Are You Fishing?

You are born. You spend four, maybe five years tumbling around, bringing joy to your parents, and then you are off to school. You are told that you have to study hard, score well so that you can go on to a good school to study harder. The process goes on until you graduate and go on to a nine to five job.

There you spend maybe a good five years till another better offer comes along. If you are lucky, you might get promoted so fast that you stay on the job. Nevertheless, you tumble around the job market, dabble in stocks and insurance and spend some money on the lottery. You might even try out some business sporadically for the next 40 to 50 years.

Thereafter, by official decree, you have to leave the job market when your nest egg is not even half filled for retirement. You work on odd jobs next just to make ends meet. Alas, one day you have a bad stomach ache and the doctor tells you that it is cancer. You linger around for another three to five years, 10 if you’re lucky. And that is it. You eventually leave this world with blank eyes and a gag, while your body gradually freezes and hardens in death.

Have these paragraphs described the life of someone that you have known? Or do they, at any line, describe your life thus far? These paragraphs have done both for me. My life is currently at paragraph one, going on to paragraph two. It is amazingly predictable what my life story will turn out should I continue my current way of life.

I was channeled into a mass production factory from the start. In these factories, inputs come in and outputs come out. Inputs are my youth and energy; outputs are my strong work ethics and a set of good employable skills. You might have guessed it – the factory is the education system. Don’t imagine for a second that I am berating schools or belittling the benefits of mass education. I am all out for mass education. Education is necessary to build an efficient economy with an employable population. School bound education is the way forward for many people with no bread on their tables and no food in their stomachs. Institutions provide me with the necessary skills to satisfy my basic human needs, but eventually, I arrived at a certain threshold to know that schools are not teaching the right skills to get us beyond our basic needs; beyond mediocrity.

Life is like a marathon right now. I came from 12 years of school, did my service for the nation with the Army, and now I’m back in school. At least I had a two years break from the monotonous cycle of waking up daily at 0530 to go to school, to face tests and tests and more tests. The girls of my age do not even have that chance. Sometimes I wonder if anyone feels as tired as I am while running this mentally, physically and emotionally draining marathon.

Shortly after the end of the 16 years educational marathon, we are thrown into the 40 years vocational marathon. The plan is to wake up at 0700hrs, a little improvement from the 16 years plan, trudge your half awake self to work by 0830hrs and expect to work your ass off to make someone else rich. Life takes on a new meaning from now on: 40/40. (40 hours work weeks, if you are lucky, for the next 40 years)

If you do your math, more than half your life will be over by then. The worse thing is, after 56 years of toiling, you are no better than where you have started from! You are just as broke as before, and that to me is a nightmare – a 56 years nightmare. (58 years, if you add the Army days.) I don’t want any part to play in that sad story; I have to break free of this bond!

You may be tempted to reprimand such acute egotism, and tell me to get a grip of reality and start helping those worse off than me. Sure, there are countless poorer people that I can help, but I will like to pose this question: Would you rather be a 2 hours weekend helper offering limited help; or a 24-7 helper with the financial clout to back up your charitable activities? This is a fool-proof question with an obvious question. Why commit to something that you cannot give your all? Even if you think you are contributing, are you really helping? As the old adage goes, ‘Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime.’ If I want to help, I have to first understand that receiving a fish a month will not suffice, and start learning how to fish. Helping others to do the same will be easy thereafter. With more fish than I can eat, I can help others in so many more ways than an employee on a payroll would ever dream of.

I am therefore questioning the objectives of all students who go to school tomorrow. Why you are in school and what are you studying for? Are you studying for a good pay check? Or are you studying to give others a good pay check so that you can build your business while providing employment opportunities? Are you rushing to learn how to receive fish, or rushing to learn how to fish?

I am also questioning the objectives of all good employees who reports to their jobs tomorrow. Why do you trudge yourself off to the office and what are you working for? Are you working for a good pay check to foot the bills and loan interests? Or are you working for business experiences, building up your nest eggs and investing wisely for a lucrative passive income? Are you receiving fish or are you fishing?

Ultimately, what are you dreams in life? Are you gearing yourself up to move towards those ends or are you diverging further and further away from them? Do you even have a dream in the first place? Why then rush in life if you do not know where you are going? You might be better off staying in situ.

What a shame it will be, should you rush for 56 years only to realize that you have rushed in the wrong direction. This revelation is hardly justice for trying so hard for so long. You deserve a bigger fish than the small prawn that you are currently receiving and you know it! You ought to be fishing, but are you willing to forgo the skills of receiving fish? That, my friend, is the question.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

‘The following that I’m going to share is perhaps the single most important thing that I can ever tell you when it comes to business communication,’ said Professor Michael Netzley, my Communication Strategies 101 instructor, ‘are you ready?’

‘Good communication is always audience centred,’ he said. And that he repeated again, ‘Good communication is ALWAYS audience centred.’ I couldn’t agree more.

Sun Tzu recorded this secret way back in 2000+ BC – Know yourself, know the enemy. In a hundred battles, you shall have a hundred victories. Long ago when language was first given its birth, a new battlefield was created. That battlefield remained as little changed today as it was thousands of years ago. That battle is the war of words; the battle of ideas and messages; the battle of mutual understanding.

We fight this battle on a daily basis, and not just in a business context or classroom setting. We fight this battle at home, when socializing, when reading or when writing. Colossal damages and mighty tragedies; great deeds and tremendous achievements can all be traced to the outcomes of the war of words. Look over those small and great - they take their food from a common plate. But what makes them truly great or so insignificant that you rarely know their presence is the kind of words that they say to you or me or anyone else, through their ideas cast in words that they use to talk or write with.

The key to win anyone’s trust is simple – be genuinely interested in what interests them. Everyone cares more about their own problems, period. They care about their own blisters and worries more than they do for the rest of the world combined. Naturally, they don’t care about you what you are interested in. Hence, the fastest and easiest way to enter their world and influence their thoughts and actions is to join in their narcissism. When you are willing to share in other’s interests, people will naturally be interested in yours. This is called the trading of words. Rather than trying to win a verbose war and sustaining emotional casualties along the way, why not trade for mutual benefits?

Trade is an age old practice; its benefits are known to the man on the street and are not exclusive to those who consider themselves instructed. All good economists, businessmen, politicians, hawkers and even young children know that trade is good. But still, the war of words persists in the masses. Parting with one’s money and goods is way easier than parting with one’s ego it seems.

It feels better to be listened to than for one to listen to other. To be listened to gives the speaker a feeling of empowerment, a sense of importance, and is one of the highest forms of flattery that can be shown to anyone. And so we seek ever so insistently to talk and make others listen to what we have to say. But the truth is, when you talk only about what you want and like, you deprive others of that feeling of empowerment and naturally they will not be comfortable with it. You end up being looked upon as a selfish, egomaniacal individual who is not a team player, a lousy leader and not worthy of trust and respect. All these troubles arose from your fundamental unwillingness to listen! How outrageously simple it will be, therefore, to gain others’ trust and friendship. We only have to listen – listen attentively and prompt the other person to talk more about himself. In turn he will find you interesting and will be more willing to listen to you than before.

Now we all know the goodness of trading words, but if you observe closely, wars of words are still waged in practically every occasion daily. Why is it so hard to trade words? The secret lies in our inherent self-assumed importance and our unwillingness to relinquish it. To listen is to lose that desired sense of self-empowerment. This food for our ego is so important that we can’t even contemplate about living without it for a minute! Now, a smart person will think reversely and realize that if the above is true for himself, it should be true for everyone else. If that occurs, he has just shifted his mental paradigm from that of a warrior to that of a trader. In a gladiatorial arena, there can only be one survivor, but in the world of trading, everyone gains. This brings us back to 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’s Habit 3: Think win/win.

So, now that I know the fundamental techniques of handling people, it is time to start winning more friends by developing a genuine interest in others and listen attentively while prompting them to talk more about themselves. Should be simple enough, and I sure like hell will put them into action.

Say I Can

Say I Can
John Crowe

Think after yourself my lad,
You’re all the greatest men have had.

2 arms; 2 hands; 2 ears; 2 eyes;
A brain to use if you’d be wise.

With this equipment they all begin,
Who start way ahead and say I can.

Look them over – the wise and the great,
They take their food from a common plate.

With similar eyes and forces they use,
With similar laces they tie their shoes.

The world considers them brave and smart,
But you are all they had when they made their start.

You can triumph and come to scale,
You can be great if you want it will

You are well-equipped for what fight you choose;
You have legs and arms and a brain to use

And the man who has risen great deeds to do,
Began his life with no more than you.

You are the handicap that you must face,
You are the one that must choose your place.

You must say where you want yourself to go,
How much to study the truth to know.

God has equipped you for life,
Unless you choose success or strive.

Courage must come from that soul within,
A man must furnish his will to win.
So figure it out yourself my lad,
With your equipment they all begin.

Get hold of yourself, and say I can.