Tips and Service

There's one more thing I picked up from USA which I feel that should be implemented elsewhere in the world and that is the culture of tipping. I've lived all my life in either Malaysia or Singapore, both countries that favour charging a service charge over tipping so I've never seen how the service industry of a country that employs tipping works but having seen it in action, I'm almost convinced that tipping is a superior system that should be adopted in more places around the world.

The rationale behind tipping is simple, people in the service industry such as waiters, tour guides and private bus drivers earn additional revenue based on how their customers feel they deserve to earn. The average tip is about 12-15% but if you're feeling generous, 18% is about right. The crux is that tipping is entirely optional. If the waiter did a terrible job at their job, the customer is entirely entitled to not leave a tip. If you factor in the measly wage some of these professions have (we noted somewhere that a waiter can earn as little a $2/hour), the money they earn from tips becomes all that important so service industry employees continually strive to impress their customers in attempts to get a better tip.

I'll pull up an example of how terrible the service industry can get in the absence of tipping. Australia is a country that not only lacks the practice of tipping, employees are all protected by Australia's insanely high minimum wage (if my memory serves me well, a stall attendant earns about $12-$16 per hour). As a result of these compounding factors, employees take for granted the belief that they are entitled to their abnormally high wages regardless of the work they put in. This is especially evident among young employees. Too many times I encountered absolutely terrible service during my stays in Australia. More often than not I meet waiters who couldn't care less about their customers, carrying themselves with a demeanor which could rival a poor desk jockey stuck with a permanent data entry job. If their earnings were determined by tips, most of these waiters won't even a tip, let a alone the minimal 10% the underperforming waiters get. 

While I'm here advocating tipping to be implemented in other nations, the critical part of me understands that the practice of tipping can only exist in a society with the culture of tipping, a culture that is sadly absent among Asian societies, particularly Singaporean society. I don't really wish to attack the culture that I live in but by and large, it's all completely true. By our very nature, we're particularly stingy over things we don't want to spend money on. A Singaporean friend of mine living in USA for a year quite shamelessly advised us that if we don't intend to visit a restaurant ever again, we could just not leave a tip, regardless the level of service we get.

Another possible problem with tipping is that the customer's perception of how much to tip may be greatly swayed by forces beyond the service employees control. If the chef is having a bad day and dishes out mediocre food, the waiter's tip could be in jeopardy because the overall dining experience is still spoilt. If a customer is feeling disgruntled for their own personal reason, again the waiter's tip could be adversely affected. I feel that Asians, on top of not embracing tipping culture, prefer predictability and having a handle on things so the unpredictability of tipping is the least bit desired.

At the end of the day, tipping is still a valid form of extrinsic motivation which would greatly benefit the service industry but it would take a culture that knows how to embrace it before it could properly function. Maybe one day, Asian cultures will learn to adopt tipping, for the betterment of service.

The Talent-less

You can go ahead and say that we're good at what we do. If anything, we love to hear compliments like that to give our egos a boost every now and then but do not ever, EVER, call us talented.

'Talent' is such a dangerous word to throw around. Most people harmlessly mean it as a compliment but calling it talent in subtle ways disregards the hundreds of hours we dedicate to our craft to get as good as we are. I'm a dancer and truthfully, performances are a thankless job. Quoting a friend, "For every minute on stage, we spend 10, maybe 20 hours preparing for it," and people who are not quite acquainted with performing arts don't appreciate that fact. Most, if not all the time, great performances aren't the product of talent, they're the product of hard work.

I'm not saying that there's no such thing as talented people. Any and every field has their fair share of people who are talented but being good and being talented couldn't be more different. Talented people may be able to catch choreography faster than you, they may require less practice to be as clean, they may be able to do tricks and stunts that you can't but even talented people aren't good automatically. It is also important to realise that the lack of talent is by no means a barrier to being good.

I think that sometimes, it's important to disregard talent. When you acknowledge talent, you're basically drawing a line between those with talent and those without and if you're on the wrong side of the line, you're essentially screwed. Even if you're on the right side, it's human nature to look upwards, to further subdivide each section into those who are less talented and those who are more talented. We watch Youtube dancers, people like Keone Madrid, Vinh Nguyen, Kyle Hanagami, Brian Puspos and some of us dismiss them as the ultra-talented but at the same time we forget how much of their lives they've devoted to the art they love the most. The hours upon decades that made them into the dancers who they are today. Even choreography is not something that comes out of talent. It has to be grown, nurtured through countless hours of labouring in the pursuit of becoming better

When you stop acknowledging talent, it's easier to motivate ourselves to strive for seemingly unreachable goals. I would grant, realistically there are goals that require talent to be reached but no one can determine the divide between what is reachable by hard work and what can only reached by talent. If we limit ourselves to the bounds of our talent, one day we'll all hit that boundary and just stagnate but if we ignore talent, we stop being chained down by that self-imposed limit. In this world, there will realistically always be unreachable goals but if we keep working towards those unreachable goals, at very least we'll find ourselves better than we were yesterday.

The Universal Balance Theory

Humans are all naturally curious creatures. We all strive to understand the world around us from the biggest pictures to the smallest details. We always try to reason out why the world around us works the way it does in order to make sense of everything that is happening around us. Some lines of reasoning make more sense than others though like how the laws of gravity make more sense than lunar landing conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, these are all attempts to understand the things that happen around us. I too have come up with a theory of my own in my attempt to rationalise human potential. I call it the universal balance theory.

Now a slight disclaimer. I'm not saying that I fully believe my own theory since I have no real backing to defend this theory nor do I intend to actually defend the legitimacy of this theory. I'm merely proposing an interesting theory to ponder about. Now that we got that out of the way, allow me to get theory proper.

Basically the premise is all of humanity shares a common pool of 'attribute points' which is proportional to the size of the human population such the attribute points per capita is constantly constant. These attribute points are shared amongst the entire population to be used to increase their own individual attributes such as intelligence, strength, appearances, individual talents, etc.. When I say attributes, I refer to inherent attributes like how some people are inherently prettier or smarter than others. Unfortunately, how these attributes are actually applied is completely involuntary, like a random stat generator in an RPG.

Now I propose that an average person would get approximately the same number of attribute points as another average person so in a way, this distribution is fair. For example, if an average individual possesses above average intellect, said individual might possess below average looks to balance out their individual point distribution.

Of course, one might argue there are plenty of exceptions to this case. My favourite example of a person who best illustrate this imbalance of stat points would be Wang Lee Hom. He's smart, good-looking, multi-talented and best of all, not a douchebag. The perfect example of an individual who has maxed out his IQ as well as his EQ while still having twice as many special attributes as an average person.

So evidently the distribution of stat points is not equal for every individual and I never claimed such to be true. A more accurate representation of the distribution of stat points across the human race would be a normal distribution centered around the amount of stat points an average joe would have. So for every perfect individual out there, there is an equally flawed individual to compensate.

The universal balance theory extends a little further than just the general amount of stat points each individual gets. As I mentioned earlier, the allocation of said points is involuntary and I believe that even the distribution of points to each stat is fair. For example, the nett average intelligence of the human race remains constant throughout time. Again, the distribution of points across each attribute is normally distributed. It may not be necessarily true that for every smart person, there is an equally stupid person. In fact, I have been told many times that stupid people far outnumber smart people and I won't be too quick to disagree. But allow me to challenge this notion a little. Sure, there may be a lot of stupid people around but how much damage could one individual stupid person do? Perhaps a few dozen people, maybe even a few hundred people over a lifetime. Now lets look at the other end of the spectrum. How many people could one smart person benefit? One Mark Zuckerberg changed the lives of an entire generation and his legacy will probably live on for generations on. That's practically one or two BILLION people who benefit from one smart person. Granted it's one really smart person but hopefully you get my argument. So in the end the effect this stat distribution is pretty much balanced.

I suppose at the end of all this, there are a few points I'm trying to get at. The first would be that we as human beings haven't gotten any better over time. We haven't gotten any smarter, any better looking, any more talented. We are still pretty much the same species of human we were thousands of years ago. Of course now we have better facilities and technologies but naturally we are the still the same. 

The second would be that in a way, the world is fair. No matter how you skew it, the balance of humanity is well, balanced on the grand scale of things. Everyone is born with their own strengths and weaknesses. And for those who have more weaknesses than strengths, that's just the unfortunate circumstance of being on the wrong side of the bell curve of humanity. The only thing we can do is suck it up and move on (and perhaps hope that our descendents get better luck from life's random stat generator).

Something To Prove

I have a small confession to make. I have come to believe that I might have a minor inferiority complex. Not the sad type of inferiority complex where I feel small and insignificant and that I will never amount to anything. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's the type of inferiority complex where I constantly feel the need to prove something. Not necessarily to prove something to someone, just to prove something. It's that feeling where I just feel the need to accomplish something.

This complex is probably one of the driving forces behind the formation of my current personality. I will admit, for the longest time I've always been hounded by a constant nagging need. The need to be cool. I can't really remember where this need manifested from but I do know that I have had it for as long as I can remember.

I'll be perfectly honest with myself. I wouldn't consider myself a very normal person by societal standards. On more than one occasion, people's first impression of me is that I'm weird (occasionally the qualifier 'weird Malaysian' is added for nationalist emphasis) and I felt that this seriously hampered my chances of being the hip kind of cool person.

Since my chances of being that type of cool person were throw out of the window, I decided to approach being cool from a completely different perspective. I tried to approach coolness by being entertaining and as a result, my personality shifted to become the comedic, overly-dramatic person that I am now. The best way to describe my personality would be that of a cartoon character, over-the-top yet never ceasing to bring a smile to people's faces.

Of course, this need to be cool affected more than my personality. I believe that it also drove my passion for dance. At first, I picked up dancing out of jest but then I suddenly took it so seriously that it now has become an inseparable part of my life. I think the reason why this happened was because I found out how cool dance was but more importantly, I found out how cool it was to be a dancer.

You might have heard the dancer quote "dance to express, not to impress". Honestly, I never fully bought that quote. I believe that on a subconscious level, one of the reasons why I pursued dance so fervently is because I wanted people to find me cool and to stroke my ego. After a while, I succeeded in making people think I'm cool because I dance (as per feedback of most my friends). But then suddenly that was not good enough for me. Suddenly I wanted other dancers to find my dancing cool, dancers that I think are cool and godlike themselves. This eventually became a vicious cycle of pursuing greatness as when I finally earn the respect of good dancers, I have the urge to become cool in the eyes of dancers that are even more amazing. In the end, I became locked in a cycle of constantly trying to outdo myself as a dancer.

Now, my pursuit for coolness, despite being quite a large part of my inferiority complex, isn't the only thing I needed to achieve. To quote Steve Jobs, I have this need to put a dink in the universe. Ok, perhaps not on the same level and scale as Jobs but I certainly have a need to leave my mark on life. I have probably mentioned this somewhere before but this is the reason why I'm always taking up all kinds of responsibilities. Aside from simply challenging myself, I choose to take up all these responsibilities because that is my way of leaving my mark on as many lives as I can. Ever now and then, this need becomes my own undoing as I get crushed under the weight of the responsibilities but in the end I still regret nothing. In the end, I only do what I do because I want to do it and I choose to do it.

Steve Jobs once said at a Stanford commencement ceremony, "Stay hungry, stay foolish". I fully intend to do that just so that one day I can prove to myself that I have become cool enough to impress myself.

In the Solemn Defence of All Things Weird

Just imagine this for a moment. You're standing at a bus stop as the bus you're waiting for approaches. You board the bus, pay your bus fare and walk in to find your seat. Then suddenly you notice a guy casually doing a handstand against the side of the bus with the most deadpan look on his face. What are your most immediate thoughts of the person?

Some of the more open people would probably just think 'Cool' and move on with their lives without anything more than an impressed eyebrow raise. The slightly less open people may probably think 'Okay...', look confused for a moment but still continue on their path to find their seat without any negative impression of said person.

Now we look at people who are even less open and that is where things start getting ugly. Thoughts like 'freak', 'retard', 'crazy person' and maybe even 'mental hospital escapee' start popping up. Muttering "siao" not-so-under their breath or even blatantly just shouting it the person. Making terrible jokes about the person, thinking they're out of hearing range when really they are. And then suddenly, just because he's doing a handstand in a public bus, he becomes a bad person. It may not be entirely obvious but he has just labelled and socially outcasted just because he stood out.

I'd pose a question to everyone. What exactly is wrong with being weird, being different? I'll qualify my question a little bit. People who are weird in the sense that they hit on random people, invade people's personal space and stuff like that, those examples I concede are cases where it's wrong to be that weird but by no means can we pigeonhole ALL weird people with the above cases of weird people. Just because weird people are a little more difficult to understand doesn't automatically make all weird people closet perverts and axe murderers.

Now why exactly am I defending weird people? Well for starters I'd be lying terrible if I said that I wasn't the least bit weird but the biggest reason why I defend weird people is because they are often times the most interesting group of people I know. Weird people tend to have more character depth than conforming individuals who just end up being carbon copies of the next guy. I mean, the last adjective you would use to describe a weird person is boring. Take the time to talk to a 'weird' person and leave your mind wide open and you'd know this too.

I'll take an example of a conversation I had about doomsday. My friend said that if humanity was about to go extinct (for argument's sake we said that this was a confirmed issue), she'd want to quickly kill herself before everyone else died so that when she went to Hell (and face it, most of us probably will too) she'd be able to better picks on things like land and accommodation. Furthermore, she'd be able to hoard goods at cheap prices since supply would great outnumber demand and possibly make a killing by selling her hoarded goods back to the rest of mankind once doomsday hits. Now do I agree with anything she said? To be honest not really. Did I find it the least bit logical? If I accepted the wild premise that Heaven and Hell are just extensions of the real world, then her logic is technically sound. Then again, I never did accept her premise so by extension, I didn't accept her logic either. Did I find that doomsday discussion interesting? Heck yeah.

And that is why I like mingling with 'weird' people. I suppose all I wanted to say is that we should just have a more open mind to different people and take life a little less critically when we don't need to be critical. We're all human and we all have limits to our comfort zones but open up your comfort zones a little bit and you might just let in a brilliant new way to see the world you thought you knew.

Confessions of a Sai Kang Warrior

(Pre-blog note: For those who don't speak Hokkien well/at all, 'sai kang' roughly translates to 'shit work' and is usually used to represent menial tasks or simply work that no one wants to do)

In my last post, I talked about one aspect of myself (being hyper) so I thought I'd use this opportunity to talk about another aspect of myself, being 'on'. A brief history lesson now, prior to coming to Singapore a few years ago I was pretty comfortable with drifting through life but the moment I came to Singapore I decided that I would turn over a new leaf to mark this new beginning. Thus, I hopped from the drifting end of the involvement spectrum all the way to the to the hyper involved end.

From my first year in Singapore all the back in Secondary 3 till now, I have volunteered/ran for/self-nominated myself for every committee position/key role/responsibility that I could get my hands on.

Trivia-break. Back in secondary school, my classmates nicknamed me 'Nitro' which was the result of some twisted train of logic which somehow went like 'enthusiatic --> enthu --> N² --> Nitro' (surprisingly the name still managed to somehow capture the essence of who I was/am).

Anyhow, fastforward to present time. I'm currently in 4 clubs (one of which I currently president of >.<) and the dance choreographer for SoC's Rag Dance (Rag is sorta like a Chingay type parade, it'll take too long to explain in full). I'll be totally honest with you guys, never once have I wanted to run for the sake of filling my CV (though it does feel good when I look at my CV and say "Damn, it did a lot of shit"). I mean, it's kinda like working for the sake of the money, after a while you're just going to end up jaded and start hating your job. And that is why I've told myself that I'm doing all these jobs because I want to. That way I always have the resolve to see my work through.

I've come to the realisation that I'm sort of like a shark. A shark has to constantly swim in order to survive, much like myself. I constantly need to be doing something or else I start rotting. It's either I'm full out doing something or I'm full out nua-ing (like a tofu). I can't quite tell if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I have yet to find a middle gear between the two.

After all these years of being a sai kang warrior, I've discovered yet another rather important perk about being a sai kang warrior. I found out that the pre-working environment is the perfect place for all trial-and-error experiments regarding any responsibility-related. It's the perfect sandbox where we are allowed to screw up with (relatively) minimal repercussions. It's nearly impossible to not screw up the first time we do anything so why not try while the cost of trying is still small?

I'll end this blogpost with a thought that I was once told:-

Never call your work sai kang because if you call it sai kang, you're only degrading the work that you are doing. There is no such thing as sai kang because any work you do, no matter how insignificant it may seem, is still important - Patrick Loo

A Keen Sense of Insanity

Greetings poor Mr. Blog. I'm sorry I haven't been visiting you very often. I have been, still is and will be very busy with Rag Dance but I'll try to come around as and when I can okay?

Never mind that. I digress...

Back to the subject title. Recently I just came back from a 4D4N stayover camp better known as the School of Computing Freshman Orientation Camp (SoC FOC). I think the name of the camp best speaks for itself what the camp was about. My role in the camp was supposed to be that of a fake freshie but my cover was very quickly (albeit unintentionally) blown by one of my orientation group's (OG) group leaders (GL) so I ended up being my OG's fake GL/mascot for the rest of the camp.

Now anyone who knows me well enough will know that I'm a hyperactive bunny when I'm in camp mode. I figured myself to be a rather animated person under normal circumstances so being in camp mode just exaggerates the crazy person that I already am. This behaviour stems from one of my many life philosophies. I believe in creating moments regardless of the personal social costs. To rephrase that, I'm the type of person who doesn't really care if people are laughing with me or laughing at me, just so long as they are genuinely laughing, like being a jester of sorts. It's a whole lot easier to keep people hyped and keep their morale up when you have a hyperactive crazy dude prodding them from behind. That and generally people are more inclined to have fun at the same time.

Which now brings me to the final point of this blogpost. I think being slightly hyper is an important trait to have yet I don't think I'm wrong to say that most people shun it. Granted, there are a great many situations which call for utmost seriousness but that doesn't mean that ludicrousness has no place in our society. Maybe it's in our Asian blood to be conservative and all but I swear, sometimes we are just too quick to reject anything that either stands out or is simply out of the ordinary.

Nevertheless, I suppose I would be asking for too much if I wished that everyone be a little more hyper and I will also concede that not all people are cut out to be hyper. So that being said, I think I'll just have to contend with being one of the few crazy people around to light up people's days for now, for better or for worse =D

Greatness

Don’t we all want to be great? Don’t we all want to have that feeling of being able to honestly say to ourselves, “I am awesome”? Don’t we all? Yet, why is it that so few of us actually strive to achieve it? A good majority of us end up settling for less, settling for average or worse still, settling for mediocre.

It’s true that not everybody can be in the top 1%. It is true that in most cases, every winner will produce losers to similar effect. I will certainly concede that a sense of realism is important. Yet, in this morbid realisation of reality we tend to forget one thing. Greatness isn’t something that is given, it something that is achieved.

I suppose one reason people would settle for average is how daunting the path to greatness seems. It’s a given that not all individuals are born equal and it’s easy to blame the lack of opportunities or natural talent when we decide to give up on pursuing greatness. However, I believe there is one very big misconception of greatness. Greatness is not absolute, it is relative. To be great does not necessarily mean that we would have to be globally recognised or be the winner of some highly sought after prize simply because not everyone has the calibre to pull of such feats.

The point that I’m trying to get to is that of potential. Not everyone is cut out to be Einstein or Zuckerberg and that in itself is what makes them the geniuses that they are. Yet, I believe that everyone has the potential to be great. Like a hearing-impaired person learning how to dance or a local choreographer’s dance item that sends goosebumps down one’s spine, the ability to fully utilise one’s potential is what defines greatness. All people can achieve greatness. That is what I believe. It may not be ground-breaking or world-shaking greatness but still greatness that can touch the lives of others.

Then again, you might ask yourself, why on earth am I making such a fuss over others? If others choose to settle for less than greatness, what does that matter to anyone else? The only person who is left miserable is the person who didn’t attempt to pursue greatness. To those who share those thoughts, I will say that greatness is not a means to an end or an end in itself. 

Greatness catalyses greatness. Inspiration inspires inspiration. Have you ever witnessed a moment of greatness, be it real or fictional? A moment where your world seems to stop spinning as you bear witness to a sight so epicly mesmerising? A moment that simply drives you to tears with its majesty? Of course, these moments are not limited to human creation and I grossly exaggerate my descriptions but it is moments like this that drive other people to pursue greatness. These moments serves as testaments, showing us that greatness is achievable. They propel us to strive to recreate those moments of greatness for ourselves and in the process achieving greatness. 

I’ll end this blogpost with a quote from my favourite geek webcomic, xkcd.

You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process – Randall Munroe as zombie Marie Curie

Trials and Errors

Fear is a necessary evil. It keeps us safe. It keeps us sane. Like most other developed instincts, fear stems from our need for preservation as a species. Without fear, we would lose our inhibition for self-destruction altogether. However, fear itself isn't perfect. It cannot completely distinguish what is truly detrimental to us from what isn't. So as a safeguard, fear takes effect against everything in the grey zone. To protect us from what will harm us. To protect us from what might harm us. To protect us from what won't harm us.

It is necessary for us to take control of fear, not let fear take control of us. As a boy, I was deathly afraid of failure, deathly afraid of embarrassment, deathly afraid of being an inconvenience to others. Thus, that little boy never tried, bound by the invisible grip of fear. But one day, that boy realised that not all fears are to be feared, that death was little more than an exaggerated figment of his imagination. Thus, on that day the boy made a resolution to live a life of living, even if it kills him. For even if he died, at least he died living, not died dying.

It is necessary to live not inhibited by fear, nor ignorant of fear but alongside it. Fear is a necessary evil because it is by definition, necessary. To live a life without fear is stupid but to live a life governed by it is sad. Thus, I walk, hand in hand with fear, into the abyss of the unknown, so that one day I may meet the face of what I so feared.

Because it is necessary to understand that in life, if we never try, we will never fail but neither will we ever succeed.

A Life on Stage

Alternatively titled "Why I became a dancer/performer"

To all my friends who have never been on a stage/performed in front of an audience, I'll tell you one thing. The feeling one get when on stage is unlike anything on Earth. There are a number of reasons that drive performers to be performers. Nevertheless, I'll just mention the reasons why I do so.

Firstly, it's simply because on stage, I get to live a whole new life. I've had my fair share of stage performances and I'll tell you, for those few minutes I'm on stage I feel most alive. My dance instructor once said "We you're on stage, you get to be anyone and anything. So much better than living your old boring life," and I couldn't agree more. On stage, we can get away with doing close to anything that is allowed by law. It's probably the only place where people will CHEER a performer when he cross-dresses (thanks ACS(I) Drama for burning my eye on way too many occasions). In a nutshell, when we're on stage, we cease to be us. We instead become the characters we have been chosen to play, for those few minute we have on stage.

Secondly, it's because I want to say something. Much like why politicians do what they do, performer perform because they want to be heard, be it with their words or otherwise. Dance was, is and will always be a form of expression. It's the visual interpretation of music. Even if I'm just performing another person's choreography, in the end when I'm on stage it's just me and the audience (and the other dancers of course). The point is, even if the words are not mine, it's me who's having the conversation. It's me who's having that connection with the audience and nothing can replace the feeling of connecting with an audience. I'm not quite at a level where I'll be able to pull off my own choreography but I hope to be able to one day.

Lastly, it's because I want to entertain. I want to be able to create a moment for my audience, even if that moment lasts for well... a moment. The famous anonymous quote saying "dance to express, not to impress". No matter how noble the intentions of the quote are, the quote by itself fails to see that dancers are at then end of it all still performers. To dance without any regard for what the audience might think is quite frankly just masturbation. Besides, I shudder to think they may be dancers who would not feel the slightest bit of happiness when they see how much enjoyment their audience gets. Don't get me wrong. I do believe to dance simply for the glitz and glamour is like smearing mud on the good name of other dancers but that doesn't make the other extreme any better.

At the end of the day, I dance because that's what I love to do. Dancing is by no means an easy thing to pursue. If I didn't have as much vested interest in dancing, I probably would have quit a long time ago. Thankfully, I love it as much as I do since I cannot imagine myself in a world without dance.

Drive and Aspirations

There will exist that one thing that a person is willing to spend the rest of their lives doing. That's what I truly believe in. I mean, I feel that I'm truly privileged to have found the things in life that make me feel alive, the things in life that I'll be doing for as long as I can. I've talked to friends, people who are deciding what course in university to pursue, people who have entered into the working world, and I have come to the understanding that maybe it's the norm for the common man to have little idea of what they want from life.

What are the most common fields of choice fresh undergraduates choose to pursue? For some of the brighter individuals, it's always the choice of law, medicine or business. Why? Simply because those are the choices that are likely to lead to the most profitable careers. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all law and med students are in it for the money. But there's a point to be noted when an individual puts Law and Medicine as their top two choices for uni when in reality they are absolutely nothing alike.

I've been told before that 90% of people hate their jobs and it seems that some of my working friends support this statement. This has led me to question, "Why on earth do people continue to strive at something the despise?". I grant, not everybody may have the ability or the circumstances to allow them to pursue what they really want but 90% of the entire workforce? I'm hardly an adult myself but I refuse to believe that dreams and aspirations are really that much a fairytale, figments of a immature man's imagination.

I truly believe that every person has at least one thing that they want to do, that one thing makes the world and all its troubles seem insignificant. And if there really exists that one magnificent thing, we will want to keep doing it over and over. Eventually, we would become so good at the things we're passionate about that the larger society will find a use us, a use that both benefits society while allowing us to pursue the things we really have a vested interest in.

At this juncture, I should qualify the difference between passion and escapism. Playing computer games simply because we're too jaded to do anything else should not be confused with passion. No matter how much vested interest we may have in these activities, at the end of the day we're only pursuing them as a form of escape. On the other hand, if we are willing to put in as much effort into such 'escape' activities as say, a Korean professional StarCraft player, then that may be considered passion (of course, nobody should ever estimate the amount effort Korean StarCraft players put into their profession. E-sports is as much a legitimate sport as any when players are executing over 300 actions per minute).

Nevertheless, there will always be a trade-off. We cannot simply be good at something and expect employers to drop from the sky to offer us jobs to do specifically what we're good at. They is always some middle ground to be broken. For example, if one is passionate about cars to the point that one buys all kinds of car magazines and the like to keep up with the specs of the latest model, perhaps one could pursue a job where one actually designs car parts. Sure it's more work than sitting on one's ass while scrolling down an automotive website but one is still working with things that spark one's interest more than the average man.

So yeah. Don't settle for the average. Don't just dismiss dreams as simply dreams. Life is too precious to be spent hating it.

"Stay hungry, stay foolish." ~ Steve Jobs

The World Through Different Eyes

One of the things that has fascinated me till this very day is people or more specifically how different people perceive the world in different ways. I mean I'm only one person so I can only see the world in one way. So I always find it so intriguing how the world may look to another person. Some people may travel the world in search for 'exotic' people and cultures but to me, the person sitting next to me is as just as exotic as some other person on the other side of the globe.

Of course on the surface, people of the same culture will appear similar to one another but if we look deep enough, we'll find all the difference in the world. Every person grew up under different circumstances with different families, mingling different people, with different goals and aspirations. So I always find it most interesting listening to the daily life stories of different individuals, as if vicariously living their lives in fast forward for those few moments. To take the time to listen to the life of another is probably as interesting, if not more, as taking a holiday to a far off land to experience exotic cultures (at least that's what I believe in).

Same thing with artists, dancers and the like. Their works, their styles, are all embodiments of who they really are. Seeing a dancer freestyling in a cypher or capoeiristas in a roda is almost like having a conversation without words. Watching a person's honest choreography is like having a screen the looks right into the soul. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I choose to hang with these kinds of people.

But yeah, next time you have the time with someone, just sit down and listen to how the world looks like through a different pair of eyes.