My new year resolution came early — in November 2011. It’s to treat my body better. I’ve had a terrible track record at taking care of my body. Having been plagued by an autoimmune disease for a decade, my body has always seemed more like a liability than an asset to me. It doesn’t help that I naturally enjoy spending a lot of time developing my mind either. The only thing I do fairly well in recent years is that I pay attention to what I eat.

But then I got really inspired. While flipping through the boyfriend’s e-book collection, I stumbled upon Mark Lauren’s You are your own gym. Mark said something that really struck a chord:

It blows me away every time I walk into a nice home and meet its proud, overweight, out-of-shape owner. They just don’t get it. Your real home is not your apartment or your house or your city or even your country, but your body. It is the only thing you, your soul, and your mind, will always live inside of so long as you walk the earth. It is the single most important physical thing in this world you can take care of.

Touché!

The premise of his book suits my lifestyle too. No gyms, no expensive equipment required! All I need is to dedicate about 20 minutes a day doing bodyweight exercises. Just me, the floor and the occasional prop – chair, towel, door, etc – whatever’s lying around the house. It’s not a lot compared to what the gym rats are doing but 20 mins is better than 0 mins!

I’ve been doing the basic bodyweight exercises, on top of my Wii routine, for a little over a month now, and I feel great! I’m less tired in general. My stomach and arms are getting trimmer too! So yeah, I hope to keep this up for a long time to come.

So what are your new year resolutions? Do share them in the comments below!

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1. Happy 2008!

I like exploring the realms of philosophy and psychology but I’ve never really taken an interest in happiness. I’ve always believed that happiness had to come naturally — that thinking about it won’t necessarily make one happier, in fact, it may make one more miserable. So to read a former NPR foreign correspondent embark on a world tour to seek for the happiest (and unhappiest) places was really quite fascinating.

(By the way, I highly recommend this book, if you are seeking for life’s insights with a dash of wit and humour — served light.)

There were a lot gems of insights in the book, which I haven’t fully wrapped my head around yet, so I won’t be writing about them in this entry.

But at a more basic level, it did make me wonder what happiness means to me. And I think Weiner answered it for me when he wrote these words:

Blessed Idleness

Yes, that is precisely what happiness is to me — at least at this point in my life.

Just sitting at a cafe pondering about life with a great book, my laptop, a strong dose of caffeine and jazz playing in the background (or in my MP3 player). Blessed idleness — what I’m feeling now, as I write these words.

So what is happiness to you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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1. Why I Enjoy Reading Investment Banking Blogs

I was so inspired by it I self-snooped. And here are 3 of my deductions — do share yours in the comments or in a blog entry (do link back to this entry, so I can I read them)!

Snoop #1: What My Music Playlist Says About Me

Gosling says we can infer personality traits from the music we listen to. You’d might imagine someone who loves religious music as someone pious, perhaps conscientious and not very open to new experiences. I find this snoop a little devious because you may fall prey to false stereotyping, if you don’t dig deep enough. Here’s my deduction of my own playlist as an example.

Top 25 Songs on iTunes

From this playlist, you might deduce that I love anime music. Before you accuse me of being a socially eccentric, cosplaying otaku, let me explain my listening habits. While it’s true I love anime, I don’t enjoy anime music all that much. Consider this: I only listen to music via iTunes when I blog. Music with prominent vocals or noisy electric guitars interfere with my thinking. In contrast, music from the ARIA anime is very soothing so it inspires me to write.

Top 15 Artists on Last.FM

My Top 15 Artists list from Last.FM is a more accurate depiction of my music preferences because it’s sortable by time frame. My music tastes have changed over the years. When I was younger, I loved Korean pop music. Now that I’m older, I’m much more into Kubota Toshinobu’s music (genre: soul) and other soothing genres like R&B, Jazz and Bossa Nova.

Gosling points out that people who listen to jazz are generally calm and collected. While that is true of me most of the time, notice that there are 2 anomalies — Lee Hyolee and 2NE1. Both are remnants of my favorite genre during my teenage years. That should point out that I’m not yet 100% calm and collected. Occasionally, I’m still susceptible to reverting to my younger, boisterous, not-so-calm self.

Snoop #2: What My Office Cubicle Says About Me

My company culture is fairly conservative and our office design is one that’s very open. Everything – including the number of shoes under the table – is viewable on plain sight. As you can expect, there’s not much decor going on around. With that said, my cubicle is more barren than the others.

I have no photos of my friends or family, no memento or souvenir on my table. Gosling talks about how employees who are disconnected or disengaged from their work have less personal belongings in their cubicle. While that may be true for some people, I just prefer to separate my work from my personal life. I also avoid revealing too much of myself. See Snoop #3 for reason.

However, I do have three personal items displayed on an inconspicuous corner on my whiteboard. Two of them are postcards — one of a cute cat in a beret, another with a colorful abstract design. At first glance, one might think I like cats and colorful postcards. While that’s also true, there are deeper reasons to why I displayed them. When you flip the back of the postcards, you’d see that they both have personalized messages. The one with the cat is from a very, very close friend from university. The colorful one was from the customer service personnel who decided to accompany the item I ordered online from Swedish retailer, DesignTorget with a hand-written postcard saying “Hello from Sweden “. The postcards remind me of the value friendship and reaching out to strangers. Not coincidentally, both of which I wish I could have more.

The 3rd item is a photo of my project team along with Singapore’s Prime Minister and my company’s CEO. This one’s a no-brainer. It just means I’m ambitious.

Snoop #3: What My Wallpapers Say About Me

Gosling also dabbles a little into what our blogs, Facebook profiles and usernames reveal about us. Personally, I think there is an even better way to snoop online — by ransacking people’s Google Search history. But good luck getting your hands on that… hahaha.

For me though, I think the single most telling item of my core being is my desktop / mobile phone wallpaper. I’m sure most of my observant friends have noticed various artwork displayed on my personal electronic devices. They are all paintings from Audrey Kawasaki. I haven’t fully figured out why I am enchanted by them but they give a vague inkling that no matter where I am and what I am doing, a part of me will never change. This is my favorite painting:

My favorite piece from Audrey Kawasaki
百鬼夜行 – Hyakki Yakou – Hundred Demon Night Parade

Most my friends comment on how haunting and creepy these paintings are.

Perhaps that is reason why that I don’t display these paintings on my work-related devices and why I endeavor to show as little of myself as possible. The core of my being might just be too haunting and creepy for people to handle — a stark contrast to my nanyate self — the perpetually shining, affable, easygoing optimist.

What most don’t understand is that both sides are equally me.

For one to embody the light, one must know darkness.

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Ghost toured around Singapore

Thanks to 24seven and the Asia Paranormal Investigators, I had the opportunity to tour around Singapore’s spookiest places. We went to a dilapitated cemetary called Bukit Brown, Singapore’s largest cemetary, the Choa Chu Kang Cemetery and apparently, the most haunted place in Singapore – Old Changi Hospital. I caught a pretty strange ‘thing’ on one of my shots. Will share it after I do more research.

The boyfriend visited

After more than a year of being apart, my boyfriend visited me. It was refreshing and reassuring to know that our feelings and friendship can withstand the test of time and distance.

The perfect diet is working!

It’s been about 3 weeks since I embarked on the paleolithic diet. It’s working wonders. My eyes have completely stopped protruding. I have a lot of energy. And I’ve also lost quite a bit of weight; I dropped at least a dress size. This is a picture of me earlier this week!

Alain de Botton is cool beans.

Discovered Alain de Botton from his TED talk. Devoured his Consolations of Philosophy a few months back and now reading his new work, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. A lot of light bulbs went off while reading the Consolations of Philosophy. It’s too deep to discuss in a paragraph, so I shall save this for another entry.

Google Wave

Received my Google Wave invite thanks to Teddy! Do add me and start a new wave, so I know you’ve added me. If I don’t know you, do include a self-introduction as well. I can be found at ivytan at googlewave.com.

That’s it for my quick update. Will blog and reply to your comments after my projects end. Until then, take care!

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This is just one example of a long list of things I noticed, stuggled with, but could never really verbalize or understand that momentary lapse in what I assumed was my foolproof rationality…until I read Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. (which I finally found the time to finish, thanks to the fever that has finally grant me a day’s rest from work.)

It’s an amazing, amazing read. It really explains what I noticed long ago in my own decisions ever since I came across Robert Cialdini‘s Influence. With Influence, I thought that if seemingly superficial things like words, order and looks could influence someone else’s decisions, then there must be loopholes in their decision-making processes that allowed for these things to influence them in the first place. So I began to carefully inspected my own decision-making processes.

I started to notice that I made strange decisions like paying 5$ for unneeded, overpriced coffee, and then trying desperately to save $5 from my prescription medication by traveling an hour in search of a cheaper drugstore.

And let’s also not mention all the times I could’ve helped that old lady cross the street or spared that homeless man a quarter but was rushing from class to class, so “I just didn’t have time”, while obnoxiously thinking what a good Samaritan I was when I help lost strangers find their way only at a time which is convenient for me.

But with Dan Ariely’s book, I feel a little better of myself now knowing that I’m not the only one in the world who is not perfectly rational. More importantly, however, is that I now not only recognize, but also fully understand the err in my decision-making processes.

With that knowledge, I shall no longer be duped into buying the wrong pads again… I hope.

[Edit] Sorry, if you are expecting to discuss this book at length. This is more of quick reaction than a review. I’m currently too sick to digest and analyze everything. But I share a lot of information social psychology, in particular self-control and decision making processes on my Tumblr at propagenda.org and my Shared Items on Google Reader. If you have time to comb through my entries, perhaps you may catch a glimpse of what I think of this. Cheers, Ivy.[/Edit]

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It’s simple and blatantly obvious, if you think about it. A person with the opportunity and dedication to sing for 10,000 hours or geek out for 10,000 is obviously going to be more skilled than someone (of equal talent) who only sings in the shower or geek out only when s/he majors in Computer Science.

With that said, Gladwell isn’t saying that 10,000 hours guarantees that you will become the next Bill Gates. It’s just that Bill Gates was rich and fortunate enough to clock 10,000 hours of programming in an era where computers were not easily accessible to the public. So social status, cultural background, era of birth, innate talent and the magic 10,000 hours all played critical roles in his success. In short, Bill lead a life of luck, while never forgetting hard work.

However, Gladwell does point out that 10,000 hours is the magic number that gets you good at something – good enough to be the best in your country, or in some cases, the world.

Have I clocked 10,000 hours for anything? Probably.

Surfing the Internet: 20,000 hours
I started surfing at age 9. In 1995, my dad brought home a modem to connect to the Internet. I can still remember the excitement in his eyes. From there I owned a Hotmail account, logged onto mIRC, and regularly scoured Yahoo!. Then at age 11, I stumbled upon a Backstreet Boys fansite hosted on Geocities. It was too pretty for words – then. And that’s how started learning HTML.

Over the past 12 years, I’ve clocked in 20,000 hours in email, chat, surfing and web design. Not sure how many hours I’ve spent with web design, but it’s safe to say somewhere close to 3,000 hours.

Watching Anime: 1,800 hours
I’m sure I’ve spent more time doing other things in my life, but anime deserves an honorable mention. Here’s why: I started watching anime in 2006. According to my anime list, I’ve watched about 75 days worth of anime. That means I’ve clocked 1,800 hours within 2 years. It’s a scary thought, but I now enjoy an interesting byproduct.

Language Mastery at 10,000 hours?

So it struck me. Watching 1,800 hours of anime is probably why I can easily understand colloquial Japanese. It means that I’ve spent 1,800 hours listening to spoken Japanese (while reading subtitles). For the record, I’ve never tried to study Japanese beyond the alphabet system. I can barely read, write or even speak Japanese.

And this also explains certain strengths and weaknesses I have with other foreign languages. I’ve read a lot of French in my life. I’d read up literary works, news and even blogs. But I’ve never had the opportunity to speak. So I couldn’t ever have a decent French conversation without interjecting with “ummm…” after every 5 words. As for Chinese, I’ve always understood it well. That’s ’cause my mom would scold and lecture me in Chinese. But I’d always retort in English, and staunchly refused to read anything with Chinese characters on it. So my strength lies with understanding Chinese but not speaking, reading or writing.

So the key to master a second language is to clock 10,000 hours and divide it equally amongst reading, writing, listening and speaking.

Moral of the story: Get off your lazy butt and start clocking 10,000 hours if you want to be the best. And if you’re learning a second language, spend 2,500 hours watching movies, 2,500 hours reading the newspaper, 2,500 hours skyping with foreigners, and 2,500 writing a blog. When you finally reach 10,000 hours, your second language will have probably become as easy as your first.

In the meantime, I will attempt to get off my lazy butt and clock another 8,000 hours in web design, read more books in Chinese, and practice strumming the guitar.

Have you spent 10,000 hours in an activity? (Please don’t say school, work or sleep. That’s the same for everyone.) What do you think the keys to success are?

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Not that it was messy to begin with but it wasn’t as presentable as I’d like it to be. If anyone had unexpectedly dropped by, they would classify me as an organized-messy person. I know it’s a juxtaposition but I can’t find a better word. Organized-messy means that I don’t randomly throw things everywhere. My laundry will always be thrown into a basket. All my language books will squished into one shelf. My socks will be spilling all over one section of my drawer. It doesn’t look great but everything is where I designated them to be. EXCEPT my work space; my work space has to be clean and organized 100% of the time or I’ll throw a huge party? fit.

So after a session with my toilet companion, I decided to clean up the rest of my room to get it as organized as my work space – just so I can trick myself and visitors that I am not only organized in my work life but in my personal one as well. We’ll see how long this lasts. Hah! Pictures below.

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