What the word means

It’s a German word, it means the enjoyment of looking at someone successful failing. It’s a very lucrative idea. I first encounter the word while watching Boston legal a few years ago. There is an episode where Alan Shore (a lawyer) who successfully defend an artist who’s wrongly detained because people are not looking it in an objective way. They are using emotions and schadenfreude is the right word to reflect such emotion.

Scientifical Evidence from Wikipedia
A 2006 experiment suggests that men, but not women, enjoy seeing bad people suffer. The study was designed to measure empathy, by watching which brain centers are stimulated when subjects inside an fMRI observe someone having a painful experience. Researchers expected that the brain’s empathy center would show more stimulation when those seen as good got an electric shock than they would if the shock was given to someone the subject had reason to consider bad. This was indeed the case, but for male subjects the brain’s pleasure centers also lit up when someone else got a shock that the male thought was well-deserved.

How it applies to everyday life

Next week is the biggest game of the year, between Collingwood and St Kilda (After a draw last week). While I am not the biggest footy supporter, however, I heard rumours that Collingwood supporters are despised because they have been winning too much games. I think schandenfreude is in play in here and chances is that if you look at it in a very objective way, why choose another losing team while clearly there is a winner.

How it applies to Corporate life

Microsoft Corporation is perhaps the biggest victim of schadenfreude.

While we all know they are developing fantastic products, however, due to monopoly and the rich CEO, it became a very huge victim of  schadenfreude.

There are a few other companies that still cannot handle schadenfreude successfully. Apple is one of them. It started in a garage and then it became a multi billion dollar companies with products that everybody love. However, recently it became a victim of schedenfreude , there is a massive antenna issue that shaken the company and also the issue with Apple trying to outbreak and manoeuvre the competitions.

How to handle it

Mudita is the reverse word of schadenfreude. It means "Happiness in a another’s good fortune". Google is one of the company that handle it quite successfully. The company has a motto: "don’t be evil". They are investing in a lot fantastic products such as the Gmail, the search engine and the android mobile operating systems and all of them are fantastically free!

How to handle it (on a personal level)

On a personal side, the idea is pretty similar. brighten up your image with a more cheery outlook, donate more to charity and help more people.

Final thoughts

I wonder whether in the future there will be a footy team that would handle schadenfreude by having a motto: "Don’t be evil". As for now, I am supporting St Kilda.. not because of schadenfreude… but because I like their red color.

Cranium.. a very nice board game.. I played it a lot since we got introduced to it (Thanks Sonia You can see the reactions from the video above.

Since early last year I have made a decision to start losing weight. I have gained a total of almost 94 KGs and was extremely unhealthy. My typical diets includes my favourite crispy skin pork with egg chiffon on rice at A1, Big Macs at McDonalds and Wicked Wings at KFC. Here is a picture of me during a fishing holiday in Phillip Island:

December 2008	December 2009

Noticed the difference?? Nooo.. it’s not the fish… comee onnnn… Yes that’s right!! I have lost a total of 12 KGs!!

What inspire me?

The most important thing behind all endeavour is the main root cause. There are a lot of totally valid reason to lose weight… but none of it really inspire me.. the following are the examples:

• I look ugly
• I look like Santa Claus (Because red is my favourite colour)
• I’ll get heart attack soon
• I am unfit
• I won’t be able to get a girlfriend

The real reason of why I should lose weight is that during a quiet session in Borders, I was reading a book called ‘the power of full engagement’. This is a very exciting book about the fundamental of energy management in human. Apparently, high performance is not by the longer hours you spent on a task but instead by how effective you do on a task. To be very effective, a human must balance between rest and work. Physical energy need to be trained to harness the effectiveness of performance, so do spiritual and mental energies which can be gathered from various means . The author used various examples of various clients that he has, including many tennis players and highly stressed executives at fortune 500 companies.

Nevertheless this book inspire me and get me going to start to lose weight to achieve better performance.

How do I do it?

I drew up a to do list of things to do. First of all I draw up a list of things that I have tried on the previous year and why this have failed:

• I went swimming with friends… but my friends are the one who pulled me out from the swimming pool to go the Jacuzzy
• Then I went jogging with friends.. only when they pulled me to a nearby KFC within the first 10 minutes to savour the wicked wings meal deal.
• My last effort is to cut down my eating.. only when they started to give me discount vouchers to my favourites restaurants.

SO HOW DO I AVOID THESE TEMPTATIONS??

As Steve Wozniak famously quote:

"If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone."

The moral of the story is: DON’T DO IT WITH FRIENDS.. DO IT ALONE!!

This actions started early in January 2009 where I started to swim everyday.. alone..

This is followed up by me buying books on how to lose weight:

THAT BOOK DOESN’T WORK!! DON’T BUY IT!! I gave up after a week of writing every single calorie that I took.

Then I started to bet with my friends, there are 2 bets, with a very expensive dinner at the end of the bet. To win the bet, I must systematically lose a kilo a month for a year. And I lost to both of the bets… this is because initially this is very easy.. but  later on they are becoming more and more difficult. As I shed more kilos, the curve of effort is becoming steeper in the later months. But it was good experience though, challenging and entertaining. I remember at one point in time, before the actual ‘weighing day’ I wore a super thin clothing, just to remove the excess weight in jeans.

I continued on to join charity runs. I incrementally increase 5 kms for each run. At this point, I will be running a 15 KM charity run. Hopefully one day I will be able to run 42 KM marathon. My dream is to join the great tibetan run and the new york city run. There following are some of my photos of the charity runs:

Besides that, I have also joined several other exercises such as tennis and badminton and I joined gym.

My reflection after successfully losing weight

Losing 12 kilos is truly my biggest achievement so far in life. My reflections are the following:

It’s a very expensive endeavour

Both time wise, psychological wise and money wise. I have to repurchase my entire wardrobe.. that costs me thousands of dollars. To save cost, I put most of my clothes in the dryer.. so that it’s shrunken. Time wise, I quit spending time with my friends. Most of them have deserted me, except for several very close friends. Psychological wise, I almost went crazy, because of the pressure to become thin when I put my bet on, I kept on working hard each day to accomplished it. Fortunately enough, the endorphin that’s produced each time I went for exercise makes me ‘high’, so that kept me happy for a fleeting moment, before I started to rushed again to work on it again.

Maintenance

The thing is, this kind of goal is not a one off thing. The moment I stopped gym/exercise, they came back.. yes.. the fat!!! The key is to maintain it..consistent exercise need to be performed..

Was it worth it?

Hell yesss… I looked great and feel more confident… I am able to focus at work better.. and avoid getting sleepy at work.

(By the way as an aside , here is a photo of a colleague of mine who failed to exercise and getting sleepy at worked… we happily decorate him while he slept at work ;P)

What next?

In early 2010, I have set up goals to gain more muscle. At this point in time I have joined gym and going to see my fitness instructor next week. Hopefully if all work out fine, I will be able to gain some muscle at the end of this year.

Btw, here’s a photo of me last week:

When I was young, my mom would bring me to a fortune teller where they can analysed your future by examining the year that they are born and the palms of their hands. The fortune teller will look up the almanac and recite about the experiences that I am having and whether or not I will be successful one day. As I grow older, I started to believe less in those things as I believe that my fate lies in my hands.  Until a while ago I was reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The story of success. It’s telling a story about how the success of a person is determined by the month or year that you are born. As an example: hockey player in Canada is born in the months of January, February or March. The reason is because hockey players are recruited during the age of 11, where those who are born in earlier year would have a bigger body size compare to those who are born on the later years. There are other examples in the book including how IT billionaires are born in the months which are similar to each other.

Nevertheless the most interesting thing that I found in the book is about this 2 lawyers:

Maurice Janklow and Mort Janklow. Maurice is the father and Mort is the son. Maurice went to a law school in 1919 and once he graduated he set up a practice on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. He married the very beautiful Lillian Levantin, who was the daughter of a prominent Talmudist. He drove big car. He moved to Queens. He and a partner then took over a writing-paper business that gave every indication of making a fortune.

Here’s a man with every indication shows that he’s going to be successful. He’s well educated, he married a prominent wife. He took risks to build up a business, however, Maurice’s career didn’t take off as it should. As a matter of fact he floundered.

Maurice got a son with the name of Mort who happened to study law as well. He went to the same school as his dad and built a law firm from scratch. He then put together one of the earliest cable television franchises and sold it for a fortune to Cox Broadcasting. He has his own plane and every dream that eluded by his father was now fulfilled by the son.

Looking in the story, both approach the same steps, however, the most crucial difference is apparently the year that they are born. Maurice was born before 1911, where after graduation, there are 3 significant world event that kill him economically. Firstly is the great depression and secondly is the second world war and thirdly is the 1918 flu epidemic. Most lawyer’s career during that time is a dignified road to starvation because very rarely lawyers are needed during those period.  In contrast, Mort is born in the 1930s, where the population is smaller and the economic is booming. Every single business that he got his hands on turned into a success. Today, Mort has offices high above Park Avenue filled with gorgeous works of modern art. The year that you are born does affect you.

History Repeats Itself.

Now applying this to my current life situation. I am born in 1984. I graduated with Computer Science degree in 2004. During that time there are many significant world event that happened. The dot com bubble burst shortly after I graduate. All of the computer science graduate are jobless for months and some even could not start a career in IT. The swine flu and chicken flu outbreak takes over the world by storm. And yes, finally the great depression repeats itself: the subprime mortgage crisis. When I looked at this, this is a sad reality of Maurice’s fate that he was born at the wrong year fall onto me.

So knowing this … what should those born in 1984 do?

In my opinion, search for the role models who has survived the great depression in the 1930s successfully and mimic his steps. After countless of research, I have found Macau Casino Mogul Stanley Ho as one of the very few person who survived the depression and thrived. He initially stayed in Hong Kong for his study but fled to Macau when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. Even though he is very poor when he came to Macau, he’s able to build up his business. he married Clementina Leitao, a macanese belle and daughter of Macau’s wealthiest man. And it was through the Leitao family connection that he can establish his gambling businesses. During a recent video interview, the interviewer asks him what makes him so successful. He mentioned about three things: education, hard working and willing to sacrifice. However looking into his life history: seemed like ‘change’ is the biggest factor.  So Darwinian theory still holds: adaptability – key to human survival.

2010

As early in 2010 I have written up my new year resolution to tackle what are the things that I am going to change this year. Look forward to completing them at the end of the year

Here is a video of Stanley Ho:

Impossible is Nothing

Since Australian Open 2010 is near.. I have been trying hard to practice my tennis! I am watching the game this saturday. My first ever tennis game!!