Singapore Stock Market Discussion

If u are feeling down in this market... here is something for u.

Why Be Positive?

Why be positive? Well, being positive puts you in a state of mind and body for higher productivity, greater success, better health and relationships and more joy.

Just ask yourself? would you enjoy being around a perpetual sourpuss? Most people wouldn't; unless they're grouches themselves. When you're negative, with a sullen and gloomy disposition to boot, you're sending out signals to others to stay away from you. Since you seem to judge almost everything badly, people assume you'll feel the same way about them. But if your demeanour is cheerful and embracing, people naturally resonate with your open and optimistic vibe. Having a positive attitude helps you attract and develop relationships.

The body takes its cues from the mind. What the mind believes to be true, the body seeks to align itself with. That's why in clinical trials, placebos have been shown to be effective for patients who thought they were taking the real medication. This is also the reason for athletes picturing their victory even before the game starts. Even if it's all baloney, you've got nothing to lose if you think positively. On the other hand, if it's true, imagine how much damage you could do to yourself if you have a negative mentality.

When we adopt a positive outlook, we strive to look for the good in every situation. We try to find the lesson, or at least the fun. We learn to laugh at ourselves, and even in the face of adversity. We recover faster and are back on track sooner. And because we tend to see the good in everything, we also experience more joy. That's why positive persons also tend to be happy persons.

You are what you think. That's why after a lousy day, an exhausting ordeal or after receiving bad news, sometimes all it takes for you to feel a whole lot better is a line from a song, a book or magazine, or a remark by a friend; a phrase that sums up what you're feeling but shows it in a wholly different light.

I once heard that even if we didn't achieve any pleasure or joy today, at least we learnt something. Even if we didn't learn anything, at least we didn't get sick. And even if we did get sick, at least we didn't die. Indeed, most of us have a lot to be thankful for. If we can turn our attention away from what we don't have and focus on what we do, we will naturally be positive!

Developing a positive attitude will not be easy for everyone. But if you can become more conscious about when you're turning to the negative, arrest that thought and flip it over to see the positive, you're well on your way to higher productivity and joy, greater success, better health and more rewarding relationships!


A Slice of Life is written, produced and presented by Eugene Loh unless otherwise stated. If you wish to share the scripts with others, please credit 'Eugene Loh, 938LIVE, a station of MediaCorp Radio'.

Rest in peace, Dan Fogelberg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6fR7j0agpk

Merry Xmas everyone.

We always dunno we HAVE IT.... until we LOSE it... >>> an irony in life... so in this festive occasion, let's spend some moments to reflect on what we now have..... and focus on what we have (not what we do not have).

Here is... a toast.... toast to the wonderful things we own now..... and cherish the things we have in our lifes ... cheers!

Best wishes
from myself and my family

Merry Xmas Namdlo and everyone here.

Wish you all a wonderful New Year ahead. Cheers!

Happy New Year to one and all!

May everyone here improve on their portfolio performance in 2008

Happy New Year 2008... am wondering what will happen in 2008... will pen my thoughts here...

Using Stumbling Blocks as Stepping Stones
By: Brian Tracy

Everyone makes mistakes and the busier you are, the more mistakes you will make. The only question is "How well and how effectively do you deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life?"

In this newsletter, you learn the difference between a positive and negative worldview. You learn how to benefit from your mistakes and how to remain positive in the face of adversity.


Let the Light Shine In
This is achieved through the simple exercise of self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself, or to stop being troubled by things that may have happened in your past, you must be able to disclose yourself to at least one person. You have to be able to get those things off your chest. You must rid yourself of those thoughts and feelings by revealing them to someone who won't make you feel guilty or ashamed for what has happened.

Using Stumbling Blocks as Stepping Stones
There are two ways to look at the world: the benevolent way or the malevolent way. People with a malevolent or negative worldview take a victim stance, seeing life as a continuous succession of problems and a process of unfairness and oppression. They don't expect a lot and they don't get much. When things go wrong, they shrug their shoulders and passively accept that this is the way life is and there isn't anything they can do to make it better.

On the other hand, people with a benevolent or positive worldview see the world around them as filled with opportunities and possibilities. They believe that everything happens as part of a great process designed to make them successful and happy. They approach their lives, their work, and their relationships with optimism, cheerfulness, and a general attitude of positive expectations. They expect a lot and they are seldom disappointed.

Flex Your Mental Muscles
When you develop the skill of learning from your mistakes, you become the kind of person who welcomes obstacles and setbacks as opportunities to flex your mental muscles and move ahead. You look at problems as rungs on the ladder of success that you grab onto as you pull your way higher.

Two of the most common ways to deal with mistakes are invariably fatal to high achievement. The first common but misguided way to handle a mistake is the failure to accept it when it occurs. According to statistics, 70 percent of all decisions we make will be wrong. That's an average. This means that some people will fail more than 70 percent of the time, and some people will fail less. It is hard to believe that most of the decisions we make could turn out to be wrong in some way. In fact, if this is the case, how can our society continue to function at all?

Cut Your Losses
The fact is that our society, our families, our companies, and our relationships continue to survive and thrive because intelligent people tend to cut their losses and minimize their mistakes. It is only when people refuse to accept that they have made a bad choice or decision-and prolong the consequences by sticking to that bad choice or decision-that mistakes become extremely expensive and hurtful.

Learn From Your Mistakes
The second common approach that people take with regard to their mistakes, one that hurts innumerable lives and careers, is the failure to use your mistakes to better yourself and to improve the quality of your mind and your thinking.

Learning from your mistakes is an essential skill that enables you to develop the resilience to be a master of change rather than a victim of change. The person who recognizes that he has made a mistake and changes direction the fastest is the one who will win in an age of increasing information, technology and competition.

By remaining fast on your feet, you will be able to out-play and out-position your competition. You will become a creator of circumstances rather than a creature of circumstances.

Interesting. The words from a highly intellect from Oxford Uni.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7yf9GJ ... re=related

Was at a parenting seminar last evening... speaker is good... Jessica Leong (http://www.jcintegra.com/About.html)

One of the thing she mentioned based on a studies in US (I think) is this... question is... "what are the important characteristics one must have to have a successful career?"

________________________________________________________

The basics must be CHARACTER. (Honesty, Integrity, Courage, Loyalty, Responsive etc etc)
W/o character, the rest doesn't quite matter I guess.. if all bets are off on your chances of making success.

With character... here goes.. what it takes.

1. I Q
2. Professional skills
3. Social Intelligence (or EQ)

________________________________________________________

1+2 = 20%

3 = 80%

Prof Randy passed away last Fri 25-Jul-08

I am very inspired by this guy's last lecture too.
I felt he left behind a great legacy
And most imptly he impacted millions in his last days …

To be honest, after watching it, i realise i dont really have any concrete childhood dreams.
Now trying hard to figure out what are my adult dreams

Anyway do spend time watching it.
Hopefully, this will inspire you ...

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

He has one more lecture on Time Mgt… not bad too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0
And looking at the way most pple use their time, I think we need to see this

More abt him can be found here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

Great video ! Tx for putting up this link.

Inspiring.

My new life anthem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i35WRFDcKGo

Am thinking of writing this in my will... to play this song at my funeral.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (from Monty Python)

words and music by Eric Idle
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle - that's the thing.

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

For life is quite absurd
And death's the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow.
Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin
Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow.

So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Life's a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true.
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

And always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the right side of life...
(Come on guys, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the bright side of life...
(Worse things happen at sea, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of life...
(I mean - what have you got to lose?)
(You know, you come from nothing - you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!)
Always look on the right side of life...

Adrian Tan is a litigation lawyer at one of Singapore's leading law firms. Outside the courtroom, he is known for a variety of funny things, including The Teenage Textbook, which he wrote in the late 1980s. The book became a cult classic among students of that generation and was adapted into a film 10 years later.

Adrian was the guest-of-honour at an NTU convocation ceremony last week, and this is Adrian's speech to the graduating class of 2008:

Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It's a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you've already won her heart, you don't need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married.
Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You're done learning.

You've probably been told the big lie that 'Learning is a lifelong process' and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters' degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don't you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they're wrong.

The bad news is that you don't need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You're in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I'm here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common:
our football teams are all hopeless. There's very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you'll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they're 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn't meet their life expectancy.

I'm here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it's calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don't need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life's a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it.
Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don't expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term 'Karoshi', which means death from overwork. That's the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there's nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There's a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are 'making a living'. No, they're not. They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan 'Arbeit macht frei' was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn't do that, I would've been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction - probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don't imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I'll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don't, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I'm not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating.
There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It's not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it's often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one's own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn't say 'be loved'. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one's looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We've taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work - the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth, the worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn't happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don't, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You're going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there's no life expectancy.

below copied from http://valuediscipline.blogspot.com/

One of the best books about Templeton's investment approach is,at least in my opinion, The Templeton Touch by William Proctor, published in 1983.In it, he highlights twenty-two maxims that Templeton said were his enabling principles. Let me highlight them:

1) For all long-term investors, there is only one objective-"maximum total real return after taxes."

2) Achieving a good record takes much study and work, and is a lot harder than most people think.

3) It is impossible to produce a superior performance unless you do something different from the majority.

4) The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.

5) To put "Maxim 4" in somewhat different terms, in the stock market the only way to get a bargain is to buy what most investors are selling.

6) To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell what others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude, even while offering the greatest reward.

7) Bear markets have always been temporary. Share prices turn upward from one to twelve months before the bottom of the business cycle.

If a particular industry or type of security becomes popular with investors, that popularity will always prove temporary and, when lost, won't return for many years.

9) In the long run, the stock market indexes fluctuate around the long-term upward trend of earnings per share.

10) In free-enterprise nations, the earnings on stock market indexes fluctuate around the book value of the shares of the index.

11) If you buy the same securities as other people, you will have the same results as other people.

12) The time to buy a stock is when the short-term owners have finished their selling, and the time to sell a stock is often when the short-term owners have finished their buying.

13) Share prices fluctuate more widely than values. Therefore, index funds will never produce the best total return performance.

14) Too many investors focus on "outlook" and "trend." Therefore, more profit is made by focusing on value.

15) If you search worldwide,you will find more bargains and better bargains than by studying only one nation. Also, you gain the safety of diversification.

16) The fluctuation of share prices is roughly proportional to the square root of the price.

17) The time to sell an asset is when you have found a much better bargain to replace it.

18) When any method for selecting stocks becomes popular, then switch to unpopular methods. As has been suggested in "Maxim 3," too many investors can spoil any share-selection method or any market-timing formula.

19) Never adopt permanently any type of asset, or any selection method. Try to stay flexible, open-minded, and skeptical. Long-term top results are achieved only by changing from popular to unpopular the types of securities you favor and your methods of selection.

20) The skill factor in selection is largest for the common-stock part of your investments.

21) The best performance is produced by a person, not a committee.

22) If you begin with prayer, you can think more clearly and make fewer stupid mistakes.

Good write up on X'mas. What it really means? Seems like much of it is un-religious?
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Psy ... /celeb.htm

Merry X'mas everyone.

Many of you might also be familiar with the Christmas carol titled Silent Night.
Turn on your speakers & enjoy the musical artistry of pianist Dana Cunningham and cellist Max Dyer.

I hope it quiets your mind, renews your spirit and brings you peace.

http://www.asilentnightmovie.com/

merry xmas to everyone here
pray that 2009 will be a huat huat year for all

so any plans on the future of this forum?

anyway just want to say a BIG thank you to everyone who contributed here
esp to annboy, cif5000, BFG, Gallen, Legend, PoHAnn and others too (sorry cant recall all names)
really appreciate all ur postings
keep them coming

shalom, peace to all

A great video to remind you to Drive Carefully! Pls watch if you drive.

Disturbing scenes included, but this is what it looks like in real life.

http://bilgalleri.dk/html/vid_vis.asp?VideoID=22034

The only constant is CHANGE.

Watch this... See what happens in ONE year in 40 seconds.

http://www.yahoo.com/s/1009615

This is very good. On BT today but Teh Hooi Ling took it from Beliefnet. I quite the BT article here.

... from inspirational website Beliefnet
http://www.beliefnet.com/Health/Emotion ... e.aspx?p=5:


Be kind to yourself: Think about what you need most, and then get it. Is it a cup of tea, a brisk walk, some downtime, quiet music, a little rest, or reading inspirational literature? Whatever it is, grant yourself permission to do it, even for just a few minutes, says writer Naomi Drew. If you're at work, take a 'care-break' where you take care of yourself for a brief moment. These small moments accumulate and transform the texture of our days, she says.


Treat each day like a precious gift: Be vigilant in looking for things and people to appreciate. What if today was the last day of your life? How would you want to live it? Ask yourself this question throughout the day. It will help you let go of the countless petty annoyances that tend to throw most of us off-balance, she says. Shift your gaze to appreciation. Who and what are you grateful for? Make a list each day and add to it.

Take a break: Every morning, afternoon and night, take a 30-second break to look at the sky, breathe deeply and offer thanks. Let the sky be a touchstone of hope, says Ms Drew. Think of other people around the world as you look at the sky, and know that we all share this planet together. Among all of us, we have the ability to create solutions to the problems that now exist. Trust that this is so.

Express love tangibly: Hugs, words, notes, acts of kindness - be indiscriminately generous with all of them. Surprise a friend with a hug, she says. Hug and kiss your kids longer and with deeper feeling. If you like how the salesperson treated you in the store, thank her. Leave your partner small notes expressing gratitude for kind acts. Doing all of this adds warmth and positive energy to our lives and the lives of people around us. It's also very comforting both to the giver and receiver of each loving act.


Make a difference: Reach out beyond your normal scope. This is your opportunity to live your greatest promise, highest self. Don't wait, writes Ms Drew. Each time we make a difference in the lives of others, we create hope in ourselves. By reaching out to someone in need, be it your neighbour, a Guatamalan orphan, or people in a homeless shelter, we add a little more peace and hope to the world. Our accumulated gestures of care and compassion will ultimately transform our lives and the lives of others. We are each the source of that transformation. Knowing this gives her hope, Ms Drew says.

Finally, I'd like to end today's column with two quotes, also picked up from Beliefnet:

'What you thought before has led to every choice you have made, and this adds up to you at this moment. If you want to change who you are physically, mentally, spiritually, you will have to change what you think.' - Patrick Gentempo.

'Good humour is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.' - Greenville Kleisser.

< HOW TO REALLY LIVE >

1. Take a 10-30 minute walk every day.
And while you walk, smile. It is the ultimate anti-depressant.

2. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.
Buy a lock if you have to.

3. When you wake up in the morning complete the following statement,
'My purpose is to __________ today.'

4. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and
eat less food that is manufactured in plants.

5. Drink green tea and plenty of water. Eat blueberries,
wild Alaskan salmon, broccoli, almonds and walnuts.

6. Try to make at least three people smile each day.

7. Don't waste your precious energy on energy vampires,
issues of the past, negative thoughts or things you cannot control.
Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.

8. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince
and dinner like a college kid with a maxed out charge card.

9. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

10. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

11. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

12. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

13. Make peace with your past so it won't spoil the present.

14. Don't compare your life to others'.
You have no idea what their journey is all about.

15. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.

16. Frame every so-called disaster with these words:
'In five years, will this matter?'

17. Forgive everyone for everything.

18. What other people think of you is none of your business.

19. GOD heals everything.

20. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

21. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick.
Your friends will. Stay in touch!!!

22. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

23. Each night before you go to bed
complete the following statements :
I am thankful for __________.
Today I accomplished _________.

24. Remember that you are too blessed to be stressed.

What does 'Love' mean? A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, 'What does 'love' mean?' The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined. See what you think:


"'When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore.

So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love.'
Rebecca- age 8

'When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different.
You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.'
Billy - age 4

'Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.'
Karl - age 5

'Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.'
Chrissie- age 6

'Love is what makes you smile when you're tired.'
Terri - age 4

'Love is when my mummy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.'
Danny - age 7

'Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.'
Bobby - age 7 (Wow!)

'If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,'
Nikka - age 6
(we need a few million more Nikka's on this planet)

Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.'
Noelle - age 7

'Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.'
Tommy - age 6

'During my piano recital, I was on a stage and I was scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling.
He was the only one doing that. I wasn't scared anymore.'
Cindy - age 8

'My mummy loves me more than anybody
You don't see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night.'
Clare - age 6

'Love is when Mummy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.'
Elaine-age 5

'Love is when Mummy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.'
Chris - age 7

'Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day'
Mary Ann - age 4

'I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.'
Lauren - age 4

'When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.' (what an image)
Karen - age 7

'You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.'
Jessica - age 8

Lee Wei Ling wrote an article today and she mentioned this poem as her personal mantra. She said "these lines that left the deepest impression on me".


If
by Rudyard Kipling.

=================

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

This is good.

Funeral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw0s4C0g5SM

Date: Sunday, 3 May, 2009, 2:29 PM



This is Adrian Tan's speech at the convocation of students at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (NTU).
Adrian Tan is a litigation partner at Drew & Napier LLC.

--------------------------------------

LIFE AND HOW TO SURVIVE IT


I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address.

It's a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation.

I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.


My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one.

She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living.

She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.


On the other hand, I am a litigator.
Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are.
I make my living being disagreeable.


Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home.
That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.


And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men:
when you've already won her heart, you don't need to win every argument.


Marriage is considered one milestone of life.
Some of you may already be married.
Some of you may never be married.
Some of you will be married.
Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.


The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You're done learning.


You've probably been told the big lie that "Learning is a lifelong process"
and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters' degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on.
You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers.
Don't you think there is some measure of conflict of interest?
They are in the business of learning, after all.
Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.


The good news is that they're wrong.


The bad news is that you don't need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone.
That may come as a shock to some of you. You're in your teens or early twenties.
People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.


I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people.
But I'm here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.


You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy.
We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long.
We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless.
There's very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup.
Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.


Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years.
Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.


So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you'll have another 40 years to go.
Four decades in which to live long and prosper.


Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they're 50, 40, 30 years old.
Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation.
They would be very disappointed that they didn't meet their life expectancy.


I'm here to tell you this.
Forget about your life expectancy.


After all, it's calculated based on an average.
And you never, ever want to expect being average.


Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family.
You are told that, as graduates,
you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.


That is what is expected of you.
And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.


If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people.
I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them.

And you don't need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.


What you should prepare for is mess. Life's a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it.
Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it.
Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment.
Your degree is a poor armour against fate.


Don't expect anything. Erase all life expectancies.
Just live. Your life is over as of today.
At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look.
This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.


What does this mean for you?
It is good that your life is over.


Since your life is over, you are free.
Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.


The most important is this: do not work.


Work is anything that you are compelled to do.
By its very nature, it is undesirable.


Work kills.
The Japanese have a term "Karoshi", which means death from overwork.
That's the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways.
If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there's nothing left.
A rock has been ground into sand and dust.


There's a common misconception that work is necessary.
You will meet people working at miserable jobs.
They tell you they are "making a living". No, they're not.
They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.


People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free.
The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps.
Utter nonsense.


Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort.
You may never reach that end anyway.


Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play.
Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again.
You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often.
Soon, that will have value in itself.


I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator.
I enjoy it and I would do it for free.
If I didn't do that, I would've been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction - probably a sports journalist.


So what should you do?
You will find your own niche. I don't imagine you will need to look very hard.
By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do.
In fact, I'll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions.
By this time you should know what your obsessions are.
If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.


Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession.

Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm.
If you don't, you are working.


Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication.
To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth.
I'm not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things.
The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth.
Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating.
There is also great skill.
Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences.
It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.


In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it.
That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.


I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth.
I now say this to you: be hated.


It's not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you?
Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many.
That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.


One does not have to be evil to be hated.
In fact, it's often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one's own convictions.
It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions.
Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average.
That cannot be your role.
There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself.
Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.


The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.


I didn't say "be loved".
That requires too much compromise.
If one changes one's looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.


Rather, I exhort you to love another human being.
It may seem odd for me to tell you this.
You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false.

Modern society is anti-love. We've taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings.
It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise.
Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance.
It is hard work - the only kind of work that I find palatable.


Loving someone has great benefits.
There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness.
In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way.
We learn the truth worthlessness of material things.
We celebrate being human.
Loving is good for the soul.


Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person.
Despite popular culture, love doesn't happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor.
It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming.
It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.


You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.


You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated.
You are not doing it to be loved back.
Its value is to inspire you.


Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone.
You either don't, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology.
It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.


Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.


You're going to have a busy life.
Thank goodness there's no life expectancy.

How A Child Learns

If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, she learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame, she learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement, she learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with fairness, she learns justice.
If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith.
If a child lives with approval, she learns to like herself.
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world.
(Dorothy Law Nolte)

The Rules for Being Human

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a fulltime informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "works."

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive there are lessons to be learned.

6. "There" is no better than "here." When your "there" has become a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here."

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie inside you. The answer to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. This will often be forgotten, only to be remembered again.

(Cherie Carter-Scott)

Some signs and symptoms of inner peace:

• A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on past experiences.
• An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
• A loss of interest in judging other people.
• A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.
• A loss of interest in conflict.
• A loss of the ability to worry. (This is a very serious symptom).
• Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.
• Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.
• Frequent attacks of smiling.
• An increasing tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.
• An increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.

The Secrets of Heaven and Hell

The old monk sat by the side of the road. With his eyes closed, his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap, he sat. In deep meditation he sat.

Suddenly his zazen was interrupted by the harsh and demanding voice of a samurai warrior. "Old man! Teach me about heaven and hell!"

At first, as though he had not heard, there was no perceptible response from the monk. But gradually he began to open his eyes, the faintest hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth as the samurai stood there, waiting impatiently, growing more and more agitated with each passing second.

"You wish to know the secrets of heaven and hell?" replied the monk at last. "You who are so unkempt. You whose hands and feet are covered with dirt. You whose hair is uncombed, whose breath is foul, whose sword is all rusty and neglected. You who are ugly and whose mother dresses you funny. You would ask me of heaven and hell?"

The samurai uttered a vile curse. He drew his sword and raised it high over his head. His face turned to crimson, and the veins of his neck stood out in bold relief as he prepared to sever the monk's head from its shoulders.

"That is hell," said the old monk gently, just as the sword began its descent.

In that fraction of a second, the samurai was overcome with amazement, awe, compassion and love for this gentle being who had dared to risk his very life to give him such a teaching. He stopped his sword in mid-flight and his eyes filled with grateful tears.

"And that," said the monk, "is heaven."

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at
Stanford University


I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the
finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be
told, 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 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 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
college 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do
you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out
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 someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively 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 how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I
was spending all of 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
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 5¢ deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the 7 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 san 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, its
likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped
out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal
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 ten 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made
all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky Ð I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started
Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years
Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion
company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation
- the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. 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. So at 30 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 Ð I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had
not changed that one bit. I had 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 of 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 worlds 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, I retuned to
Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's
current renaissance. And Laurene 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 hits 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 your 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. 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 until you find it. 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 tool I've ever
encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything Ð 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 doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to
try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years
to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure 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 and 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 doctors 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 I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its 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 is 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 is 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 other's opinions drown out your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your 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
Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought
it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, 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, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and
overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and
then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the
mid-1970s, 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 it 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.

Written By Regina Brett, 90 years old, of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio :

"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I've ever written. My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:"

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important PLS GET OUT OF HERE organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words ''In five years, will this matter?".
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time, time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.
35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come.
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.

Here is a long life tiops... quite interesting comments... Doctor Shigeaki Hinohara is 97 yrs old.

--------------------------------------

Energy comes from feeling good, not from eating well or sleeping a lot. We all remember how as children, when we were having fun, we often forgot to eat or sleep.. I believe that we can keep that attitude as adults, too. It's best not to tire the body with too many rules such as lunchtime and bedtime.


All people who live long regardless of nationality, race or gender share one thing in common: None are overweight... For breakfast I drink coffee, a glass of milk and some orange juice with a tablespoon of olive oil in it. Olive oil is great for the arteries and keeps my skin healthy. Lunch is milk and a few cookies, or nothing when I am too busy to eat. I never get hungry because I focus on my work.. Dinner is veggies, a bit of fish and rice, and, twice a week, 100 grams of lean meat..


Always plan ahead. My schedule book is already full until 2014, with lectures and my usual hospital work. In 2016 I'll have some fun, though: I plan to attend the Tokyo Olympics!

There is no need to ever retire, but if one must, it should be a lot later than 65. The current retirement age was set at 65 half a century ago, when the average life-expectancy in Japan was 68 years and only 125 Japanese were over 100 years old. Today, Japanese women live to be around 86 and men 80, and we have 36,000 centenarians in our country. In 20 years we will have about 50,000 people over the age of 100...

Share what you know.
I give 150 lectures a year, some for 100 elementary-school children, others for 4,500 business people. I usually speak for 60 to 90 minutes, standing, to stay strong.

When a doctor recommends you take a test or have some surgery, ask whether the doctor would suggest that his or her spouse or children go through such a procedure. Contrary to popular belief, doctors can't cure everyone. So why cause unnecessary pain with surgery ?I think music and animal therapy can help more than most doctors imagine.

To stay healthy, always take the stairs and carry your own stuff.
I take two stairs at a time, to get my muscles moving.

My inspiration is Robert Browning's poem "Abt Vogler."
My father used to read it to me. It encourages us to make big art, not small scribbles. It says to try to draw a circle so huge that there is no way we can finish it while we are alive. All we see is an arch; the rest is beyond our vision but it is there in the distance.


Pain is mysterious, and having fun is the best way to forget it.
If a child has a toothache, and you start playing a game together, he or she immediately forgets the pain. Hospitals must cater to the basic need of patients: We all want to have fun. At St. Luke's we have music and animal therapies, and art classes.

Don't be crazy about amassing material things.
Remember: You don't know when your number is up, and you can't take it with you to the next place.

Hospitals must be designed and prepared for major disasters, and they must accept every patient who appears at their doors. We designed St.... Luke's so we can operate anywhere: in the basement, in the corridors, in the chapel. Most people thought I was crazy to prepare for a catastrophe, but on March 20, 1995, I was unfortunately proven right when members of the Aum Shinrikyu religious cult launched a terrorist attack in the Tokyo subway. We accepted 740 victims and in two hours figured out that it was sarin gas that had hit them. Sadly we lost one person, but we saved 739 lives.

Science alone can't cure or help people.
Science lumps us all together, but illness is individual. Each person is unique, and diseases are connected to their hearts. To know the illness and help people, we need liberal and visual arts, not just medical ones..

Life is filled with incidents.
On March 31, 1970, when I was 59 years old, I boarded the Yodogo, a flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka . It was a beautiful sunny morning, and as Mount Fuji came into sight, the plane was hijacked by the Japanese Communist League-Red Army Faction. I spent the next four days handcuffed to my seat in 40-degree heat. As a doctor, I looked at it all as an experiment and was amazed at how the body slowed down in a crisis.

Find a role model and aim to achieve even more than they could ever do.
My father went to the United States in 1900 to study at DukeUniversity in North Carolina . He was a pioneer and one of my heroes. Later I found a few more life guides, and when I am stuck, I ask myself how they would deal with the problem.


It's wonderful to live long.
Until one is 60 years old, it is easy to work for one's family and to achieve one's goals. But in our later years, we should strive to contribute to society. Since the age of 65, I have worked as a volunteer. I still put in 18 hours seven days a week and love every minute of it.

Here is the poem mentioned in the previous posting. This is written in 1864... and is very deep. Much like those literature poems that we study in our schooldays. I will not attempt to understand what these verses mean as it will take me weeks to do so by researching over Google.

-----------------------


Abt. Vogler
By Robert Browning (1812–1889)

(After he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention)

WOULD that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly, — alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed, —
Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,
And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!

Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,
This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!
Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,
Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!
And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,
Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things,
Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,
Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.

And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,
Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:
For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,
When a great illumination surprises a festal night —
Outlining round and round Rome’s dome from space to spire)
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.

In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man’s birth,
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:
Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,
Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star;
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.

Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,
Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,
Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,
But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:
What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;
And what is, — shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,
All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth:
Had I written the same, made verse — still, effect proceeds from cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled: —

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and all is said:
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;
Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.
Never to be again! But many more of the kind
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind
To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.

Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, — yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Vogler — Georg Joseph Vogler (1749-1814) was a renowned organist and extemporaneous composer, which means he composed music as he was playing, i.e. he improvised. None of these compositions were written down, so none survive. “Abt.” means “Abbot,” i.e. he was a member of a religious order.

the musical instrument of his invention — an organ called the orchestrion; it had nine hundred pipes and was nine feet on a side and six feet tall.

Solomon — in building his great temple in Jerusalem (of which the so-called “Wailing Wall” is the only surviving section), Solomon supposedly had the power to command all of the animal kingdom to help him.

of end and of aim — of ultimate purpose and present intent

the ineffable Name — i.e. YHVH, the name of God in the Old Testament.

dome — St. Peter’s (in the Vatican)

Protoplast — literally, the first thing formed; in this case, something from the initial stuff and time of the Creation

houses not made with hands — cf. Corinthians 5:1.

common chord — the major (happy sounding) chord

minor — the sad-sounding chord; one makes the common chord into a mnor chord simply by moving the middle note down one half-step.

ninth — another chord, rather strange-sounding to most ears

C Major — C Major is a musical scale that has no sharps or flats; on a piano or organ, it uses no black keys.


Source: http://classweb.gmu.edu/rnanian/vogler.html

Very good commercial... also a reminder to all parents.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvYb4BLIAQw

Really sad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpf2hsZG ... re=related

I like this v much.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2V3uYjHM_0

Five Regrets of the Dying
By Bronnie Ware



For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learned never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Somechanges were phenomenal.

Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their
peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would dodifferently, common themes surfaced again and again.

-----------------------------------

Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that theirlife is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see howmany dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due tochoices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is toolate. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longerhave it.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed theirchildren's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spokeof this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of awork existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along theway, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more opento new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.


3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as aresult.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, but in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationshipfrom your life. Either way, you win.


4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friendsuntil their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track themdown. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they hadlet golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deepregrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that theydeserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physicaldetails of life fall
away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holdsthe true importance for them. They want to get things in order morefor the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love
and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.



5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the endthat happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns andhabits. The
so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into theiremotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to
themselves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your death bed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again,long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

The story began when I was a child. I was born as a son of a poor family.
Even for eating, we often got lack of food. Whenever the time for eating, mother often gave me her portion of rice. While she was removing her rice into my bowl, she would say "Eat this rice, son. I'm not hungry".
That was Mother's First Lie.

When I was getting to grow up, the persevering mother gave her spare time for fishing in a river near our house, she hoped that from the fishes she got, she could gave me a little bit nutritious food for my growth. After fishing, she would cook the fishes to be a fresh fish soup, which raised my appetite. While I was eating the soup, mother would sit beside me and eat the rest meat of fish, which was still on the bone of the fish I ate. My heart was touched when I saw it. I then used my chopstick and gave the other fish to her. But she immediately refused it and said "Eat this fish, son. I don't really like fish."
That was Mother's Second Lie.

Then, when I was in Junior High School, to fund my study, mother went to an economic enterprise to bring some used-matches boxes that would be stuck in. It gave her some money for covering our needs. As the winter came, I woke up from my sleep and looked at my mother who was still awoke, supported by a little candlelight and within her perseverance she continued the work of sticking some used-matches box.
I said, "Mother, go to sleep, it's late, tomorrow morning you still have to go for work. "Mother smiled and said "Go to sleep, dear. I'm not tired."
That was Mother's Third Lie.

At the time of final term, mother asked for a leave from her work in order to accompany me. While the daytime was coming and the heat of the sun was starting to shine, the strong and persevering mother waited for me under the heat of the sun's shine for several hours. As the bell rang, which indicated that the final exam had finished, mother immediately welcomed me and poured me a glass of tea that she had prepared before in a cold bottle. The very thick tea was not as thick as my mother's love. Seeing my mother covering with perspiration, I at once gave her my glass and asked her to drink too. Mother said "Drink, son. I'm not thirsty!".
That was Mother's Fourth Lie.

After the death of my father because of illness, my poor mother had to play her role as a single parent. By held on her former job, she had to fund our needs alone. Our family's life was more complicated. No days without sufferance. Seeing our family's condition that was getting worse, there was a nice uncle who lived near my house came to help us, either in a big problem and a small problem. Our other neighbors who lived next to us saw that our family's life was so unfortunate, they often advised my mother to marry again. But mother, who was stubborn, didn't care to their advice, she said "I don't need love."
That was Mother's Fifth Lie.

After I had finished my study and then got a job, it was the time for my old mother to retire. But she didn't want to; she was sincere to go to the marketplace every morning, just to sell some vegetable for fulfilling her needs. I, who worked in the other city, often sent her some money to help her in fulfilling her needs, but she was stubborn for not accepting the money. She even sent the money back to me. She said "I have enough money."
That was Mother's Sixth Lie.

After graduated from Bachelor Degree, I then continued my study to Master Degree. I took the degree, which was funded by a company through a scholarship program, from a famous University in America . I finally worked in the company. Within a quite high salary, I intended to take my mother to enjoy her life in America. But my lovely mother didn't want to bother her son, she said to me "I'm not used to."
That was Mother's Seventh Lie.

After entering her old age, mother got a flank cancer and had to be hospitalized. I, who lived in miles away and across the ocean, directly went home to visit my dearest mother. She lied down in weakness on her bed after having an operation.
Mother, who looked so old, was staring at me in deep yearn. She tried to spread her smile on her face, even it looked so stiff because of the disease she held out. It was clear enough to see how the disease broke my mother's body, thus she looked so weak and thin.
I stared at my mother within tears flowing on my face. My heart was hurt, so hurt, seeing my mother on that condition. But mother, with her strength, said "Don't cry, my dear. I'm not in pain."
That was Mother's Eight Lie.

After saying her eighth lie, She closed her eyes forever!

Happiness is one aspiration all people share. No one wants to be sad and depressed.
http://www.globalone.tv/group/gratitude ... icle+Title

We’ve all seen people who are always happy – even amidst agonizing life trials. I’m not saying happy people don’t feel grief, sorrow or sadness; they just don’t let it overtake their life. The following are 21 things happy people make a habit of doing:

----------------------

1. Appreciate Life

Be thankful that you woke up alive each morning. Develop a childlike sense of wonder towards life. Focus on the beauty of every living thing. Make the most of each day. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

2. Choose Friends Wisely

Surround yourself with happy, positive people who share your values and goals. Friends that have the same ethics as you will encourage you to achieve your dreams. They help you to feel good about yourself. They are there to lend a helping hand when needed.

3. Be Considerate

Accept others for who they are as well as where they are in life. Respect them for who they are. Touch them with a kind and generous spirit. Help when you are able, without trying to change the other person. Try to brighten the day of everyone you come into contact with.

4. Learn Continuously

Keep up to date with the latest news regarding your career and hobbies. Try new and daring things that has sparked your interest – such as dancing, skiing, surfing or sky-diving.

5. Creative Problem Solving

Don’t wallow in self-pity. As soon as you face a challenge get busy finding a solution. Don’t let the set backs affect your mood, instead see each new obstacle you face as an opportunity to make a positive change. Learn to trust your gut instincts – it’s almost always right.

6. Do What They Love

Some statistics show that 80% of people dislike their jobs! No wonder there’s so many unhappy people running around. We spend a great deal of our life working. Choose a career that you enjoy – the extra money of a job you detest isn’t worth it. Make time to enjoy your hobbies and pursue special interests.

7. Enjoy Life

Take the time to see the beauty around you. There’s more to life than work. Take time to smell the roses, watch a sunset or sunrise with a loved one, take a walk along the seashore, hike in the woods etc. Learn to live in the present moment and cherish it. Don’t live in the past or the future.

8. Laugh

Don’t take yourself – or life to seriously. You can find humor in just about any situation. Laugh at yourself – no one’s perfect. When appropriate laugh and make light of the circumstances. (Naturally there are times that you should be serious as it would be improper to laugh.)

9. Forgive

Holding a grudge will hurt no one but you. Forgive others for your own peace of mind. When you make a mistake – own up to it – learn from it – and FORGIVE yourself.

10. Gratitude

Develop an attitude of gratitude. Count your blessings; All of them – even the things that seem trivial. Be grateful for your home, your work and most importantly your family and friends. Take the time to tell them that you are happy they are in your life.

11. Invest in Relationships

Always make sure your loved ones know you love them even in times of conflict. Nurture and grow your relationships with your family and friends by making the time to spend with them. Don’t break your promises to them. Be supportive.

12. Keep Their Word

Honesty is the best policy. Every action and decision you make should be based on honesty. Be honest with yourself and with your loved ones.

13. Meditate

Meditation gives your very active brain a rest. When it’s rested you will have more energy and function at a higher level. Types of meditation include yoga, hypnosis, relaxation tapes, affirmations, visualization or just sitting in complete silence. Find something you enjoy and make the time to practice daily.

14. Mind Their Own Business

Concentrate on creating your life the way you want it. Take care of you and your family. Don’t get overly concerned with what other people are doing or saying. Don’t get caught up with gossip or name calling. Don’t judge. Everyone has a right to live their own life the way they want to – including you.

15. Optimism

See the glass as half full. Find the positive side of any given situation. It’s there – even though it may be hard to find. Know that everything happens for a reason, even though you may never know what the reason is. Steer clear of negative thoughts. If a negative thought creeps in – replace it with a positive thought.

16. Love Unconditionally

Accept others for who they are. You don’t put limitations on your love. Even though you may not always like the actions of your loved ones – you continue to love them.

17. Persistence

Never give up. Face each new challenge with the attitude that it will bring you one step closer to your goal. You will never fail, as long as you never give up. Focus on what you want, learn the required skills, make a plan to succeed and take action. We are always happiest while pursuing something of value to us.

18. Be Proactive

Accept what can not be changed. Happy people don’t waste energy on circumstances beyond their control. Accept your limitations as a human being. Determine how you can take control by creating the outcome you desire – rather than waiting to respond.

19. Self Care

Take care of your mind, body and health. Get regular medical check ups. Eat healthy and work out. Get plenty of rest. Drink lots of water. Exercise your mind by continually energizing it with interesting and exciting challenges.

20. Self Confidence

Don’t try to be someone that you’re not. After all no one likes a phony. Determine who you are in the inside – your own personal likes and dislikes. Be confident in who you are. Do the best you can and don’t second guess yourself.

21. Take Responsibility

Happy people know and understand that they are 100% responsible for their life. They take responsibility for their moods, attitude, thoughts, feelings, actions and words. They are the first to admit when they’ve made a mistake.

Begin today by taking responsibility for your happiness. Work on developing these habits as you own. The more you incorporate the above habits into your daily lifestyle – the happier you will be.

Most of all: BE TRUE TO YOURSELF.

THE ANT

One morning, I wasted nearly an hour watching a tiny ant carry a huge
feather across my back terrace. Several times it was confronted by
obstacles in its path and after a momentary pause, it would make the
necessary detour. At one point, the ant had to negotiate a crack in the
concrete about 10 mm wide. After brief contemplation, the ant laid the
feather over the crack, walked across it and picked up the feather on the
other side then continued on its way.

I was fascinated by the ingenuity of this ant, one of God's smallest
creatures. It served to reinforce the miracle of creation. Here was a
minute insect, lacking in size, yet equipped with a brain to reason,
explore, discover and overcome. But this ant, like the two-legged
co-residents of this planet, also share human failings.

After some time, the ant finally reached its destination—a flower bed at
the end of the terrace and a small hole that was the entrance to its
underground home. And it was here that the ant finally met its match. How
could that large feather possibly fit down the small hole? Of course, it
couldn't—so the ant, after all this trouble and exercising great ingenuity,
overcoming problems all along the way, just abandoned the feather and went
home. The ant had not thought the problem through before it began its epic
journey and in the end the feather was nothing more than a burden. Isn't
life like that!

We worry about our family, we worry about money or the lack of it, we worry
about work, about where we live, about all sorts of things. These are all
burdens—the things we pick up along life's path and lug them around the
obstacles and over the crevasses that life will bring, only to find that at
the destination they are useless—and we can't take them with us.

From an email...

----------------------


The Story: SELLING COMB TO THE MONK

There was one company "manufacturing combs" which intends to expand its business and so the management wanted to
employ a new Sales Manager.

The company ADVERTISED the vacancy in the newspaper . They are so many peoples turned up for the interview
everyday....accumulated to almost a hundred peoples in just few days.

The Company now having the problem to choose the right candidate for this position . So, The Company interviewer
had set A Difficult Task to whom who want to come for final interview.

The Task Is To : Selling Comb To Monks In Temples

Only 3 Applicants willing to stay on for this Final Interview challenge. (Mr A , Mr B , Mr C)

The Chief Interviewer instructed: "Now I want three of you here to sell these wooden combs to the monks in the
temples. You only have 10 days to do it and report to me after that."

After 10 days, they reported.

The Chief Interviewer asked Mr A:"How many have you sold?"

Mr A answered:"Only One."

The Chief Interviewer asked: "How did you manage to sell?

Mr A answered: "The monks in the temples scolded me when I show them the comb . But on my way back to downhill I
met a young monk who bought it to scratch his head due to dandruff.

The Chief Interviewer then asked Mr B: "How many did you sell?

Mr B replied: "10 pieces. I went to a shrine and noticed many devotees's hair was in bad shape due to strong wind
outside the shrine. The monk in there listened to my advice and bought 10 combs for their devotees in showing
respect to the Buddha statue."

Then, The Chief Interviewer asked Mr C:"How about you?"

Mr C replied: "1,000 units."

The Chief Interviewer and the other 2 interviews were astounded.

The Chief Interviewer asked: "How you did that?"

Mr C replied: "I went to a famous temple. After observing for few days I discovered that there were many tourists.
I then told the Chief Abbot there. "Sifu, those who come here are much devoted. If you could give them a gift, it
will be more elating to them. I told him that I have a bulk of combs here and ask him to raft his handwriting on
the combs as a present to those visit here. He was very delighted and straight away ordered 1,000 pieces."

MORAL OF THE STORY ;

HARVARD UNIVERSITY had done a research that says :-

1) 85% of success is due to attitude and 15% is capability
2) Attitude is more important than intelligence , specials skills and luck ..

In another word , professional knowledge only constitutes for 15% of success of a person and 85% is due to
self-cultivation, public relation and adaptability ability.

Still remember the story of Selling Shoes to African ?

When 2 Salesmen were sent to that continent, one of them reported: Can not do it. No one wears shoes there?

The second salesman said: "It is good to market . A lot of opportunity."

Success and Failure is dependent on how we face problems.

Remember, when the economic is good, there are peoples going bankrupt .

When business is bad , there are many new millionaires produced as well. So , apply now the 85% right working
attitude fully.

Something2Share:

I believe this basic principle of 85% right working attitude is also applicable to Plantation Management.

Many problems encountered by planters in their plantations can be overcome for they are not as difficult as "
selling comb to monks in temples". Logically it's impossible for no monk will buy a comb because it is used for
combing hairs. Monks in temples are simply not your customers!

Now with this story, we learn to "think out of the box" and even with 15% capability, we are confident to solve
problems for nothing is impossible as long as we have the RIGHT WORKING ATTITUDE with COMMITMENT full of
DISCIPLINE, DEDICATION and DETERMINATION. Every time when we watch MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie, the ending is always
POSSIBLE.

DO NOT FIND EXCUSES NOT TO DO THE POSSIBLE, BUT FIND WAYS AND MEANS TO DO THE POSSIBLE. That's the right working
attitude!

A C-130 was lumbering along when a cocky F-16 flashed by.
The jet jockey decided to show off.

The fighter jock told the C-130 pilot, ' watch this! ' and promptly went
into a barrel roll followed by a steep climb..

He then finished with a sonic boom as he broke the sound barrier. The F-16
pilot asked the C-130 pilot what he thought of that?

The C-130 pilot said, ' That was impressive, but watch this! '

The C-130 droned along for about 5 minutes and then the C-130 pilot came
back on and said: ' What did you think of that? '

Puzzled, the F-16 pilot asked, ' What the heck did you do? '

The C-130 pilot chuckled.
' I stood up, stretched my legs, walked to the back,
took a leak, then got a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll. '

When you are young & foolish - speed & flash may seem a good thing !!!

When you get older & smarter - comfort & dull is not such a bad thing !!!

Us older folks understand this one, it ' s called S.O.S... slower. older,
smarter....

Great short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... ksdBSVAM6g

Spent some time reading a book "Why we want you to be rich" by Donald J. Trump and Robert T. Kiyosaki. The main message of the book is to help middle class americans out of poverty by investing in buisinesses and real estate. Below are some the points which I find very motivating and important:

Everyone has money problems, if you want to make yourself rich, solve problems. Idenifying a problem creates the opportunity for creating a solution

If you are in business, you need to learn how to sell

In a world of less and less job, it would be foolish to count on job security

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, if your reality begins with your dreams, your dreams will become a reality

Write your own script. Then produce it yourself and find yourself living the way you want to. Thats freedom, that's power and that's winning

If you cannot control your mind, you cannot control your life. Today whenever I meet someone who is unhappy, unhealthy and unwealthy, I know it is simply because he or she has lost control of his or her mind, the greatest tool given by God.

Teaching is one of the best ways to learn

Loving what you do, Having patience and acting in the face of fear

Invest in financial education

Rich people use more leverage than poor people. If you want to be rich, you need leverage.

The more financially educated we are, the more control we have.

One way to maintain control is to always keep the big picture in mind.

A true investor buys to own the investment and pass it on for generations

Excellence can become a habit

Study accounting and business law

Raise the bar on yourself. Never settle for doing enough.

If you are going to invest in a business, real estate or stock, it is important to be able to read numbers. They are an important part of financial literacy.

Love is the key to a life of health, wealth and happiness

Mr Buffet looks for in a business is a well managed business that will grow valuable over time. He often refers to business value compounding, in other words accelerating in value.

Taken from: http://personalfinancemaster-guru.blogspot.com/

For once, a worthy interviewee on Sunday Times' "Me and My Money". This gentleman has surely made it.... instead of "trying to make it" as most interviewees in this column has come across to me.

Some great quotes:
- Time is the most important commodity people can consider, because you can't save it and you don't even know how much you have. If you don't invest a given minute, it is a lost minute and they can add up.
- Money is to him, he tells me, just a transference of value. 'If I can transfer my money into an emotional connection, then it has a lot of value to me.'
- Do your homework, keep it simple with diversification, maintain liquidity and never trade on rumours. The rumours often come from insiders who are not trying to make you rich, or from complete idiots.
- Smart money does not tell people specifically what they are doing.
- Every child, teenager, young adult should be taught the value of compound interest in school. Saving as much as you can, as young as you can, is the hidden secret to wealth accumulation.
- fees drastically reduce returns over the long haul and should be minimised;
- asset allocation is more important than stock picking;
- growing and stable dividends are the most undervalued asset; and
- real estate returns are overrated because most people do not account for the very high leverage or believe that prices can go down (and they do).
- We own very little real estate. I don't like the debt that goes with it. If people had to pay cash for a house, they would save and be more rational in their finances.

-------------------

The Straits Times
Jan 1, 2012
me & my money
Charity the most important investment
Former top investment banker flies economy and discount airlines for business and pleasure so that he can use the money saved to help others

By Joyce Teo

-------------------

Former top investment banker Michael Dee will bust all your ideas of what a typical banker should be.

The man does not own a car in Singapore and he flies economy and discount airlines everywhere, whether it is for business or pleasure.

'I think of myself as a personal business and make the same decisions in my personal life as I do in my business life,' he says.

Money is to him, he tells me, just a transference of value. 'If I can transfer my money into an emotional connection, then it has a lot of value to me.'

Personal happiness has nothing to do with one's portfolio. 'Money can create dysfunction in families, conflict among nations, arrogance and a belief that monetary wealth means one's life is better than another's of less wealth.'

It should never control one's compassion for others nor cloud one's ability to do the right thing, says the 55-year-old.

Mr Dee flew economy more often at the peak of his earning power, which helped his company cut costs, 'by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year'.

It was money he could use to improve other people's lives. 'There is no greater feeling than flying to Brazil in economy knowing that I can provide $10,000 or more to a charity.'

And charity, he says, should be thought of as your most important investment.

Mr Dee has clocked 26 years at Morgan Stanley and 'while the economic advantages were good, it was never about the money, it was about loving what you do'. He was also with Temasek Holdings for 2 1/2 years.

A United States citizen, he has spent 18 of the past 30 years working overseas. Now based in Singapore, he is an investor, a job which he says he has come to believe is 'the world's hardest profession, because everything affects the market and every day is different'.

Mr Dee is married to Shelly, 52, a housewife and philanthropist. They have four children - Matthew and Christopher, both 17, David, 15 and Diana, 12.

----------------------------------------

Q: Are you a spender or saver?

An investor. What I spend on, I look at as an investment of money and/or time. Money as a commodity to be spent or saved is a vastly overrated concept.

Time is the most important commodity people can consider, because you can't save it and you don't even know how much you have. If you don't invest a given minute, it is a lost minute and they can add up.

What most affects people's lives is when they realise how little time they have. Their value of time begins to change and they become more focused and discriminating.

Society needs to realise that there is a much greater return to be made investing in our youth than in our elderly years due to the compounding effect. The challenge is to extend people's productive capacity as they age, so that the retirement burden does not fall heavily on youth as the population ages.

I spend on travel as my wife and family are inveterate travellers and love to see the world in all its glory to seek understanding and adventure. This summer, my three sons climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with two intellectually disabled Special Olympics athletes from Tanzania and Singapore, while my wife and daughter spent the week working with street children in Moshi, Tanzania.

Q: How much do you charge to your credit cards every month?

I have two credit cards, one in Singdollars and one in US dollars. I charge everything and collect frequent flier miles. I have never in 30 years had a balance on my credit card and never will. I carry very little cash but my wife is my ATM when I'm short.

Q What financial planning have you done for yourself?

Mostly it's asset allocation, tax and estate planning, as there is global taxation for Americans. I get heartburn when I think of the taxes I have to pay while outside the US.

I am underweight fixed income and heavily weighted to high quality equities which are income generating. We have a few funds but generally the fees are too high to justify them. We also have a relatively high proportion of cash.

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are increasingly our choice for diversification, because of their low fees and liquidity. I also like high yielding non-financial, non-telecom stocks with a record of growing payouts, high cash balances and solid credit ratings, which can pay dividends out of free cash flow.

My wife, a Harvard Business School graduate, enjoys stock picking more than I do. As most relationship problems revolve around money, I prefer to focus on making it, keeping it and thus the bigger picture is my zone of focus.

My wife and I have life insurance mostly in a second-to-die policy as it reduces the cost substantially. Life insurance is just disaster insurance. It's health insurance that has real value to me.

Q: What advice would you give to investors?

You should never let your money out of your sight or delegate your finances to a third party.

Do your homework, keep it simple with diversification, maintain liquidity and never trade on rumours. The rumours often come from insiders who are not trying to make you rich, or from complete idiots.

Smart money does not tell people specifically what they are doing.

Every child, teenager, young adult should be taught the value of compound interest in school. Saving as much as you can, as young as you can, is the hidden secret to wealth accumulation.

Other issues that are often overlooked are:

•fees drastically reduce returns over the long haul and should be minimised;

•taking less risk the older you get allows you to sleep better at night;

•asset allocation is more important than stock picking;

•growing and stable dividends are the most undervalued asset; and

•real estate returns are overrated because most people do not account for the very high leverage or believe that prices can go down (and they do).

Q: Moneywise, what were your growing-up years like?

I grew up in a small town outside Buffalo, New York. When I was young, my relationship with my dad was based on me working with him every weekend. He was an electrical contractor. He worked very hard, loved what he did and was a perfectionist. You could count on his work and in particular the bits you would never see. As I put on his tombstone, he was 'A Great Guy'.

My fiercely independent mother is 84 and she has been teaching figure skating for over 60 years. Till today, she puts on her skates and goes on the ice to teach. She embodies all that is great about excellent teachers.

In the 1950s, the idea of working women and, in particular, an entrepreneurial woman, was virtually unheard on.

My parents knew the value of education and even though neither ever went to college, they drove me crazy drilling college into me. We never had much money and most of what my parents had went to my education. I graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. They were both all about helping others and they taught me value and values. I hope I have lived up to their lessons.

I have one sister, Anne, who has Down syndrome, which is why I support the Special Olympics.

Q: How did you get interested in investing?

When I was young, I saved as much as I could in every tax deferred plan I could find. Because I started early, those plans are now worth many multiples of what I invested.

I learnt about the value of delayed gratification when I spent my summer savings as a 16-year-old on some fancy racing tyres for my car. They cost US$500 and were stolen a week after I had bought them.

Had I invested that money at a 10 per cent annual rate, I would have had US$22,000 today. My dad showed me the maths just to make the point about how I had wasted my money and it made a huge impression on me. Now, I keep it simple and look to invest in things I generally feel will have long-term value.

My very first stock was in a tin can packaging company called American Can. It later became Citibank. I sold it much later and made 30 times my investment.

Q: What property do you own?

We own very little real estate. I don't like the debt that goes with it. If people had to pay cash for a house, they would save and be more rational in their finances.

I have had zero debt almost my entire life and have no interest in owing any bank any money. I would rather rent and invest my money.

For what a good class bungalow costs here, we could buy hundreds if not thousands of acres of the world's most beautiful land in the US.

Q: What's the most extravagant thing you have bought?

I lost my mind when I bought a Porsche in Singapore. I had driven one when I was 16 and always wanted one to relive that drive of my youth.

But driving in Singapore is boring and analogous to the garage as people treat their cars with the greatest of care. The real value and action was in Malaysia at the F1 track on the weekends. Fortunately I'm over that phase of my life, although I still keep my American Muscle car in Texas.

I bought the used Porsche for about $300,000, at a 35 per cent discount to the new price after its first owner had had it for six weeks, and I sold it for about the same price four years later.

Q: What's your retirement plan?

Retirement is for the unimaginative or the lazy. No interest, thanks. (Former prime minister) Lee Kuan Yew is setting a fine example and raising the bar for everyone. At a minimum, as we get older we should give back to children of the disadvantaged, but never give up completely.

I am financially independent but still have the drive to develop businesses and people and to ensure the next generation has the opportunity to fund my efforts to help others.

The whole concept of old age has radically changed in the last 40 years and will continue to do so. Current retirement ages are far too low, given life expectancy and should be raised immediately.

At the same time, the concept of retaining older workers should change also. Companies could take out life insurance policies on workers to fund current health care costs, for example. Capital and labour are on a collision course as the population ages and pensions and government plans need to get in front of the curve.

Q: Home is now....

A rented five-bedroom house with a pool in the Bukit Timah area.

Q: I drive....

I take the taxi. I will not own a car in Singapore because it is the worst investment I can think of here (my wife has a used car for the kids). Singapore has one of the lowest tax regimes in the world until you buy a car, then it's in the middle.

Most people drive their cars for about two hours a day, or 700 hours a year. It's ridiculous when you consider the capital outlay and depreciating asset versus the annual cost and the opportunity cost of not investing it.

joyceteo@sph.com.sg

----------------------------------------

WORST AND BEST BETS

Q: What is your best investment to date?

It was the investment in the company I committed half my life to, Morgan Stanley. I joined when it was a private company with only 1,100 people.

I bought my first stock at a discount during the initial public offering, and sold a large portion of it in 2000 at $104 a share. I made more than 30 times my money.

Q: And your worst?

Without question, it was the energy giant Enron Corp. I love pipelines and it had been a great investment for decades.

My first shares were at about $5, and the stock rocketed, rising over 17 times. Enron collapsed in 2001, after a false accounting scandal erupted. Its stock price, which hit a high of US$90 per share in mid-2000, plunged to below $1 by the end of 2001.

Expecting the world to treat u fairly coz u r a good person is like
expecting the lion not to attack u coz u r a vegetarian. Think about it.

In ancient Greece (469 - 399 BC), Socrates was widely

lauded for his wisdom. One day the great philosopher

came upon an acquaintance, who ran up to him excitedly

and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about

one of your students...?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before you tell

me, I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called

the Test of Three."

"Test of Three?"

"That's correct," Socrates continued.

"Before you talk to me about my student let's take a

moment to test what you're going to say. The first

test is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what

you are about to tell me is true?"

"No," the man replied, "actually I just heard about it."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know

if it's true or not. Now let's try the second test,

the test of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me

about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary..."

"So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me

something bad about him even though you're not certain

it's true?"

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.

Socrates continued, "You may still pass though because

there is a third test - the filter of Usefulness. Is what you

want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?"

"No, not really..."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell

me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell

it to me at all?"

The man was defeated and ashamed and said no more.

This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher

and held in such high esteem.

Life is uncertain. Death is certain.
There are those who are alive but doesn't live a life
There are those who died but their legacy lived on
We work hard for a uncertain future not realizing that it is still uncertain
We do not cherish what we have but craved for what we might be having
When is the last time you looked up the sky and see the stars?
When is the last time you appreciate the breeze and the warmth of the sun?
When is the last time you appreciate the greens in the trees and the colors of the flowers?
Life is but an illusion. Like a dew in the morning disappearing when the sun is up.
Like a dream without substance when you are awake.

1. No point using limited life to chase unlimited money.

2. No point earning so much money you cannot live to spend it.

3. Money is not yours until you spend it.

4. When you are young, you use your health to chase your wealth; when you are old, you use your wealth to buy back your health. Difference is that, it is too late.

5. How happy a man is, is not how much he has but how little he needs.

6. No point working so hard to provide for the people you have no time to spend with.

Remember this -- We come to this world with nothing, we leave this world with nothing!

Chinese Words of Wisdom for Modern Day Living:
When we are in heaven
Our money will still be in the bank.
When we are alive
We don't seem to have enough money to spend.
When we are gone
We find that there's still a lot of money not spent

One tycoon in China passed away
His widow, with $1.9 billion in the bank, remarried his chauffeur.
His chauffeur said, "All the while I thought I was working for my boss. Now only I realise that my boss was all the time working for me !!! "

The cruel reality is:
It is more important to live longer than to have more wealth. So we must strive to have a strong and healthy body, it doesn't matter who is working for who.

A high end hand phone, 70% of the functions are useless
An expensive car, 70% of the speed is not needed
A luxurious villa, 70% of the space is not occupied
A whole wardrobe of clothes, 70% of it is not worn
A whole life of earning, 70% is for other people to use
So we must protect and make full use of our 30%

Go for med exam even not sick
Drink more water even not thirsty
Must let go even faced with grave problems
Must give in even you are in the right
Must be humble even you are very powerful
Must be contented even you are not rich
Must exercise even you are very busy

LIFE IS SHORT; WE MUST LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST