Live Life With No Regrets!

How to find your mission in life by Richard Nelson Bolles is a short and interesting read but concise in what it needs to get across. A mere 67 pages with just one to two paragraphs per page, it strives to get across the fact that our mission life is secondary to the mission giver.

Making no apologies for being a Christian, we must know that between the bookends of our lives on this earth, namely our birth and death, we have a mission. But it is more important to remember who the mission giver is and to be united and connected to him in order for us to know our mission.

To summarise:

1. Your first mission in life is to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the one from whom your Mission is derived.
2. Your next mission is to do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guiding of God's spirit within you and around you.
3. Your third mission on earth is:
   1. exercise that Talent which you particularly came to Earth to use—your greatest gift, which you most delight to use,
   2. in the place(s) or setting(s) which God has caused to appeal to you the most
   3. and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world.

Continue reading "How To Find Your Mission In Life" »

Posted by Nico at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think one of the things I and everyone should keep on learn is decision making.

Decision making is one of the most important things that affect our lives, yet we aren't taught this vital subject in school.

It's quite a fascinating subject, really. A quick search on google websites describes the biases that people are prone to, the psychology of the decision making process, etc.

Our decisions affect our lives and shape our future. Shouldn't we therefore take the the effort to make better decisions?

Posted by Nico at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I would recommend to anyone to read a one motivational or biographical book each month. As Norman Vincent Peale said, "Encouragement is like food, we need it everyday!"

Posted by Nico at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The motivation for me to have picked up this book is because I'm taking my GRE exam tomorrow and I needed to know how to write graduate level essays. Not that you need to have perfect punctuation to score well in the GRE, but this was the perfect excuse and impetus for me to find out (among several things that have been bugging me for a long time):

1. How to use the semi-colon. ";"
2. How to use the comma at certain times.
3. Is it "Jesus's disciples" or "Jesus' disciples"?
4. Do you put the full stop in dialogue inside the quotation marks or outside of them?

Lynne Truss's book is a delightful read, weaving emotion and character into punctuation marks such as the comma (likening it to Babe the sheep-pig, or in this case, the sheep-comma), the boisterous apostrophe and the dutiful full-stop. Humourous situations are created with examples of poor punctuation making the book a breeze to read through in a week.

If you want to teach kids punctuation and not let it fall into a list of humdrum rules, you'd do well to use this as a textbook for secondary school kids.

Here are the notes for the things that often confound me:

Continue reading "I Finally Know How To Use The Semi-Colon!" »

Posted by Nico at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Global IQ: 1950-2050

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." Rich Cook

Scientific proof of Cook's statement at last!

Posted by Nico at 2:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's Foxtrot comic illustrates beautifully what it means to learn things your own way.

One of the problems with education is that it imposes its own structure on learning facts on students.

The structures and framework of learning facts may or not be the right one to be absorbed by someone.

In fact, it is because of standard frameworks and structures that we are caught thinking in the box and forget the that facts and ideas can be rearranged to produce different ways of thinking.

For example, one of the constraining facts in physics space-time theory was that time was constant. It took Einstein to come along and think differently that it wasn't and that time could be dilated.

Another way of looking at the periodic table of elements now is the periodic galaxy. (A larger version can be seen here.)

When I grew up, during standard one, my mother tried to drill in me the mathematical times table. I cried when she used the cane to beat it into me. It was only the intervention of my uncle that stopped it.

The funny thing is that until now, I have never memorised the times table. I still cannot recall instantaneously what is 6 * 8. I think in my mind 4 12's, 2 24's = 48.

Yet, I scored A's in almost all of my math subject. The reason is because I found my own way around mathematics, trying to understand why instead of memorising by rote. Why this, or why that. During secondary school, the teacher gave various formulas for integration. However, the reason was never given. I took it upon myself to read up why it was so. Finally understanding the background and rationale for integration allowed me to look at the subject in a different light and absorb it.

Posted by Nico at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)