Truly Friendship.

It's the Lunar Festival. It's the weekend, the third day of Chinese New Year. All I could say it's a scotching Saturday. Weather of a toaster.

Mum woke me up from my beauty slumber, and so I did. While I was preparing and cleaning myself up, I received a call from an old friend of mine that she wants to pay me a visit. Of course I gave the green light. In half an hour time there goes the awaits. It's been a very long time since the last time we met, I could say probably 2 years. With the duration of not meeting nor catching up for 2 years it made this time catch up session a pretty good one. Reminiscing about the past, present and future. 

And in the afternoon, something surprising happened. A very true friend of mine dropped by, a friend that left to Perth 2 years ago for further studies and finally came back to Malaysia for Chinese New Year. This friend of mine is a very busy woman. To the extend that she did not has the time for me for any catch up session nor any meet ups. Knowing her arrival date to Malaysia as well as her departure to Perth, I ceased to see her pretty face, her genuinely sweet smile, and her unforgettable tone of communication, all due to her busy schedule. She travelled to Taiwan, after that visitings together with her parents and quality times with her family and friends. Sadly I'm not in the list which I'm absolutely have no idea why. 

That made me angry and upset that why did not she make any effort to stay in touch with me, to fix an appointment with me, to make it up to me, to call or message me, etc. Neither any of that I heard from her, which at some point made me verge to give up on her, give up on our friendship, to let her go and self-eliminate from her circle of friendship. However, until today, this afternoon, that she purposely drove to my house and gave me souvenirs from Perth as well as the 2 special gifts she specially bought for me only. One from Perth and one more from Taiwan. Both are the same character but different purposes. The moment I saw her appearance in front of my house I was rollick through my heart, jumping of joy excitingly that I could meet her, and so we talked. 

If my memory serves me well, I did not talk much because I was so happy to have my best friend standing by my side. I was so happy to hear the laughter, the voice, the support, the love, the thought, the warmth and the care of my best friend. However, to know she's leaving tomorrow my heart pounders melancholy. In addition to the precious souvenirs she gifted me I could never ask for more than hugging her  several times, not letting my best friend go for another time, while tears flowing down on my cheeks. Never in my life I've teared for a friend. Especially your friend that you've spent all of your evening as a child cycling and hanging out together, doing silly things and of course there are some things that cannot be forget and them memories are definitely irreplaceable. 

Right at the moment when I do not want to let her go, it got me thinking deep down that I'm lucky and grateful to have such lovely friend. This made me to not give up on any friendship for any kinds of reasons regardless the circumstances. I would need to thank god for not allowing the fact of giving up happened. Had not for the instinct of lunar messaging I think I would be at the point of exclusion. With that I believe the theory of Everything Happened for a Reason. Feeling nothing but thankful with whatever happened, and most of all whatever offered in life. Never once at all for taking things for granted, life for granted. 

Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for loving and caring me. Last but not least, thank you for remembering me. You never know how much your little doorstep surprise means so much to me. With your effort, no matter the size of it, it changes the very moment of mine. 

Loves and warmth. Sincerely regards.

Artistry.

The Coffee Club. 

The Evening Sun.

The Construction.

Secret to Healthiness and Happiness of Life.

Health:
1. Drink plenty of water.
2. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a beggar.
3. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants, and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.
4. Live with the 3 E’s — Energy, Enthusiasm, and Empathy.
5. Make time for prayer and reflection
6. Play more games.
7. Read more books than you did in 2012.
8. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.
9. Sleep for 7 hours.

Personality:
10. Take a 10-30 minutes’ walk every day —- and while you walk, smile.
11. Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
12. Don’t have negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.
13. Don’t overdo; keep your limits.
14. Don’t take yourself so seriously; no one else does.
15. Don’t waste your precious energy on gossip.
16. Dream more while you are awake.
17. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
18. Forget issues of the past. Don’t remind your partner with his/her mistakes of the past. That will ruin your present happiness.
19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. Don’t hate others.
20. Make peace with your past so it won’t spoil the present.
21. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
22. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
23. Smile and laugh more.
24. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

Community:
25. Call your family often.
26. Each day give something good to others.
27. Forgive everyone for everything.
28. Spend time with people over the age of 70 & under the age of 6.
29. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
30. What other people think of you is none of your business.
31. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your family and friends will. Stay in touch.

Life:
32. Do the right things.
33. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
34. Forgiveness heals everything.
35. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
36. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
37. The best is yet to come.
38. When you awake alive in the morning, don’t take it for granted – embrace life.
39. Your inner most is always happy. So, be happy.


Last but not least:

40. Enjoy LIFE.

What can a conversation tell you about someone's intelligence?

By Charles Faraone (Quora)

Intelligence, like beauty, is a gift that has more to do with dumb luck than personal achievement. So while I admire intelligence and beauty, I tend to respect compassionate and down-to-earth individuals who exhibit a genuine sense of integrity. If they happen to be intelligent and attractive, all the better. 

Gaining a sense of an individual's intelligence from casual (or intense) conversations is relatively easy. The problem/challenge is that it's often easier to underestimate a stranger’s intelligence than it is to put the energy into finding out how intelligent the person might be or actually is. 

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Unknown

Too many people use their limited areas of expertise or knowledge as the benchmarks of intelligence, which is actually a cheap trick to score dopamine squirts by artificially boosting weak esteem by looking down on others. I prefer to find out what topics people are interested in by encouraging them to share what they know. 

It helps to start out assuming the people I'm communicating with are smarter than me and then giving them the opportunity to prove me right or wrong. 

People's responses reveal their intelligence, especially to abstractions such as humorous comments, creative interpretations, and not-so-obvious observations that connect seemingly unrelated dots. 

One of the most helpful tells is how people misinterpret what was said and how much trouble they go to to avoid answering specific questions. (When people overreact to what wasn’t said they're letting you know what they fear might have been said.) 

Identifying sensitive areas is a lot like how dentists locate cavities by working a probe and watching for winces. 

How people tip toe or tap dance around topics/questions not only exposes where they're actually coming from but how intelligent they are. Dull witted types (especially racist and bigots) seldom realize how much they're giving away (about being craven safety addicts) whereas highly intelligent types tend to catch on relatively quickly and then go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

Quotes (Part Two)

• Want to lose weight? Don't eat anything 4 hours before you go to bed. It makes a huge difference.
• You might gather the same materials and make identical preparations, but you would never be able to duplicate the result.
• Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway.
• You are not what has happened to you. You are what you choose to become.
• Do what is right, not what is easy.
• We're all the same. Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing.
• Grab whatever chance of happiness you have. Don't worry about other people too much.
• Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.
• Taking everything into consideration, my instincts still tell me to go for it. Simply because that you don't get chances like this very often.
• I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute.
• I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it? - A,B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.
• So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.
• Material development only gives us sensory pleasure, but to be lastingly happy we need to develop our minds. We need calm minds.
• Never apologize for burning too brightly or collapsing into yourself every night. That is how galaxies are made.
• When I didn't understand something, I gathered up the words scattered at my feet, and lined them up into sentences. Anyway, be happy. I get the feeling a lot of shit is going to come your way, but you're a stubborn bastard, I'm sure you'll handle it.
• Whatever you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
• The years between eighteen and twenty-eight are the hardest, psychologically. It's then you realize this is make or break, you no longer have the excuse of youth, and it is time to become an adult - but you are not ready.
• Stories come to me and I grasp it and write it down. That is all. It is just like catching exotic birds or butterflies in the deep woods. If I lose sight of them once, they would be gone in an instant, and probably for good.
• Have you every had that feeling that you'd like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?
• There burns throughout the line of words, the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion.

How do I get over my bad habit of procrastinating.

By Suresh Rathinam in Quora
I was a very bad Procrastinator for a very long time, until i really understood the basics of why i procrastinate. 

In order to understand why you procrastinate, first you should have a strong desire to eliminate procrastination in your life and following the methods mentioned below will be helpful.

I. Track down your everyday activity

     When i first started writing down the list of activities that i do everyday, it felt like a waste of time. But later while analyzing the one month data i clearly understood why i don't have enough time to do the necessary activities and it narrowed down to the bad habits that i had created over time.

I was spending most of my time in Facebook and was affected by the "Chain-clicking curse" where watching a video from Facebook will lead to YouTube in-turn to Twitter to see the trend and it goes on and on into loads of unnecessary browsing wasting your precious time

II.Understanding why we procrastinate

We procrastinate because of the habits that we create over time. When we work some random thought strikes our mind, it might be as simple as,
 
where to go for the next vacation?

and I go to online to check details of it.
it doesn't stop there, then to Facebook to see where my friends went?
and something else catches up my eyes and the clicks goes endlessly 

III. How we create Habits

I have been following this routine every day which let me do overtime to complete my work and had no time for the essential things in life. All of these made sense to me when i read the Power of habit by Charles Duhigg.

understanding the basic of habit was big help to me. I starts with a cue/signal in my case it was the random thought and my routine was to search about it and reward that i get is leaving a stressful work for that moment/satisfaction by answering my random thought which sucks my time endlessly leaving only a very short period of time to do the necessary.

Now the trick it to replace the bad routine with a good routine which will lead to greater productivity in life, which could be understood by looking at how runners reward themselves

Here the cue is the Running shoe and it lets you to the routine of running which was created over time, running leads to the reward which is sense of accomplishment on completing a run also satisfying the Endorphin craving that you get by looking at the running shoe

IV. How I cured myself by changing my routine

1. Keeping myself distraction free

a. Turn off internet: Most of my work doesn't need internet so turned 
     off my WiFi whenever i work.

b. Note pad: Whenever some random thoughts strike rather than searching it 
    online i started recording them down in a small note and researched about 
    them later

c. Setting Time limits: Started setting a duration to complete my work which        helped me to focus more on my work, Even had set time on socializing      
   with my colleagues spending not more than 5 minutes on 
    unnecessary talks.

2. Sustaining the habits

a. Tracking your activities: Its quite tough for me to write every activity now and then, so i spent half an hour every day before sleeping to write down the activities of the whole day splitting into hourly activities and do a quick analysis on where to improve next day. It looks something like this,

9:00 - 10:00 : Forecast Meeting
10:00 - 11:00 : Project#1 - Prepared the procedure
 
b. Prioritizing activities for tomorrow: This summary helps me in prioritizing the activities that i should be concentrating more tomorrow and I write down top 3 things that should be completed tomorrow

c. Monthly and Quarterly Review: then i started analyzing my monthly and quarterly data's to continuously improve my productivity

The methods mentioned above worked perfectly for me and I started finding more time to do the necessary things in life. Hope it will be useful for you as well, Let me know if it was helpful :)

What are the most productive ways to spend time on the internet.

Was browsing through Quora and I came upon this interesting and truthful article regarding procrastination and social media. With that I thought of sharing this here so everyone could have a read at this importance. 

P/S: I didn't alter a single thing on this article but copy directly from Quora. Credit to Quora as well as the writer for this interesting section, which frankly speaking, opened my mind about social media as well as procrastination. 

By Evan DeFilippis in Quora.
I think a lot of these answers miss the point of the question. The real issue isn't that there's a paucity of useful webpages on the internet, it's that taking advantage of those webpages is difficult. What does it say about human beings that we really can get an Ivy League education for free online but nearly nobody does it? The Coursera and Udacity and Khan Academy attrition rates are so phenomenal that it makes the completion rates look like round-off errors. We live in an attention-deficit culture, and the solution isn't better websites, it's better humans.

In view of spending your time more effectively, I suggest the following tips:

1. Completely cut Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and any other social sites out of your life. If you are unable to do this, strictly regulate the total time spent on these sites to 30 minutes to an hour each day. You can download Chrome extensions to help you with this like StayFocusd. But, I cannot emphasize enough how much these sites will ruin your life. Everyone always comes to the defense of social media with excuses like, "well, I use Facebook to keep in touch with my high school friends and relatives overseas," or "Twitter is how I stay up-to-date with current events," or "you can learn lots of great things with specialized subreddits," and so on. Yet when you look at a distribution of how people actuallyallocate their time, nearly none of it is spent doing the very things that people point to when they justify their behavior. It's always just mindless scrolling, animated gifs, cat videos, the first twenty seconds of a really neat lecture, and so on.
   
   What could be a more devastating rebuke of social media than the fact that nobody uses it for the reasons it was designed? This is, of course, auxiliary to the more important reality that research on Facebookconsistently shows that it makes everyone more sad and less fulfilled with life on average.
2. Practice efficient procrastination. If you need time to recharge in between difficult activities, find outlets in which you can still develop yourself as a person. For me, that's chess. I'll play a couple games of Blitz in between projects to recharge, and, more importantly, I'm not watching cat videos. For other people it might be practicing an instrument, or reading a book, or drawing.
3. To-do lists. There may be nothing more insanely effective than a to-do list. Write down what you have to do, prioritize the list by difficulty, and be excruciatingly detailed when you write down your objectives. Don't get fancy, don't use Evernote or a Chrome Extension, or some app, just use paper and pen. Don't write "Finish research paper on ethics." Write "Write one page on Chapter 3 of Peter Singer's 'Practical Ethics." The smaller, more discrete the tasks, the more superable they become. Also plan howyou are going to efficiently procrastinate in between the tasks. Write "play chess", "watch a Noam Chomsky lecture", "do one lesson of DuoLingo," and so forth in between big tasks. Take a power nap if you're too exhausted to be efficient with your procrastination. 
   
   Remember: when you don't plan your time, you fail to take advantage of opportunities that avail themselves, and you go for the path of least resistance -- which usually happens to be AngryBirds and YouTube videos.
4. Who cares? This is perhaps the most important point. Next time you are about to post something to Facebook, or watch a funny video, or read a blog post, or get involved in an internet argument, ask yourself: Who cares? If something isn't helping you to become a better you, don't waste your time. 
   
   Today I read a BuzzFeed article on "Epic Twitter Comebacks." I was baited into reading the article by the outrageous title, and subsequently became angry at myself for finishing it. The article just didn't matter. Nothing productive could possibly come from reading or writing it. The most popular articles shared anywhere -- Facebook, Buzzfeed, and the countless copycat sites-- are the journalistic equivalent of McDonald's. Consuming them makes everybody worse off.
   
   I have found myself knee-deep in an hour long compilation of Vines, and twenty minutes in, I have to do a reality check: This shit literally does not matter. The world would be a better place if all of it just disappeared. What possible value could there be spending all your time mindlesslyconsuming 7 second videos for hours at a time? It doesn't make you happier, it doesn't leave a lasting feeling of satisfaction; it is just raw, unproductive consumption.
   
   Now step back, and think of all the countless hours spent in front of screens, convincing yourself that it's just one more video, or just one more picture, just one more.. and then remember that this is your life. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. This is it, this is all we have; you are the aggregate of your experiences. Do you want the average of those experiences to be summarized by a few URLs, a couple videos, and some half-hearted commitments to better yourself? 
   
   So be vigilant! When you find yourself immersed in mindless consumption, ask yourself: "Who cares?" If what you're doing right isn't helping you become a better you, do something else.