Back in primary school, we have a subject for life skills and one of the practical lessons that I remember most is woodworking. We’d have one workshop that situated at a remote corner of the school compound, which is built out of wood and looks a little out-of-place among the concrete buildings that surrounded it.

In there, there are lots of cupboards with toolboxes, rows of saws, hammers and other larger woodworking tools hanging on one side of the wall. The floors are totally covered in saw dust which never seem to be completely swept away cleanly no matter how much effort one have to put into sweeping it.

One of the projects is to build a small wooden stool. We’d first need to saw out pieces of wood into symmetrical polygonal shapes …

Before starting the project:

Got a great project idea, feel really pumped up about it and getting ready to make that first dash.

Read Seth Godin’s Linchpin and liked the ideas that linchpins ship. Decided to follow Seth Godin’s advice of setting a deadline and ship no matter what.

“Let’s make something out next week then! Just this small tiny feature will do.”

Feel good about being so decisive and get to work.

One week later…

Staring at bits and pieces of stuff that has been hacked together. Everything seems to only barely being able to support itself while it wobbles around like jello. Worse, it does practically nothing while all it does is just taking space.

There I was: dejected and frustrated, staring blankly at the piece of junk that’s …

I had just got myself a Wacom Bamboo tablet and this is the first card-toon that I had done digitally.

This remind me of a [great article from Dave Navarro][rock], aptly titled Give Up, explains that the reason we met with persistent obstacles and frustrations is because we are unwilling to give up tolerating with them.

Stepping up to owning responsibility and claiming what we rightfully deserve could be a scary thing, hence we allow ourselves to be hindered by limiting beliefs. David really nailed it when he says:

Whatever seems ludicrous, whatever you say “I could never do that …” to, that’s the limiting belief that you are absolutely committed to. In fact, you’re so committed to it that you’ve got a ready-made collection of reasons excuses to support it – and …

Complaining, one of our greatest vices.

Not only it’s easy to do, it’s also extremely enjoyable. Even better, you can weave any sort of excuse to your satisfaction.

The only problem with is such habits is that you may develop learned helplessness: by abstaining from personal responsibility, you may develop a worldview all problems occurs to you and you have no control over your life. Also if you happen to believe in the law of attraction, what do you think you’ll attract more of in your life?

Yes, there’ll be a lot of things that proves to be impossible or extremely resistant towards change: like what had happened to you and its consequences, or hard-headed person you constantly brings you nothing but grief. But that doesn’t equate to you unable …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Fresh out of college, I had always dreamed of becoming a millionaire. “With such amount of money, I’d then be financial free and I could a care-free life!” With that rosy goal brewing in my mind, I would constantly imagine of the things I could do with such an amount of money: the fancy studio apartment unit, the beaches I could go to, how proud my friends and family would be…

So I took the obvious path as all the kind adults has pointed out to me: study hard and land a job at a well-known, large-cap company. And the next thing I know, I got lucky – I got a prize in a programming competition and I landed my first job at one of the most prestigious IT companies in Malaysia. Just the mention …