Never be to busy for life

Most of the time, we are so busy until we are not quite sure what are we doing, or why are we doing it. For example, we might have a very busy and demanding job until we have no time to think why work there in the first place. Is the job fun or satisfying, or we are in just for the desperate need of money? Is it inline with our life objective, or do we know what we wanted to do?

Let’s say there is a hard labor who earns RM 600 by doing odd jobs at the construction site. Does he think of ways to improve his life, or he is just too busy working and coping with a difficult life. Will he consider taking night classes to move on to a white collar job, or would he think about starting a small business such as Nasi Lemak stall. Let’s say he succeeded in making his life better and now able to earn RM 1500 per month, will he be satisfied or try to be better? Maybe he could try to get a part-time diploma or degree in hope on landing on a better job, or expand his Nasi Lemak stall into a restaurant. If he manage to double or triple is income, will he try harder again to improve his quality of life again?

In real life, most of the hard labors will probably remain a hard labor for the rest of their life, as they don’t know what else they can do or they have no time or money to venture further. We can come up with a thousand reasons not to do something, but we just need one reason to do something. So there will always be hard labors who manage to improve their life, and fewer who succeed into greater heights which impress most of us.

Sometimes we tell other that we have 10 years experience in doing something. Do we think about did we gain 10 years of experience learning new things, or did we repeat the first year 10 times? Most of the time, we learn something new when there are changes, such as when we switch team, project, department or job. If we are afraid of change, then it’s less likely that we would learn something new.

Why is this important? Rather trapping ourselves in the infinite loop of being busy forever, I think we need to take a step bank to rethink about the things we are doing. Is this capable of bringing me to where I want to be in the future, or I need to change?

In my work in educating children, I found it to be cruel to tell a child that they can’t read, write, count, sing, play music instrument, draw or use a computer. Even though I know some of them really sucks or hopeless in doing certain things, we as educator should not deny their rights or kill their dream in doing something. We can only try and encourage them, and let things take place; we don’t have to add a stab to the already cruel and realistic world. A child always say he wanted to be Datuk, Prime Minister or Town Council (too many political news for the children). I just tell him what he need to do in order to become one.

As such, I don’t think we like people telling us that we can’t do something, such as being we can’t be a singer or a millionaire. Though many dreams are fallen every time, but we do need to hang on a certain dream (or hope) to move forward. The property prices in Malaysia is growing like no body business, and few years down the road middle class white collar worker could only afford some cheap apartment (no luxury condominium or terrace link house). Anything which looks nice today easily cost RM 500,000 to a few millions, which are beyond my reach at the moment. If I wanted to own one of these babies, I would need to rethink about my work and my life. If I wanted to change my life, I need to change. If I tell myself that I could not own this forever, it would just be too depressing to bear.

Take a step back, and rethink what you had thought of before. It's like a new year resolution which we had forgotten about.