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An interesting riddle I got from a friend today… What is the hardest thing to break?

Diamond? No… It’s hard to find but easy to break.

Promise? Definitely no, I bet none of us have never broken any promise before.

It’s none other than HABIT !

Analysis:

If you break the “H”, you will have “A BIT”…

If you break the “A”, you will still have “BIT”…

If you break the “B”, you will definitely have “IT”…

And if you continue breaking the “T”, you will have “I”…

Nothing can change ourselves more than a single alphabet… the 9th.

Since this new blog was setup, I received quite a number of comments and questions from my friends. The most common would be:

1. Wah, you wanna become professional blogger ar?
2. Why pay so much for it when you can get everything for free?
3. Why make your life difficult to not doing what most people do, instead taking the hard way?

The answer to the first question is no, it’s not my plan to be a professional blogger. I mean, c’mon… with my profile, it would take me centuries before reaching “Kenny Sia’s” status.

The answer to the second and third question is quite personal actually. First of all, I don’t believe in free lunch. If I wanna get something done, I’ll have to work for it. If someone gives you something for free, there are always something that you’d have to pay back, or sacrifice…

Besides, humans tend to appreciate something more when that particular thing BURNS THEIR WALLET…

So why take the hard way? Simple, I just wanna have a taste on everything by myself, manage and learn from it. In other words, I wanna take full responsibility on myself.

I do not mean all, but most of us are living in a world of denial. Whenever we get into troubles, there’s certainly something or someone that we can blame of. We can blame our boss for being autocratic, blame lecturers for being irresponsible, blame our friend for betrayal, and so on… By putting the blame, we will have a sense of self being, satisfy, momentarily… but in the process, we have closed up our mind to everything around us, which often result in making decisions that we tend to regret later.

That was one of the moments of truth in my life. I, as like the other team members, blamed participants from other universities for being irrational. We did work hard, so why disqualify us? But from another perspective, we did wrong as well. If we did not, things would not turned against us. We too have the responsibility for everything.

For everything that happened, it happened for a reason. Of course, I can’t be saying that by taking responsibility, I’ll surely become a better man or be successful in future. But if I do not start taking responsibility on myself, then who will?

Life will never change if we do not take actions, and reflect on ourselves.

Today, I just realized someone from another part of the world is doing something similar to what I’ve been wanted to do for long long time, and he is doing it in a relatively large scale, yet doing it great! Once again, I am one step behind.

Does this sound familiar to you? On a very boring day, you are lying on your bed, brainstorming, thinking hard about your future and what comes next, being drown deep into thoughts…

… and “ting !”, a magnificent idea suddenly struck you. The more you imagine, the more you think it’s gonna work. It will make you become more successful, it will bring you from where you are to where you want to be… An “angel” on your left told you,  “OMG, that’s so cool !”

But at the same time, another “devil” on your right keep whispering, “You’re definitely not ready for it !“. At this moment, there will be four categories of people:

Type 1: Lose Before Battle

Back to zero, give themselves tonnes of excuses why they just can’t do it, ignore the “dream”, blame their own faith and get along with life.

Type 2: 3-Minutes Passion

Start taking little actions, gathering information, crunching books and journals… but the more they read, the more confuse they become. In the end, they gave up.

Type 3:  Chicken Little – The Sky’s Falling

Similar to Type 2, but they persisted. Take their sweet time gathering the “required information”, but always thinking that they are still not fully prepared yet. By the time they get started, they realized other people are already a hundred years in advance.

Type 4: Just Do It

People in this category will always tell themselves, “JUST DO IT!” They are clear with what they want to achieve in life and they know it’s not going to be an easy path. They have the great passion to try their best to reach their target. To them, their objectives of life is not a “should”, but a “must”. They do fall down in the journey but they keep themselves resilient. In the end, some may just achieve what they want… some may not, but still they know they have achieve quite a lot.

Often, we as human are thinking and worrying too much. Some are not satisfy with their life, they want to improve, but they do not want to take the responsibility. Some took little actions, but when it comes to obstacles they’d just give up. All these came from the same reason, they are not taking their goals seriously. They knew that without achieving their goal, they can still get along with life, their complaining life. They are only taking their goals as a “should”, but not a “must”.

Working hard for your goals might not 100% guarantee you achieving them, but not taking any action at all will always 100% guarantee you NOT achieving them.

Think for yourself, which category are you?

Went for a “In search of Blue Ocean” seminar last night, as recommended by a friend. I’ve attended a few of this type of seminar and people would just say all these so-called “introductory” seminars are tools to lure people to sign up for the “actual” seminar behind, provided by the same company, which can cost up to a few thousand bucks.

Many may just think, What can I really learn in just a 2 hours short seminar anyway? But to me, these are platforms that keep us updated with things that happen around us, that can affect our lifestyle, and which we never realize…

…until they hit us…

For example, the establishment of East Asia Community (东亚共同体) by ASEAN Plus Three (东盟 10 + 3), a cooperation between ASEAN countries and 3 East Asia giants; China, Korea and Japan. The community aims to broadened and deepened many areas of cooperation among its membership countries, including politic, economy, tourism, agriculture… etc. This idea was proposed by our ex-prime minister during the 90’s, but only then was taken into serious consideration a few years back. The objective is to unify the economy among the membership countries, providing free tax zone, as well as to cultivate cooperation among the countries during financial and economy crisis.

Malaysia has been a target of many foreign countries as our “culture blend” was considered best managed among the ASEAN countries. We have attracted heaps of foreign investors to invest in many projects, such as the Iskandar Project in Johor and the proposed project to build a bridge connecting Malacca and Sumatera.

Sounds great huh…?

But how many of us living in Malaysia will actually consider what are the long term consequences behind the establishment? I mean, is there any free lunch in reality?

Our country has great potential and resources, but we do not have the talent and ability to expand them. All of these projects, which were suppose to be utilized by the locals to increase the country’s income, have all been “sub-contracted” by foreign countries. Our government has directly “outsourced” all these projects, and yet still proudly claiming “Malaysia Boleh!”

We have many projects with great future, but most of them failed after a few years of development. This is mainly because we failed to establish the right system for everything we do. As mentioned by the late W. E. Deming, most of the problems that occurred in an organization, are due to the inefficiency of the system.

If employee under-perform, it’s the fault of the employer who failed to establish a good system.

If underlings misbehave, it’s the fault of the leader who failed to establish a good system.

If co-workers couldn’t meet expectation, it’s the fault of the boss who failed to establish a good system…

… and in our country, we failed to do the same as well.

Imagine, when Asia’s giant such as China’s market begins to take a big step into Malaysia, how would it affect us? Let take Starbuck Coffee for instance, a cup of coffee would normally cost RM10 or so. But China’s investor and entrepreneur can provide the same coffee bean, with same taste and coffee quality, but at less than 40% of Starbuck’s cost. For us consumers, that sounds marvelous. But how would this affect our country’s economy?

In China, franchising is not a matter of how many hundreds of franchises, but they count by how many THOUSANDS across the country! Numbers are just small matters…

How will our local products survive when people can provide the same, but higher quality products at lower cost in Malaysia?

How will most of our local entrepreneurs react when the foreign investors bring in this competition?

Are we going to put ourselves into the price slashing war, and end up drowning in the Red Ocean?

Some may procrastinate, saying that we would look for QUALITY than QUANTITY, but let’s be frank… how many of us have always preferred Malaysian Made Product than China Made Product?

As you can see, other countries are advancing in fast pace due to this “economy war”. Everyone are implementing innovation, thinking hard of how to further improve their business as well as the country’s future economy. Unfortunately in our country, the most popular topic we can listen everyday would be “political war”. All parties fighting among each other over who should be in “business“… but when there’s a problem, it’ll turn into “It’s none of my business“.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are at war… economically of course, and yet most of us are still unaware of it. In two months time (beginning of year 2010), we are going to battle with these people (foreign investors and entrepreneurs).

So how well are we prepared for it?