Doing the Wrong Thing that You Love to Do

It's close to 12am, this officially announce the end of my usual weekend before I have to return to my 5 consecutive mindful of workload with very little time for my own. Just like everybody else.

Such short duration always make working adults refuse to sleep early and prefer to stay up and do something relaxing and trying to forget about how much time left before we should get ready for bed.

But one thing got in my way: I need to complete filling up my time sheet for the last week before I got my very first message from my boss asking me to complete my time sheet even before I manage to reach the office to do so.

I knew I got a strong resistance to complete my time sheet as the first thing I do to start my Monday morning, so I figure that I should fulfill this duty before I end the weekend in my own term.

My laptop is on, same as my home laptop. I need to review the list of things that I had done for the week and fill in my time sheet accordingly. At the same time, I'm pretty hook up with an old game site that I found recently that allow me to download any old games for free.

Being an old timer like me, I always like to browse through infinite list of old games and see which one call back my good old memories. I spent some of my time checking the game that made up my childhood and wouldn't mind to waste some of my time now doing the same.

People like me who fall under Enneagram type 5, we prefer to make a good use of our time as much as we could. I love to watch movie, although I've been denying it for quite some time. It's like I feel like I'm not wasting my time enough, I also browse through sites for older movies that are good and I would love to broaden my insights from there.

Browsing through movies is a higher priority, so that I can move the movie screen to my another monitor and let the movie run as I browse through a long game list. When I have not decided which movie I should spend my precious night time for it, as I switch to the next page of the movie list, I switch back to the game list and continue browsing until the movie list completely loaded.

At one point, I feel like my time is being utilized well. Not until I forcefully remind myself that I have another laptop turn on, waiting for me to complete my time sheet duty before I can let the laptop rest for the night before going through what I have to go through the next day.

That actually make me feel bad, as you may have guessed. Conventionally, entertainment are desserts, whatever main job or task is the main meals that we should work on before we touch on the sweet stuff. I know as much as you that people have all the reasons to say that it's wrong to left your unfinished business behind and satisfy your freedom desire.

If you are as normal as myself, needless to say, we are pretty clear that we should work on the important and high priority thing before we started to do anything to increase our happiness/freedom gauge.

As confuse as it is, majority of us failed to understand why we choose to do things that our inner conscious told us that we would feel better doing so despite having some real deal to work on. Hope you learn that you are not alone if you ever face such unexplained mindful conflicts.

Here's the thing: we still choose to do that "wrong" thing.

When exams are coming up, we know that we should be spending time devouring whatever is available in the textbooks as soon as possible, but found ourself watching TV, playing games, reading our own favorite storybook, or anything that has nothing to do with what you suppose to do. Even if we stare right into the textbook, our mind is somewhere else. We have some tough time pulling ourself back into our first main priority.

What would you do when it's 12am and you knew that you should be lying on the bed preparing to shut down your mind and get a full rest so that you can face whatever comes to you on the next day, yet you found yourself starring at your computer, doing whatever that may be insignificant but your inner conscious give you strong reasons to keep you awake?

Many successful theories resolve such situations with self discipline. Trying to abstain ourself from activities and behavior that doesn't provide practical benefit to us. However, if you are fortunate enough to experience the real state of being true to your own inner voice, you knew that holding back your true feeling and force yourself to do things because that is the thing that you should do isn't the perfect answer for yourself.

Self conflict often being experienced as an individual and we constantly question ourself why we are not doing what we suppose to do. That eventually result in procrastination, self doubt, and decrease of self confidence in decision making.

Guess what? You really have to stop fighting with yourself and that inner voice that seems to be nothing but evil that persuade you to do what you are not suppose to do. Perhaps I should put it this way, there isn't really anything that you shouldn't do in your life, it's just that it may not be the right time to do it.

That doesn't mean it's wrong, not at all. As long as it's logical and reasonable enough for you to do it, don't think of it as a wrong thing. And stop doubting or blaming yourself for not focusing on your main priority. That is just a matter of self discipline, as mentioned before, but do not make the matter sounds really bad by thinking that it is wrong.

Somewhere in the corner of this world, there are many who do the exact same thing as you. But not everyone take this as a right or wrong thing, because they don't need to. When they need to make a decision between main priority and things that they want to do, it's just a matter of adjustment and acknowledgement.

In layman terms, it's about "how much" to do between the two. Say, you addiction of gaming is on, but it's 15 minutes until 12am, and you have to sleep at sharp 12. Sleeping is your main priority, and playing game is the thing you love to do.

Make your time precious, do what you love to do and make sure you enjoy it. When the time is up, tell yourself that you done it, and don't be greedy.

The next part is very important, you need to recognize that you did it. Most people did something, but they felt like they have not do anything at all and grief for the insufficient time spent on it, instead of appreciating the little thing that they able to do even though it's for short moment.

Having this small twist of your mindset able to make you feel that you had fulfilled your desire, and your day is not wasted for not doing things that are meaningful to your life.

It's important to focus on your priority, be it your inescapable duty or responsibility, but it's equally important not to ignore the little things that you love to do even though it may seems insignificant or unrelated to your main priority.

Even if it sounds wrong to others, be true to your inner voice. Recognize why you love them, and give yourself space to achieve them. This mindset can make your life so much more fulfilled and attain great sense of accomplishment other than just doing the so-call "suppose to do" things.

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Why Most People Failed because of Planning

Planning is considered to be the core of everything before you actually started doing something. If you had experience going through some tough time in life, try to recall how many times that things are so much tougher than what you initially expected and try to think, would things became better if you had invested the necessary time for a complete plan before you actually dive into it?

Around my near-30th generation, I begin to experience hell lots of planning needed for almost every single thing that I need to fill up in my daily life. And I'm also at the stage where I can observe and easily see how others deal with their planning.

I'm always interested to see friends who wanted to start a business and at the stage of planning where they suppose to sketch the entire route map and list down the A to Z of their business plan. What interest me the most, is how much struggle they had during planning.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I enjoy seeing people struggle and lost of direction to do something that they suppose to have great interest with. Just that the idea behind "doing something that they are interested with but at the same time, they had so much struggle in it" is kind of an ironic yet it's a real life situation occurred behind the human mind.

The Anatomy of Doing What You Like But You Ought to Struggle A Lot

Isn't it sounds familiar somehow? If it's something that you like to do or you have a strong desire to achieve it, where is the struggle coming from? Isn't that sounds like you wanted to torture yourself?

The truth is, doing things that you like doesn't always means the subject contain only things that you like and there is absolutely nothing that you don't like.

Being in a relationship with someone you love has the same concept. You love someone because of certain traits that attracted you. But at the same time, there is no human being that you would only love and he or she is so perfect that there is nothing you dislike or hate about it. You love the person you love, but at the same time you dislike or hate something that they have.

It's the same for planning for business. You love the idea where you are the owner of the business, and you are capable of taking up something challenging and hold certain positive value in the society and the business world that has the chance to compete and show the people and the world how capable are you to grow the little seed of yours into a huge and significant business, but you hate it when the times come where you have to deal with all sort of stuff that is not in your preference list but you know that you must go through them to get what you want.

Irony or not, that's how people practically is. There is no perfect plan in the world where you can just do what you want to do and throw away whatever you don't like but still able to achieve what you want. Those who want to do so ought to struggle even more because when they refuse to accept the reality, the cruel reality get to become more visible and taunt down their life. And thus, became one of the reasons you see situation where the more people hate about a subject, the stronger desire they had to do it.

And unfortunately, people is a creature that strongly depending on their feeling and desire. It's bloody difficult to accept something that you dislike and hate something that you like. In the end of the day, we frequently looks ridiculous to ourself when we say that we hate it but we want to do it so much. And we suffer a lot because of such a double edge feeling in our heart. As well as doing something that we really love to do even if it's something that you've been desired since years ago, you ended up hate doing it.

The Misconception Between Planning and Result

From my experience dealing with people, many people out there know the importance of planning. "Failed to plan is plan to failed" is always a practical idea for me, so it's a good thing I see people willing to put effort into planning.

The only problem is, I doubt people actually have any solid idea of why is the planning all about other than doing it because other people is doing it, or the so-call "successful" people are doing them, so they should do it.

One of the struggles is the idea of trying to use planning to achieve result. Well, you want result and therefore you need a good plan that can help you to eventually achieve the desire result. The idea is great and nothing wrong, just not accurate enough and that could increase the chance of failure and cause more obstacles than ever if you didn't consider properly.

Try to visualize and think about the concept of Planning-Result methodology to run a business, any type of business will do.

In this case, I will use a florist business as example. Imagine this, I wanted to run a florist business because I love flowers and plants, I want to own a shop that is full of beautiful and natural flowers and plants that looks colorful, feel comfortable and refreshing for whoever step into my shops. In the Planning-Result methodology, this will be my concept:

• Planning: To identify ways to gather the flowers and plants, and get a place to run the business
• Result: Own a florist shop full of natural and colorful flowers and plants

Now that I done what was stated in my planning, I got all the flowers and plants that I want, and I got a pretty nice place to put all my colorful kids, I can start decorating and run my business just like how I visualize it in the beginning.

But hey, is my desire result just to create a florist business like that for awhile or for long term? Needless to say, it's for long term, so where are all the following thoughts and planning gone to?

• Tools to maintain flowers and plants
• The brand of fertilizer for all the colorful kids
• Long term renting budget & planning for the shops/place
• The type of design and pattern to decorate the shop so that all plants and flowers look beautiful and comfortable
• Who is my targeted customer?
• Who is the supplier for fertilizer and tools?
• How much I need to earn per month to cover up all operation expenses to maintain the business?
• How much I'm able to earn after reducing all operation expenses for the business and is that enough for my living?
• Etc.

If I had thought of this in the beginning of my planning, my Planning-Result methodology suppose to be something like this:

All these little fragments are not something that I can finish them within a single day, probably not even a month or two. Every single one of them need another set of complete planning and thoughts, and they are necessary to maintain the result of owning a florist that full of the colorful and natural design, AND to maintain it as a business in a long term.

Now look at all the little fragments between the Planning-Result. With all the fragments stacking up, touching on the final result that I want is actually quite far away and not every single part of them is what I truly want to do, but I have to do it because that's what could achieve and maintain the result that I wanted.

And here is the main point:

Things that I want	Things that I hate but I have to do it
Own a florist business with colorful and comfortable flowers and plants	Deal with planning on budgeting & operation cost, dealing with suppliers, targeted customers, etc

When you learn that there are so much that you need to cater for when you plan, and you can't escape from it, you will feel the burden even though you knew that it's part of what you want in the end. As you go with it, you easily feel fed up and tired, and you might get to a point of wondering why are you doing this at the first place.

Don't find it hilarious or silly, it's actually quite natural for feeling tired over something that you have interest in but when it's not part of your preferences. This is exactly the burden and uneasy feeling that rip off your interest and passion to continue going for what you planning to achieve in the earlier stage.

Do not fall into Result Focused Mindset

Planning-Result is a straight forward thinking that somehow lead people to think that the end of their planning would be the result. It's just natural that we start to do planning and do all sort of things because we want the result. But reality don't work that way. planning is not a method to achieve result, it's a complete thoughts that help to identify the path you need to take, as well as identify which are the stepping stones and rocks that you need to beware and look into.

And all these definitely take time. If you are planning to achieve things as soon as possible, it's quite likely that the result would not be fruitful and you won't enjoy as much as you thought it would.

Planning is not just something that you need to do so that you can get the result. It's mean far more than that. It demonstrate how much you are capable of building the necessary path towards the desire direction. And the direction is not all about result, it's not suppose to be a straight path moving directly to the destination.

Your path should allow you to gain more and expose to more opportunity other than the result itself. If you see nothing but the result during your planning, I doubt you truly understand what's the result is all about.

Instead of going all the way towards one destination, create a path where you can learn more and make yourself a better person. Even if it's only for planning, it doesn't take only planning & management skill to draft a good plan.

You need perseverance, and you need to learn that you can't rush things out. You must achieve things one step at a time, and the targeted achievement need to be practical, small but meaningful enough to make progress.

You also need good decision making skill and deal with trade off. There are always times where you have to choose over something you dislike and work on it without failed, and best without complaining and hate it when things don't go as plan.

Last but not least, you need constantly watch where you are going. Planning is a must in the beginning, but it's also crucial in the long run. You don't plan because people say you should plan before doing something, you plan when you really understand planning is a practical behavior to ensure you know what you are doing and what is your aim, and you can clearly tell people what your idea is all about without hesitate and doubts in yourselves.

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When the Conciousness is Fading, Will You Regret It?

I'm unsure if it's because of the massive improvement of the internet, or it's simply because I'm having greater interest in this world as I grew up, I realize that this world is becoming more like a mess.

In a random location of the earth, the uncontrollable natural disaster would strike at any time, and terrorist is no longer a tiny treats towards a small part of the world.

As we sit down comfortably in a peaceful environment, did you ever thought that the next seconds could be the moment where you have to face the last moment of your life?

In the recent earthquake of Tainan, no one would ever foresee the disaster before it happen. Everyone was living through their daily routine, troubled by their studies or work, looking forward for their upcoming vacation, recall about the drama they watched last night, being upset for the recent comments towards themselves, and so on.

Several months ago, when ISIS attack Paris and other countries, it was a harmony situation that turn into a horrific event that costs massive amount of heartbeats to be stopped and before that, people have to go through the unexpected fear in their entire life and leave like everyone else. After living for so many years, whatever trace that they had in this world, all the memories that carved deep into people's memories, turns into a tiny dust and dive deep into the unlimited dusts in the universe without any trace. And the consciousness fade, they can only accept the cruel fact of what human should be accepting at the end of life.

No one in the history willing to accept anything like that. No one would sincerely, willingly accept this so-call inescapable fate. Everyone has dream, and many things that they wish to achieve in life. And unlimited things that are really important throughout their life, and only they would understand in the dept of their heart. And their family, friends, and all those who had however a tiny bond in this life, no matter what sort of conflicts and feeling they had before, it's all precious and no one willing to let it disappear within this world.

However, there is no way for us to avoid accepting the reality.

We are truly lucky, we do not need to worry if we are able to survive until the next morning. We don't need to deal with war and suffering, and we have choices and freedom to choose our desire path. All the dreams and wishes that we had, is just a matter of how we going to achieve it, there is nothing like impossible for us to do it. But if the next moment would be the final moment of your consciousness and it's the end of life, will you regret it?

We knew that there is no way we can run away from this. I believe this is not the first time you came across any articles that talk about appreciating life and avoiding regrets, but are you sure that your truly understand the burden of regrets and you are going to feel when such negativity going to remain in the last minute of your life?

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Actual Meaning of Wasting Time

We all know what does it means by wasting time Precisely, claiming that someone is wasting their time basically just means that they are doing things that doesn’t create actual value for themselves and/or for others.

There are unlimited behaviour and situation where people are considered as wasting their time but the most important factor in this post is regarding the type of value that wasting time is referring to when people use that term.

One common situation where you heard people use the terms “wasting time” is when people play games. Especially for the elders, our generation are very well aware of their perception that playing games is nothing but entertainment and only meant for fun and that’s it. People who play games will not get anything at all afterwards but enjoyment that could not be seen. And the larger concern is the addiction to games and unfillable desire to keep on playing. That is something that contribute to more reasons for elders to think that playing games is absolutely a waste of time.

But we need to consider a fact, games had became one of the major industries in the world of IT. And putting the games addiction aside, games companies are getting better in creating games that not only create the terminal disease call “games addiction”, they also work to produce games that involve educations and learning for people for all ages. And guess what, who are those who developers that create all these games and where did their inspiration came from?

Great inspiration couldn’t be produced by thin air, the games developers are people who experience playing wide range of games and for some reason, they get to produce better idea and turn their idea into output that bring benefits (aside for games addiction) to the society and making the IT world much more creative. Here is my main point in above scenario: If the game developers playing game means wasting time, is this means that their effort to create better game and contribute to the growth of IT world is also meaningless? That’s definitely not, IT world had become much wider to ease our life, and otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read this blog post now and so on.

Most of the time we think that a lot of things that doesn’t mean anything to us are wasting time, but there is one theory I found to be very true: there is nothing that actually waste time in this world. Not only because seconds will keep on counting as you breath on, for every waking moment, your mind is working and thinking. No matter what you do, you are able to utilize your mind to think for something beneficial and for the goods.

Even if you are doing nothing particular such as waiting for bus, standing under the ceiling waiting for the rain to stop, siting at your home sofa to think what you want to do later, or playing a game, your mind is always working and you are able to utilize your capability for thinking and learning.

Sometimes we are bound to certain factors that we couldn’t do what we want that has value for us. For instance, you need to go home to do your work but you couldn’t because of the rain. Instead of feeling frustrated and do nothing but waiting for the rain to stop, you can think and recall what you need to do for your work. Plan about it if you have not do so, think about what is the next step, review your plan to see if there is any way you can work it out faster and better. Or else, think about something else in your mind. Do some thinking, or write down something in your mind if you have notebook or into your phone; if you are playing a game, other than just play on and do what the game ask you to do, you can observe on the design of the game and think how to produce games with amazing graphic and how well is the features of the game compare to others. This is how wasting time does not apply to you when you think about something meaningful in whatever situation you are in.

On the other hand, the actual wasting time would occur if you do not produce a proper thoughts when you could. Take standing under the ceiling while waiting for the rain to stop for instance, you might think about a colleague in the workplace that is offending you or you dislike, or you think about the TV shows that you watch yesterday and try to recall the shows. These thoughts are not a waste of time, but they are a waste of time when you are only thinking about them for the sake of thinking and these thoughts doesn’t give you any value afterwards.

So if you are only thinking about something that you doesn’t need later on, you will be wasting your time as you can always choose to think something better that could improve your life instead of just thinking something that will occur in your life but doesn’t really important afterwards.

This does not only apply to some of the situations in our life that is outside of what we want to do, it also happen when it’s comes to our main life goals such as studies, work, and living. One main concern I have is for people who put high amount of focus in work for salary increment, better performance, and better job advancement. All these definitely create values in our life as better salary means we are able to get better life and better performance means people have better impression on us, and we will eventually become a better person with better status and financial in the society, right? WRONG, why do you need them for?

The very basic concept of this post is one thing: wasting time means doing things that doesn’t create value. Your salary increment and better performance generate more income and better impression for you, and that is true. But what is the value of those in your life? All of us always obsessed with more money and better status so that we can get more things in life and get more fame, but is it true that we can’t live without better income and status? What does better income and status really have to do with the value in your life?

This is something that you need to think through and you have to provide a clear idea for the values of all these efforts for yourself. It’s not the matter of how hard you work for something, it’s all about how much you know what you are working for, and why are those important to you to know that if you are utilizing your time properly to create important values that you truly desire to know that if you are wasting time or not.

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The "Success" that we seek, is nothing but normal life

I'm currently at the stage where the people around my own generation are getting more and more focus on their career, wanted to learn and involve in investment, exploring their network to seek better life and opportunities, and etc. For those who are not doing well, they no longer stay with the same mindset and think that's just they unchangeable fate. They begins to change their job, try to think what's give them better option that open up the road of success and wealth for themselves.

Most of them are getting out from their comfort zone and involve themselves to do things that they dislike, hate, or not really prefer, but often convinced that that is what they suppose to do. In the name of success, before the age of 30, almost all people that I know are doing things that they have never foresee themselves doing this in the past 10 years. Well, sure we could not expect what would happen in the future, but remember those dreams that you once had and realize how much you forgotten about them? We spent massive amount of our teenage time thinking what we want to do in the future and we call them dreams, but now we just want to focus to do what we need to do because that's is known as success.

Being successful is a subjective topic. You can Google and found unlimited answer to it but I'm firm on one thing: no matter how successful you are, you will never consider yourself as successful. Of course, I'm obviously not a successful person, you can persuade yourself that I'm not at the position of saying this so my theory is most probably inaccurate. While this is true, let's look back how we are generally being taught and grew to be successful.

In the education life, we are always being nagged to focus on studies and not too much into games and enjoying life. If possible, no game at all. What we need to focus is to study, and then pressure ourself for exam to get good grades so that we can be labelled as "A's Student". In the final year of your major exam, that's where you are able to be granted with the name of top student if you are able to get excellent result, which is just to get as much A as possible, and then entitled to a piece of paper that stated with printed writing that you are a top grade student with ordinary inks with coloring.

As you proceed with college or university, it's about the same but this time you are given more pressure to the title of some diploma, degree, master degree and PhD holder with CGPA that label how excellent we are, as in how much A we got in our studies, in the same way as previous education level.

Working life does not give you grades or A's no matter how much you work, but most people seek stable income with moderate job satisfaction and once we have that, we frequently explore better job offer. To a certain extent, that's where we look deeper into success by investment and purchasing houses and cars. While seeking ways to constantly improve our capitals, we also spend efforts in create value in the assets that could be seen and measured by people to think how good you are compare to others.

After we established our own family, we are not only spending life in expanding yourself but expanding your family, especially to your children to make them go through the same good education that you experienced in the young age and make sure they have a good solid foundation to be constantly allowed to seek better opportunities and increase their own values. When all your children graduated and able to obtain stable job and income, that's where they able to seek for their own path of success.

As you retired, you have more than enough saving with children and spouse who supported you over the years and not only that you are able to travel to anywhere you want, you officially have your own successful stories of how you gone through a good education background, got yourself stable, great and enjoyable jobs, purchased your own houses and cars under your own name, provide good education and life to your children, completely establish a family of your own, and much more stories to tell as you speak.

There are a lot more details about the type of life that we gone through and we are going towards such directions to work really tough to be successful. But wait.... why is this consider successful?? Isn't this what everyone is doing???

All above that we talks about is basically what's happening every single day and it's nothing really new. You don't have to focus too much of the scenario above because you already knew there is such life out there, and tons of people are doing and achieving that. But if we are talking about success.... why are we doing the same thing like many people and think that is success?

I mean, success doesn't have a fixed terms, but imagine if you gone through the same thing and you achieved success after retirement, I did the same thing and achieve the same success as you do, everyone did exact same thing and achieve the same thing.... is this really success when everyone is doing and achieving the same thing? Is success means everyone just gonna be the same?

Sure there are differences as in how many houses and cars we owned, which expensive countries we are afford to go, how much we able to offer our children to other country for their studies and enjoy their life, how much saving we have after retirement, how healthy we are after retirement...... but are those really matter? Putting all the major and minor differences aside, we are still living in one place and in the end, what we got is nothing other than education, career, wealth, fame..... Are you really satisfy with getting the same thing as everyone do to call yourself successful?

My emphasis is to encourage you to think further, create differences in life that distinct yourself from others, achieving success not by the means of others and not achieving what the society want you to achieve to convince yourself that you will be successful in that way. Are you happy from the depth of your heart thinking that you are going through all those stuff until retirement? Is your true desire exactly the same with what everyone trying to achieve?

Sticking back to actual life, we have unlimited moment that we convince ourself that we have no time to think about what we want and what we are doing now is the best for now, or precisely this is how things suppose to be. I urge you to give 100% thoughts in one moment to think and understand the true meaning behind "You only live once". If you are not going to do what's truly matter and important for yourself that fulfill your life and soul to be the same type of success that you truly desire, are you going to be satisfy in your old age knowing that you did not do achieving what you truly want but following the path of everyone?

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The Consequences of "Later"

Have you seen the book "The Power of Now" in the bookstore? I don't own the book, or else I will be taking picture of the book as my cover for this post.

The Consequences of "Later" is something like the opposite idea of "The Power of Now". I only flip a few pages of the book "The Power of Now", it's basically emphasize on the importance of bringing our thoughts and idea into reality as soon as we can before we forgotten about it or we somehow give excuses to delay it and in the end, we procrastinate too much and we are not doing it at all.

Can you recall the last time when people ask you about something and you reply "Later"? How long does it take for you to remember the task or subject requested by other people and finish it up? Small matters that does not take us much time & effort probably not going to take long. But stuff that make you feel clinging to do it would take a long time, and they are either important to you or not important and you don't feel like doing it.

Would you be surprise that the things that we usually would say "Later" are usually something that are important to us? Remember the time when you thought to yourself that you need to clean and tidy up your room but soon, you tell yourself that you do it later but end up dragging it for days or weeks. And during college or university time, you told yourself that you will study after dinner but end up surfing Facebook or doing other stuff, and you told yourself that you will study later after all these relaxing activities but end up it was too late and you need to go to bed, so again you told your that you will study tomorrow.

We can witness and experience unlimited times when we or other people would say "Later" but only choose to remember it when we wanted to. To a certain extent, you can consider that things that we would procrastinate are usually things that we dislike and it's just because we are suppose to do it, one of the serious issues that I notice is the procrastination of people dream and ambitions.

As I'm getting older (not really that old, currently I'm just 26yo), many of my friends are getting into the stage of slowly realizing that they need to get into an advance stage where they need to have dreams, and they need to persuade them and start changing their life for goods. They should not stay at the same stage and most of them feel uncomfortable thinking that their life would be just like that for the rest of their life.

But in order to get out of our current life and start changing, you need practical plan and clear idea of what you want to change and how. You need to find a nice & relaxing place to think and best if you could write down everything in your mind and make sure you truly know what you want instead of thinking about your thoughts over and over again. This is the life changing stage where we call it "Planning". But do you know that most people who seeking for life changes doesn't failed during their life changing process, but failed in this initial stage because they have problem starting it?

In Chinese, there is a saying: "Everything is hard in the beginning". This quote perfectly apply to this situation. Because we do not know how we should start changing, we have no idea what we truly want and we not sure how we should think or do about it, so when comes to starting your plan for it, you frequently or unconsciously tell yourself Later.

If you have experience on the situation above, try to think if you have any dreams or wishes that you thought about them a lot in the past but eventually, you totally forgotten about it and even if you remember it now, it doesn't seems important to you?

Time flies, a lot of things that matter to us in the past no longer seems significant to us, but doesn't mean that those dreams and wishes don't play an important role in our life. Imagine if you have a dreams in the past to became a singer. Now you know that being a singer is tough, but what if you pursuit your dreams during that time and succeeded to be a famous star? If you stubbornly hold on to the passion at that time, you might be, or perhaps I should say you definitely living a total different life right now. But that is only IF you did not tell yourself to do things "Later".

There is no saying of what could come true in the future. Quote from Steve Jobs: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." Yes, you can't know what's going to happen ahead, but you know things that already happen. If you experience the lost of passion in the past because you frequently push your passion to "Later", you should not let the same thing happen again right now and in the future.

Thinking about 10 years later when you look backwards, what do you wish to see? Do you wish to look backward and blame yourself that you did not chase after your passion again but let them fade? I'm sure you don't want it.

If "The Power of Now" is insufficient to ignite the passion for you to do what you wanted to do now, think about "The Consequences of Later" to remind yourself that you want a meaningful and fulfilling life and not a regretful life of not achieving anything.

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Wisdom Trap: Truth Believer

Knowledge in this world can be divided into three types: Truth, Belief, and Assumptions. To determine if a matter belongs to the specified type of the subject, it’s all depending on how we view the subject.

Truth is an undeniable subject. For instance, sky will be blue in colour during day time if it’s a sunny day is one truth that we cannot deny. If we want to deny, means we want to say that the clear blue sky is actually not blue. Of course, we can further deny it by specifying that the sky seems blue in our eyes but it’s actually not the case when we look at at the point of the universe. But simply put, the sky is indeed blue during day time when we look at it.

Belief is a subject that we want to think it’s true according to our knowledge and willingness. It’s a subject that can be denied for many reasons regardless the willingness of the people. You probably notice, the most related subject would be religion. It’s an issue that people can deny them in many ways regardless of how many believers a religion has. While the believers can provide all the proofs, theories and information to prove that their religion is a truth and it’s not just a matter of belief, the subject can still be denied because there is no absolute truth in the subject.

Assumption will not be covered here although it’s somehow related. It’s basically a subject that is created based on weak reasoning or points that not are not proven to be solid. Thus cannot be relied in most cases.

“Truth Believer” is a type of inaccurate mindset to think that the subject that they believe in is a truth. It’s incorrect to think that a belief would be a truth because these two are different matters. It’s the same concept that you can’t say that an Apple is same as Orange although these two are fruits.

Again, religious person frequently demonstrate such practice when they claim that their god is real although there isn't much solid proofs to support that. No matter how many documents, books, or discoveries existed, all supporting matters are not solid in most cases. And it’s quite common that assumptions and other thoughts that are made up according to the supporting matters would occur.

This topic not only related to religious people, my main focus is actually more on usual society thinking. This phenomenon can occur everywhere as long as we have knowledge and we have idea of what is true and false.

Truth believer is one of the wisdom trap because it’s an occurrence when we have knowledge, and we use that to judge the solidity of certain subjects. A partial problem occur when we put out feeling into it when we want to think that certain subjects must be true or false, regardless of how much we know about it.

One of the related fallacies that produced by Truth Believer mindset is general prejudice. When we walk on the street and we notice a particular person face, we would have a great idea of what type of personality and attitude he/she has based on his/her appearance and behaviour, without having any idea who is him/her, what type of background he/she has, or wanted to know the true personality he/she has. Sometimes we only have a brief and simple thoughts about it and we forget about it, but sometimes we have a strong thoughts that the person must be the type of person we thought he/she is. Probably because a certain behaviour remind you of someone you know, and you immediately relate this stranger to be the same person that you knew.

This is not an issue until we truly develop a type of strong feeling in that person because he/she remind us of someone we knew in the past without us realizing such feeling. For example, he/she talks really loud when using the phone and is really rude. You would thought he/she must be an inconsiderate person and does not has any manner at all. So you would avoid him/her and not letting him/her to get close to you because he/she might crash on you instead of avoiding you as he/she walks.

In this case, you are actually believing that the person is inconsiderate and rude due to his/her behaviour, but your consciousness telling you to avoid that person because your mind telling you that getting near to him/her will definitely be a bad idea. I don’t deny the possibility that things would happen according to what you think because you have a good reason for thinking it that way, but this does not conclude that it definitely going to happen. Not only that this is a matter of possibility, it’s also relate to you believing that your thoughts definitely came true, because you unconsciously thought that what you believe is a truth. When the Truth Believer instincts occur, you develop prejudice to a person or subject, and refuse to find out what is the truth behind your idea or how true is your thoughts.

In a much serious case, when you are being cheated by a certain of person before, you will developed a strong beliefs, in which you thought of it as a truth, that anyone that you met that belong to that type must be a cheater as well.

You probably heard this before: “There is no good guy in this world” or something similar. I heard a lot of it when the lady who said this is really firm with it and there is no space for debates on this subject. While there are possibilities that they were just parroting what other people said, it’s also not surprising that they encounter terrible experience before and thus creating such claims.

While I don’t feel offended of any hard feeling of this subject, but I have to emphasize that this is definitely not a truth because who they met in the past remain in the past, it has nothing to do with any other guy in this world. Just because you have not seen any good guy, you can’t just conclude that there is no good guy anymore. Furthermore, claiming things that way only creating a strong resistance for them to consider things the other way. When a good guy finally appear before them, their Truth Believer instincts would pull them away from the good guy. So it will be really hard to realize things when they are unwilling to think things a little different. On side note, if a girl always surrounded by bad guys, they should really consider if there is any problem with their lifestyle.

This is why, Truth Believer will be an obstacles for us to be willing to understand things better and we are directly influence by our own feeling to improve our thinking and knowledge. We even get to become really unwilling to find out what supposed to be right and wrong. It’s also really common that such mindset not only lasted for a period of time until they willing to reconsider the subject, there are also unlimited cases where people carry the same mindset for the rest of their life. Unwilling to know what supposed to be right and wrong even at the end of their life.

When a person had fallen as Truth Believer in one or more subjects, they would practice in that way in their usual days. They might even teach others about their beliefs but claiming that to be truth to ask people to practice their life according to the way they want.

Remember how frequent and serious our parent is when they taught us not to talk to strangers? I strongly support the fact that we must not simply talk to strangers to avoid the risk of any unwanted thing happen to us. But I also need to urge on the importance of socializing to expand your network and meeting with more people for sharing of knowledge and idea to make your life more meaningful. It may sounds a crash between not talking to strangers and meeting new people to make your life more meaningful, what I’m trying to emphasize is your mindset when meeting with new people, you can have your thoughts to be cautious and beware when certain people would have a bad idea on you, but there are people who are sincere about meeting new friends and they might be capable of changing your life for good. Imagine if you fallen as a Truth Believer in this subject, you probably not going to meet any kind people and you will always be in your comfort zone without anything new and interesting for the rest of your life.

So basically, to avoid falling as Truth Believer, it’s simply a matter of identifying what should be truth and what should be belief. While it sounds simple, it’s actually really difficult as there are infinite amount of people out there who only focus on living as a Truth Believer for the rest of their life. You might want to consider them having weaker wisdom and knowledge, but bear in mind that such situation occurs to all type of people regardless of how great or capable they are, or how great is their education qualitifaction. So failing into such wisdom trap is really easy and it’s not simple to pull yourself out from it. Especially we humans have a strong ties to our own feeling, which often screw things up.

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