Hurrah to rest :)

It seems a little bit odd for me to be sitting here at the balcony of our hotel typing on Blogger thru my iPad right on top of and almost beside the blue clear resort pool and the gushing waves of the blue sea. My wife is attending her lecture, the kids are already having their classes so they were left home, and here I am alone in the room just pondering on what to do.

It's a bit odd coz just days or even hours ago, my mind is filled up with so many things to do and self guilt as to why I'm not accomplishing everything as planned out. Is it my old habit of postponing things again at the helm? Hmmm, let me work at why I don't think so...



So far, I was already able to take a step forward as far as medical pursuit is concerned. Had already fulfilled & submitted the requirements to be a member of the prestigious American College of Physicians. And as of last week, I had received an official email from them confirming me now as an official international member. :).

It was not just the title I was after. What lured me was the perk of being able to access all the full text journals of the Annals of Internal Medicine (whether past or present) and their other resources which certainly would help me a lot with my practice and in my teaching. So far the past few days I had been actually been busy downloading some PDFs which some I had come to and were indeed very good material. I hope that as I intend to share them with the medical residents, they would have the enthusiasm to appreciate them and use them in their training.

As for my online marketing ventures,  I was able to get involved with a low entry network marketing company with good products which is also backed up with huge online resources to boost its marketing and pay plan. I felt it was a good fit for my brother in law and my wife's secretary whom my wife and I are trying to help. So we got them in and in the past few days had managed to enroll too my other 2 sis in laws and placed them in my bro in law's downline. I missed attending their online marketing seminar this Saturday and missed clinic too but in exchange was able to attend my niece's daughter's birthday and saw our son dance with her.

Enough mumbling.....it's now time to go back inside, rest so I could clear my mind for the following days and be more in tune with my life purpose (or maybe in tune with the latest hits on Myx or what's up at HBO). I believe I should take heed of what Tim Ferriss says, "Less is not laziness". Doing less meaningless work so you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. Focus on being productive rather than busy.

I have a full week ahead once we get home but for now it's rest time......... :) Why slave, rest, and retire when you can do the mini retirements and enjoy things at the moment . The next few posts will be about achieving results by not necessarily being busy.

Hurrah to rest!!

"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day..."   -   Robert Frost          (tsk tsk tsk)

No excuses please!

One of the common reasons why people fall back from their plans and promises is that it's easier to just let things happen, stick with your old habits, and hope and believe that something better will just come by.

Alcoholics anonymous define insanity as  " continuing the same behaviour and expecting a different result. Nope it's not going to happen. If you're an alcoholic and you keep on drinking, your life is not going to get any better. In much the same way, if you continue your current behaviors, your life is not going to get any better either.

People are so used to believing they should be getting all the good things in life but they could not take in the thought that they should take action for it. Jack Canfield in his big white book "The Success Principles" puts out as Principle #1: Take 100% responsibility for your life.

He likens most people as this man who was on his knees looking for something on the street under the streetlamp. A passerby asks him what he was looking for and he answers that he's looking for his lost key.  The passerby offers to help, bends on his knees too but after an hour of searching, nothing was found. "Are you sure you really lost it here, asks the passerby. The man replies, "No, I lost it in my house, but there is more light out here under the streetlamp..(Tsk tsk tsk, toink!).

It is time to stop looking outside yourself for the answers as to why you haven't created the life and results you want, for it is you who creates the quality of life you lead and the results you produce.

As you take 100% responsibility of your life, you have to give up all your excuses, all your victim stories, all the reasons why you can't and why haven't until now, and all your blaming of outside circumstances. Mr Canfield brought out this life formula:


                                                      E + R = O
                           ( Event + Response = Outcome)

The basic idea is that every outcome you experience in life (whether it is success of failure, wealth or poverty, health or illness, intimacy or estrangement, joy or frustration) is the result of how you responded to an earlier event/ events in your life.

He says there are only two basic choices you can make if you don't like the outcomes you are currently getting.

Choice A:   You can blame the event (E) for your lack of results (O).

Choice B:   You can instead simply change your responses (R) to the events (E) - the way things are - until you get the outcomes you want.

Examples: 

Common Event:  Traffic is at a standstill. Two 10 wheeler trucks collided with each other at NLEX causing a traffic jam. Your usual 2 hour trip turns into 3 hrs.

Response A:  "Nakakainis talaga, buwisit! ( What the f...., I hate this!!! Grrrr!). " Then the guy opens his window and shouts curses.

Outcome:  1. A very bad day. The bad mood shortens his life quality 3 notches lower.
                  2. He created equally hot headed people by inviting other people to join him in the "Ain't it awful" club...


Response B: "Well ok, at least I have some more time to eat my snack in the car, listen to inspiring audio CDs, and maybe even do some leisure reading..good thing knowing traffic can happen anywhere, I had prepared a traffic survival kit. :)"

Outcome: 1. A great day. I was able to finish my snack.
                 2. I learned new skills and ideas from the audio CDs and entertained myself with the book which I planned to read in weeks.


Everything you experience today is the result of choices you made in the past.

Examples:

Event:   You are given a P20,000 bonus.
Response:  You spent in a casino thinking you'll win a million the easy way.
                   You spent it with the guys drowning yourselves with beer and gin.
Outcomes: You are broke!


Event:  You are given a P20,000 bonus.
Response:  You invest it in mutual funds or a well thought off business.
Outcomes:  You had an increased net worth!


You only have control over three things in your life ---  the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behavior). How you use these three things determine everything you experience.



Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
  - Dale Carnegie - 

Enforcing life changing habits into your own "comfy" life

It was almost 11 days ago when I last posted here. Tsk tsk to think that I plan posting daily as much as I could when I made this blog a month or so ago.

To ensure this, I changed my Yahoo homepage to blogger (it has been Yahoo since I "discovered" the internet about 12 years ago). This is to constantly remind me that when I begin to surf (which I do daily), I would get subconsciously "forced" to write a short piece to share to the world before I get lost in my emails, Twitter, and FB...

Apparently, starting a new habit is really hard. Life always get in the way. There is this call (referrals/ admissions) from hospital A, then hospital B. There is this habit of patients to come in your clinic when you are about to have your lunch ( clinic time is 10-12 in am, not much to see when you arrive early but a throng arrives at 11:45am) so you finish almost 2 pm very hungry. And when you are to come home for dinner ( clinic time in pm is 4:30 to 7pm, the gang cluster of patients arrive around 6:45pm) so you finish almost 9pm and when you come home, the kids are usually asleep and you take your dinner watching the last batch of telenovelas for the day and you're so poofed right after, you lost consciousness the moment your back hits the bed.

Beyond the medical life, there are too many distractions also. Your wife who is equally busy with her patients suddenly asks you to bring the kids to the dentist for their dental appointment (Yep, I have a 2 hr window to travel from Dau after my morning clinic to Bacolor to have lunch, bring the kids to the dentist in Angeles, wait for them to finish,  to bring them back to our home in Bacolor and then catch my 4:30pm clinic in Dau....whew). If not dental appointment, maybe their singing and painting lessons and of course, our tutoring them on their classroom assignments, etc. Yep, life is SO SO filled up and busy for me......... Well, that's what it appears to be..... but I chose NOT to be.

Yes each of us have 24 hours a day to spend on what we think will make us feel good (well not really everything is spent actively, take off at least 6 hours for sleep, so 18 hrs). But honestly, many of us spend at least 3 hours of television everyday. 18 hrs of awake time, 3 hrs of TV time..that's 1/6 of our lives awake infront of the TV  ( about 85 hours of TV a month!). And I can't understand why many of us (me included) could not spend at least 20 minutes a day writing down what you want to do with your life (believe me it should not be just work and FB!) for the next 5, 10, and 20 years. Or spend the same amount of time learning something new beyond your daily routine/ work, Or sharing what you already know to others so you can make a statement in the world (like what I am supposed to do with this blogging). 18 hours a day for each of us human beings...whether very poor or very rich...and it's how it is properly spent that makes a man poor or rich.

They say if you want to start a good habit right and regularly, set a fixed time of the day to do it. Some prefer the moment they wake up, some right before sleeping. Sigh, I know too much principles but I still have to work these principles into my life.

I would be reading self discipline and time management articles/books this week and would share them to you thru blogging in my next posts (which I hope would be just a few days from now.  Ciao!

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that is why they call it the present.“ –
Kung Fu Panda