4×4 lists of my writing inspiration

One group writing project has caught my attention again. This time, it comes from Joanna Young from ConfidentWriting.com. The project is requesting 4 lists of 4 items and all have to be about writing inspiration. So here is my contribution to the project…

4 sources of inspiration:

1. Conversation. Here is an article, “Dinner with Dreamers“, inspired by my conversation with friends. All of them are dreamers, and I had a great dinner and special meal with them.
2. Books & Magazines. I like reading, I always carry a book with me, and I spent much of my travelling and waiting time reading. An article that combines my inspiration from both book and magazine is “The lazy man’s guide to decision making“.
3. Movie & TV Shows. A statement by one of the actors or the presenters can trigger my inspiration. My article, “Naive’s guide to happiness” is inspired the movie Enchanted. Here is another article inspired by a TV show, “Five steps to win with your limitation.“
4. Other blogs. Since I started blogging, I read many blogs, and a lot of statements there inspire me to write something. Here is one of them, “Mindset to win sales trick.“

Read more

Popularity: 40% [?]

Seven benefits of blogging to your personal growth

How do you consider blogging?

Some people consider it as a waste of time, some people think that it’s a way to run from reality to cyberspace, but it’s not necessarily so. In fact, some people are serious about blogging and consider it as a hobby, channeling their passion and hobby on writing, or better still as a business they want to grow, business that they can run from home. Similarly, blogging is something that you can start as long as you like to learn and share information. You can even start without spending so much capital.

Particularly, personal development blogging has many benefits that I have enjoyed, it does come with a price, time and energy to do it, but you can gain much by doing it with passion and persistence. I have not tasted the returns in terms of money but I do have tasted the benefit in terms of personal development and growth.

In this post, I will distribute the seven benefits of blogging into two areas, blogging as a hobby, and blogging as a business. Both will help you to your personal growth.

Read more

Popularity: 99% [?]

The lazy man’s guide to better decision making

I’m sure that you have heard a lot about decision making by considering alternatives, listing down pros and cons, writing them down, etc. But I don’t think lazy person will do that, that’s too troublesome, isn’t it?

What I’m going to share in this article is more about the attitude you need to watch out when making the decision, it’s all in your mind and you too can make better decision if you look out for the warnings and mindset I’m going to share.

The easiest and laziest way to make decision is following our gut! I’ve shared about this in the first part of the series on decision making I have created. As what I have shared in the first part of the series, following our gut can give us better as we have no time to splash it with our doubt, fear or worry, but sometimes it will take consideration, check and re-check a lot of things before we can truly make a better decision.

Tina Su from ThinkSimpleNow.com gave me a comment in the first part of the series as below…

Learn to recognize when your gut is speaking out of fear and when it is speaking out of infinite intelligence.

Tina Su @ ThinkSimpleNow.com

Read more

Popularity: 46% [?]

How to make better decisions (Part II)

Wondering, from so many choices given, which shoes will the woman take?

Life is all about choices and decisions! Few days ago, I discussed about making better decision against your fear and with your gut. This time, I’m going to share about the forces of making decision that are coming from outside of us!

Life will give you many choices, people will offer you with so many choices, and each one of them will request something from you, your time, your attention and your money. Either to buy their product, to make a deal with them, work with them, to meet their need, to spend time with you, or to help them.

From so many requests which one will you choose?

Many things can influence us in taking the decision, but not all of them will lead us in good decision-making. Reading the Reader’s Digest December 2007 article, “10 ways to make better decisions” has given me insights on the external threats that we need to be aware of…

Read more

Popularity: 50% [?]

How to avoid busyness #2: The Procrastinator

In my previous post, I talked about busyness and the first type of busyness, the perfectionist (busy for perfection).

The next busy profile is the procrastinator, those not willing to do the important things now, but delaying and postponing the important things to later time. Then why are they so busy?

1. They’re busy doing non-important tasks, they prioritize fun and pleasure over the job and the main task they have to do.
2. They’re busy preparing, busy making up their mind, and keep on waiting for the right time to start making action. They can’t make up their mind, and indecisiveness is most of the time the time-waster in our life.

Here is what Tim Chester in his book, Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness mentioned as often the excuse of procrastinator…

I work better under pressure. I need deadline to focus the mind. I do my best work when the heat’s on.
- Tim Chester

It’s very sad that because of this we are busy at the present and the future, at the present as we keep on making ourselves busy with the trivia task and wandering between one decision and another, while the future as we are actually putting back our responsibilities where we are still going to do it again in the future.

Why are they doing this? Tim Chester mentioned two reasons:

Read more

Popularity: 50% [?]

How to avoid busyness #1: The Perfectionist

“Busy!” Sounds familiar, isn’t it? It’s an answer we got when asking people about how are they doing, an answer we got when we ask for their help, or it’s an answer that we give to people when they ask us something. Busyness is so common now, we live in information age where information are abundant, and we need to get the information faster, read faster and act faster to stay competitive in this world.

A question from Joyce Meyer that we should ponder…

Are you busy? Or are you fruitful?

Joyce Meyer

Yes, we have to consider, whether we are busy for the right reason? Do we really fruitful (productive) or are we just trying to be busy? Sadly a lot of time, we are busy not for the right reason, and I’m going to write a series on various types of busyness.

Let’s get started with the first one, The Perfectionist, busy for perfection!

Many of us introverts, are perfectionist, aren’t they? We expected that whatever we do are perfect, we’d like to re-think, re-do, re-adjust, re-arrange, re-make, re-vise, re-view, and many other “re-”s to ensure we have a perfect result. It’s no surprise that perfectionist are busy, a job that takes one hour, can be doubled, tripled, or even more because of their perfectionism.

Right now I’m reading a book from Tim Chester on guide to busyness. And it gives me a lot of insights on busyness, first for the perfectionist:

Read more

Popularity: 38% [?]

Write it out!

Recently, I read few articles from various blogs that emphasize the importance of writing it out:

1. To learn from your failure

One of the simplest and most powerful methods to learn from your experience is to write out how you would deal with it if you were to repeat it. The act of writing it out places the lesson in your mind …. Your writing becomes a plan for dealing with those situations.


Jonathan Frye (3-Steps for How to Respond to Failure @ LeadershipJot.com)

2. To overcome jealousy

By writing down your thoughts, it gives you an opportunity to express yourself, but also lays your options out clearly on paper… Ask yourself “Why do I feel this way?” Write out all your reasons out on paper.

Tina Su (9 Ways to Overcome Jealousy @ ThinkSimpleNow.com)

3. To overcome your depression

Write it down. Make a list of what’s depressing you. Take out a paper and pen, and start writing. It’s that simple. This is done to physically get it “out of your head”. Now you can look at your problems in a more objective way.


Alex Kay (What to Do and Think When You Feel Down @ JustKeepTheChange.com)

 

It’s really good to start the habit of writing. You can choose either blogging, or journaling. Before I started blogging, I started the habit of journaling. Journaling is merely writing down your experience in the day you journal. It can be a success, failure, feelings, friends you meet up with, things you learned, and so on. In fact, anything you want to write. I moved to blogging to be more focused on what I have learned and share it with others.

Here is the benefit of writing it out:

Read more

Popularity: 39% [?]

When Lazy is Better

 

One reason might be that laziness is the principal spur to creativity. Lazy people are always looking for easier, simpler, and less arduous ways to do things. If they are also clever, the chances are that they will find them, and make them available to everyone else.

Lazy people are also natural delegators, and find it very attractive to let their subordinates get on with their work without interference from above. Lazy, but bright, generals would be likely to make sure they focused on the essentials and ignored anything that might make for unnecessary work, whether for themselves or other people. In fact, it’s hard to see why you would not want your top managers to be as lazy as they are clever. It would indeed make them great strategists and leaders of people.

Carmine Coyote (SlowLeadersip.org)

I guess I’d like the word efficient better, be efficient and clever. Efficient people will find the better way to finish the task with minimum time required. Efficient people will be happy to delegate task to the right person that is able to finish the task faster, without any unnecessary efforts replication. But efficient people need to be effective as well, he/she has to be able to finish the work on time, possibly strategically. Otherwise, IT’S LAZY IN A BAD WAY.

Read the full article from SlowLeadership.org here.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Banning my own blog

Working in IT industry, having access to internet really a big temptation to lose focus at work and surf the net.

From LifeHacker, I got to know some tools to block time-wasting website, either for temporary or permanent. Here is the full article on the tools to be used. The idea for temporary block is using the greasemonkey script to block certain website at certain time of the day.

And what is the website I banned today? my own blog, this blog! I do find it really necessary, being the owner of the blog, I’m really tempted to see the traffic to my blog, finding out the website or what kind of query that people used to find my blog and so on.

Be focus and remove any distractions, both to maintain your integrity and increase your productivity. Maybe you’ll say… “but I’m multitasking…”. Here is what getrichslowly.org mentioned about multitasking:

Do not multitask. Oh, how I love multitasking. “I’m great at doing many things at once,” I told Kris once. She gave me one of those looks. “No, you’re not,” she said. “You’re great at starting many things at once, but you never actually do any of them.”

Try this tool, it will help you to increase your productivity.

Popularity: 46% [?]

Productivity: Being productive by being yourself

Have you ever tried very hard to be productive? A blogger on blogging Michael Martine has a message on blogging productivity that we can apply to anything that we are doing.

The key to being productive is not to try and be productive… it is to understand and be yourself. If a “productivity guru” said that, he would be laughed off the stage, because productivity gurus make their money by selling you formulas—science without the art. Don’t try to be productive! Try to be yourself. Expressing yourself is the art. Productivity naturally follows.

Michael Martine*

So… be yourself! That means follow your passion and calling in life! Share with others and you will be productive!

*Michael Martine’s blog can be checked here.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Next Page »