on a woman her age on the table behind us. She (the woman) was busy fidgeting with her Blackberry, which made my mother comment that that is the new activity of people today – they fidget with their Blackberrys. No one in my family own a Blackberry; we have never been “victims” of “technology fashion”. Therefore, seeing a person busy playing with their BB’s, while in the middle of a family dinner, made me think about the way we use technology to enhance our lives.

“What do I want from life? Well, I want to be happy.”

In the digital era of instant gratification and 3G internet speeds, patience is a rare commodity. Our minds and our collective culture is growing up with the mind frame that we can get mostly anything we want at any time we want – leaving the previously usual work and waiting out of the equation. For some purposes, this may be good, but in the long term of human growth, the work and waiting that we used to have to go through are vital in forming the character of a person.

Gretchen Rubin shares her experience on how she was able to find the inspiration to write her Happiness Project; she was sitting on a bus one day while looking outside the window and asked herself, “What do I want from life?”. Her answer was, “Well, I want to be happy” [1]; and it was that answer that made her write the Happiness Project book – a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Gretchen says if she was busy fidgeting with her Blackberry, she wouldn’t have found the inspiration to write the book that has influenced the lives of tens of thousands of people today.

Some people have trouble sitting down on a bus without anything to do. They have to fidget around with something, because maybe they can’t stand being alone with their thoughts. This is the sign of an unhealthy mind, because a healthy mind is constantly curious about itself and always exercises examinations upon its own characters, observations, beliefs, and mechanisms. It is the power and uniqueness of man to be able to view himself from third person to gain a perspective on his life purpose. This is how the great figures of our society found their calling, explored their minds deeper, and consequently changed the world we live in.

Technology we own is rarely technology we need

Humility is therefore a primary character before all characters, because without humility you can not have the patience to sit down on a bus without anything to do. Without humility, your mind will always think you are bored, and seek out brain dead information through mindless gaming and social networking to entertain yourself. Humility is key to keeping a mind that is brave enough to spend some time alone with itself.

At the end of the day, the technology we own is rarely technology we need. Most of the technology in our hands are results of us just satisfying our carnal desires to possess and perhaps even show off that we can afford to buy these things. How do we know that is true? Because even with so called “better” technology, we still experience the same social problems we face since the history of mankind.

Therefore a healthy mind realizes, it’s not about what the technology we have is; it’s about how we use the technology we have. It’s not about owning a Blackberry so you can stay on always; it’s about having that correct portable device that becomes an extension of yourself and truly helps you be efficient in reaching your life goals, instead of eating away at your mental health. It’s about the change we make, through the resources we are given; because the easy choice is always to live life for yourself and eat up all the resources you feel like eating up.

—

[1] Gretchen relates this story in the first chapters of her book: Happiness Project