A Malaysian's life

I'll tell you what's insane about this.
You've paid with credit card for clothes you're wearing to a job you may not really want to get out of bed for.
You drive to your office in a jam incurring unnecessary costs in a car you're working your butt off to pay for.
You come back to a house only at night even though it takes 20% of your salary every month to pay off for 20 years.
Repeat this cycle for 26 days a month.
Now, are you Malaysians sane?

Decisive when the time comes

While average performers are timid and lack confidence in their own judgment, champions are known for their ability to make decisions, especially under pressure. 

The difference is courage and confidence. 

Even the best leaders are uncertain about their decisions in an environment of unprecedented change. 

I know this for a fact, I've been down this road a couple of times.

The difference is their willingness to make a decision and take full responsibility for the outcome.

Amateur performers habitually play not to lose and procrastinate because they fear making a mistake. 

The great ones know mistakes will be made and can be corrected. 

Their willingness to assume full responsibility for their decisions eliminates the need to gather more input than is absolutely necessary. 

Developing a sound decision-making process, while understanding every decision is somewhat a gamble, is the foundation of superior leadership. 

Professional performers can lead people and organizations effectively under such high-pressure constraints because they possess the self-trust necessary to make decisions without fear. 

Generally speaking, the higher the leadership position, the greater and the deeper the leader’s self-trust must be. 

Courage, self-trust and the willingness to assume full responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions are mandatory traits of competent and effective leaders.

Action Step for Today:

Take a decision you have been putting off for a while and decide on a course of action within the next 24 hours.

Decision-making skills are like muscles: they can only be built through use.

Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.

Perhaps we should take heed of this article. The real resource of a nation isn't it's natural ones, but rather it's people.


Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.

Thomas Fuchs
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 10, 2012

EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?”

Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman                           


I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.       
Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”
That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof.       
A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?       
 The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf)       
As the Bible notes, added Schleicher, “Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.”       
So hold the oil, and pass the books. According to Schleicher, in the latest PISA results, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out the same way in a similar 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss, test, while, interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — also Middle East states with few natural resources — scored better.) Also lagging in recent PISA scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them.       
Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”       
Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.       
By, contrast, says Schleicher, “in countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. ... Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it.”       
Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”       
That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.       
But there is an important message for the industrialized world in this study, too. In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher.       
In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”       




A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 11, 2012, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pass the Books. Hold the Oil

From housemaid to Harvard

“For those who want to live, the sky is the limit”. ~Dr. Jin Kyu Robertson

Anyone who has had the pleasure and privilege of being around Jin Kyu Robertson has often been impressed by her warmth, strength, determination and ability to inspire others through her example of leadership. She is a rare individual who makes everyone around her want to be a better person.

From inauspicious beginnings, her story is about the power of perseverance. She was the child of a tavern owner, and neither of her parents ever attended school. During her early teen years, she helped her mother with endless house chores. She also had to look after her baby brother who was a special child. She said that her brother’s condition caused her mother to turn to drinking, and that added more nightmares to her childhood. Reflecting anger for her sad fate of being a woman, mother used to yell at me, “Girls are useless! You are useless!” Over mother’s heartbreaking wails, I heard the louder voice of my silent anger: “Why? Was it my fault to be born a girl?”

Despite all of this troubles and mental stress, she excelled in her studies, and her parents agreed to let her complete middle and high school. There was no money for college, so she worked in a factory, as a waitress and housemaid. One day, she saw a newspaper ad for a housemaid in America. She decided to apply for the job, over her family’s objections.
I was 22 years old, and I didn’t speak much English at all,” she said. “So what I did was, I practiced words, like ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ ‘this way please,’ and ‘enjoy your meal,’ and those were all the words you needed,” she said. The job she came for had been filled by the time she reached New York, but she eventually found work as a waitress and moved on to become a hostess in a Jewish restaurant in Wall Street.
She eventually met and fell in love with a guy from Korea, got married and had a kid. But, she later found out that he was an abusive husband and she was a battered wife. With all this trouble around her, she chose to escape to the US Army and ended up becoming a private.
Her English was poor and she was 10 years older than most of the other recruits. Basic training was grueling, but she persevered, and finished first in her class of 200. She says she has always confronted her weaknesses head-on. She was afraid of heights, so she enrolled in an Army Airborne program that forced her to parachute from a helicopter. She found other opportunities in the military, and she pursued one she thought was tailor-made for an immigrant from Asia.
The Army employed regional specialists known as foreign area officers, and needed one in Japan. She applied, but was rejected. She says that did not stop her. ” But I liked the program. I wanted the program so bad, so I went to Washington D.C., the decision makers, and I asked them, why was I turned down?”She says, Army officials worried a woman officer would face problems in a male-oriented country like Japan. She disputed the idea, and asked if Japanese officials looked down on Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Britain. Of course not, was the reply. “So it took me one day, and they reversed the decision,” she said. Because of her perseverance, Jin Robertson is the first woman to represent the U.S. Army as liaison to the Japanese Self Defense Forces.
She also kept her focus on education. She decided early that the key to her dreams was education. She started college while working in New York. While in the Army, she completed a master’s degree at Harvard University in East Asian studies, and enrolled in a doctoral program, focusing on relations among the United States, Korea and Japan. After retiring from the Army with the rank of Major, she returned to Harvard to finish her Ph.D.
After she finished her doctorate, she started getting requests to give motivational speeches. “I didn’t know I was able to speak in public, really,” she said. “Always, whenever I thought about speaking, even giving briefings in the military, my heart was pounding so badly and I was so nervous, I couldn’t even drink water.” She says again she persevered, and found her confidence growing as the audiences responded. “I found this amazing great exhilarating feeling, and I said, wow, I love this public speaking,” she admitted.
Jin Robertson says one of her proudest accomplishments was raising her daughter, Jasmin. Also a Harvard graduate, Jasmin has followed in her mother’s footsteps and serves as a captain in the U.S. Army.

Some Things You Keep

Some Things You Keep

(This applies to friends,too!)
by Sheri Sobek

Some things you keep. Like good teeth.Warm coats.  Bald husbands.
They're good for you, reliable and practical and so sublime that to throw  them
away would make the garbage man a thief.
So you hang on, because something old is sometimes better than something new, and what you know often better than a stranger.
These are my thoughts, they make me sound old, old and tame and dull at a time when everybody else is risky and racy and flashing all that's new and improved in their lives.  New spouses, new careers, new thighs, new lips.
The world is dizzy with trade-ins. I could keep track, but I don't think I want to.
I grew up in the fifties with practical parents - a mother, God bless her who washed aluminum foil after she cooked in it, then re-used it- and still does.
A father who was happier getting old shoes fixed than buying new ones.
They weren't poor, my parents, they were just satisfied.  Their marriage was good, their dreams focused. Their best friends lived barely a wave away.
I can see them now, Fifties couples in Bermuda shorts and Banlon sweaters,
lawnmower in one hand, tools in the other.
The tools were for fixing things - a curtain rod, the kitchen radio, screen door, the oven door, the hem in a dress. 
Things you keep.
It was a way of life, and sometimes it made me crazy. All that re-fixing, re-heating, re-newing, I wanted just once to be wasteful. Waste meant affluence. Throwing things away meant there'd always be more.
But then my father died, and on that clear autumn night, in the chill of  the hospital room, I was struck with the pain of learning that sometimes there isn't any 'more'.
Sometimes what you care about most gets all used up and goes away, never to return.
So, while you have it, it's best to love it and care for it and fix it when it's broken and heal it when it's sick. That's true for marriage and old cars and children with bad report cards and dogs with bad hips.
You keep them because they're worth it, because you're worth it.

Some things you keep.

Sheri Sobek
http://mrmom.amaonline.com/stories/Somethingsyoukeep.htm

The 4 keys

"4 KEYS TO CONQUERING DISCOMFORT AND ACHIEVING EVEN GREATER SUCCESS"

by Bill Bachrach

In coaching advisors for more than 17 years, I’ve observed a key distinction between those who succeed at a high level and those who operate at a more mediocre level.

Successful advisors are willing to do uncomfortable things.

I’m talking about things that are uncomfortable for everyone. Successful people manage to do them, while those who aren’t succeeding at a high level will do just about anything to avoid the feeling of discomfort. I can understand why advisors don’t like to make cold calls; they’re uncomfortable for just about everyone (and we don’t recommend making them).

But I’ve noticed that many advisors are reluctant to do something even as simple as asking for, obtaining, and following up on referrals.

Recently, I took a week off to go on a very long bike ride. While my friends and I were logging over 100 miles a day and pushing ourselves up one hill after another, it occurred to me that very few people deliberately do things that make them uncomfortable.

In fact, most people are so self-conditioned to avoid discomfort that they think people who seek discomfort are stupid, reckless, or gluttons for punishment.

I often get just this kind of feedback when I tell people about my “vacation.”

When confronted with something uncomfortable, most of us just won’t rise to the challenge, even if it means failing to achieve our goals.

However, when we’re forced into an uncomfortable situation with absolutely no choice in the matter, we human beings have an incredible ability to rise to the occasion. People successfully move beyond being fired, going through divorce, and dealing with life- threatening illnesses, or surviving the death of a loved one.

Often they tell us, “It was the best thing to ever happen to me. I’m stronger, better, and more equipped to live a more productive, successful, and happy life.”

This is great news because it means we all have the capacity to handle discomfort.

We simply have to choose to harness it to achieve our goals.

So why do we avoid deliberately putting ourselves in “controlled” uncomfortable situations to make ourselves stronger, better, and achieve higher levels of success and happiness? More important, how can we do this on purpose so we can be stronger, better, more successful, and happier?

At the 1940 convention of the National Association of Life Underwriters, a gentleman by the name of Albert Gray said, “The common denominator of success—the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful—lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.” Gray’s words are often quoted within our industry, yet even more significant are the lines he spoke next: “The things that failures don’t like to do are the very things that you and I and other human beings, including successful men, naturally don’t like to do. In other words, we’ve got to realize right from the start that success is something which is achieved by the minority of men, and is therefore unnatural and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences and prejudices.” In other words, successful people push themselves beyond their natural discomfort to do whatever is necessary.

When it comes to asking for referrals and following up, for example, I look at it as a necessity—you can’t build your business without it. As far as I can tell, there’s no comfortable method for filling your appointment calendar. But if you don’t have any experience doing the things that are optional and uncomfortable, you’ll probably tend to avoid them.

What discomfort are you avoiding that needs to be faced in order for you to be the success you’re really capable of being? Are you asking yourself “what if” questions that discourage you?

•What if I hire the staff I really need, but it doesn’t work out? (Implication: I’ve wasted time, effort, and money.)

•What if I confront a staff person who isn’t getting the job done and they quit? (Implication: I’m stuck doing paperwork for a while and I’m forced to go out and find the right person for the job.)

•What if I ask for referrals and I offend a client? (Implication: The client fires me and tells everyone in the community what a bad person and advisor I am.)

•What if I follow up on a referral and they don’t appreciate my call? (Implication: They call my client because they’re angry. Then the client gets mad that their friend is mad so the client fires me and tells everyone in the community what a bad person and advisor I am.)

]•What if I make that investment in my business and it doesn’t turn out like I hoped? (Implication: I’ve wasted my time, effort, and money.)

•What if I give a client bad advice? (Implication: The client fires me and tells everyone in the community what a bad person and advisor I am.)

If questions like these are standing between you and your success, stop asking such lousy questions and try these four ideas instead!

1. Ask better questions.

Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong bad things. The consequences of not asking for referrals and following up are much greater than the worst-case scenario your imagination can conjure up.

Instead of focusing on all the bad things that might happen if you do what needs to be done, ask yourself what will happen if you don’t do it. Here’s one answer: You’ll end up being mediocre. Which is worse: being mediocre or dealing with the discomfort required to be successful?

Mark Allen, the six-time Ironman Triathlon world champion, asks the question, “Are you willing to do the work that the goal requires?” If you’re not succeeding at the level you really want, you might want to spend some time thinking about that question. If you want to be a successful financial advisor—someone who has the right number of ideal clients to generate enough gross business revenue to live the life you want—are you willing to do what it takes?

2. Give yourself empowering answers.

As long as you’re talking to yourself anyway, why not focus on the positive? What are some amazing, incredible, fantastic things that could happen? What might happen when you consistently and effectively ask for referrals and follow up? What might happen when you have the right staff doing the right things? What might happen when you make that investment in your most valuable asset—yourself?

3. Stop making excuses.

It’s amazing how often I hear advisors say, “That successful person was just in the right place at the right time.” No, the truth is that nearly every successful person has worked hard and taken uncomfortable actions consistently and diligently over a long enough period of time to become successful today. Stop making excuses and choose to face the uncomfortable situations that will lead to your success. Instead of criticizing the people who have become successful, choose to do the work and join them.

4. Make it a habit to choose discomfort.

The next time you find yourself avoiding something just because it’s uncomfortable, do it anyway. This applies to both personal and business decisions. Have you been putting off a preventive or diagnostic medical procedure because you know it will be uncomfortable? Have you been avoiding a personal issue or uncomfortable conversation? Schedule that doctor’s appointment, mammogram, or colonoscopy. Visit that friend in the hospital. Talk to that family member about how you really feel. Make an appointment to draw up your will or trust. Join the gym and go workout, even if you don’t look perfect in your shorts! Yes, these things may be uncomfortable, but do them anyway. Practice choosing discomfort. It will eventually come more naturally to you and the results will inspire you.

Here’s the bottom line. To become an even more successful financial advisor, you’re going to have to do things that are uncomfortable. Remember the advice offered by Albert Gray and Mark Allen. Don’t let discomfort be the deciding factor in determining what you do or avoid doing. If you’re going to do anything significant in life, you must push past the discomfort. In doing so, you’ll also set a great example for people around you and earn their trust and respect.

Don’t be a salesperson. Be a Trusted Advisor.