Passionate Living

SUCCESS is an achievement every person desires in his life. To be handsome and rich, intelligent and articulate, healthy and happy; these are the preoccupations that become the foundation on which we choose our professions, our friends, our activities, and even the people we love. To achieve any degree of success in the above aspects, hard work and commitment is needed, since we are working towards an artificial state of being [1].

Midnight in a supermarket by Cyril Caton

ADVERTISEMENT is mostly about pushing the emotions of people by using the powerful lure of the above achievements. The products that are marketed in every part of our community and physical surroundings, all offer a better, faster, cheaper way to become the things we desire. It’s the business of the businesses, to attach values – whether they be true or only an over-exaggerated claim – to their products in order to persuade people to purchase them.

QUALITY is a result of focus, dedication, faith, and integrity; to reach the best results we need to invest a great number of resources. Quality is the artificial state, since it takes full intention and deliberate actions to reach this condition. Quality does not come cheap or widely available to the masses; it is highly specific and niche, and is inherently integral to principles and values.

The constitution of beauty

Two weeks ago as I was waiting for my friend to pick me up, I walked into a supermarket and bought some of the children snacks whose company often come to the studio where I work and request for music to be made for them. The clients of the studio are mostly children snacks companies, such as biscuits and wafers; and the added value they advertise is mostly great taste and good nutrition. As a person, I feel it’s necessary to understand what the product is, since it is part of my business.

I discovered my digestive system wasn’t too fond of children snacks that day; the moment I ate them my stomach solicited an unusual reaction. This made me think whether the snacks contain any harmful ingredients for my sensitive stomach, and therefore may also harm the sensitive stomachs of children who are exposed to the advertisements of these products. As a company, are they aware of the possibility that their products – priced low in order to achieve mass market; consequently not with high quality – may inflict some harm on the very target market they pursue?

One of the products advertise vitamin B as one of their selling points. Uneducated people would think this is good nutrition and therefore a good snack. They also hope they can achieve quality, if possible at the lowest price.

However, this made me think the validity of generic products to help us reach what we want to become. Besides children snacks, there are countless other products that promise easy access to becoming the best of society: skin-whitening products to make us become beautiful, body shaping milk that will give us the lean waist or six pack we’ve always dreamed of, and low budget cellphones prepacked with Web 2.0 media apps that promise we will never have a moment of boredom.

The truth is, generic products rarely become the products we believe in to help us achieve success in life. I am sure the models in the advertisements spend a large sum to purchase specialist products – ones that are not mass marketed, since they are expensive – to help them achieve the quality they need to. The celebrities who endorse skin-whitening lotions, use better skin-care products, register with an expert skincare physician, limit their movement outside in the sun to protect their skin, sign up onto high-end fitness facilities and dedicate time periodically to work out, and various other premium beauty products that combine to make up the constitution of their beauty.

The same goes with the models who model for six-pack inducing protein shakes. They have six packs because they work out – very hard – and they also choose a highly nutritious menu; where the protein necessary to build muscles does not come at a cheap price. The supplements they use, are imported and sold at 20 times the price of the product they endorse.

Believe the necessity of specialist products

Would you say that you have a generic life? No, of course not – you have a highly specific life with a highly targeted purpose that needs specific (or unique [2]) treatment. You need to work out the formula for yourself, and search for which products that are effective for you and which are not – and sometimes you find the cheap products work, other times you need to invest in the expensive ones.

Believing in success means believing in the necessity of specialist products. Quality is not accessible through the proxies of low priced, mass market items. Beauty is always on the high pedestal of persistent pursuit; we need to work hard and spend large if we want to achieve it.

Therefore, it’s OK if you need to spend a large amount of money to achieve the success you want; that’s how successful people do it. You don’t need to feel like you don’t have the right to spend out that much, and reserve your money for something that may never happen, and therefore of lower functional value. Because the success we achieve allow us greater strength to create the change we envision.

Isn’t that what beauty is all about?

—

[1] Artificial not in the sense of superficial, but something that is man-made and needs to be done intentionally, since it doesn’t occur naturally
[2] Though my belief says there is nothing unique; everything original has been done before, and everything we consider original today is not exempt from the principles and frameworks in which it is based upon
[3] Photograph by Cyril Caton

Must beauty hide behind the sadness of a tree by Lemuel Cantos

Last weekend I attended the AXIS 2010 International Java Jazz Festival [1]. I hadn’t planned on coming before, because I felt I didn’t appreciate jazz enough to justify the time and money for a jazz festival. But because Diane Warren [2] came to perform, and me being a musician and all, I decided to come anyway during the busy and jam packed Saturday night.

One of the bands who performed were Tika and the Dissidents [3] – a local indie band whom I heard from Adit, my guitarist. I first heard them when Adit and I were traveling to Bandung together, and he brought their CD. I chose to see them at Java Jazz because their schedule was precisely before Diane Warren, and I wanted to know how they sounded like live.

During one of their songs, the vocalist – Tika – said the inspiration behind it was the thought “every woman is beautiful”. She said every woman is beautiful in her own way, and guys should know that too. Of course, the audience responded with a cheer (or at least most of the female audience), but standing at the back line I said to myself I want to contest that theory:

IF every woman is beautiful, then it should also be TRUE that every man is handsome. Is this correct?

The permutations of beauty

Think about that for a moment: is every man handsome? I think accepting the belief that every woman is beautiful is far easier than accepting every man is handsome. Because history and society has had its share of mass murderers, corruptors, terrorists, kidnappers, violent husbands who are largely the male population. Yet from the logical relation, it should hold true, that ALL men are handsome.

IF you disagree and say NOT ALL men are handsome, how can ALL women be beautiful? What’s the difference between women and men such that ALL women are beautiful but NOT ALL men are handsome? It’s like we’re going against a law of nature when we make that statement.

Therefore, I think NOT ALL men are handsome, and NOT ALL women are beautiful. There are four combinations in total, based on beautiful inside and beautiful outside:

1. Women who are beautiful outside, not beautiful inside
2. Women who are not beautiful outside, beautiful inside
3. Women who aren’t either
4. Women who are both

The same also holds true for men.

The four pillars of beauty

This writing might make you think I’m a chauvinist [4], but I can assure you I’m not. The reason I’m writing this is because I want to ask the truth behind our beliefs. I feel the idea “every woman is beautiful” functions more to console the feelings of women who feel they aren’t beautiful, and gives women a justification to NOT do the hard work to BECOME a beautiful woman.

Beauty is a state of success, therefore it demands hard work and high commitment – whether you’re striving for inner beauty or outer beauty. To say that we are all already beautiful inside is mostly a fallacy – the fact is we all have our ugly sides that still need to be educated. Don’t let the idea make you think that you don’t have any work to do – on the contrary if you have the idea then there’s much work to do.

The conclusion: No, NOT every woman is beautiful, and NOT every man is handsome. Everyone needs to put in their hard work to be beautiful. This includes studying to be articulate in an intelligent way, exercising to be healthy and young in a physical way, experiencing enough adversity to be strong in an emotional way, and understanding grace to be humble in a spiritual way.

The question is then: are you beautiful?

Maybe you’re just pretty.

—

[1] Official Java Jazz International website. I share my thoughts about going there HERE (also includes pictures!)
[2] Diane Warren website. During the concert, she only appeared on stage twice; the rest of the show was to promote her new project Due Voci
[3] Tika and the Dissidents on MySpace. Turns out they have quite a number of fans (and Tika, if you’re reading this I’d like to know your thoughts)
[4] Check Wikipedia for the definition of chauvinist
[5] Photograph by Lemuel Cantos

Bora Bora Landscape by tiarescott

Frans, my vocalist, and I talked about success for life after we finished yesterday’s vocal recording session. We brought it up because Adit, my guitarist, has been missing from our social life for these past few weeks. We both think it’s because having a nine-to-five desk job takes a serious amount from our reserve of time such that we rarely have time for ourselves other than weekends.

My previous education tells me that success is having freedom of money and freedom of time (I now add real happiness and understanding of fundamental human principles to that list). Plenty entrepreneurs have achieved freedom of money but not freedom of time, and non-workers have freedom of time but no money. To achieve both takes a huge amount of effort, investment and long term thinking, which is why most of us would rather choose a steady, stable, easy, and instantly rewarding nine-to-five job.

Frans is an insurance agent, and I was in a Multi-Level Marketing company once [1] so it’s natural that we both share a common paradigm on success and having the drive to achieve that success. He is currently focusing on enlarging the revenue of his business in order to win a trip to Lyons or Paris, and also to purchase the down payment for his car and rent an apartment. We talked about it as I drove him home, and it made me think about how we need to dream big in order to achieve big success.

I was a dreamer once

There was a time when I shared the same type of dreams that Frans has now: to be successful in terms of material measurement. There’s a part of me that still has the desire to achieve material wealth, but the degree to which I dedicate my time and energy to that goal has decreased significantly. However, talking about it again with Frans yesterday consolidated the conflicting interests I’ve been having ever since I became a non-active network marketer and pursued a career according to my passion instead.

When we dream, we should dream big. But I believe not everybody wants to achieve the same degree of success Frans and I were talking about [2]. This paradigm and the necessity to dream big belongs only to a small handful of us who are willing to take responsibility over our lives and become our own captains in our journey towards success in life.

In order to do that, we can’t dream small. The energy it takes to think about small dreams is the same as big dreams, so why not dream big instead? It might sound preposterous and ridiculous at first, but every major advancement in culture and technology has been because of the “crazy” people in our society.

Dream big with love

It’s been quite a while since I dreamed big – I think it’s time to return to that man I once was. This time though the dreams are different although the responsibility is just as large. And this time there may be less glory and coolness involved.

So dream big. Dream big because it’s the only way to dream. Dream big because small dreams are for small people who aren’t made to create the high impact change in our world for a better place.

Dream big with love. Dream big with principles. And most of all, dream big with an open mind, a humble heart, and a great sense of humor.

—

[1] Why People Hate MLM People, 2009
[2] 95/5, 2010
[3] Photograph by tiarescott. Because I want to go there someday, a la shoestring