As a kid, you've probably had a character that you admired and admired. It could be an accomplished musician, an adventurous traveler, a brave army general or an outstanding scientist. 

It's hard not to be curious about what these various roles models have in the same way? Many might argue that it's their extraordinary talents and qualities that they possess - intelligence, talent beauty, talent - which make them what they are. 

Perhaps. But, all the time everywhere we look, there are people who are fascinating well-educated and attractive who are in the shadows and those with doubtful merit get to the highest levels. The difference isn't in their personal attributes but in the manner in which they "chosen people" pick to see life.

As soon as we are brought to the world, we're greeted with a set of guidelines to observe. Don't chew your thumb! Do not eat all the candy! Don't speak to your teacher in this manner! The list is growing with every passing year. Have you ever thought about where these rules come from? Who made the decision that you had to be living your life in in a certain manner?

The reality is that most of our cultural norms were created by the social order to attempt to unite us, making us more or less identical. Think about it this way, which would be more easy to manage? A tame crowd of clones, or a huge horde self-sufficient people? The guidelines and traditions you're used to was designed to make YOU more in line with the goals of the entire group.

"Wait just a moment, you say in a voice of anger"I don't want to be a slave "I don't want to serve other people! What are my personal interests?" Unfortunately, society in general, doesn't even care about your individual interests or goals. 

It doesn't take into account the dreams of anyone else. It is, in essence, an immense machine which only cares about its own operations. Within this system , a human is nothing more than an extremely small, easily replaced bolt.

But what happens to those who "made something from themselves"? People who have wealth as well as power are not important tiny bolts? Perhaps they are a symbol of something else inside the machine, or the engine perhaps? The secret to"the "creme de la"creme de la" is that they're not part of the system in any way.

I'd like to think about what makes your hero special? Maybe that's George Washington who fought and won the war for United States independence, despite the fact that his army was smaller than the British. Maybe you are awestruck by Walt Disney for creating the gorgeous "Snowwhite" animated film, investing all the money in his own capital, despite all his friends advised him against the idea. 

Perhaps you're thinking of that Russia's Peter The Great, one of the most famous European rulers who was responsible for many of the most significant shifts in Russian the history of Russia. The list of "greats" could go for a long time, and however different they may be they all have one thing they share. They didn't hesitate to breaking the rules.

Remember when you were a young child. What was the thing you desired to do the most? What was something you loved to the core? Did you stick to the road to your goal or did you drift off in the process? Maybe you thought that by making yourself "like the rest of us" you'd be more accepted and climb the ladder more quickly? Did it happen? If not, it might be time to rethink your strategy to achieve your goals.

I've discussed my thoughts I have discussed this with an American man known as Brad Smith who I met via Myspace. Brad's passion is traveling which is the reason his family suggested he join an airline company. The years passed and Brad was spending long days on the road instead of traveling the world. 

With a modest income and limited time to spare it was difficult for him to change careers. Family and friends encouraged him to be thankful that he held an employment that was stable, however it was clear that the man didn't want to celebrate the more important aspect of "existence than a existence" in the words he used to describe the phrase himself.

After many years of his job as an airline pilot that wasn't fulfilling, Brad turned to the Internet to find an answer. After many months of searching and searching for an online business opportunity known as The Abundant Living System, which is a social club that is founded on the right of every individual to make cash gifts to others, free of tax. 

The person has to give an amount of money (that can range from $150 to $5000) to the person they invite after which they receive an online site for free and marketing tools that allow them to reach others who be able to gift them gifts. "I was aware that for my family, this might sound like a joke," - said Brad. 

Brad "So I signed up for the program without being able to tell to everyone. I studied everything, and I realized that this was an incredible opportunity, even though it was not traditional."

The chance worked for Brad and, currently, he's recruiting numerous others via his website "These days, I take an annual vacation of 3-4 months instead of every 3- 4 years" Brad says. "It was difficult to make the first move since it wasn't something I was used to. However, I'm grateful that I made the choice. It was the best decision I've ever made."

There are many more who were introduced The Abundant Living System by Brad who is benefitting from the same advantages. Jessica Carter, a nurse from Washington has this to say: "Three months ago, I was told by a friend the amount of money I'd receive through ALS, I would think they were making fun of me. Within a couple of weeks, I was able to purchase a luxury automobile! It's awe-inspiring that this kind of thing exists however only a few people are aware of it!"

We hear about many "Internet successful stories" which range from the creators of Myspace as well as Facebook to those who are like Brad or Jessica who, maybe did not make it to NBC news however were able attain financial independence and focus on their own goals. Imagine that 10 years ago, many people thought that the Internet an accident!

The process of change can be a bit scary. It's like taking a leap off of a cliff that is a mile high rock, hoping to master the art of flying before hitting the bottom. The truth is that it's necessary to change when you have a dream. Do not be hindered by the sticky mortar of the old customs. Nobody has the authority to dictate how you should live your life. 

After all, when you put aside the assertions of certain religions and beliefs, this is the sole life you'll remember and the only one you can live! Take advantage of it! Perhaps, if you allow yourself the privilege of being yourself and follow your heart, then in the future there will be kids who look up to you and naming them their idol.

Earlier this year I made a decision to quit my job that was consuming my mind and body. 6 weeks later, I never thought I would still be jobless by now. And the fact that I have little money and little time left dominates my thinking right now. JJ Peterson, the author of this article, called it the Poverty Mentality: putting myself into survival mode before it is even necessary.

This poverty mentality penetrates to other areas of my life. When I am fearful of not having enough time and money, I start to become fearful of not having enough of other things as well. I start to feel like maybe I don’t have enough love. A poverty mentality scavenges and hoards, looking for every possible thing to grab hold of.

I live out of my poverty instead of my abundance.

In reality, I am fine and will be fine. I can’t be unwise with things, but I have plenty for today. I have an abundance of love, not only from those around me, but an unending supply of love from a God who loves me. If I can grasp that fact, that I am loved beyond measure and that I will never run out of that love, I can stop living out of a poverty mentality and live in my reality of abundance.

You are exactly where you are supposed to be, always, and so is everyone else. The portion of the path you wake up to today was written for you.

You are not your own or anyone else’s path-planner. You are just a traveler. You just keep moving. Trust the Path. Follow in the footsteps of a billion other mighty travelers who have walked and run and crawled the path before you.

http://ideami.com/changing-flow-of-life/

Inspiremetoday.com published the following article of mine a few weeks ago. you can find it at inspiremetoday.com here: http://www.inspiremetoday.com/archiveDisp.php?type=0&ref=1116

Inspiremetoday.com asked me to reflect about the words i would like to communicate if today was my last day on earth. This is the article:

____

Look at the shining sun, listen to the singing water, feel the unpredictable wind. Are those ever completely still? Not really. They are in fact always in movement, always flowing. Anything that is alive is always moving and changing. And so are you.

Whatever your circumstances are, they are already changing, right now. And in what direction? That depends entirely on you. Every single thought that crosses your mind, every single action you take is the foundation of who you will be right around the corner.

That’s why, whatever you are feeling today, remember that you are already becoming somebody else, moving in the direction you choose through the thoughts and actions you perform now, right now.

Most of our frustrations in life arise when we try to block, stop or go against the natural everchanging flow of life. That is in fact the opposite of creativity. As an artist i have learnt that the essence of creativity is flowing with your own soul and nature.

You are a beautiful whisper of the earth, whose natural behaviour is to explore, to learn, to experience, to engage, to change, to evolve.

We often attempt to block this process by for example wishing for a person never to change (because we like that person right as he/she is today), by wishing for us never to change (because we fear the consequences of change), by wishing to control the flow of life and set it exactly as we like it today and keep it that way forever.

The fact is, thats not possible. And the more we try in that direction the more unhappy we feel because we are fighting against something much larger and bigger and powerful than us, life.

The answer to this challenge is in recognizing our true nature and flowing with it. When we understand that every single part of us, from our smallest cells to our deepest thoughts are constantly changing, we can then relax and enjoy our true nature, swimming along with it and discovering the amazing variety, richness and infinite joy we can find all around us when we are truly there engaged with what is going on at every moment.

Some people fear that love and other valuable things are in danger because of this everchanging reality of life. It is in fact the opposite. Those things that are rigid and never move are the ones that crack and break easily. Those that flow and move continuously are also the ones that are most resilient and last longer. Start looking around, reconnect with life, from the trees to the skycrapers, all of them move to adapt to the winds or the earthquakes. Love is also movement and only in movement it can thrive, grow and last.

By realizing that like the wind, like the trees, like the sun, you are constantly evolving and flowing, second by second, you will discover that every one of those moments is different and full of amazing opportunities and joy that are right there for you to interact with.

You are an artist. Yes. You are. Because your life is your art, and if you truly engage with it, your life itself will be the most beautiful artistic work you will have ever seen

________

At inspiremetoday.com http://www.inspiremetoday.com/archiveDisp.php?type=0&ref=1116

----- Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008. ----- I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband. My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me. On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable. Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife. And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument. Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you. The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning. You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers. The good news is that they’re wrong. The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy. I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life. You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap. Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom. So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper. Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy. I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy. After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average. Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much. That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste. If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average. What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate. Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows. What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over. Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free. The most important is this: do not work. Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable. Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust. There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful. People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense. Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway. Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself. I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist. So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher. Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working. Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence. In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror. I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross. One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong. The other side of the coin is this: fall in love. I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone. Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable. Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul. Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm. You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart. You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you. Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it. Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

This is a very interesting article that I've just found in the internet this morning. I just want to share here, in my blog to remind me about who I am, what I wanna do and what I have to do in life. Many thanks to the writer - Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.