Brienne writes

What's the milkshake's job?  In the mornings, customers who bought the milkshake alone from the fast food chain said that they bought it to accompany them for the long commute to work. They've tried other alternatives like a bagel or a banana but none does its job as well as the milkshake. The bagel was too boring on its own so customers had to spread butter or jam that they placed between their legs while driving. It sometimes became messy. The banana did its job too quickly. Customers finished the banana really quickly and soon, they were left hungry before lunchtime.  In the afternoons, the milkshake did another job. Parents often ordered two meals to go for themselves and their child. Children love milkshake. As compared to saying yes to a new toy or to go to a new place for the afternoon, saying yes to a milkshake was the easiest and cheapest.  When you know what's the milkshake's job, it's easier to boost sales for the milkshake. In relationships, we all h

Austin Kleon always post the good stuff.  In his weekly newsletter sent on Feb 24, he talked about how a blog post (or a newsletter, or a YouTube video, etc.) is a search query to find your people .  He referred to Henrik Karlsson 's post, " A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. "  Henrik's advice for what to write about to find your people? You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because this is what you would have wanted. Austin wrote , "If you do this, Karlsson says, "You will write essays that almost no one likes....

The path I'm walking is a terribly lonely path.  I haven't met somebody like me. I'm playing the long game. Looking to an infinite future. I want to make writing my thing . At the moment, writing is already my thing.  But I want to be known for this thing, called writing.  Bearing fruit is always beautiful but so is planting that seed, watering it, nurturing it every single day.  A day goes by, nothing. Two days go by, nothing. Three days, four, five, six and seven. Still nothing. Then suddenly one day, a seedling starts sprouting.  Was there really nothing that was happening? Underneath the surface, some time after the seed was planted, tiny roots started growing.  Things that looked invisible to the surface, were happening.  It can be frustrating to see nothing happening.   But what if it just needed another day for the seedling to break out of the surface of the soil? Keep going, plant your seed, nurture it. Be patient. x

Montessori said play is the work of the child. Play is also the work of the artist. Can we get closer to play if we re-label our tools as toys? - Austin Kleon   From a certain moment on, we stopped having fun.  Our cameras became a tool to capture beauty. Our knifes, pots and pans, tools to whip up a delicious meal in the kitchen.  What happened?  Not long ago they used to be toys we played with. No pressure, just pointing the camera at our parents' direction and snapping away without a care if we got them in the shot. Or cooking an imaginary meal with jigsaw pieces too big for the plastic plate.  When we drew pretty dresses on paper, a teacher or a grown-up might go, "You'll be a fantastic fashion designer in the future!" I'd probably made that mistake one too many times myself. Kendra Patterson  said we are socialised early to see the productive, money-making possibilities of our activities. It's part of how we survive in our capitalist ecosystem. But let

Are you living an intentional life? Justin Welsh believes that an intentional life can be summarised into these points: A life spending time doing what he wants, when he wants and with whom he wants to.  A life where he does very little of what he don't like and a lot of what he likes. A life with limited obligations and as much freedom as possible. A life free of traditional full-time employment. A life free of traditional full-time employment.  This reminds me of what Tim Denning shared in a LinkedIn post . He said the goal in life should be to become unemployable.  The unemployables were misfits known as the contractors, freelancers, or consultants... Instead of a salary, they sent my employer an invoice. The subtle difference is they got to get paid faster, not have tax taken out, and negotiate their own working conditions.  Everything from what laptop they got, to where they worked, to what meetings they would attend was negotiable.  Do we like or not like full-time employm

I love deadlines.  I borrowed the book Someday is Today from Libby with a skip-the-line loan because the library got a few new copies to their stock and I was one of the lucky ones who saw that information first.  Skip-the-line books meant the books cannot be renewed too.  The 7-day deadline and the book made a great recipe. The immense volume of interesting stories added to its deliciousness. 7 days in and I've completed 56% of the book. The fastest I've read a book, or any book with that volume. I cannot tell you enough how every story, every page just makes me want to flip to the next one. I'm reading on my commute, reading during my lunch break, highlighting interesting paragraphs, screenshot-ing pages just 'cause I want to be reminded one day next time when I scroll through pictures on my phone.  Even when I'm left with 23 minutes to returning the book, I'm reading it as fast as I can because I cannot imagine the long wait before I can pick it up again. 

"Life's too short to waste on regrets, choose wisely." Eugene Seah In this YouTube video, Eugene shared about his life journey and how he became a life coach. He reminds us that money can be achieved when you find meaning in work. Don't be a corporate zombie.  I like this quote Merlin commented under the video.  I think he was referencing Srikumar Rao 's words.    Wherever you are in life right now, be it success or failure, how did you grow?

I've learnt so much from reading Someday is Today I don't even know where to begin. For a start, maybe to share the impact the book have had on me. I read the whole of today, only to stop for meals and to watch two and a half episodes of a Korean drama my boyfriend and I are currently into. I know what you're thinking, watch 2 and a half episodes? Isn't that a waste of time?  I don't think it is because we spent quality time together. Besides, the majority of my time was spent reading. I went from completing 19% of the book this morning to completing 36% after dinner.  We really do have a lot of time. If we use it wisely.  But most of us squander it away like death is something that will never happen.  Now the question " What will your hundred-year-old self want you to do? " occupies my mind every time I want to make a decision.  The story of the most expensive popsicle in Chapter 4 is what I want to keep going back to to remind me to focus on what reall

I promise you there is not a person in the world who is lying on their deathbed, wishing they had watched a little more TV or played a few more video games or waited just a little while longer to make their dreams come true.  (from the book Someday is Today by Matthew Dicks )      @#$%. those words shot me. so many tales I've told the world but I haven't fulfilled one.  So many dreams left for dead. I shot them down because I'm afraid.  What are you so afraid of? What are you going to tell your future kids someday?  That you stayed at a job you stopped growing at for fear you'll run out of money living your dreams? Is running out of money worse than killing your dreams?  Would you rather die poor or die not trying to live your dreams once? I'm a coward. I hate being a coward. I hate being rooted to the ground, not moving. I hate complacency, stagnancy, I hate the place I'm in right now.  Thinking about growing, stepping out of my comfort zone, chasing after my

Today, I got to observe something interesting.  I went for a run, the first of the month. It was supposed to happen on Monday but it poured that day. And it was a long and tiring day.  The plan for the week was to work out thrice and I already missed the opportunity to complete one. Fast forward to today, I took a nap but woke up still tired. Weather was good so I was determined to do the run. I ran fast, I felt I had the momentum and the flow going, I pushed a little harder, finished faster but didn't reach the finish line that I set for myself. Still a win because I got it done. But my energy was drained. I came home, had dinner and thought I'd like to make progress on a course I'm studying. I open Youtube to search for the same topic because the modules in the course often take a while to load and I'll toggle between the two windows to learn while waiting.  Wrong move.  Bree with zero energy and willpower could not stop watching unrelated YouTube shorts. It was one s

Read something interesting from Paul Millerd's Boundless newsletter this morning.  He writes,  In the book, the author W. Timothy Gallwey shares his approach for thinking about improvement through the lens of tennis.  He argues that everyone has two selves: Self 1, the "teller", and Self 2 the "doer". It is the relationship between these two selves that determines how well people are able to translate "knowledge into effective action." This is what he calls the "inner game.". ...the message is quite clear: we spend far too much time in self 1 mode and struggle to let go enough to shift into self 2 mode.  The problem is that you can't just "do" doing. We have to find ways to loosen the grip that self 1 has over our actions. Which is really hard because most of us are brought up in cultures that tell us that life is pretty much about avoiding bad outcomes, aiming at "good" goals, and trying harder when we fail.  Farnam

Travel is no cure for the mind. That headline made me click and seriously consider if I want to travel full time in the future.  Lawrence Yeo  explains that we're all living in a Box of Daily Experience where we follow a set routine of waking up, commuting to work, sitting at our desks at work, commuting home, winding down with Netflix, heading to bed and the cycle repeats.  He shared,  "The boundaries of our box define our present-day situation, so when we dreamingly gaze toward the prospects of an exciting future, we look outside of it to experience emotions like wonderment, amazement, and inspiration. Our current box is okay and livable, but the world outside of its boundaries is where our hope really resides." We desire things like a a new house, a new car or a new relationship and we will attain it but then the excitement only lasts for a few months at most before we're back to the mundane of the Box of Daily Experience.  Same with travel. A vacation is a tempora

Give yourself time to write offline. Just wrote in my journal and it feels amazing. Yes, it still feels amazing as I type this. It feels like something was writing for me, something was giving me the words. Feels like my inner guidance speaking to me.  My fellow writers, do you feel this way too? I re-read some of my earlier posts for the month and feel like I haven't made much progress. There's no hook in the title, there's nothing remarkable in my posts. I forgot the joy of writing. Then I went online and watched Youtube. (Youtube is my escape now because I'm on a 30-day no social media experiment and I don't count Youtube as social media). I came across Pick Up Limes 's video on The Routine that makes me happy and effective  ✔️ . If understanding cognitive biases is right up your alley, watch her video as she explains four of them and how she implements some of her habits to break these mental barriers.  A comment under the video struck me. Mediocre consisten

My blogging process: Usually I have a lot of thoughts in the shower and sometimes I settle on a topic I'd like to blog about.  Then, I'll start writing after putting 'fbr' ( fast, bad and wrong ) at the top of the page.  I'll let the words flow without editing them much, because fbr.  The point is to make mistakes and get the first draft out.  Skip to today which is a bit unusual, I didn't have any shower thoughts.  I open Youtube and allow myself to watch videos on topics I'm interested in at the moment. I realise from previous experience, doing that gives me some inspiration.  Today's topic of interest is minimalism.  I chanced upon this video  by Sophie Daquis . Her video editing is great, the video clips accompanying her voiceovers are so beautiful and I've learnt a couple of minimalism tips: 1. Keeping your lifestyle inflation in check We can choose to live a little better with a higher paycheck but try to keep your lifestyle relatively similar

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. Then I'm the beholder.  I see beauty in all the things and people around me.  I wonder who thinks I'm beauty.  Growing up, I was the ugliest of the sisters. that's how I got introduced and how I remember my childhood. I used to think to myself, there got to be an ugly one to bring out the pretty one. I held an important job.  I never smiled in photos since.  I wonder if my parents knew why.  My photos are often edited with filters.  They made my eyes bigger, nose smaller, face thinner. I often adjusted them just enough so the photos still look like me, a me I wish I look like.  I long for the day I'll be comfortable with the way I look, not super attractive, just attractive enough for me to think I can be called a beauty. 

Listening to this  after feeling some negative energy in the room.  There's something about it that's making me feel a little better.  Do you feel energy around us?  Sometimes we go to a place and we feel like we'd like to get out of that space. Other times, we want to linger longer because the space made us feel so welcomed and happy.  Same with people, some give us bad vibes and some people we want to keep hanging out with.  Why is that?  Do we have possess unique energies then? Can we change our energies?  So many questions which I hope I can get an answer to someday. What do you know about energy? 

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is a book recommended by many.  In this video by Ali Abdaal , he highlighted 12 key lessons but I want to highlight three. 1. Avoid financial commitments for your future self The end of history illusion is the idea that when you ask people how much they've changed in the past 10 years, they're pretty good at describing it. But if you ask people to describe how they're going to change in the next 10 years, people are very bad at doing that. Knowing that we're bad at that, we're still going to need money 10 years from now so we should keep in mind not to make extreme financial commitments. 2. Don't be a flashy twat Morgan wrote to his son, "You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, a huge house. But I'm telling you, you don't. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive things will bring it. It almost never does, especially from the people you wan