Escape clause and escape route

When I was still working for Gillette, I have been trained that for every contract there must be an escape clause. This is to ensure that for any unforeseen circumstances where both parties have to separate, there is always a ready platform for discussion. Since then, there is always escape clause in everything I do, no matter how sweet the deal could be. So far so good.

Now, that was work I'm talking about. But what about life? A contract where there is no resignation because any resignation simply means death. So, if life is a contract, what do we do? Do we have an escape clause and do we have an escape route?

The activities that we do in life should have an escape clause in my opinion. For example, for career, this is the job I am willing to do for this price and in the event I want to terminate this job, this or that will happen in my life. We should know the cost of parting way. We also need to have an escape route, something that we plan to escape from the things we don't like.

Take stock of your life's main activities. What are the 3 important things that you are doing in your life? Job, marriage and health may be? If one day you don't feel like doing it any more, is there an escape clause? If of the 3 important things you are doing and 1 sucks, do you have an escape route or plan? Difficult? Definitely. But again, if a prisoner can escape from the most tightly guarded prison called Alcatraz, everything else is possible. If you need inspiration, go check out some old movies I find useful such as Escape from Alcatraz (Clint Eastwood), Shawshank redemption (Morgan Freedman), Great Escape (Pele), you start to realize David Copperfield only makes things disappear in front of your eyes, but these guys make themselves disappear forever.

Some food for thoughts:

'I don't mind today ends up lousy. I do mind tomorrow ending up like today'

Escaping now to a better-than-writing activity called dreamland, I wish you all the best in your great escape.

Password to your subconscious mind - 'ICDIAAA'

"Yes, you can do it"
"Do your best and let God do the rest"
"This tiger year will be good for you if you wear red"
"I don't believe in superstition, self reliance is what that works"
"Based on the law of attraction..."
"There is a miracle when you believe"

Some guys will swear that feng shui (geomancy) works, some will tell you how one event becomes the turning point of their life, some will swear that it's confidence that bring them success, some believe in perseverance, some pray hard, others pray harder...We believe that there should be only one truth but yet this truth can come in many versions :) Truth seems to be always true to those who choose to believe in it. If the rest don't believe in it, that's because they have yet to understand the truth. Well, I leave this point alone since my discussion here is more on subconscious mind.

If you observe all the quotes I have listed above, those are really words targeted to ourselves. But are they really talking to us? Or are the words meant for our subconscious brother? (see stranger in the attic for reference) As I explore subconscious mind recently, I have a strong hunch that these words are not meant for us (at least not to the conscious me) but for our subconscious mind.

It's a bit like the placebo effect where patients are given medicine which in actual fact are merely sugar pills but the patient improves his health due to strong conviction or more specifically conviction by the naive and gullible subconscious mind.

As scientists will attest, we only use 10% of our brain. The rest is basically not used or perhaps the rest is latent power in the subconscious side that have yet to be discovered with the right password. The passwords come in many forms such as feng shui, confidence, NLP, specific words that you tell yourself, memory of a person, aspiration...So, observe next time when you have a busy day ahead -what peculiar thing do you observe eg. special words you mumble to yourself, special drinks you take, special clothes you wear..those when work are the passwords to your subconscious mind.

To end, the password 'ICDIAAA' is 'I can do it again and again'

Stranger in the attic

Recently, I spent time in understanding consciously the workings of the subconscious mind. While I’m still new at it (assuming my brainpower is hopeless), there are a few interesting discoveries. While these discoveries may not win Nobel prizes nor make me walk on water, it helps a great deal in explaining the linkage between the conscious and the subconscious mind, or I prefer to call it the interactions between the management and the operation departments.

Overall, the mind is divided into the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious comprises the things we want to do consciously while subconscious takes care of the involuntary activities such as heart beating, breathing, digesting and other trained skills such as cycling or driving.

The conscious brother is the ‘I’ that we know ourselves very well. The ‘I’ that thinks, plans and wishes. This is the brother that does all the thinking. It’s the one that is talking to our spouses and friends every day. It’s the one that is employed by companies, the one that everyone knows as us. However, the brain is born as a pair of twins.

We have a twin brother besides the one that we know. This twin brother is quiet, hardworking, disciplined, and gullible and always looks up to his brother for aspiration and instructions. While this good twin brother is not a great leader, he has a lot of strengths and qualities that the conscious brother cannot do. This subconscious brother doesn’t need rest, knows all the technical stuff in the body way better than the scientific knowledge combined in the world, is constantly in charge of cell production, and can even connect with the unseen force of the universe for ‘celestial’ or ‘divine’ help or solutions.

He does have one weakness inherent to his strength – he trusts the conscious brother too much to the point that he takes his conscious brother’s messages and instructions literally –word by word; letter by letter.

So, we have a perfect pair of twin brothers. The conscious one is smart, extrovert, active, full of passion, have infinite needs but has low stamina, doesn’t know much about the workings of the body and doesn’t know how to communicate with divine forces. The subconscious brother works tirelessly, knows a lot of technical knowledge has his divine networking and takes instructions very well. However, he is very gullible and trusts his twin brother too much without questioning.

Since the conscious brother is doing all the thinking, hence the relationship between the twins if turns sour must be due to the conscious brother since the subconscious brother is only at the receiving end. What sorts of problems arises form these relationships? It is very much like a lousy boss that gives conflict instructions, breathing down the next of his staff, lacks technical knowledge but still wants to meddle, and worse still, de-motivates his team.

Now that we know we have this biological twin brother that co-exists with us, it’s time we treat him well so that he can work well for us and by that, work well for both of us. Howe can we be a good brother and treat our non-evil twin brother well? Just follow the golden rules below:

1. Tell him what you want but don’t tell him how. Let him handle the operation part because he knows the best and you don’t

2. Having confidence in you simply means have confidence in your subconscious brother. Just tell him what you want and shut up. Don’t advice him and worse still, instil doubts in him.
For example: Just say ‘I want to remember all these words’ instead of ‘I must try to remember’; ‘at least remember 60% of these words’; ‘I must not forget’ – you are just confusing your own subconscious brother

Simply put, you do your best and let your twin brother do the rest. Whether you like it or not, the guy has been living up there since you were born. Why not make friends?

Why some guys have all the luck?

If you ever wonder why some guys have all the luck while others don't, it could be more than just fate, karma, god testing your will power...don't neglect one more factor ie OURSELVES

For an incident to happen, we know it depends on the conditions causing it. But these conditions can be easily divided into 2 types : external and internal. External factors are those that you may have some form of influence or may be totally out of your control. Examples are weather, your boss, money, timing, karma...For internal conditions, there is just you and your attitude, and your stubbornness, your positive energy ie all that can be controlled by us.

If you review some of the small events that take place every day, you need to check whether the incident (or your wish) could not come true because of external factors or it is merely internal. One simple example: A female friend wants to go swimming. That's easy. But she doesn't like to go alone so she gets 2 friends to join her. But her 2 friends have menstrual cycle at different time of the month and they refuse to go swimming during this time. Now, initially it looks easy because she just has to pack her bag and go swimming. Just because she needs friends to do so, the success rate drops because the moment one of her friends doesn't go with her, she won't. Because it is not merely depending on the schedule of her friends but also also the menstrual cycle, the success rate drops even further. Now, if she doesn't improve her swimming or she feels frustrated because of not being able to swim, is it really karma? will power test? weather? or just plainly the conditions she has set?

Many will agree that life is short and we want to play hard. But if you set too many conditions for something to happen, it may not happen at all and we miss so many opportunities just because of the conditions we set. Worse still, we blame other people or external factors when we are the only stumbling block here?

So next time when you feel that you are unlucky, could you be the one that turns off the doorbell when luck knocks on your door?

Just close it

In today's working environment, everyone needs to interface with another colleague or another department especially in a matrix organization which you don’t even know how many bosses you actually have unofficially. The problem is that with the advancement of technology, everything becomes faster but problems arrive at your knowledge faster than the solutions. Each problem, with the ideas of many people, have now multiple options of solving it, going around it, overcoming it and sometimes even postponing it.

If we are not careful, options will multiply by themselves and worse, each option will multiply into many sub-options and in less than days, you will have a web of possible solutions. Then each solution or sub-solution requires some form of effort to solve and that effort creates another set of conditions and solutions (refer to ‘Solving Solutions’ if you want more details). Suddenly, your world turns into a swampy mangrove in an Amazon jungle and you wade through the muddy water underneath and the thick bushes in front and above!!

For those who can say ‘well, I can let go my work during weekend, so it is not affecting me’, unfortunately you are not spared in your personal life too. All matters, if not careful, can create a web of options by itself if we leave it unattended.

So, the key to all this is to weed the unnecessary options at a very early stage so that it doesn’t turn into a jungle. That is why each matter MUST have a CLOSURE. As you close one option, you close with it all its sub-options and complications and what you see finally is a well-kept garden instead of a snake farm ( I call it snake farm when a person’s garden looks like an idle land with weeds and usually you will find snakes lurking)

There are many things we can close as fast as it opens but we don’t. Why? Maybe because we are greedy, trying to see if some better news will pop out. Often than not, it is because we have a fear of making the decision now subconsciously influenced by the scary part of ‘what if’. If I decide to buy the laptop here and now, what if another place sells it at an even better deal? We don’t notice that when we decide to ‘wait’, we could be spending 3 weekends trying to look for the best deal, only to realize that each laptop model has its unique features and suddenly your garden of options turns into a snake farm. Imagine if you have decided on the model, at least now it is a matter of 3 stores with the lowest price and you grab.

So, if you have a tendency of leaving multiple files open on your computer while working on a project, or those that have a long to do list, most likely you are not closing fast enough. Instead of making your to do list, why not make a ‘to close list’. What are the things you want to close today?

When I was young, my mother always cooked dinner at about 5.30pm and we would have finished dinner by 6pm. I asked her why that early and she gave a simple answer, "the earlier you eat, the earlier you are free". It makes sense because if we don’t have a closure for the dinner, you will then need to re-organize all your activities around it and that creates another set of options.

In short, just close it!

Busy or don't know what to do

I once came across a quote in a shopping mall that said 'those who don't know how to enjoy life have not discovered shopping'. While the intention is to encourage spending, I think there is an alternative meaning to it. We keep doing the same thing because that was the only way we know so far.

I spoke to many people especially the successful ones and I see some common traits of these highly effective people:

1. I like to keep myself busy
2. By the 3rd day of my holiday, I find life too slow
   
3. I have dreams of what I want to do with my life, but my schedule is just too tight
   

Sounds familiar? Read on...

Would it be that we keep ourselves busy not because we want it but because we just don't know what to do with life. And since we don't what to do, then may be it is better to keep ourselves busy or to be more specific, let others or our jobs keep ourselves busy. If we know so well what we want to do with life, then how can a person be bored after 3rd day of holiday.

A little acid test to our achievements in life. List down some of your big achievements in your work and personal life. Grow sales despite economic slowdown, contain budget, bought a new house with high potential return, goes to the gym 4 times a week consistently...remember this feeling you are having now as you list down.

Now, imagine you have a colleague who is diagnosed for 4th stage liver cancer. You visit him and he tells you about his achievements which so happens to be the ones I listed above or those that you have in your mind. Do you still find the achievements very relevant in his context? Well, yes or no, you decide but one thing for sure...that guy can be you. If you find that your achievements like growing sales and market shares are less relevant, then better think again.

The power to create and destroy

No, we are not talking about super power or playing with god. Not that deep or far-fetched. We are talking about the power of parents.

When I go to a friend's place, I notice different attitudes of their children. Some greet me and ask after me. Some are too engrossed with what they are doing and cannot be bothered about my presence or probably not worth bothering.

Well, for children, having visitors was a first experience at some point their process of growing. They naturally responded in the best way they thought in that situation then and that response became their benchmark. As time went by, that became their attitude. However if the parents interfered with that response and insisted that their kids must greet visitor regardless of what they were doing then, it would influence the response of their kids.

What does this mean? It means that parents have the power to create, destroy or continue any tradition. Each generation is a cross road and the parents bear the highest responsibility. If you teach your kids your mother tongue, that it shall continue for another generation. When your kids teach their kids the mother tongue, it will then be transferred for another generation.

So parents united, use your power and use it carefully.

Happy Mother's Day!