Archive for the ‘ Self-help ’ Category

Mistakes Weight-Watchers Make

An article appeared in today’s Mind Your Body section of The Straits Times which listed down a number of mistakes that weight-watchers make. Of the seven mistakes they listed, here are the ones I personally found worth highlighting: Weight watchers mistake #1: Underestimating how much you have eaten — the newspaper quoted a study by Dr [ READ MORE ]

Persevering Through Difficulty

I am currently reading Seth Godin’s book The Dip, in which he mentions that well-roundedness is not the secret to success, contrary to what we learn in school. How often do you look for someone who is actually quite good at the things you don’t need her to do? How often do you hope that your [ READ MORE ]

Personality Testing

My brother recently told me that he was exasperated at being unable to figure out what his “true” personality was. He had just a week before picked up two of my books on personality testing using the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI (take a free personality test at similarminds.com) and has been bothered ever since. [ READ MORE ]

Your Ultimate Mission

Reading The Power of Story (by Jim Loehr) has made me think long and hard about the true purpose(s) by which I live my life, especially the chapter on finding my life’s “ultimate mission”. The premise of the book is that we all have some story about ourselves, and this story shapes our beliefs and [ READ MORE ]

On Happiness

A passage I thought especially enlightening from the book The Art of Happiness, authored by Howard C. Cutler with the Dalai Lama: [H]appiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than by external events. Success may result in a temporary feeling of elation, or tragedy may send us into a period of depression, but sooner [ READ MORE ]

The Secret Law of Attraction: Fact or Fiction?

I recently came across a video detailing “the secret law of attraction” — secret because people don’t know about it, and a law because it is infallible. In essence, what the law of attraction tells is that we get what we think about most of the time. Is the law of attraction really that effective? Does [ READ MORE ]

On rah-rah self-improvement

I’ve always had this love-hate relationship with self-improvement. On the one hand, I can’t get enough of it. I love reading about it; talking about it; and even occasionally actually acting upon the new things I learn about. On the other hand, self-improvement has always felt corny and overhyped; and oftentimes self-improvement “gurus” simply promise [ READ MORE ]

Delusion of Success

I was just mulling over how I might be more “successful” the other day when I realised that that thought held one very fundamental problem: what did “success” mean to me? Lately, I’ve been going around sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay looking for torrents on “success” and “self-improvement”. I like the success genre, and [ READ MORE ]

Mixing Disciplines

I’m currently reading a book on innovation, called The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. What I have read thus far has intrigued me and got me thinking like no book has for a long time. [ READ MORE ]

If You Can't Beat Them…

If you can’t beat them, go around them. I’d like to share another great passage from Jim Collin’s Good to Great, with regard to the difference between being competent at something, and being the best in the world in something: [C]onsider the young person who gets straight A’s in high school calculus and scores high on the [ READ MORE ]