This is one of my favorite nursery rhymes as it helps me think when things go down.

The itsy-bitsy spider
Climbed up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain
And the itsy-bitsy spider
Climbed up the spout again


So what does it have to do with a blog that is talking mainly about working life?

Well, the answer is very simple… just read it again!

Life and work life has its ups and downs. We are always looking to climb the corporate ladder and to get to a higher position with more money, responsibility and in some cases, fame.

However, we do get washed down by “rain” every now and then but don’t fuss, don’t fret, just pick yourself up and climb on up again. The sun will come out and the rain will stop but we must always look to continue climbing up again.

Inspiration does come from places where you find them. 

I have been thinking a lot recently on where should my path take me. And all more importantly I have figured out is what I enjoy doing. Earlier I discussed that we need to know what we don't want to do and that makes it easier for us to know what we like. So now lets explore on the stuff that makes us happy.

Why did I start off with what we don't want? It's simple. We must know what we don't want before we can concentrate on what we want. I not, we will focus on the things we want and forget about what we dislike. And by continuing to accept things that we dislike will make us unhappy in the end.

The path is very simple, like earlier when we listed out things that we don't want to do, start to list out things that you want to do. Be realistic. Just because you want to be a CEO of a company doesn't mean you are qualified for it now. (I'll talk about skills planning in another post, on another day)

Once you know what you would enjoy doing, it's then simple to add the lists together and start looking at jobs that will be able to grant you both. Choose what is a must have and what is a nice to have else there will be no job in the world that would satisfy you. Like I said earlier, its about living with the maybe's and staying away from the will not's. 

So, earlier I talked about what do you want and also for you to think about what are you bad at. Now, it is time to put those things down and for you to narrow down what do you actually want! Yay, getting somewhere!


But don't get ahead of yourself. We must know what are we want to get ourselves into before looking into getting what we want. We need to be sure that we will not be doing things that we don't like in order to be happy doing what we are asked to do.


To make it simple, lets look at a list of things we usually don't like to do. 

1. Monotonous routines
2. Door to door sales
3. Lack of direction

So, basically we will need something that is higher up in the work food chain. We don;t want to be doing the entry level boring stuff. At my level, I can choose not to but for someone starting out, you got to prove yourself first. 

Speaking of being in the higher levels, we actually have to do more of the things that we don't like in order to do what we would like. It's a trade off. Simply put, we need to do it because we have the necessary skills and we reached these levels because we passed through doing the things that we didn't like in the first place. And we did them well.

Next after knowing what we don't want to do, we have to think what can we actually live with? So please look through your list and choose, what can you live with and why? Why can you take it? With that, you will now have a list of things you will never do, things you may do, and things you don;t mind doing. 

Stay tuned for the next post where we will start looking at what we want to do!

As I sit and write this, it echos in my head "What do you want to do?". And I find that this is a common question I come across when talking to friends about career choices.

It's not that I am an expert in this, but for myself, it does help to write it out in order to get some clarity in my head. I too am always thinking what do I want to do? What do i want to achieve?

But it's more than just that. It's more than what do you want to do, what are you good at, what do you have passion for... It's also about what do you not want to do, what you dislike, what can you live with and what compromises are you willing to take. What are you going to handle?

I know for many its all about how much am I going to get paid and that no matter what, you can take it for the money. Kinda sounds like some profession? Not knowing what you are getting until u get in?

So while I think more and write more on this over the next few days, think of this first.

"What am I not good at?" 

Sounds simple? It's harder than it looks. Knowing what you are not good at will help you choose what do you want to do, and ultimately knowing what you are good at.

So as part of my sharing on what i learnt from startup training is to simplify things. Many times in our life, we tend to think a lot of what we want to do, analyze the situation, what others will think and so on. This makes everything complicated. More importantly it makes us second guess ourselves. 

Even when it comes to our ideas, what we want to do, what do we want to achieve, we usually will think all sort of things and add more and more layers in order to cover what we think or what some other people think will be the shortfalls of the system. 

This complicates things. 
Keep it simple. 
Strip it down to the core

It's not about the money. Money has clouded our judgement, our motives and our actions. But what do we want is to have a purpose!

Well, I have been involved in the Founder Institute 2013 Kuala Lumpur chapter and I am glad to say that I have finally graduated! Out of the 31 people who joined, 9 of us made it to the end!


At times I was unsure whether we would make it and if the idea had enough legs to float but I feel that the final idea we have come up with will work and all I need to do now is to build the core team up and it will be able to continue on.


Do keep an eye out as I write about the journey here. I think its much better for me to write it all here instead of the company blog as it is much easier for me to compile everything together! 

A simple way I would recommend everyone is to do like what I do, go buy yourself a domain name! It's much more memorable when I tell people my email address is bert@bertlim.net or iam@bertlim.com! It makes you easily remembered and greatly helps in your own self marketing. You don't have to get a blog if you don't want to but it doesn't hurt to get your domain name first.

And the best part is that it's not expensive at all! Its not going to cost you hundreds a year, there are so many free options available these days and its easy for you to get it done!

Here are some tips from me

1. You can get domain hosting from GoDaddy.com or bluehost.com or any other site you like. Most importantly is to ensure that you have a DNS for it once you are registered.
   
2. Many local Malaysian registrars do not have free DNS. You only can get it once you have a hosting account. So unless you get a .my domain, just go for the international ones.
3. On what domain name to buy, its up to you. You can go like me and get your own name. If you use your chinese name more often, you can go for that and put your surname as your email address so it becomes lim@bert.com. 
4. For free email, I use outlook.com. Just go to domains.live.com and register for it. You can have up to 50 free email accounts so if you are able to get your surname as your domain, that will be great for family use. However lim.com is taken. :(
5. Google used to be free for emails but they have changed it. So now you have to pay for it else you could also use it as an email hosting service. 
6. If you want a blog like this, there are many sites you can use. Blogspot, wordpress are the common ones. However I use Weebly.com as I find the interface to edit and modify my page much simpler and not waste so much of my time writing HTML code for pictures and anything else.I can also choose my own themes whenever I want and they look great!

Anyway, do start thinking of self-branding yourself. Even if you don't want to use it yet, buy the domain now!

I posted this out last year...

I am reminded from many experiences that people often get worked up and go off tangent when they misinterpret words when in a discussion. And often when you are trying to clarify with these people, they often talk about their agenda and will not allow for others to explain to them their mistake.

So have you encountered this before? I am sure each one of us has had a conversation like this before. And how did you handle it?

Personally, I find that this happens to me when the other person is not very technical or uses another language as their primary language. The problem occurs when they interpret the meaning of a common word for something else. And they can’t understand sarcasm.

How to deal with this? Normally I would let them talk until they feel they are right. Then start asking them back what do they mean. In these cases, it will then allow me to understand where did they misinterpret and correct them.

Few rules to follow

1. Be patient
2. Don’t get emotional
3. Explain slowly to them

Hope you don’t hit into similar problems anytime soon but if you do, just let them finish first. And don't try to be a smart ass

As you can see, the price of oil has been at its highest for quite some time. We all feel it daily as we can see the cost to refill our cars, the increasing price of goods and also especially the portions of food becoming smaller and smaller.

But in a way, car manufacturers are to be blamed. They make a lot of money and are focused on selling more cars each year to make more money, like all businesses. I think that they are also to be blamed for the increase of oil demand worldwide!

When you look at a car brochure, what do you see? Wow... the car looks good, it has a CD player! Reverse camera, 10 airbags etc. But what many of us immediately look at is... the engine specs. How many cc's? How much horsepower? 0-100? An of course, how may liters/100km... And we will rationalize to ourselves that we won't be stepping on the gas so much and we will drive sanely...

All governments and safety groups will always tell you "Speed kills!", "Drive within the limits", "Penalty points and higher fines are the way". Public will cry out "I want an efficient MRT/LRT/Train system", "Public transport sucks", "It's not convenient to take the bus". And all these add up to more petrol being used.

But there is a much simpler way to save petrol. If all governments around the world get all the car makers around the world to make cars that can't go above the speed limit, what will happen? We probably will get souped up Tata Nano's like the Aston Martin Cygnet.

But won't that be much more interesting? We spend much of our time stuck in traffic jams, going to work and back. A small, comfortable car with a nice interior will be great. You can't use your 500+hp in a traffic jam at all and all that fuel saving technology like engine stop/start, cylinder deactivation, FSI, ultra high compression etc will not be so useful after all. It is just to make the cars pass through federal inspections to look good on paper.

End of the day, if all car makers look at building a car that can do 100km/liter of gas, with a lovely interior will we still need so much petrol? Will companies like Ferrari, Lamboghini etc be relevant? 

I won't mind buying something like the Cygnet if it was affordable so I can use it as a daily driver.. but all small cars are either very cheap with bad safety or very expensive like the Audi A1, BMW 1-series. And cars like the Prius C, Honda Jazz have interiors that are not comfortable at all.

Maybe I should go make my own car... but stupid JPJ won't allow it.