Human beings naturally seek happiness in life. But how can we find it?
Real happiness comes from within. It’s really a matter of personal choice. Yes, life is always about making choices. And that includes how you choose to feel. If you choose to feel horrible even when you live in heaven, *shrugs* – nothing helps.
Gratitude makes us appreciate life and feel satisfied with things we have in our hands. A poor person who’s grateful can live a happy life despite having little material belongings. Gratitude is like a pair of magic spectacles. When you wear it, you can see simple miracles happening every moment in life.
A sense of purpose in life is like a warm blanket covering us during cold days. Having a role to play in society and contributing to humanity helps to keep us grounded. Without a sense of purpose in life, we’ll feel stagnant and miserable. That’s why it’s healthy to engage others and stay active in society. It’s a powerful mood booster.
Our social aspect in life affects us significantly. How happy can you be when you live alone like a hermit? How nice is life when you have a lot of enemies surrounding you? Invest time, money, and energy in your social life and make more friends. You would like it when you are surrounded by many happy faces. It’s warm to have people laugh with you.
Standing firmly with both feet on solid ground is important. I’m saying that reality in life is important and still relevant to our state of mind. I bet you won’t be in happy mood when you are facing huge debt and job loss problem and your children are starving. We should deal with our reality and manage it well, so that reality can become a comfortable life support system for us to live a happy life. You can choose to strive for success in life (wealth, career, fame etc.). That way not only you live in a comfortable, solid reality, you also gain satisfaction from it. However, don’t over-believe that money and success is every thing in life. It’s important, but it’s just an fraction of the whole.
Last time a group of National Geographic researchers went to the island of Okinawa, Japan to find out why there are so many Okinawans who live beyond 100 years of age. Besides having healthy diet and active social life, these long-life Okinawans also have strong sense of purpose of life, which keeps them going on to live.
A life without purpose is like a broken tree branch drifting on the lake. It’s boring, unenergetic, and stagnant. A stream of life energy should be injected into our life and keep us bright and positive. The source of this energy is the life purpose – the purpose for us to exist, the role for us to play.
Serving others is a good way for us to get a sense of purpose. This includes doing friends a favor and helping those in need. You can get involved in charity. Besides playing a part in improving humanity and the world, you also get to know more people.
If the real world doesn’t provide the platform for you to reach out to others and play a significant role, you can do it on internet. Participate in online forum discussion and share your ideas on your blog. Spreading ideas and learning from others on internet can bring colors to your life. But you shouldn’t overdo it until you neglect your offline life.
Nowadays it’s convenient to learn new skills such as dancing and web building. All you need to do is to get a few books and video DVDs or enroll in classes and you can experience new things. Learning new things opens up unexplored areas in life and gives you the potential to meet new people. The good thing is that there are so many choices when it comes to learning new things. Do you agree that being a learner is a fun role to play in life? I would love to learn a lot of things when I retire.
Finally, a healthy social life is essential to give you a sense of purpose in life. What’s life when you are living alone like a hermit? Go out and meet people. Life’s wonderful when there are people who watch movies with you on Saturdays and sip coffee with you at café. If you are shy, learn to open your mouth and approach other people. Don’t worry about being rejected because we cannot satisfy everyone in life.
I hope you live a long and happy life!
(Blogging gives me a very strong sense of purpose in life)
Imagine you want to buy a book, but it’s as expensive as a gold bar. You try to download its eBook version on internet but Google and all the PDF finders fail to get the result you want. I faced this problem before, but I have found the solution.
Last week my good colleague showed me a website called Gigapedia. He told me that I can download a lot of high quality eBooks from this site. It’s the place where he himself downloaded tons of engineering reference books. I just need to register, search for the book that I want, and go to the download link page to get the eBook (the eBooks are hosted on other file sharing platforms such as megaupload and rapidshare. Gigapedia provides only the links to the shared file).
I was amazed to find the book that I was seeking for months! It’s like a treasure chest dropping in front of me. Now I never look back and keep downloading good stuff from it. It’s my favorite source of knowledge other than Wikipedia.
Do you know other websites where we can download good stuff? Please share it here. Thanks.
There are several ways to score well in exam. Some of them are potentially immoral. But I’m not going to be the moral police to tell you what’s right or wrong. I’ll let you be the judge. From my experience, the things mentioned below are quite effective to help you do well in exam.
1. The super nerd
There are people who study more than 9 hours a day. I call it the super inefficient way of studying. They pour in huge amount of time and energy resource to achieve success at school. Most likely they have to sacrifice their social life.
2. The real substance
There are people who do well in exam purely based on merit – they are really good at what they study. They are resourceful, knowledgeable, and smart. With solid foundation and proper substance, they don’t need to cut corners and cheat around. This is the hard way, but the best way to achieve success at school, in my opinion.
3. The strategist
Some smart people perceive exam as a game of strategy. They think of optimum ways of using their resources to do well in exam. Some of their strategies include finding out which chapters have better chance of appearing in exam, the passing rate of a subject, and the exam pattern of various subjects. They study smart, not hard.
4. The predictor
Some people do well by finding out past exam pattern. They’ll ask their seniors or dig out past semester exam questions to predict how future exam questions will behave. This way is effective on subjects with cyclic behaviour, where past questions are repeated in future exam. However, we know that not all subjects behave in this way. So it’s a matter of luck.
5. The brain investor
Many people put time and effort in doing homework and reading text book. But only a few students are willing to invest in their intelligence. They do mental exercises to develop their memory, thinking skills, and creativity. Having developed mind is like working with powerful computer. You learn faster and remember more facts. This is a good move because it benefits us for a life time.
6. The cunning player
Some people are really good at cutting corners. Instead of building up their substance, they play the easy way out by persuading teachers/lecturers to be lenient, asking for leak questions or sure win tips, and bribing others. The end justifies their mean.
7. The consistent student
The students who study consistently usually don’t need to rush at last minute or cheat their way out. They are balance learners who allocate a fixed amount of time every day to study. Studying becomes a way of their daily life. Their substance will gradually build up until they can easily handle exam.
Moral standard is a tool to control human behavior
Since young, we are taught to tell the truth, behave well, and show kindness. Most people think moral standard is the right path to follow and seldom question it. Truly speaking, there’s no such thing as objective moral standard. Moral code is man made. A moral value in a culture might be frown upon in another culture and vice versa. Some moral nihilists and moral sceptics openly question the existence of objective morality.
In my opinion, moral standard is created to keep society functioning in an optimum way. It’s like a microchip implant in people’s head to make them behave in certain way that’s productive and not harmful to the social economical system of a society. Societies need moral code to prevent people from robbing the bank, killing people around, and wracking all kinds of havoc (ironically, sometimes it tolerates racism. Ha ha harr….).
I think certain moral values should be embraced because it makes us better human beings. But I’ll always remain sceptical with the whole holy moral high ground thing. Sometimes moral standard is a tool used by certain parties to achieve their agenda. Do you notice that some nations used the man made “human rights” to bash countries they don’t like and they themselves don’t walk the talk?
You can become smarter if you put time and effort to improve your intelligence. The scope of intelligence is broad, covering areas such as interpersonal, spatial, and logical intelligence. We can’t cover everything in one page, but at least this article provides the guideline for you to become significantly cleverer.
The brain is the center of intelligence and should be the main focus of our interest. It should be well developed since infancy. That’s why children should receive proper nutrients by eating proper three square meals. Adults can grow their brains too. Research has shown that smart people who work a lot with their brain power have better developed brains than most people. Through mental training, our brain cell network can become more inter-connected and complex, making us cleverer.
One aspect of mental training is to develop memory. Memory is important because it’s where the knowledge substance lies. The better the memory you have, the more knowledge resource you can hold. There are many memory training books out there and I recommend you to get them and start developing your memory. I have written an article about developing memory power here, which is pretty useful.
The ability to recreate reality vividly in your mind enables you to think much better. With sharp imagination, you can simulate reality and think of various what-if scenarios. Engineers and artists need such imagination to work creatively. Fortunately, imagination can be improved. You need to search the internet for imagination development techniques for various senses (visual, auditory, touch, smell etc.). You’ll notice significant improvement after a few days of training.
Decision making and problem solving are important skills required to become clever. In real life, we have to use limited resources in our hands to yield the best result in specific situations. We have to identify the problem, think of several solutions, and pick the best alternative to achieve the best outcome. Sometimes the problem is so complex until we need to build a flow chart to analyze it. By learning such skills, we can make intelligent decisions and solve many problems in life.
Clever people can interact well with others. That’s why it’s essential to build up our interpersonal (social) skill. This is not so easy because we can’t learn it directly from text books alone. We need to consciously observe how people interact and analyze why some people are successful at dealing with people. We might have to improve this skill via trial and error until we can click well with others. Another related aspect is leadership. Some people are influential, where people around them pay them respect and obey their instruction. We don’t gain such authority automatically through position and power. It’s a quality that has to be earned.
Becoming cleverer puts you in an advantageous position in life. For that reason, it’s worth investing in your intelligence by mastering the skills mentioned above.
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