Go The Extra Degree

At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees it boils and creates steam. And steam can power a hundred-ton train. And just one extra degree of effort does amazing things for us, too.

212 is a very uncomplicated, simple metaphor that Sam Parker has beautifully described in his book "212: The Extra Degree."

Let's face it, there's no "secret" or easy way to success in life despite what the infomercials and spam emails try to tell and sell us to the contrary. As Parker points out, "...in many cases people will actually work HARDER to avoid the extra effort than actually applying the extra effort that will produce the originally desired outcome."

Look around you. Analyze the wildly successful people you know. Most likely you see that the difference between success and just barely getting by is effort.

Action. And doing extra. The extra degree. 212.

Parker further points out that while action is required for success, few people experience the EXTRAordinary success that comes with the extra effort. What's lacking is the COMMITMENT to achieve, not just a desire or an intention.

Yes, little differences can bring major rewards. At the Masters golf tournament over a recent five-year period, the average margin of victory between first and second place was 2.4 strokes. That's .6 strokes per day. But the winner earned an average of $344,000 MORE than the second place finisher!

At the 2002 Winter Olympics, the difference between a gold medal and NO medal at all in Men's 500 Meter Speed Skating was .26 seconds.

Are you thinking of ways you can apply this concept?

Why not one extra hour per week devoted to self-improvement and education?

And think about how you can apply this to your exercising, your family, your friends ... anything important to you that you'd like to improve.

When working a muscle, the greatest growth occurs as a result of the last, extra efforts... when the muscle is pushed to failure and beyond.
It applies to work, too. So, go for it!

(I strongly recommend "212: The Extra Degree," by S.L. Parker. A short, quick read with major impact potential at http://www.just212.com/excerpt.aspx )

Anyone who thinks sunshine is happiness has never danced in the rain

I am sure that each and every one of us has, at some point in his or her life, been visited by grief, tragedy, or tremendous loss, emotionally or materially. It may have been a serious illness or accident or death of a loved one, or we may have seen a business or professional career which has grown and prospered over many years, finally come to disaster.

To those who have suffered such a loss, their feelings are hard to describe adequately. There is a sense of utter despair, emptiness, and a numbing of the senses. It can become so intense that one actually questions the whole purpose and meaning of life. Many people are unable to come to terms with sudden catastrophic loss, and therefore, we often hear of someone being so overcome with grief that they have taken leave of their senses, they suffer prolonged and repeated bouts of deep depression, a complete change of personality.

In extreme cases, some victims of hardship lose all inclination for life at all and they commit suicide. I remember a Turkish proverb which says that the best teacher is a bad experience. We should know that during our lifetime, we must expect to be visited by success and failure, pleasure and pain, loss and gain. This is the inseparable duality of life. We cannot value anything without knowing its opposite. We must accept life as it comes, in the best of times and the worst of times, with equal grace and forbearance.

Let’s look at the words from an email that I received quite a while ago. It came as an unsolicited email and I don’t know who wrote it. But it’s worth sharing with you.

“One day, a small opening appeared in a cocoon; a man sat and watched for the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole.

Then, it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could not go any further. So the man decided to help the butterfly: he took a pair of scissors and opened the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a withered body; it was tiny and had shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would open, enlarge and expand, to be able to support the butterfly’s body, and become firm. Neither happened! In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a withered body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man, in his kindness and goodwill, did not understand that was the restricting cocoon and the struggle for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening, were nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings, so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.”

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were allowed to go through our life without any obstacles it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been and never been able to fly.

Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who tried, for only they can grasp the meaning of life. Life is not what you expect. It's what you don't expect that makes life worth living.

My life is too busy! I'll never find time to write!

When is the last time you just sat and did nothing? Or watched a sunset in a quiet place? Or stopped and really listened to a piece of music?

Unfortunately, doing things like that is uncommon in our busy lives. In recent months, my life is dreadfully hectic. There are so many things I believe I ‘need’ or ‘have’ to do that I don’t take time to recharge myself and just stop occasionally.

But shouldn’t there be more to life than rushing around and doing things every second of the day? Being overly busy results in being tired and less creative, it keeps pumped up and without time to reduce the pressure. Business fills my mind and get overwhelmed and lose track of where I’m going as so caught up in the tasks at hand.

And all of that builds into stress. Sure, a bit of stress in our lives is healthy and keeps us to deadlines, but continuous stress is exhausting and unhealthy.

When we are stressed, we become focused on only a few aspects of our lives – whether it is finishing a project, earning more money or dealing with a difficult relationship. Being so focused makes it hard to see the wholeness of life, and this can also mean missed opportunities.

If your head is always down at the desk then you may not see the perfect answer walking past. And it is hard to be creative and find alternative solutions when you are stressed and focused.

Focusing too long and hard on one thing is likely to bring up negative feelings towards the issue and your life. Stepping back occasionally breaks that focus and has many benefits.

Would you ever drive your car for years without changing tires, giving it a service or an oil change? What about an animal such as a horse – would you ride it all day without giving it a rest?

Think about star athletes for a moment. They train hard for hours every day, pushing themselves to the limits. But their training programs ease off as they get closer to a major sports event, and on the final day they are likely to do something very light and easy, not a hard training session. Why? They are letting their bodies have a rest so they will be at their peak during the event they have worked towards.

So if cars, horses and athletes deserve a break from busyness and stress, don’t you?

If you take a few small breaks in your day, and it can be five minutes of looking at a garden or listening to music, you may be surprised at how much more you can actually fit into your day anyway. The break will refresh and energize you, making the following tasks easier.

Busyness is a symptom of modern living, but you can control it so that stress isn’t a constant part of your life. Remember that you deserve to enjoy your life, too.


P/s: To all my friends out there, I’m sorry that I forgot to reply your email/msg, your birthday, wedding, etc. Hope to see you someday!

Failure is the quintessence of success

All success is the result of failure. It takes repeated attempts to succeed before success is achieved. Just think how many times you tried to drive a car before you got the hang of it. Success, of course, is "better" than failure, but success is not possible without failure. The progress of civilization is the accumulation of myriad failures followed by small successes, with the successes incorporated into the intellectual capital of mankind. Those societies that encourage failure in that way also encourage success. A father who punishes his sons for their failed attempts discourages them from making new attempts. See what I mean?

In our culture, mistake-making is not allowed, or at least it's not admitted. Sharing best practices is popular these days, but what about sharing worst practices or lessons learned? Wouldn't this approach provide some essential learnings? With best practices sharing, you run the risk of squelching innovation and creative thinking. People think: "That's how it's supposed to be done, so why should I bother to look for new and better ways?" Worst practices sharing or lessons learned leaves the door open for generating new ideas, and it provides people with valuable information about what to avoid.

No amount of analysis can replace your confidence in yourself. When you’ve made a mistake, especially a visible one that impacts other people, it’s natural to question your ability to perform next time. But you must get past your doubts. The best you can do is study the past, practice for the situations you expect, and get back in the game. Your studying of the past should help broaden your perspective. You want to be aware of how many other smart, capable well meaning people have made similar mistakes to the one you made, and went on to even bigger mistakes, I mean successes, in the future.

One way to know you’ve reached a healthy place is your sense of humor. It might take a few days, but eventually you’ll see some comedy in what happened. When friends tell stories of their mistakes it makes you laugh, right? Well when you can laugh at your own mistakes you know you’ve accepted it and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes. Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about the past. It’s easy to make new mistakes by spending too much energy protecting against the previous ones. Remember the saying “a man fears the tiger that bit him last, instead of the tiger that will bite him next”.

So the most important lesson in all of mistake making is to trust that while mistakes are inevitable, if you can learn from the current one, you’ll also be able to learn from future ones. No matter when happens tomorrow you’ll be able to get value from it, and apply it to the day after that. Progress won’t be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.

Money and dreams

Shouldn't I make money first -- to fund my dreams? The notion that there's an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn't find any.

Sure, I found tons of rich guys who were now giving a lot away to charity or who had bought an island. I found plenty of people who had found something meaningful and original to do after making their money. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the garden-variety fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, go out and make a ton of money, and then come back to the lockbox to pick up your calling where you left it.

It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world -- and psychologically adapted to it -- that you don't really want to ditch it.

I met several people who had left the money behind. But having "enough" didn't trigger the change. It had to get personal: Something had to happen such as divorce, the death of a parent, or the recognition that the long hours were hurting one's children. (One man, left investment banking after he came home from a business trip and his two-year-old son didn't recognize him.)

The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom. Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the "practical approach." But in truth, the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It's scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.

Are you a follower or a trailblazer?

If you blaze trails, you risk getting lost, risk having no one follow, risk being laughed at, risk starving, disillusion, and dying in obscurity. You also risk becoming rich and famous (which, by the way, has its own set of problems).

If you are a follower you must decide how close to follow, who to follow, and how to reconcile your life with the fact that you have chosen to follow. The real sadness is not in whether you lead or follow (both of which are honorable pursuits), but the position of doing neither, of merely wondering about, lost in a haze, gazing at empty spaces in which we find ourselves.

So many people “miss the boat” because it's easier and more comforting to follow without questioning the qualifications of the people just ahead than to do some independent thinking and checking.

A hard thing for most people to fully understand is that people in such numbers can be so wrong. A little checking will reveal that throughout all recorded history the majority of mankind has an unbroken record of being wrong about most things, especially important things.

For a time we thought the earth was flat and later we thought the sun, stars, and planets traveled around the Earth. Both ideas are now considered ridiculous, but at the time they were believed and defended by the vast majority of followers. In the hindsight of history we blindly following the follower out of habit rather than stepping out of line to look for the truth. It's difficult for people to come to the understanding that only a small minority of people ever really get the word about life, about living abundantly and successfully.

Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything — a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood. But for some reason most people wait passively for success to come to them living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully.

It's a good idea to step out of the line every once in a while and look around to see if the line is going where we want it to go. If it is not, it might be time for a new leader and a new direction.

Come on dude...Falling Isn't Failing ... Unless You Fail to Get Up!!!

A Muslim and his business

Does a Muslim naturally conflict with his business responsibilities? Does survival in the modern business world mean ignoring Islamic teaching on personal conduct? Some would say it does. Some would say we need ‘money politics’ to gain mega projects. They argue that a capitalist economy is founded in greed and self-exaltation, so no one can do business according to the Quran.

Muslims are required to behave Islamically in their business dealings because Allah Himself is witness to their transactions:

"In whatever business you may be, and whatever portion you may be reciting from the Qur'an and whatever deed you may be doing; We are Witnesses thereof when you are deeply engrossed therein." [Al Qur'an 10:61]

My intention for running my own business will not be merely to enrich myself but to earn Halal and spend in the right path. I will support the community I live in as well as the world-wide Ummah and be a good citizen, by contributing to the welfare of the needy and the destitute in society.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said, "Truthfulness leads to righteousness, and righteousness leads to paradise".

"A man continues to tell the truth until he becomes a truthful person. Falsehood leads to al fujuwr (i.e. wickedness, evil-doing), and al fujuwr (wickedness) leads to the (Hell) Fire, and a man may continue to tell lies till he is written before Allah, a liar." [Hadith No. 8.116]

Honesty and truth is especially important for Muslim business persons because of the need to make a profit and the temptations to enhance the attributes of their product of service during a sales pitch. This is why the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: "The merchants will be raised on the Day of Resurrection as evil-doers, except those who fear Allah, are honest and speak the truth." [Tirmidhi, Ibn Majah, Darimi]

Keep Your Word. In a hadith narrated by Abu Hurairah, the Prophet (peace be upon him) is reported to have said: "If you guarantee me six things on your part I shall guarantee you paradise". Speak the truth when you talk, keep a promise when you make it, when you are trusted with something fulfill your trust, avoid sexual immorality, lower your gaze, and restrain your hands from injustice." [Ubadah Ibn al Samit, Ahmad, Baihaqi]