Today Diablo 3 just being released. As a retired gamer, this is a very hard thing to resist. I am a past Diablo 2 game addict with more than 1000 hours of play under my belt in my teens. If I recall those sweet time in Singapore playing that game, I am just wondering whether I should play it again. And the decision is: NO. Simply because I am playing it through real life now.

Currently I have been burning more than thousands of hours every day climbing the corporate ladder and gathering business and technology acumen and everyday has been a real joy and fun.

I recall on why I played the game a long time ago: it was because real-life does not match the virtual. Now real-life is everything to me.

To all of the young Diablo 3 players out there, my advise is, read this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/05/09/how-i-became-a-21-year-old-business-executive/

and this

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/04/24/why-we-need-to-take-20-somethings-seriously/

and see how real life can be really attractive to you while you are in your twenties

Stay tuned until I get into level 99 hard-core character.

I became so obsessed in becoming more efficient and time effective, and that I took every single precious seconds to make the full use of it: and this include my sleep. I just got this Lucid Dreaming project at Kickstarter.com and was fascinated by it.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bitbangerlabs/remee-the-rem-enhancing-lucid-dreaming-mask?ref=home_popular

The following is a screenshot for it:

What is Lucid dreaming?

So I began my research about what is actually Lucid Dreaming. Wikipedia described it as the following:

Lucid dreaming is any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming.

In other words: you CAN control your dream! How amazing is that?? You got an extra 8 hours to do more things in life! including doing the things that you can’t do in the real life.

There are some notable example about how people used this, Paul McCartney from the Beatles wrote the song ‘yesterday’ in his sleep. As you might have known, this became the Beatle’s best selling song of all time.

Why should you do it?

After all there are only 24 hours in a day. minus 8 hours of sleep. If you can make use of that sleep, that will equates to 56 hours a week and 240 hours a month and 2920 hours a year!

In conclusion : You can do more things in life! This is definitely worth a try!

Let me know if you have done it and I can contact you on how you progress in your dream

To all of you who followed my blog a few weeks ago about how to become smarter, I am pleased to show the result to the audience:

I did achieved a H1!! Here’s the screenshot:

So the technique to become smarter does worked! I will be refining more techniques to create better study and work. Will share it more here.

Ability to focus has been one of my most important 2012 New Year Resolution. Our society evolved from hunter and gatherer into a more specialized field and they traded skills for exchange of benefits.

The ability to focus has been described in many great technology entrepreneur. Examples include the late Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates.

My challenge to overcome focus has been the following:

1. Opportunities are abundant. There are so many roads to go to Rome and I don’t know which one to choose.
2. Dilemma in execution. How I feel vs. what I plan to do.
3. How to know that what you choose is the best option?

However, the most difficult challenge for me is ‘willingness to give up’. That has been the hardest challenge for me. A lot of sacrifices along the way to focus. And this sacrifices can include: your friends, your family, your religion, your other dreams, your other goals, your love, your enemy, your fun-time and your hobbies.

How to become more focused?

I have been reading a few books and blogs on how to focus:

1. zenhabits.net – a very good blog about focus.
2. $100 start-up book – Contain a framework to choose.
3. Study hack blog – calnewport.com – contain a lot of stories about people who’s able to focus.

I have also tried a few ways to practice focus, which include long distance running and meditation.

As for today, I am going to use the technique from the $100 start-up:

There are a few  movies in my life which fascinate me, one of them is “Limitless” (Photo below) which captured my attention about how the invention of a smart-pill could change a person’s life. As you all know, I started uni again this year, so I thought why not do some research on this subject, who knows I can become smarter

Full disclaimer: I am not a doctor. If you are following my advice below, please consult with your doctor before proceeding further.

Full disclaimer 2: This experiment is real! It’s tested on a real human being: me!! No animal is harmed along the way!!

(By the way, as an aside, here’s another similar take-pill-and-get-smart movie by a more handsome actor, in case you are not interested in the first movie)

Ok now to the serious stuffs. There are a few things I want to talk about. Let’s start with the first one:

Why do you want to be smarter?

Ha! I know what you are thinking. Obviously you might be thinking I am a dodo bird that needs a smarter pill. Obviously there are a lot of reason to becoming smarter such as the following:

• Smart is the new sexy.
• I can divide my bills better when I go out with friends.
• I can calculate discount faster.

In fact none of all the above,  I tell you the exact reason:

To do the things that I love.

Not convinced yet? This will happened if I am smarter than you:

Me

You

Me

You

Me

You

Convinced now? Ok let’s get back to the core business:

Research, Research, Research

My initial discovery is by doing a lot of research in medical and law student. Amazingly, they do take medication that makes them smarter. Unfortunately those medication are illegal. Due to the illegal nature of the medication, I am not allowed to disclose what it is, but as a hint, it’s the same medicine used by war soldiers as a painkiller after they got shot or bombed.

As I don’t want to get jailed for consuming illegal stuffs, I need to take this research further and after countless nights and research, I found what it is!!

So what’s this ‘smart’ pill?

Apparently this smart pill is divided into 3 different medication:

The first one is a drug called Ritalin (a.k.a Methylphenidate). According to Wikipedia this is a psychostimulant drug approved for the treatment of ADHD or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

So what does this drug do? Well that’s basically it. Have you ever got your mind wondering around aimlessly while you are studying? That solved the exact problem. It will kill all of the distractions and achieve complete FOCUS!

Now for the second drug, it’s an interesting one. Have you ever fell asleep while studying? This second drug avoids you that. The drug is called: Modafinil. Which is a sleep-inhibitor drug. You can be widely awake for days after consuming this. With that extra time, you can consume more work and study.

So what’s missing after you are focused, and you are not sleeping?? The last part is something to fix your emotion. Imagine how boring it is to study alone in the 24 hour library, flipping through pages of thick books and creating summary notes. This third drug did just that, basically it’s an anti-depressant. It’s called prozac. Once you have taken this drug, you can better control your emotions.

What’s the outcome?

The outcome is pretty amazing. To sum it up in graphic, my brain is transformed..

From This	To this

Notice the difference??

To test it out, I am up against my mid-term exam this semester and I got a H1!! I am so happy that I even framed my exam paper. Here’s a picture of it:

Not only that, I also participated in the Entrepreneurship competition and became the top finalist!!

My reflection after becoming smarter

There are a lot more advantages that I see in life as long as you are smarter. So in conclusion, it’s definitely worth pursuing.

Next up, I am going to write the phase 2 of ‘becoming smarter’ technique. Stay tuned

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!!