What to Write in a Journal

Jim Rohn was the master of the journal. "If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual—keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down," Rohn said. As such, a journal can be many things to many people. Here are a few ideas for how to use a journal:

1. Keep a tally of your daily 'wins' or accomplishments.

2. Keep notes on an ongoing problem you're facing.

3. Write down ideas. The Magic of Thinking Big author David J. Schwartz writes, "Every day, lots of good ideas are born only to die quickly because they aren't nailed to paper."

4. Maintain your lifelong goal file. Writing down your aspirations in a journal helps build a file so that you can review your ideas over and over.

5. Keep a to-do list for big projects. Day-to-day tasks can be scheduled in Outlook, but larger-scale projects are perfect for recording in a journal.

6. Jot down inspirational quotes and why they impact you.

7. Keep a dream journal bedside.

8. Handwrite important facts, statistics or phone numbers to help cement them in your mind.

9. Tear out a page and write a note to someone important in your life.

Source: http://www.mylifecompass.com/?page=blogs/view&BLID=3913

Leadership

“A good leader inspires others with confidence in him; 

a great leader inspires them with confidence in themselves. ”

Unknown

Image Source: 

http://www.womenpr.com/site/component/content/article/3-lnb-article-cat/83-eadership

What I saw @ RSAF Open House Today...

I was in B&W mood today...Everything thru my lenses were in B&W. Hope you will enjoy my sharing.


Camera: Canon 5D MarkII
Lens: Canon 16-35mm f2.8L Mark I

 

Thinking about people and their thoughts today.

Thinking about people today. 

My thoughts... A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. 

You can have the ugliest look or distorted facial features, but if you have good thoughts, they will shine from inside no matter how you look. I've met many people who are not very attractive (physically) but their thoughts (character, attitude & values) attracted me to them. I'm attracted to who they are from within. 

On the contrary, beautiful people may not be beautiful if their thoughts are bad (character, attitude & values). I've seen a lot of such "beautiful" people around. So, don't judge anyone based on how they look, but based on their thoughts...hmmm. 

Today, I will look at people around me a bit differently...

Jim

Transcript of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. 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, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.

You can also watch it on Youtube if you want.

Source: http://sandeshkumar.com/2011/01/29/stay-hungry-stay-foolish/

This morning's reflection...

Reflected on my personal and work life this morning. 

Concluded that both my work and personal life is getting better. My life is getting better not because I have more. Successful life is not about how much you have.

My life is getting better because now I know more. I am more certain about myself and things happening around me. I am more certain on what's important in my life and I am more certain on who I am and where I want to go.

This is part of growing up I guess. :)

Jim

Why People Change?

I was in church this morning listening to sharing of ex-drug addicts from breakthrough mission sharing their stories of transformation. God's love & power is indeed amazing. 

I reflected on why & how these hardcore drug addicts can transform to a totally different person with very different values? 

My conclusion... 

1. People change only when they hurt deeply enough so the desire is there. 

2. People change only when they learn enough so they are able to - so they know how. 

3. And finally, people will only change when they receive enough. When they receive enough love and experience love and hope...they will change! 

Change can only happen from within and nobody can influence anyone to change...except Christ! When his love is compelling. We no longer live for ourselves...we live for him :)

Jim

Gratitude

Once upon time, a man hated his job 

He was a stonemason who wl all day for miserable salary
He wished he could be rich and idle all day
His wish was so intense that one day a voice came and said,
You are what u want to be, he became rich immediately.
He cold have everything he wanted, house, food, entertainment.
He idled all day enjoying riches.

He was happy until one day he saw a king pass by
Saw his power
Wanted to be as powerful as a king
Voice came and he became king
Most powerful man in the worlds
All feared and obeyed him

Happy for a while until he become dissatisfied again
Saw sun in the sky, wanted to be the dun cos more pwrful
He became sun, big, strong and bright
Nothing cld exist without him

But later notice clouds below him and cld block him
They were light and mobile
Can take any shape
Wanted to be the clouds, he became a cloud
Happy, took diff shapes, mobile.

But soon cloud condensed into raindrops and struck a rock of granite. Rock strong, raindrops burst onto rock and flowed onto earth and disappear forever. How wonderful to be a rock.

Instantly he became a rock.
He found stability. Felt secure and solid
Then one day figure approach with a large hammer.
It was a stoenmason, strike hammer agst him
Sharp pain.
Stonemason was stronger than him

Thus the stonemason became the stonemason again.
This time he was happy.
Cutting stone became an art
Sound of hammer became music
End of the day, felt sense of satisfaction for a job well doen
Night in bed dream of cathedral his stones were helping to build
There was nothing better than what he was.

     It was... 

Lesson:

A basic change from restless dissatisfaction "i want this, i want that" to gratitude " i am thankful for what i have" Gratefulness is heaven itself.

Pic Source: http://bradcusworth.com/

Story Source: Unknown

Sunset at Henderson Wave_18 May 2011

Sunset with shoot buddy Kuai...


Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
Lenses: Canon 16-35mm F2.8L Mark I & Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 APO DG

Walking around with my cam...18 May 2011

Took a slow walk with my camera with shoot buddy Kuai...This was what we saw...selected shots for sharing.

Camera: Canon 5D Mark II

Lenses: Canon 16-35mm F2.8L Mark I & Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 APO DG

Life lessons I learnt from Photography #5: Keep at it. Don't give up!

If I am afraid of mistakes or have doubts that I can take good pictures, I would have put aside my photographic gears long time ago. If I don’t have self-confidence (Lesson #1) and I am not willing to be creative (Lesson #4), today, I would still be wondering why others can do it and why can’t I? If I did not persevere, I would not be able to capture the beautiful sunrise at Changi Beach below. This picture took me 2 years of “Keeping At It and Not Giving Up!”

Pic #1: Sunrise at Changi Beach

When I go for landscape shoot outings, I take an average about 100-150 shots per outing (digital photography makes it easier and almost cost free today). I will try all sorts of angles, camera settings and interpretations of the site. When the shot is over exposed, I’ll try again. When the lens is not right, I’ll change it. When the view is not fantastic, I’ll move to another location to take a fresh look, etc. When I shoot, I will not be worried about making mistakes. I will keep at it until I capture one possible good shot (that’s how I started, by trial and error). Even so, if I have the time, I will try another angle or interpretation. I will not stop, even when I get the first shot that I am happy with!

Do I like making mistakes? Of course not! I am not saying that we ought to make needless mistakes. We want to take the time to get as much information and as many insights as we possibly can. Then, if we do make a mistake, we can ask why things happened as they did, what we can learn, and how we can make things work. As I hone my skills over time, I hope to make fewer mistakes and take more good pictures. But whenever I make a mistake, I will ask myself how do I learn from it? I will reflect on the mistakes and turn the situation around the next time. To help me along, I keep a shoot journal to document my learning and reflections after every shoot session. At the end of the day, if I can only keep 1 or 2 shots from the 100-150 shots I have taken from an outing, I will be fine because I know that I am a step closer to better photography. I will just reflect on my learning and make it better the next round. Most importantly, I keep at it and do not give up!

When Thomas Edison was attempting to discover the light bulb he was not met with much support from the scientific community.  As a matter of fact, they thought he was crazy to try to invent something that was clearly impossible.  A young reporter interviewed Edison and asked him, "Mr. Edison, how can you continue to try to invent the light bulb when you have failed over 5,000 times."  To which Thomas Edison replied,  "Young man, I have not failed 5,000 times.  I have successfully discovered 5,000 ways that do not work and I do not need to try them again."  This is a great way to interpret failure - as a learning experience.

I remember when my girls were younger, they were curious about everything. They would ask me lots of questions daily. They would experiment and try out all sorts of things just to satisfy their curiosity. They were not afraid of making mistakes. When they wanted to find out about something, they would keep at it (and never give up) until they got their answers.

Well, as we grow older, we realised that learning is part of life and it never stops. However, we hopefully assume that our propensity to make mistakes will stop. As we grow older, mistakes are harder to take. We learn that bruises to our pride and egos hurt just as much as bruises to our bodies. So, what is our natural reaction? We gradually decided to stay within our comfort zone, not take unnecessary risk and avoid trying new things. As the saying goes, we tend to gravitate towards the path of least resistance. In doing so, we will not make any mistakes, but we also do not achieve anything as well.

Most of the world’s greatest accomplishments were produced only after innumerable mistakes (with learning). There are no mistakes in life; only lessons. What this means is that whenever something happens, there is a something for you to learn.

Pic #2: Sunrise at Changi Beach    

"There are no mistakes, no coincidences.

All events are blessings given to us to learn from."

~ Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Life is a classroom. Besides presenting lots of challenges, life also presents us with windows of opportunity, what the French photographer, Cartier-Bresson called, “decisive moments.” Moments where it all comes together. If life is a classroom, all of us can choose whether we want to sit in the back, relax and do our own thing or we want to sit in the front row and diligently taking down notes. We have a choice. If life is a classroom, I would sit in front and pay attention to all the lessons. What will you do?

Some questions for your reflection…

1.   How open are you when it comes to mistakes? How do you learn from your mistakes?

Do you learn from your mistakes?

2.    Can you think of a situation when your character is strengthen after a failure or a mistake?

       What happened?

3.    What will you do differently after reading this sharing? If not now, when?

There you have it folks! Hope you have enjoyed my "CLICK" series. 

Stay tuned for my next series of sharing...Coming Soon.

Life lessons I learnt from Photography "CLICK":

Life lessons  #1: Confidence in Self & Pay the Price

Life lessons  #2: Look for the Beauty

Life lessons  #3: Imagination is Important 

Life lessons  #4: Creativity is a matter of Attitude & Perspective...So is life

Life lessons  #5: Keep at it. Don't Give Up!

More pictures on the beautiful sunrise @ Changi Beach on 7 May (Polling day):

For more photos on the sunrise @ Changi Beach, click here!