Musings of Eric Chong

Our first encounters with anything are usually memorable. Ask yourself if you can still remember these ‘firsts’ in your life: - Your first interview? - Your first speech? - Your first drive? - Your first flight? - Your first fight? - Your first kiss? Of course you do! The thrill of doing something you have never done before mixed with the fear of the unknown makes these insignificant events memorable and even life-shaping. However, after these things have been done repeatedly for a while, the fire burns out and the thrills and excitement experienced earlier disappear. Boredom sets in and it becomes a routine and nothing more. This is, of course, simply a natural progression. When a young person just starts out, everything is new to him. He therefore explores, with great curiosity, this world that he is just getting to know. Everything he sees and touches is new, fresh and novel. He tries out everything passionately yet clumsily. As time passes, the things that were once new and exotic...

. It can be next to impossible for any one individual to accomplish something grand and epic. However, collectively, there is little we cannot do. Behind all the big names that have dazzled us in the world today, very few are the work of just one man or woman. Behind each and every legendary name or brand, there is most often a group of people working together – in absolute unity. The great achievers that we know of are seldom loners. There are, of course, genius artists and scientists like Picaso, Eisntein, JK Rowling. These rare individuals may indeed have worked entirely on their own and achieve great success. However, in the world of business, where products must be manufactured and services rendered, it is a near impossibility to do this. There are legendary names in every industry. However, the people who have established themselves in their respective industries are almost universally those who were able to attract a group of people to believe in their vision and cause. In shor...

. In this modern world that we live in today, everybody is busy. From children to housewives, workers to professionals, chief executive officers to entrepreneurs, every modern soul multi-tasks in so many ways. It is not difficult to understand why adults are busy. But busy children? The children of today are not like those during our times. These are busy little people. Due to the intense academic competition that exists, children nowadays must learn much more and much faster than their parents and grandparents. Modern parents understand that in order for their children to excel in this world, they need skills and knowledge; the more skills and knowledge that they can possess, the better of a position they are in to compete with their peers. These parents understand that the world is a gigantic rat race. You do not join the rat race only after you leave school and start working; you do so way before that - it starts way back in elementary school. In order to realize your vision of ge...

The world's second richest man, Bill Gates, and his best friend and the third richest, Warren Buffett, used to be busily making money. Now they are as focused on giving their fortunes away for charitable and humanitarian causes as they once were in making them. And they have not stopped there - they are now encouraging their billionaire peers to do the same - to give away at least half of their wealth to charity. The incredible thing is this - many of the richest people actually responded positively to this call. Collectively, they have created the largest philanthropic movement that the world has ever seen. As a result of this campaign, forty of America’s billionaires have pledged to give more than half of their fortune to charity. These great people, besides Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, include CNN founder Ted Turner, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Hollywood director George Lucas. The world is changing. Because of great men like Bill Gates...

To be successful we need to manage our lives effectively. And to manage our lives effectively, we need to manage our priorities effectively. Therefore, we need a list - a priority list. What is a priority list? Simple put - it records all of your priorities. What is a priority? It is simply something which is important to you and therefore deserves your immediate attention. Why do we need a priority list? That is because many people are confused between urgent matters and important matters. The urgent matters are things that you need to attend to because the situation warrants it. These matters may or may not make a material difference in your quest for success. They are merely things that you feel compelled to do as there seems to be a tremendous sense of urgency. The important things, however, may not seem to be urgent at all, but it is the effective completion (or lack of completion) of these things that will make you a success or a failure. The pace of modern life is fast, so fas...

Women of today are busy people. In fact, many are extremely so. It used to be that the sole role women played for hundreds, if not thousands, of years was that of the homemaker. They were humbly known as housewives. 'Housewife' is a demeaning term. If you are a 'housewife' it means you: (1) belong only to the house, and (2) are someone else's property (a wife). To make things worse, housewives were usually deemed the least productive members of the labour hierarchy. Because it was not easy to quantify productivity of something so non-monetary in economic terms, housewives had always been a deprived and under-recognised segment of society. Having said all that, however, these housewives decades ago were the lucky ones as they were only required to stay home and fulfil the 3C's - Cooking, Cleaning and Caring for the husband and children. However, today, the world is changing and women are now playing a much more significant role in the productive labour force. It ...

We are all beings of habits. How we live and what we do everyday are shaped by certain habits that are formed over the years. Most successful people are successful not because they have extraordinary luck or work extraordinarily hard, but because they have extraordinary success habits. On the other hand, many of those who have failed did so, not because they did not try hard enough, but because they had not developed a 'way of life' that would constantly steer them towards the direction of success, i.e. they were not equipped with 'success habits'. Success Habits is an important concept for serious pursuers of success. It is important because without it, it is extremely difficult to go far in life. 'Why is it so?' You may ask. The answer is that your ultimate success is usually a result of your consistency in life. Success is not likely to happen overnight unless, of course, one strikes the lottery or receives a surprise inheritance from a long-lost millionaire ...