But I still have time to read and hopefully be inspired, like this beautiful blog post today,

We can, and must have activity. Especially when the activity is one that we blossom in. The ‘thing’ that makes us ‘us’. The gifting and the skills that when we use, we feel connected.

However, to allow the activity to have any depth, it is essential that we allow room for contemplation. It is this which stops our activity from becoming purely superficial. And, in actual fact, the contemplation is the most active because it informs and feeds. Without it, we are running on steam, running on what we once knew and thought but not truly growing with the activity.

It is a misconception that to be still is to waste time, the opposite it true.

Absolutely genius.  A great real life reverse example of how copyrights restrict creativity and innovation.

“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

Two random quotes from alltop that I found inspiring.  And yes, do stay away from the small people, gossips backfire… :)

Ning, a feature-rich social-networking site recently announced that they are phasing out free services.  The website actually has been well received by its user base, with 2.3 million user-created Ning Networks and more than 45 million registered users. According to the Guardian, despite the $120m venture capital backing, Ning does not appear to have made a profit.  Having engaged users is great, unfortunately it is not enough to sustain a business.  Companies need to invest early and enough in coming up with sustainable, if not, innovative monetisation strategy as well.

Bebo, on the other hand, is now facing up to the fate of either being sell-off or product closure.  One apparent reason of Bebo’s downfall is the lack of investment,

At one point, we had 40 engineers when Facebook had something like 2,000.

Bebo is also compounded by the threat that their target demographics (early teens) are notoriously fickle in curating their online brand experience.  4 years ago being on Bebo was hip, now, it’s possibly tacky, as Danad Boyd’s research with American teens on MySpace and Facebook perfectly captures this demographic’s ambivalent attitude towards social media,

Then, I met Kat, a white 14-year-old from a comfortable background.  We were talking about the social media practices of her classmates when I asked her why most of her friends were moving from MySpace to Facebook.  Kat grew noticeably uncomfortable.  She began simply, noting that “MySpace is just old now and it’s boring.”  But then she paused, looked down at the table, and continued.

 ”It’s not really racist, but I guess you could say that.  I’m not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever.” – Kat

Important lesson to learn for business is that the key to sustained business success is to keep your brand relevant to your target demographics.  Getting to the top is not easy, but staying at the top is even a bigger challenge.

I have started doing yoga about 6 years ago, and have been a total convert only a couple of years ago when I learnt how to relieve any kind of strain and pain by going into certain poses.  I also wrote about the main benefits of yoga for geeks in particular.

But as action speaks more than words, I feel oblige to share with as many of you all my favourite stretches for relieving pain around the wrists and shoulders, so easy that you don’t even go into a class to try!  But of course, boring reminder here, when there’s any extreme discomfort or sharp pain, make sure you check with you GP.  Otherwise these are great little exercises to give yourself a little impromptus massage.  I have linked all exercises back to their source, but I have added my own personal comment to bring out the maximum effectiveness of each stretch.

Enjoy!

1. Basic Wrist Stretch (ninja mask’s optional!)

This one is so simple that you can do it while you’re sitting in front of your desk.

• Remember to sit properly with your both feet parallel hip-width apart
• Inhale as you extend one arm (or if your neighbour colleagues don’t mind, both), remember to tighten your fingers and arm muscles, that way you can feel the the stretch more intensely
• Exhale while you stretch up, on the next inhale point your wrist up
• Exhale, return to neutral (hands pointing to the side)
• Inhale pointing down, exhale return to neutral
• For the creative type – feel free to use this exercise to focus on the breath and try to maintain longer exhale than inhale, that way you clear your mind and come back with more good ideas (sans the caffeine and hello good night sleep!)

* also take time to notice you *are not* slouching – imagine an invisible string pulling yourself up from the tip of your head.  No, I’m not trying to imply that you’re the sock-puppet mucking around on Wikipedia, it’s just that in the long run slouching messes up with your spine alignment and exerts prolong pressure in the wrong place.  And that can really, really hurt, now we don’t want that, do we? :)

Great for wrist relief!  Once you get into the hang you can start introducing variations, such as rotating your wrists clock-wise and anti-clock-wise, also great for relieving the tight tendons around the wrists.

2. Counter shoulder stretch

Knowing my blog’s audience, I am tempted to make this pose more macho sounding, like, Couching Tiger pose.  Right. ;)

As you know, but probably not often think about, that our shoulders are composed of highly intricate joints, muscles and tendons and we tend to stuck them in the same position whole day (arms 90 degrees typing/mouse maneuvering).  By now with all the damage done, you are probably like me – a quick test here -  if you reach your left arm above your shoulder to the centre back and right arm from below up, do your hands touch touch one another easily?  On both sides?   heh.  After years of trying (definitely not hard enough), I still can’t do that on my left side.

If you are like me, you’re going to *love* the couching tiger stretch,

This pose should bring immediate relief to upper back and shoulders, as well as relieving strains on the arms.  Also it clears the head a bit, too.  And if you’re good in holding your spine steady and lock your knees, you can get a great hamstring stretch too, great for the cyclists.

Finally!  I’ve been building up to this funky one!

3. Funky hamstring-lower-back stretch:

I love this one when I start feeling sleepy – and it’s so easy to sneak into an empty meeting room when you feel stale, uninspired, or just having bad shoulder strain!  Easier done than how it looks, too, I promise.  Not to mention having all the blood rushing to your head, guess how I quit my coffee addiction slowly and steadily?

Hope you like the stretches, and feel free to share if I have missed something obvious.  Now time to show some love to your shoulders, wrists and lower back… and let me know if these poses work for you!

So this psychologist, Richard Wiseman, devised an experiment to test his two groups of people – one group consistently counts themselves as lucky, and the other group as unlucky,

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

It is shocking to see that the ‘lucky’ group tends to remain oblivious to the ‘lucky’ opportunities right in front of them.  I like how Wiseman puts a positive spin to the research outcome – being lucking is actually a *skill* that you can learn:

Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

So the keys are ICP: Listen to you Intuition/Instinct, be Creative, and stay Positive.  Wish you all luck and please do share with friends who find themselves lucky and more so those who don’t!

Special thanks to another good friend of mind who builds this MiniMotivation hack: keep refreshing it for more positive vibes.  I feel lucky already. :)

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

I am usually very private and do not discuss anything personal on my blog, but this topic is too close to heart and here is what I learnt:

1. Stereotypes sometimes contain some good schemata for us to quickly categorise and ‘manage’ people,  but not always true: My experience tells me that there are men who suck as self-promotion, there are also women who put themselves out there and talk themselves up.

2. You don’t need to talk and act like a ‘man’ to get respect.  You need to be good at what you do and be proud to tell other people succinctly. This does not discount your respect for other people, but it means that you are STRONG enough to stick to your gun when you guts tell you that you KNOW what you’re talking about.  People can doubt you, but not yourself.  Same lesson for men and women.

3. Everyone has their own insecurities and things that they wish they are better at.  I am still struggling at times of projects that I have no prior knowledge to – but do I rant/share my fear?  To be honest, I would just do it.  Research, ask questions, think, use your bloody brain, talk to someone who is good, hire someone to do the part you are not sure about and focus on your strength.  At the end of the day – focus on the deliverable – if you’re passionate and conscientious about your clients’ work, it comes across.  Whether you are a man or a woman.

4.  I love how Tom Coates put it in bigger perspective,

And while encouraging people to spot the talented and the creative, we should also be considering how we shame those people who self-promote without creating. The financial collapse has taught us that rhetorical bubbles divorced from reality are a danger to us all. We’re already approaching this point – our industry has become venal, insular and dominated by marketing. We have come to value the wrong things. And if we want a continued vigorous, creative, free, open and equal environment, that’s something we have to fix. It’s not something to aspire to.

Time to get real.

5. Finally – I am not actually arguing against Clay, I just want to clarify that women and men might communicate differently, but none needs to be arrogant/ego-maniac to gain respect.  What I note is that when I work with younger people (I’m sorry to generalise), they tend to focus too much on ‘what I can learn from you’ and ‘how I can help’ instead ‘I know what I am talking about and here is what you should be doing.  I can help you with this and that’.  To be fair, I do see more men talking with the latter perspective, which is pretty handy in building confidence with people you work with.  Having said that, I do talk like that too… and I’m a woman.  Damn proud of it.

In sum, the key thing is:

Don’t let other people decide who you are.  You know best, and with trust and compassion in yourself you stand tall. A weak ego usually comes big, because they need all the fluff to fill in the room.  But there is little substance, or foundation of trust in it.  When it bursts, nothing stays because it’s all air in it.

A small but strong ego is a beautiful ego.  It is quiet.  But when it speaks, people listen.

Pure awesomeness.

—————–

A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, ‘What does love mean?’
The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined See what you think:

‘When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore.
So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love..’
Rebecca- age 8

‘When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different.
You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.’
Billy – age 4

‘Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.’
Karl – age 5

‘Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.’
Chrissy – age 6

‘Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired..’
Terri – age 4

‘Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK..’
Danny – age 7

‘Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more.
My Mommy and Daddy are like that.. They look gross when they kiss’
Emily – age 8

‘Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.’
Bobby – age 7 (Wow!)

‘If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,’
Nikka – age 6 (we need a few million more Nikka’s on this planet)

‘Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.’
Noelle – age 7

‘Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.’
Tommy – age 6

‘During my piano recital, I was on a stage and I was scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling.
He was the only one doing that.. I wasn’t scared anymore.’
Cindy – age 8

‘My mommy loves me more than anybody You don’t see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night..’
Clare – age 6

‘Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.’
Elaine-age 5

‘Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.’
Chris – age 7

‘Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.’
Mary Ann – age 4

‘I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones..’
Lauren – age 4

‘When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.’ (what an image)
Karen – age 7

‘You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.’
Jessica – age 8

And the final one
The winner was a four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife.
Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there.
When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said,
‘Nothing, I just helped him cry’