人生的目的

问自己这个问题好几年了。读了许多，看了许多。最认同柯教授的说法。真的，不停的寻找。找的过程要不停创作。怎么知道方向对了？Follow your heart. 没所谓对或错。开心就好。

Video Notes: What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness by Robert Waldinger

What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life?

If you were going to invest in your future best self, where would you put your time and energy?

Project tracked lives of 724 men for 75 years.

Clearest message: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.

3 big lessons about relationships:

1. Social connection is really good for us; Loneliness kills.
2. Quality of close relationships e.g., family, marriage matters. 
3. Good relationships protects our bodies and our brain.

Happiest people in the study:

• Replace work mates with new play mates. 
• Lean into relationships with family, friends.

Audio Notes: 23 Tips to Uncover What to do With Your Life (When You have no Clue)

I listened to this episode and also went through the notes over and over again today. It is one of those times when I feel that what they were discussing about totally resonates with me. The hosts filled in the missing pieces of my jigsaw puzzle. Focus on solving problems for someone and learn skills along the way keep resounding in my head. And I created my own notes:

What to do:

1. Solve problem for someone. Find a problem you think you could solve for someone - Focus on a very specific crew with a very specific problem and make a very specific thing for them. 
   1. Why: Because learning is much more interesting when you apply it to a real problem.
   2. Tip #1: Reading, traveling, talking to people in other careers and even doing different kinds of work.
   3. Tip #2: Do something that’s hot and new where few people are experts. Eg, Bitcoin, intermittent fasting. 
2. Build a small, focused thing. Clear, targeted, focused, it’s built to do one thing well. Give it a timeline.
3. Do it with someone.
4. Keep the following mentality:
   1. What’s obvious to you is amazing to others.    
   2. Give it time. give yourself time and space to explore and develop.
   3. You don’t know what that thing you think you want is actually like. 
   4. Entrepreneurship is a long journey of many short cycles.
   5. Think of expertise not as an absolute thing, but as a continuum.
   6. Live your life. The point isn’t to find the thing you’re an expert at, it’s to enjoy yourself and your world. You will always be so much more than your niche.
   7. EVERYTHING is a gamble and there are NO right answers. Get Comfortable with the discomfort of no guarantees.

The Generation Divide

I always see myself living in this beautiful time. Our great-grandparents come from China and till my grandparents' time, they are still having like 4-6 kids. Then come my parents' time who like many of those parents in China, who were only allowed 1-2 kids. And we got more attention and we got education.

The irony is, during my grandparents' time, they had more kids and rightfully there would have no worries about who will look after them into their old age. More often then not, their children started shirking responsibility to their siblings when it came to the question of who should their father and mother stayed with. For me, it is not a question at all, there were only two siblings. Typically, the siblings will share the responsibility and the boy in the family will have to take up the bigger pie. Remnants from traditional Chinese families. Strange that when it come to such things, the two genders don't fight for equality.

For my children, because life has been beautiful for me, I will not make things difficult for you. I will make myself as self-sufficient as I can and I will not expect you to look after me into my old age. But if you insist, I will not mind :P My parenting goal since day one has been to raise high self-esteem, independent and street-smart kids. So my planning for you is only till when you begin university (that is if you can make it). I will be enjoying the rest of my time on earth with your mummy, likely around the world.

Life will be hard. House prices may escalate to what's happening in Shanghai now. Parents in Shanghai got to help their kids to buy house or give them their house simply because there is no way they can afford one in their lifetime. The traffic jam will get worse, trust me, all major cities are like so. The earth's health will worsen, the ozone layer will continue to widen. The earth's temperature will continue to rise. There could be more natural calamities. But I believe the end of the world will not come in your lifetime. I certainly hope not. You may also have a kid or two, but your parents will not be helping you to look after them. You may have to look for domestic helpers or use the childcare services. Fret not, because you can do this too. Don't forget to stay jovial and joyful.

The Many Little Pleasures in Life

Neil Pasricha started a blog sharing the many little pleasures in life after experiencing some lowest points in life. He shared with us the 3 As of awesomeness in this video - Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity. No one put it across better than he did.

The universe is humongous but life can only be found in this particular milky way, in this particular solar system. Life is found only on Earth, third planet away from the Sun and sixth planet from Neptune. It cannot be Venus nor Mars for they are either too hot or too cold for life. Hey but even on Earth, it takes a single sperm cell out of a million to hit an egg cell to produce me. And fortunately, I was a human cell and a human egg, born into a good family, able to receive education and not starve. What followed was amazing too. The Second World War just ended. The PC and the Internet grew up with me. We have got some of the best things around since they have been invented - light bulbs, airplanes, air conditioning, cars etc. Truly, we have many things to be grateful for already and life is really awesome.

JK Rowling's Harvard Speech 2008

Re-watched JK Rowling's Harvard speech twice today.

Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged...And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Steve Jobs also said this in his Stanford speech. He felt the same when he was chased out of Apple. Responsibilities and other burdens tend to pile on us as we age. Is it true that we can only find our passion when we are at rock bottom? I guess it just helps us to see better. My life is so cluttered now. I have so much to do but yet when I have a slice of time, I don't know where to start. Death or failure helps us to prioritise. That is the time when small things don't really matter.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Reminds me of friends who plan out their travels to the last detail. Reminds me of friends who stick with screwed-up working conditions because they were afraid to make the next move. Reminds me of friends who are afraid to do sales or to make a public presentation, but yet want to be rich. The joke is I stayed in a job for 10 years and it is not even a job that I like. 

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared. 

Something which I stopped doing and wished that I could do more of.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. 

I have to constantly remind myself.