Sep 27, 2009

Luck

I guess a small foreword is needed for this topic. It has been a relatively unlucky month for me - my car broke down and needed $11k HKD to fix, my computer broke and needed to hire a guy to recover + fix my comp, then hkgirl has been beating me 5 out of 6 nights on our nightly gambling games... and all these are happening within the week that my credit card paid all the fees from our europe trip and no response from companies. I dont have any official statistics but I am fairly confident that most people would consider this past week of mine a very unlucky week and so did I. I told hkgirl that I need to stop gambling against her because it just reminds me every night at how unlucky I am.

The funny thing is... after not thinking about this for a day, Mr Logic within me started realizing that all these is just a product of my previous actions. Both my car and computer broke down because it didnt start up at all in the past few months and they both die quickly from inactivity. The credit card bill part is bound to happen every month, I cant exactly call one week in every month unlucky just because I have to pay my bill, right?

It is actually quite natural that I have found a logical explanation to my recent occurrences... since I am usually not that superstitious of a person anyway. I like to consider myself 50% logic and 50% romance (or fantasy)... but yea back onto the topic, it seems that many times when good or bad things happen we seem to put too much weigh on luck and ignore the cause of why certain things happen. I mean... if a bird shat on you X times within a day, yea we can call that unlucky, but when there is an obvious cause to why things happen (like my car and computer breaking down), we need to actually look at what made it happen and then learn from it.

NOW... WITH THAT SAID...I still think hkgirl winning my money 5 out of 6 nights is pure luck. Gambling is like 95% luck based and 5% skill based... right??? RIGHT???

P.S. - ...Luck or no luck... I need to stop losing my phone ever 8 months...

Sep 25, 2009

Passion, Motivation, and Success

I have been looking for a job ever since I returned to Hong Kong after my MBA. The overall job hunting process is pretty similar to my previous job search - prep CV, find companies to apply, write cover letter, and send them out. In my last 2-3 job searches, I basically just applied anything within the industries that I wish to work for, partly because fresh grads and people with 2-3 years experience doesnt really have much of a choice when it comes to who to work for... its more about who is willing to take you. So with more work experience and a different perspective on life, it is perfectly natural that I am now pickier when it comes to choosing a company that I apply for, with the biggest deciding factor for me right now is how passionate I am about the job, its responsibilities and the industry.

I dont know how much of this is common sense but it never occur to me until recently that passion is such a big factor when it comes to all sorts of things. Motivation can be caused by different reasons, but a person with that "passion fire" inside them will have sustainable motivation. Motivation gives you the energy to finish the goal but passion is a fire that starts from the roots of your emotion. You will go all out and do everything that is possible to succeed if you are passionate about something. To use my own posts as example, the Ants post is a topic that I am truly passionate about whereas the spoiled generation post was just something I was motivated to write, and I will be the first to admit that the quality of the two posts was differrred by the amount of heart I have towards the topic.

While I am not saying that passion = success (brain, experience, and luck matters too), the biggest success cases in this world started from that fire from within (or as Rocky Balboa said in the last Rocky movie "the stuff down the basement".)

...now if only the companies I want to work for accepts me

Sep 17, 2009

the spoiled generation

I really dont know where this world is heading towards. about a week ago, there were news saying that at least one 12-year old was caught doing Ketamine, a drug if you are not too familiar with the name, and that is probably one out of the thousandSSS who's sniffing. I am not exactly an anti-drug person but 12-year old? Really? Is it because the time we live in is so peaceful that drugs can make it exciting? I suppose this is kind of true since there never was any drug or alcohol problem when there was a war.

Our generation and the people younger than us are really spoiled with all the peacefulness around us. Financial Crisis? pffh... most people my age or younger just lived on. We wake up, go to work / school, and then go back to sleep. All the fun in the middle is just temporary - everything comes so fast and easy (especially with the internet) that we dont learn to cherish what we have. Instead... we find our lives boring and go all out for excitement. I for one, is exactly this type of person, except i am sane/insane enough to understand what I can do (a very good topic that I havent found a good angle to write about). But for many minors with some bad influence... you get a 12-year old kid snorting shit. This is something totally unheard of in my parents or grandparents time - people usually spend their time working hard trying to accomplish something. I really think we need to have a closer look and find out why kids nowadays are so bored with their lives that they would go sniffing drugs when they are not even a TEENager.

Seriously... I dont feel comfortable raising a child in the world that we live in now