What really matters

One rainy afternoon, a certain ninja enlighten me with the art of Minimalism. A minimalist strives to live a simple, uncluttered and more sustainable lifestyle by reducing excess, removing distraction and focusing only on the most essentials. Minimalism is about simplifying your life and detaching yourself from unnecessary possessions. The one aspect of minimalism that attracts me is the focus on things that really matters. Once you eliminate all the distractions, wastes and excesses, you are giving yourself the chance to go after your dreams.

So, if you are trying to clock up that 10,000 hours, it might be wise to water down your life with a little minimalistic juice.

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In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the reason for success lies in the accumulation of experience and practice on a specific task. He said in order to be good and successful at something, you need to spend around 10,000 hours doing it. In one of his research, he discovered a disproportionate number of elite Canadian hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year. (e.g. January to April) The reason for this was since the hockey leagues determine eligibility by the calendar year, someone that is born in the beginning of the year will be bigger compared to someone born in December. This is often enough to identify the children as better athletes and once they get into training camp, they get an head-start in accumulating practices and experience. Gladwell refer to this as the accumulated advantage.

If he is right and if practice does in fact leads to perfection, shouldn't you get started on what you always wanted to do and be good at? We don't get to decide which month are we born in but we can decide when we start practicing. The best day to start was yesterday but starting today is definitely better than tomorrow.

The Great Timing Belt

One night, while I was waiting for the auto-gate to open so I can park into the porch, my car engine decided to go to bed before me. Later I found out it has something to do with the timing belt, but the first thing that came into my mind was, man it could have waited till I got my car into the porch. Then as I was heading back to my room, I realized how lucky I was to have it died right in front of the house instead of anywhere else. Being a rational and logical person, I do not believe in luck. Or rather, I do not wish to believe in luck if possible.

A rationalist will argue that I should have replaced the timing belt before it had a chance to breakdown. I agree that I could have prevented the manifestation of bad luck from having my car breakdown in the middle of nowhere. But what about those lucky moments you experience in life like having it break down right in front of your house?

Bad luck don't travel alone

The way to look at this logically would be to consider them coincidence. If something can go wrong randomly, it can sometimes get lucky too. My gripe is that a lot of people do not attribute their success to being lucky. The world is very complicated and so inter-connected that how can you be sure it was all you that made it happened?

So, yes I do believe luck plays a role in both successes and failures. My stand would be try to minimize the chances of bad luck from happening (e.g. changing your timing belt on time) and put yourself in a position that you can enjoy the benefits when the planets decide to align themselves for you but most importantly, never ever rely on it.

Little did I know how a timing belt can remind me of how lucky I am sometimes and how there are things that you simply can't do anything about. The Great Timing Belt indeed.

What are we paying for?

Did you ever stop to wonder why things we buy are priced that way? The hardcover version of a book cost more than the paperback version even though the content is the same. In fact most books are around the same price range regardless who the author is or what's inside. Are we paying for the content or the medium? This is also true for things like CDs, DVDs and even the digital revolution did little to change that. iTunes sells all music at the same price and Rphasody offers a subscription model.

Companies like Apple and Nike know that we are willing to spend on better designs and cooler branding. Occasionally, we'll splurge on innovative products like Dyson vacuum cleaners.

Quite often, the price we pay have little to with the quality or content of the product. Maybe we don't really want to pay for the content or it's just too hard to determine the price . But if you are given a chance to change the price of one thing, what will that be and why?

Choke and Clutch

Picture the final game between 2 top ranked badminton players. (or whatever sports you are familiar with) One of them is leading far ahead and seems to have the championship trophy within reach. All of a sudden, he start to lose his cool and begin missing shots that he been delivering perfectly all night. At the end of the game, he seems to be reduced to nothing more than an average player. In sports term, he choked. Choking is attributed to anxiety and failure to perform under pressure. There are however players that excel in high pressure situation and have the ability to turn things around. As you might have guessed, these are clutch players. Clutch refers to the superior play executed by the player under high pressure which dramatically effect the outcome of the game.

In a high pressure situation, do you clutch and rise to the occasion or do you choke and crumble into failure?

Driving in Beijing

During my trip to Beijing last year, I noticed something rather interesting while I was staring out from the tour bus. There are many road signs that mention "Ring roads" and upon further inquiry along with some googling, it seems Beijing is one of the few cities in the world that have rings roads or beltways. As you probably have guessed from the name, ring road is basically a road, highway or expressway around a city. The 2nd Ring Road in Beijing surrounds the city and form an area that is roughly equivalent to the old city. The later ring roads are further and further away from the city center. Most of the 2008 Olympics venues are accessible from the 5th Ring Road.

To combat air pollution and congestion for the Olympics, Beijing implemented a rather brilliant scheme to reduce the number of vehicles on the road by half. Dubbed the odd-even scheme, you can only enter the city if the last number of your license plate is in the right half for that day. (e.g. odd or even) I don't think they are still enforcing this but I can't stop to wonder how will it turn out if we were to do it here in Malaysia.

Externality

By now, everyone should know what global warming is or at least heard of it. It's a problem that is hard to solve by nature because pollution is a negative externality.

Externality is the spillover or side effect of an economic transaction that impact parties not directly involved in the transaction

When your neighbour decide to burn their trash, the smoke is the externality. If you tell your kids to never burn in the open, that's will generate positive externality as the society benefits from well behaved citizens.

Our world is so complex and well-connected that each of us generates negative externalities whether we like it or not. If you drive, you contribute to the congestion and air pollution. As I was typing this, power used by my computer, lights and fan might be produced by an air polluting coal power plant somewhere else.

I do not know the answer to reducing negative externalities. Instead I think we should focus on creating positive externalities. If the things we do can somehow benefit some parties somewhere else, I think and I hope eventually that will enough to out-weight the negative effects of our complicated lifestyle.

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Why Charlie?

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I just found out about this 3 year old Youtube video, Charlie the unicorn that has something like 40+ million views and 110k+ comments. It is ridiculously funny and random. I was curious about how this 3 1/2 minutes long cartoon became so viral. So I took the risk and watched the other episodes. Thankfully, I think I'm still sane and these are the things I noticed in all 3 episodes.

  1. Charlie's friends will invite him on a magical adventure
  2. Along the journey, Charlie's friends will make random noises/conversations that annoys him
  3. Also along the journey, they will encounter things you can't expect in your wildest imagination which will annoy and humor you (and Charlie) at the same time
  4. Near the end of the adventure, there will be a song which is surprisingly pretty catchy and of course random
  5. At the end, Charlie will be screwed in some way by his friends

Not sure if this is the formula to create a viral clip but one thing I'm sure of. This thing is pretty darn addictive to watch and probably explains the massive amount of views. Whatever it is, I need to get away from it now.