It’s easy to dream.

It’s easy to prepare and work towards your dream.

However, have that feeling of immense fear that holds you back from pulling the trigger? It happens especially at times when you’d gathered all the resources, waiting just a “yes” from you; it happens when the star are all lined up and waiting for you to take that first step; it happens when that opportunity of a life time had arrived and waiting for you to accept it.

At that moment, you just freeze there: unable to respond immediately as you’d thought you’d. A sense of overwhelming fear gushing within: it’s not just the fear of failure – where you imagine scenarios that you’d screw up somewhere along the way of claiming your ultimate prize; it …

Usually when I am having lunch in a shopping mall, I’d set myself down into a state which I tuned out all the hustles and bustles that goes around me. Clattering trolleys, howling children, the drowning noise of idle chatter among shoppers don’t bother me as I enjoyed my meal in this internal oasis of peace.

One day, I sense something curious passing by – and for the first time I lift my head and it was an unusual sight. I saw a young woman, probably in her twenties, fashioning a look that was pretty odd for this age: her overly large glasses, freckled face and sporting pony tails, which looked liked a cross between Harry Potter and Ron Weasley.

As she strides past me, I notice that she’s holding handle bars but …

Call me dense, but I’m not good at telling apart jokes that sounded serious or could be a serious request.

The most annoying joking statement I had heard are ones that goes like “you’re so rich/you earn more than I do, therefore you can [do X]”. Seriously. Unless he is a friend whom I knew well, I really couldn’t tell whether is it just a friendly complaint about his financial situation, him being sarcastic or, even worse, a bitter snide well concealed as a joking remark.

Usually I’d just laugh along with it. But with all seriousness I kept a mental note of keeping a distance with these subtle complainers so that I could have a good look at their character.

* Note: This cartoon is inspired by a friend of …

This is one of the earliest quotes that I’d conceived and has since become one of my key supports I lean upon.

This especially rings true when life’s a mess and the future seemed bleak and shrouded in darkness. While it’s easier to wallow in self-pity, this is exactly when one should police the thoughts that goes through our minds. No light can come in if you allow yourself to drown deeper into a negative spiral of despair.

It takes courage to accept our sorrows and the undesirable state we are in. It takes effort to pick ourselves up and take a correction course to improve or change our situation. It takes confidence to trust ourselves that we have the skills, resources and ability to pull it off and overcoming obstacles ahead …

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. ~Bill Cosby

It’s just human being opinionated, but it takes guts to take a stand. More so if you carried opinions that is perceived radical enough to attract haters.

This card art is inspired by Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture: in one part of the speech of retelling his story on setting up a pioneering and highly successful course at Carnegie Melon University, he puts on a vest with arrows sticking out at the back and shared the following lesson:

If you’re going to do anything that pioneering you will get those arrows in the back, and you just have to put up with it.

What issues really matters to you that you don …

… in other words, we live not to attaining perfection but to ask ourselves “what really matters?”. Instead of achieving the impossible of spreading our efforts too thin to attain the perfect life, why not live a life that really matters?

What kind of positive impact you want to experience strongly within yourself? What kind of positive impact would you want to be able to share to others?

Enough whining about how our education system is not preparing kids into the real world, the following short video from The Seattle Times shows a glimpse of the future of education:

[Source: Fifth Graders Make Paper Houses from The Seattle Times]

In this video, Joe Bailey-Fogarty, a fifth-grade teacher at Frantz H. Coe Elementary school, talks about a week-long project to build houses out of newspaper and masking tape. This video really strikes me with absolute brilliance when he explains how the project works: students need to take out loans to buy building materials, draw architectural plans, work together to build the house and keep the accounting paperwork in order.

It get even more interesting when at the end of the project, students are able to sell the house for more “money” (points) for having …

As soon as I read the term “brain fart” in Neil Strauss‘ The Rules of the Game, I’m amused by the term.

In the third chapter of the book, Neil talks about how our voice is our identity and the importance of vocal training and speaking with confidence. The chapter highlights a list of common problems and one of the greatest enemies of speaking with confidence is brain farts, otherwise known as pausers.

He elaborated that we learned to use meaningless utterances of words and phrases like um, uh, like, you know as placeholders to make sure we don’t lose anyone’s attention while thinking what to say next, or as a sonar system to make sure other people understands and agrees with what we are saying.

These pausers, although being convenient, actually …

I like mangoes ever since as I was a kid. And when I got huge, sweet and freshly picked mangoes from my dad, I’m pretty excited!

A few days later, I’m peeling and slicing through one of the mango excitedly – my mouth waters as I imagine the juicy cubes of the fruit melts into my mouth. The smoothness of texture, its sweetness flowing down…

Then I noticed something black with fine brown grains… a rotten patch.

The horror! Shivers goes down my spine, the hand holding the mango trembling. My eyes are projecting hallucinations of seeing worms crawling out of them despite there were none (blame the teachers who insist of drawing a worm crawling out of a rotten apple).

It’s only later then I overcome the feeling that I carefully separated …