Ben Blogs

What is up with the world today?

According to Daily Mail,  33-year-old Neil Brook sent a text to Josef Witkowski, a friend he’d known for about six months.

In his text, Brook meant to send the word “mutter” but instead auto-corrected to “nutter”. This infuriated Witkowski so he went over to Brook’s house looking for a fight.

A knife fight ensued, which led to Witkowski’s death.

Ok seriously first of all. What the hell is mutter? And how can something like this lead to murder! From what I read, it seemed that there is plenty of time for Brook to calmly explain to his friend that he obviously sent the wrong text.

There must have been some underlying agenda. But whatever it is, these two are nutters indeed.

Speaking of auto-correct here are some funny ones that may or may not have lead to death courtesy of Damn You Auto-Correct.

LOL!

Came across this test. All I can say is that mathematics is a hell of an invention!

Be honest and don’t look at the movie list till you have done the math.

Try this test and find out what movie is your favorite. This amazing math quiz can likely predict which of 18 films you would enjoy the most. Don’t ask me how, but it really works!

Movie Test:

1. Pick a number from 1-9.

2. Multiply by 3.

3. Add 3.

4. Multiply by 3 again.

5. Now add the two digits together to find your predicted favorite movie in the list of 18 movies after the sexy Eva Mendes.

Movie List:

1. Gone With The Wind
2. E.T.
3. Blazing Saddles
4. Star Wars
5. Forrest Gump
6. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
7. Jaws
8. Grease
9. The Joy of Anal Sex With A Goat
10. Casablanca
11. Jurassic Park
12. Shrek
13. Pirates of the Caribbean
14. Titanic
15. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
16. Home Alone
17. Mrs. Doubtfire
18. Toy Story

Don’t doubt it! Its true! Haha

When I was younger, I remember asking myself.

“What are my talents?”

Till now, I still couldn’t think of any. I never particularly excelled in anything though I was a fast learner. Nothing was really my thing.

Over the weekend, I came across a book titled : Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.

In essence, it offer’s new evidence that talent as we know it, is in fact not inborn but comes from practice and perseverance honed over decades.

Imagine my joy! There is hope after all.

One of the most important traits great performers are who they are is through what the author calls - Deliberate Practice.

We have all heard of the old adage “Practice makes perfect” but in reality practice does make perfect, but the right type of practice leads to superior and fast track results. Not only does one need to put in the hard work, you need to design it in a way that it will specifically improve your performance of a particular goal/target.

Anyway, I have decided to incorporate somethings I’ve learnt from reading the book into my life.

Nothing drastic as I know I usually falter if I make any grandiose goals. So I am starting with this.

Every working day I will -

1) Write/post at least 1 blog post

2) Swim before/after work

Research says that it takes about 2 months for new habits to form but I will give myself 3 months.

Every now and then, I visit the blog of one of my favorite thinkers - Seth Godin.

This morning on my way to work, I realized that his blog is actually the only one that I continuously and consciously (without the help of a bookmark) go back and read every now and then.

What’s more, not only do I know that I will enjoy what he post, it would also make me think and reflect about my own perspective of life, marketing, values, etc.

So I asked myself why and ultimately it boils down to these 3 things.

1. Post length

His post are often short and to the point. I think with all the noise that there is out there, the length of his post seems just about right. No filler, just straight to the point.

2. Makes you think

Most of the time, Seth starts of with some event, example or occasion in the real world and then challenges that status quo. As a reader you would probably go “Hmm thats true” or “Why didn’t I think of that”. Whether or not you agree with what he says, to me it is still something of value. It opens up a line of thought which previously would not have been there.

3.  Inspiring and motivational

Seth is an master of taking simple ideas and making them relevant and impactful. His post usually end up leaving me inspired. It makes me want to hustle, to ship, to take action. Sometimes it just makes me want to take this new found revelation and apply it somewhere. Anywhere.

Do you like his blog as well? Do share some of the reasons why!

Sometime ago I came across this video of Barry Schwartz on the The Paradox of Choice

In a nutsell, the paradox of choice simply states that while having a choice is good, choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them,  set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures.

In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis. And in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.

After watching this video, a lot of things in my life began to make sense. Not only have I experienced this personally, I see it happening to other people around me especially my friends.

In my short stint at a wine shop I often see people walking in to the store expecting to purchase something only to be bombarded by the vast amount of labels. Rather than making any decision, they opt to make no decision.

Take a trip to Giant or Tesco and you can see a whole aisle of cereal, instant noodles or even bottled water.

And then there are times where I feel I that have so many ideas to pursue and I just can’t decide which ones to go after. Which one is better? Which one has a brighter future? Which one is worth my time?

I also have a friend who absolutely hates his job right now. But because he is so deep into his profession, he finds it hard to decide what he should do next.

He wants to make the perfect choice.

He needs to know that the choice that he makes would be the best of his future.

But he is afraid of making one because what if he chooses the wrong one?

Just yesterday, me and my brother went out for dinner. If any of you have been Wai Sek Kai in SS2 before, you will know that there is a lot of food stalls to choose from. When my brother came back to the table after ordering I had a gut feeling of his choice.

Somehow I knew that he would order a plate of fried rice. Instead of cracking his head to decide what to eat, he coped with this paralysis by ordering the easiest, safest choice.

There is no shortage of this discussion on the web. Every now and then I would come across an articleon mentioning this paradox. Sometimes its about love and our partners, sometimes it is about the career choices, or it could be an advertising article discussing consumer behaviors.

Or it could be about decision making on web design and user experience like this article here. It ties in all the research, lessons, strategies about decision making and applying it to web design.

I feel that I could go on and on about this so I guess I’d stop here.

If any of you encountered such an experience before do share on the comments below

I read about Foursquare going down for an unprecedented 9 hours today on Mashable this morning. Ironically, Mashable is also down now as I wanted to quote somethings from there.

But whats interesting to note is that I immediately went to Twitter search to check whether it was just me or affecting everybody. The way I get my news now seem to be evolving!

Anyway, Foursquare went down for close to 9 hours today and quite honestly, I didn’t really care. I was once an active user checking in to everywhere I go, contesting for Mayorships, accumulating badges, competing in lead board scores and of course stalking people.

I remember when I just got news of this new geo-location check in application,I was abit hesitant to participate for the following reasons

1. I didn’t understand why the hell would anyone want to tell other people where they were. But thats when I remembered I also said why the hell would anyone want to use Twitter at 140 characters. Lol
2. I didn’t actually go anywhere much so I figured I didn’t have anywhere to check in anyway. And it would publicize my extremely sad and boring life.
3. None of my friends were using it.

But one fine day I decided to check-in to a few places and I got my first badge! That got me hooked. The next thing I wanted was to be Mayor somewhere. I got my friends to download Foursquare and we competed for a while.

These days I rarely (never) open that app anymore.

I guess seeing that I sit in the office for 8 hours everyday, I don’t find it all that fun to be checking in at the same place everyday. Perhaps someone who travels alot would appreciate it more.

Don’t ask me why but this quote from B.O.B – Airplanes comes to mind:

Cause after all the partyin’ and smashin’ and crashin’
And all the glitz and the glam and the fashion
And all the pandemonium and all the madness
There comes a time where you fade to the blackness

Related articles by Zemanta

• Foursquare Has A Bad Case Of The Mondays: 6 Hours Of Downtime And Counting (techcrunch.com)
• Foursquare’s Down for Nine Hours and Counting (mashable.com)

Seems that Google just made another one of their services public.

Apparently they have their own URL shortener now at Goo.gl and it promises to be “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”

I never gave much thought to URL shortener as TweetDeck automatically does that for  me.

Ever once in a while I do go over to Bit.ly. Whether or not Goo.gl would be a Bit.ly killer we would have to wait and see.

Matt Cutts a Google Engineer as this to say

Q: Is goo.gl an “X killer”?
A: No, goo.gl isn’t an effort to kill anything. I think the whole “product X will kill product Y” meme is getting a little threadbare. We needed a url shortener for Google itself. And then lots of people asked for this, so we’re opening our own url shortener to the world. Different url shorteners have different philosophies; I view the goo.gl philosophy as running a tight, fast service without piling on a ton of features.

Goo.gl’s tracking data look pretty neat and clean as well. So it looks like I know what I’ll be using from now onwards

Related articles by Zemanta

• Goo.gl url shortener is now open to everyone! (mattcutts.com)

So I am sitting here thinking.

Thinking of what to write as an intro to this post but screw it. I’ll just jump straight to the wine haha!

I had this white wine the other day and its from the same winery as my previous post.