Life As A Competition

From the Straits Times of 25 August 2008, an article by 22-year-old Christine Chong.

Why must life be a competition?

I ONCE met a trumpet player from the United States and asked him which competitions his school band had taken part in. Stunned, he replied: 'Not everything in life is a competition.'

It was inconceivable to me that students would participate in school bands and other CCAs out of pure interest, and not for points.

It is a tragedy that many Singaporeans believe exams, rankings and stress are necessary evils on the long and winding road to success.

The mantra that 'Your studies should be first priority' is never far from our parents' lips. 'Don't waste too much time on other activities' and 'This is a very important academic year' are close seconds ....

Coincidentally, I was having lunch with a friend yesterday and this topic came up - why are Singaporeans choosing not to have babies?

The interesting answer - it's the result of a collective herd mentality instilled by the education system. Back in the school days, the mentality could be expressed like this: "Your studies should be first priority; don't waste time on other activities." This got imprinted into the minds of the entire generation.

Fast forward to adulthood, and the same imprint is still there. It's just that it has adapted into a new form for those who have finished school: "Your career should be first priority - don't waste time on having children."

In the psychological landscape of Singaporeans, parenthood has become the equivalent of "CCAs". It's the thing you might really, really love to do. But your kiasu instincts are telling you that you can't take the risk; you might not have the time; you might not have the money; and it's much safer to just concentrate on your homework job. (Yup, the same job that you don't love, but chose for practical reasons).

Christine Chong posed a good question - "Why must life be a competition?". The problem with competitions is that they have rules, and the rules were made by someone else, not you.

It's okay to compete for a while, and it might even be fun. But you should pick and choose your races. You should also bear in mind that it's all just mind games and you always have the right to refuse to play.

If you don't see that, and you simply live your life as one big, endless competition, then in all likelihood, you'll simply end up living your life, according to someone else's rules. Not your own.

A reader, Kelvin Ng, emailed me last week. He was trying to locate one of my old posts - where I had written something about "life audits". A "life audit" is a time I set aside to reflect, feel and think about how & what I've been doing; and what I want to do next; and why.

It's not about how my peers are living their lives. Or how my boss thinks I should be living mine. Or how my mother would like me to do (which includes buying landed property). Or what society in general might be expecting me to do.

It's about how I want to live my own life.

Here, Kelvin - the link. Try it out. Because in the long run, life just isn't very fun, if you have to keep playing by someone else's rules.
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Thinking About Critical Thinking

A reader, AM, writes from Melbourne University to tell me that he is a final-year law student. Recently he has had to write many legal essays. AM wonders how he can learn to think more critically. Evidently he feels that his earlier education in Singapore has disadvantaged him:

"Of course at this time, being a Singaporean, I would readily point the blame finger at the government and MOE for creating a flawed system where schools do not encourage critical thinking but hard memorization and accurate application (or maybe that was just my school only). So I was just wondering, how does one develop critical thinking if the system we are in doesn't necessarily encourage it?"

Personally I am very interested in the mind. But less interested in critical thinking. While critical thinking is no doubt a useful tool, my personal adventures into the intuitive right brain (via meditation, self-hypnosis and certain other esoteric methods) have made me a little wary of the dangers of over-reliance on the logical left brain.

I'm sure that the above statement will surprise, perhaps even upset, some people. And it is not exactly the easiest thing to explain to a general audience via a blog post. So I shall not elaborate. Not now anyway.

Back to the left brain then. Here are six questions about critical thinking:

1. What is it?
2. Who said so?
3. Why should I be interested?
4. Where can I use it?
5. When shall I use it?
6. How can I apply it?

Guess what, I am not providing the answers. I posed those six questions just to demonstrate a certain critical thinking skill. It's called asking questions. This one, specifically, is known as 5W1H.

The five W's are what, who, why, where and when, and the one H is how. 5W1H was originally conceived as a journalistic tool. Out in the field, reporters would use 5W1H as a mental checklist to generate questions and make sure they cover all the basic facts needed for their news story. Now 5W1H shows up in all sorts of other places, such as in the Six Sigma processes.

As far as AM's law school adventures are concerned, 5W1H can be applied as follows. Suppose you are reading a legal article where the good professor is expounding certain opinions. Since he writes persuasively, you feel inclined to agree. On the other hand, if you wish to consider his article more critically, you simply generate questions to consider. Such as - what is he really saying here? Who would agree with this? Who wouldn't? Why not? What is the justification for this point? Where are the examples? What are the alternative views? When would this idea fail? And so on.

You might not have expected that such a simple thing as asking questions would be so important as to merit its own special acronym "5W1H". Well, it just goes to show you that critical thinking isn't that difficult, after all. On the other hand, many of us know from our personal experiences that Singapore's teachers often implicitly discourage questions, especially if the question strays outside the confines of the school syllabus. And over the years, many Singaporeans will forget how to ask questions. So perhaps we do need to remind ourselves about 5W1H. In fact, asking good questions is probably the most important thing that an MP can do in Parliament.

Not to flog a very dead horse, but there's a useful illustration from April this year:

Mr Low Thia Khiang: "Did MHA conduct regular audits at the Whitley Road Detention Centre (WRDC) prior to the escape of Mas Selamat?"

Mr Wong Kan Seng: "The WRDC and the Gurkha Contingent guards have their respective procedures. When the detainees are in the cell block, they are watched by a significant number of guards. The ratio of guards is more than what one can see in the prison.

When they're taken to other blocks, most of those movements are in passageways that are enclosed and they're also blindfolded, to keep them from familiarising themselves with the surroundings.

The only thing that ought to have been done better is a regular system check and audit. These will now be carried out on a regular basis."

Paragraph 1 of Wong Kan Seng's answer was irrelevant to the question. Paragraph 2 of his answer was also irrelevant. Well, no, not exactly, they did serve a purpose. They distracted people.

Now, look at Low's question again. And then just focus on the only relevant part of Wong's answer:

"The only thing that ought to have been done better is a regular system check and audit. These will now be carried out on a regular basis."

What would be the most natural follow-up question you would ask?
Probably something like this:

"Did MHA ever conduct any audit at WRDC at all? If so, when?"

The question was not asked. So we will never know the answer. We do know what happened next. Various lowly MHA officers were punished for the Mas Selamat escape, while the Minister was completely unscathed. In fact, he was the one handing out punishments.

But what if the question had been asked? And what if the truthful answer was that not only was there no regular audit system, but there had been no audit at all, for many years. For example, what if the answer turned out to be something like this:

"WDRC has never been audited. Not even once, ever since I became Home Affairs Minister fourteen years ago, back in 1994. As a matter of fact, we've simply never bothered to audit any of our prisons and detention centres for security."

Under such circumstances, I think that it would be more difficult for PM Lee to assert so blithely in Parliament that it is unthinkable for Wong Kan Seng to be punished.

But then we don't know. We probably never will. The right question wasn't asked; it was never asked; Wong didn't have to answer it; and so, the political history of Singapore took a certain turn, and went on in a certain way. As I predicted quite long ago, Wong Kan Seng managed to make the Great Escape.
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The Annual Life Audit

Haven't been posting much lately, as I've been working on various projects. One project has me busily drawing and redrawing plenty of mindmaps and flowcharts, complete with arrows, squiggles, asterixes, question marks and symbolic doodles.

I'm auditing my life.

I do this a couple of times per year, but the end-of-the-year season feels like a particularly appropriate time to do it. Basically I take time out to reflect on the past 12 months, and all the major events that happened in my life during that time. I also start thinking about my goals and plans for next year (2008).

There isn't any fixed formula for performing a life audit, but obviously it should cover all the major areas of your life. You would want to analyse your successes as well as failures, and the lessons learned. You would identify the things you did well, and think about how you could have done them better.

You would consider all the different aspects of your life. These would include your career/studies; your family and friends; your health; your finances; your spiritual growth / religious life; your relationships; your passions and interests.

You would identify the biggest personal issues that bug you, and think of ways and ideas to address them. You would set some personal goals for next year, and why you're setting them, and you'd create a plan of action for each of those goals.

And within each plan, you would include little sub-targets and benchmarks and milestones to meet along the way (so that you can tell if you're still on track).

I imagine that performing a life audit could be a somewhat frightening experience for some people. That's because the vast majority of people on Planet Earth don't live anywhere as optimally as they potentially can. And a sizeable percentage of people, even by their own personal standards, probably live badly-managed lives.

And so they would rather avoid having to face up to those standards. If you're an obese chain-smoker with young children, it's not nice to consider the possibility that you might drop dead from a heart attack sometime soon and your kids will be orphaned.

If you're an angry, frustrated youth who doesn't know what he really wants out of life, it's not nice to consider the possibility that before long, you might be an angry, frustrated adult who still doesn't know he wants out of life.

If you've been stuck in a job that is meaningless and painful to you, it's not nice to realise that unless you take some concrete action to change things, you could continue to be stuck in a meaningless, painful job for a long time.

If you've had a lifelong dream which you still aren't pursuing, it's not nice to consider the possibility that it might one day transpire to be no more than a lifelong daydream.

And so on.

I suppose that's why many people would hesitate to perform a life audit. You would have to step back and take a good hard look at yourself, the warts included. That could be somewhat painful, sometimes.

One thing to remember is that your current situation, whether good or bad, didn't develop overnight. It took you your entire life, to get to where you are and who you are today. And you still have the rest of your life, to try to get to where and who you'd rather be.

The time will pass anyway. What have you got to lose?
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The Limits of Reality & Belief

LifeHack.Org is a very well-known blog on personal productivity. According to Technorati, it is the 38th most popular blog in the world. Recently it featured one of my old posts - How to Write Down Your Goals.

This is a nice surprise. So today I shall write something more on the topic of personal development. Naturally, this is presented from Mr Wang's favourite TAR perspective.

As you know by now, your thoughts create your reality. After all, everything you have ever known or believed about the universe or your own life is just precisely that - knowledge and belief. These are mental states - the products of your own thoughts and consciousness. And these mental states are changeable.

Effectively, your mind is your universe. Change your mind, and you change your _________.

Not all your thoughts have equal power to affect your reality. For example, suppose you think a random, fleeting thought about something inconsequential to you. The thought goes away and never comes back again. This thought will have very, very little power to change anything to a discernible extent in your reality.

In contrast, a thought which recurs constantly, is attached to strong emotion and consistently held in your consciousness over time will play a much bigger role in creating your reality. A convenient word for such a thought is "belief". If such a thought is linked to other mutually supporting thoughts, then together they will constitute a "belief system".

The deeper a belief is, and the stronger a belief system is, the greater the effect on your reality.

The most deeply-held beliefs that a person has, are not even recognisable to himself as "beliefs". He simply assumes that the belief is just "reality".

Some of your beliefs serve you well. Your teachers and parents may have tried to instil them in you. For example, if they raised you to be a confident person, essentially they instilled you a strong belief in yourself.

Some of your beliefs do not serve you well. They may once have served a useful purpose, but they could have outlived that purpose. If they now obstruct you from further growth and happiness, then they are known as "limiting beliefs".

The first step in dealing with a limiting belief is to identify it. This is not necessarily an easy task. As I had mentioned earlier, a deeply-held belief may not even be recognisable to the person himself as a "belief". He will tend to assume that his limiting belief is just reality.

Think of an area of your life that you'd like to improve, or some personal issue that you'd like to resolve, or some goal that you'd like to achieve .... but which you believe you cannot. Why not? What are the limiting beliefs holding you back? This checklist may be helpful.

"I am too young."
"I am too old."
"I am under-qualified."
"I am over-qualified."
"I am a woman."
"I am a man."
"I am not healthy enough."
"I don't have time."
"I don't have money."
"I don't have the opportunity."
"I don't have the luck."
"I don't have the support."
"I don't have the skill."
"I don't have the discipline."
"I don't have the tools."
"My boss will not agree."
"My parents will not agree."
"My teacher will not agree."
"My spouse will not agree."
"The government will not agree."
"I am lazy."
"I am stupid."
"I am incompetent."
"I am shy."
"I am weak."
"I am just an ordinary, average person."

Which of the above beliefs apply to you? Remember - these limiting beliefs may indeed be "true". But what's "true" in your reality is simply the reality you've created with your own thoughts. Change your thoughts, and your reality must __________.
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Life and Other Questions

I have written little in the past week. Local news has been quiet and I haven't noticed much that I feel like blogging about. However when I checked my Google Analytics today, I found the readership numbers to be surprisingly high.

I then checked Technorati and I think that some new readers must be visiting from outside Singapore, thanks to my blog having been placed on Priscilla Palmer's Amazing Personal Growth List.

Priscilla's list looks like an attempt to compile the world's best personal development blogs. The list has some quite well-known personalities (I mean, well-known in the offline world too), including Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Marianne Williamson and Scott Adams.

As for me, well, I'm just "Mr Wang" as usual, LOL. And I'm probably on the list just for my many "Thought Affects Reality" (TAR) posts back in June and July. After all, on the global scale, no one gives a hoot whether Singapore is building a 4th university or not.

"Personal development" is a wide umbrella term and many different things fall within its ambit. Some are more abstract, some are more evolved, some are more practical and everyday. Examples of PD topics would be time management; goal setting; breaking addictions; career success; spiritual growth; self-knowledge; health & fitness; positive thinking; stress management; service to others etc.

The underlying theme is your self, and how it's going to grow, and get better and better at playing this very interesting game called life. The funny thing is, whatever aspect of personal development interests you most, you will inevitably run smack, in one form or another, back into a central principle - that the results you get in your life depend ultimately on the thoughts you think. And little else.

More succinctly, thought affects reality. And your thoughts create your own reality. Well, you already heard all about it from Mr Wang, back in June and July. So I shall not rehash.

Recently, in a corner of the Internet that I visit now and then, I've been talking to a guy who's about to kill himself (let's call him SD). Actually a bunch of other people have also been talking to SD on the Internet.

We don't know who he is, or where he is, or what his real name is, but he is quite serious about committing suicide (apparently he's already tried to kill himself twice before). Of course we are all trying to talk SD out of it and telling him things like please seek counselling, life is not so bad, there is still hope, the world is beautiful etc.

It's a tough sell, because S is quite determined to kill himself. S didn't come to ask us whether he should or should not kill himself - he actually only came to ask about the implications of suicide from the spiritual / religious point of view.

His general conclusion now is that karma is all nonsense, and God doesn't exist anyway. So suicide has no negative spiritual consequences and he can go ahead and do it. Some posters tried to reason logically with S that even if there is no God, no heaven, no hell etc, suicide is still not a good idea, because life is worth living. As I said, a tough sell.

The odd thing is that S doesn't seem to have any objectively terrible or traumatic event in his life that is driving him to suicide. He isn't bankrupt, he didn't get retrenched, he didn't have a broken relationship, he wasn't blinded or paralysed in a recent accident, his family didn't die in a fire etc. S just thinks that he is a "bad", "evil" person and so he ought to die.

When you ask him why he thinks he's "bad" and "evil", he says that he has no friends, and therefore he must be "bad" or "evil"; either that, or everyone is "bad" and "evil" for not wanting to be friends with him. S also keeps saying that the world is a very bad place and we just don't know it yet, but we will realise it sooner or later and be affected by it (I think he's thinking about stuff like global warming, nuclear war etc).

The scary part is how deeply, how completely, S believes what he's saying. It's a very striking example of how thoughts affect reality. S is deeply entrenched in his own very negative thoughts, and that's what his reality has become right now. We're trying, but we can't get him out. His existence, his reality, his entire world is indeed bad, evil, hopeless and grim - and he made it that way, for himself, through the sheer power of his own thoughts.

That's the same kind of power you have, with your own thoughts. You create your own reality, with what goes on in your mind. So be careful what you think. Make sure you give yourself a good dose of positive thoughts every day.

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Thoughts And The Reality of Pets & Children

So while we're still on the topic of thoughts affecting reality, let's turn our attention to our animal friends. Do you have a pet dog or cat? Would you like it to be smarter? Just start believing that it is smarter, and it will immediately start becoming smarter.

What? You don't believe Mr Wang? Let me make an even more grandiose claim. This "thought-affects-reality" method will work even for your pet hamster. Start believing that it is a smart little rodent, and its IQ will also expand.

Yes, this has been scientifically verified for rodents. In a famous experiment, a group of graduate students were given some rats and were told that these rats had been specially bred for their superior intelligence, especially for their "navigational" ability. Another group of students were given some other rats and were told that these rats had been specially bred for their stupidity.

All the students were then asked to train their respective rats to figure their way out of mazes. True enough, the supposedly "smart" rats ended up performing much better than the "stupid" rats. Most of the "stupid" rats did not even manage to make it past the start line in the maze.

Of course, the truth was that none of the rats had been specially bred for anything. All the rats had been randomly chosen for this experiment. They were "equal" rats. However, the (objectively false) belief that certain rats were smart led to the superior performance of those rats. The (objectively false) belief that certain rats were stupid led to the inferior performance of those rats.

Another simple example of thought affecting reality.

"Mr Wang, that's amazing," you say. "But are you sure it works for dogs and cats?"

Well, actually I don't know of any such experiments involving dogs or cats. After Robert Rosenthal finished his rat experiment, he skipped the dogs and cats and went on directly to human children.

In a school environment, teachers were, in effect, tricked into believing that certain children had been tested, and had already been proven, to be smarter than the other children. All other variables were controlled for. Eight months later, due to the teachers' false beliefs, the supposedly "smarter" children indeed turned out to be smarter. Despite having the same teachers and the same classroom lessons and the same school environment, the supposedly "smarter" children showed more intellectual gain on their IQ tests than the other children. In some cases they showed about twice as much improvement as the other children:

"All of the children in the study were administered a nonverbal test of intelligence, which was disguised as a test that would predict intellectual "blooming." The test was labeled "The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition."

There were 18 classrooms in the school, three at each of the six grade levels. Within each grade level, the three classrooms were composed of children with above-average ability, average ability, and below-average ability, respectively. Within each of the 18 classrooms, approximately 20% of the children were chosen at random to form the experimental group. The teachers of these children were told that their scores on the "Test of Inflected Acquisition" indicated they would show surprising gains in intellectual competence during the next 8 months of school.

The only difference between the experimental group and the control group children, then, was in the minds of the teachers.

At the end of the school year, 8 months later, all the children were retested with the same test of intelligence. Overall, the children from whom the teachers had been led to expect greater intellectual gain showed a significantly greater gain than did the children of the control group, thereby supporting the "Pygmalion" hypothesis." Link.

Here's the simple, practical summary. If you want your children to be smart, start believing that they are smart. If you want your children to be stupid, start believing that they are stupid. Whatever you choose to believe about your children, will come true.

Now, Mr Wang invites you to consider this. If your beliefs about another person, or even a rat, can already affect his/its mental abilities, how would your beliefs about yourself affect ..... your own mental abilities?

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