The man with the golden investment

It's 8:21 now.
I'm wondering how long it takes to write (and edit) a 450-word piece...


I know a man. he's got this sure-thing investment. pays him thousands—a month!
it's got an almost-certain growth rate of between 10% and 15% annually, plus dividends.
this guy's investment is so certain, in fact, that he's bought a car and a house with it and plans to send his kids through college with it.

on just thousands a month? you bet.
see, banks allow this investment as a collateral, so he can get virtually all kinds of loans with it. and pay off the instalments with it.

his investment also comes with its own particular derivative—about 11% of his monthly returns are automatically reinvested, and they in turn earn him about 6% per annum.
quite a cushy deal, innit?

since he was doing so well with this particular investment, I asked him, "why not invest in other things also?
you know, like a 'never mind if the dollar drops, my gold is rising' kind of thing.

he gave me a knowing smile.
"too risky. I could lose money with those. with my single investment, I'm guaranteed of returns as long as I show up at the investment centre every workday."

"what?" I asked him.

"oh yeah, it's great. there's no money down. just show up, get busy, and the money comes rolling in like clockwork."

"have you factored in the opportunity cost?"

he stared blankly at the horizon for awhile. just a moment.

"too complex. not bothered."

he looked at his big shiny watch.
"oops—gotta get to... my investment centre."

"what if it crashes? what if your investment crashes? what if you can't put in the time anymore?" I yelled after him.

but he was gone.
off to maintain his precious investment.


it's 8:34 now. I've finished the first draft.
not exactly 450 words, but I  felt that the point was conveyed and I didn't want to belabor the point.

8:44 and I'm done editing.

8:50 and I've finished polishing.
29 minutes in all...

see you next time—when Spider Man says:
uwheeeoo uwhooo!

When you edit, don't write

Last night, I adopted the intention of writing 450 words a day.
at first, I thought of writing 750—the length of a standard column, about 5 minutes of reading for the average person.
then I thought to myself, what would I like to receive, if it were me on the receiving end and some other slightly narcissistic writer on the other?

I'd tolerate about three minutes of daily reading from the same person, I figured.
so I decided to try for 450 words a day.

lucky you.

that doesn't mean that I actually expect any individual to read every blog post I write (there might be exceptions—I met a "stalker" recently ;) ).
hey, I don't even know what I'll be writing about, exactly.
it's more of an exercise, kind of like walking every day.
some things won't make it into the public arena.
I don't even know if what I'm writing right now will make it out of my Google Docs.
but that's the secondary concern.
the first is to write.

one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from someone who said:
get two hats.
label one "writer".
label the other "editor".
when you're writing, put on the writer's hat, and don't edit until you're done writing and have put on the editor's hat.

it's really impossible to write and edit at the same time, and produce prose worth reading.
cousin to that is the fact that unedited prose is also usually not worth reading.
(unless you enjoy reading and editing at the same time. but how can you absorb knowledge while being a grammar nazi?)
yes, I know Nazi is spelled with a capital N.
I just don't enjoy using the word, so I left it with a lower case N, hoping to evolve it into a generic descriptor for an obsessive jerk, and dissociate it a little from the proponents of a particular evil ideology.
see, this kind of explanation normally gets edited. I wonder whether I'll edit it out, after I'm done writing this?
one never can tell.
well, I decided to leave it in because

1. it's "just a blog" and
2. it's my blog.

I wonder whether I'm weird, sometimes. I think I am, but who can help their weirdness?
we were sharing "highs and lows", as is our custom in my small group at church.
my "high" was the fact that Microsoft has decided to support ODF natively in Office 2007.
that revs my engine, but I wondered whether anyone else even understood where I was coming from.


I just discovered my cousin Joshua's blog—Joshification: the process of becoming me.
I think that's one of the best blog titles I've ever read.
it reminds me of Dupree in You, Me & Dupree and his doctrine of youness.

what do psychiatrists say when they meet each other in the elevator?
"good morning! how am I today?"

a different but related question:
who have you been today?

Here In My Home - Malaysian Artistes For Unity

Doing my bit ;).

Work is the new Job

It was 1996 when I started to feel dissatisfied with the irrationality of the workday.
I felt it was silly to clock in and out at set times every day, whether there was work that warranted it or not—whether there was work that could be done during the agreed-upon times of "work" or not.
some things could better be done outside the 9 to 5 window. some things could only be done outside that window.
and yet we slavishly clocked in and out.

I began thinking about the divine order of work as told in the creation story of Genesis: "six days shall you work." (and not necessarily in an air-conditioned box made by human hands.)
taking a "day" to mean twelve hours (because before the invention of the electric light, you really could work only about twelve hours a day—and less in winter), this translates to a 72-hour work week.
into this window I include all manner of work, as Charles Handy categorises, "wage work, fee work, gift work, study work, homework."
and all this work should be done when they're relevant, at the best times to do them.

people looked at me like I was strange.
some said I was lazy, reluctant to "go to the office".
(how many lazy folks do you know, gun for a 72-hour work week?)

of course, I in no way think 72 hours a week at the office is ideal.
72 hours of productive work wherever you are, however, is a different deal...

anyhow, what with "knowledge work" and "outsourcing" and "lifehacks" and "lifestyle design" (and "Getting Things Done") coming not just into vogue but into the public consciousness, the things I used to rant about are gradually no longer strange and fringe but becoming the new work.
so I'm less of a rebel as the days go by.
and more of a bandwagon rider.

sigh.

ah, well.
the important thing is that humanity evolve.
after all, work is what you do with your waking hours.

to get up to speed, check out The 4-Hour Workweek and Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.
and see these blog posts by Tim Ferriss, on the Results-Only Work Environment.

also read what once upon a time helped form my thoughts on the matter of work unbound by time and place: JobShift; You, Inc. and The Age of Unreason.
(there was also an early book on Telecommuting that I used.)

people like Michael Moore may rant and rail about downsizing, but what's the solution in the face of unavoidable global competition?

have you heard the saying, "the job is dead; long live the work"?
how can a person who has been schooled from preschool to postgraduate studies in becoming a mindless (or in the case of knowledge work, mindful) drone in the organisational machine understand that saying and profit by it?

the job is as dead today as the floppy disk was dead in 1998.
meaning to say that it was not dead at all, but dying.
to the masses it seemed alive and well.
but visionaries like Steve Jobs (hate him or love him) saw it as it really was: obsolete and steadily disappearing.

leave the complaining to someone else.
my friend, how are you going to cope with a steadily disappearing job market?
(Jack Welch said, "we didn't fire people; we fired positions.")
what will you do if your job becomes redundant? if your job is manufractured?

this exercise might help:
"what is my job?
what is my work?
what is the difference?"


the floppy disk did eventually die (if you don't count those in museums and geeks' basements).
but portable storage did not die. quite the opposite—it boomed.

can you see?

How to put more peds on your pedometer

I’ve achieved my goal of taking a walk every day.
you won’t believe how…

I’d planned to take the stairs every day, up to my 6th floor office.
some days I’d succeed, other days the daunting task would get the better of me.

recently, I’d decided that I would always take the stairs. going down.
heheh.

okay, it’s not as dramatic, but it works. I’m now walking every day!
when I want to go up to my office, I take the elevator to the tenth floor and walk down six floors.
every time I want to leave my office, I walk down seven flights of stairs (six floors plus the plaza).

again, it’s not so dramatic, but it works. I’m walking every day and feeling physically better. even lost a bit of weight!

better less drama but workable than more drama but unworkable, no?

See more progress on: take a walk everyday

Are you ready to be your own corporation?

With all this fracturing of businesses into different and smaller units, employers can't guarantee jobs anymore because they don't know what their companies will look like next year. Everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor. --"What in the World is Going On?"

And every company is on its way to becoming a manufracturing corporation. link thanks to Dr. Alex.

If Facebook were real

Poke! anyone for Scrabble? thanks Mei Li for the link.

Schweppes: Burst

See with new eyes. taste with new tongue. thanks to carnaen for the link.