Never try and teach a pig to sing

Never try and teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig. - Source unknown

I got this way back in high school, reading over a mini-magazine with witticisms. My friend Tetay and I laughed our heads off while "reflecting" on the adage. Our classmates got curious why we were laughing and just pointed at the quote. We only received a handful of glares. Perhaps Tetay and I only know how to teach a pig to sing. :P

But kidding aside, I think there's a ring of truth in this witty remark. Don't you think so?

Two Kinds of Success

“There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do. That is genius. But the average man who wins what we call success is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.” - Theodore Roosevelt

True. To that, I admire and respect more the successful ordinary man. As I've long believed, success is not where you are now but the journey you took to where you are now. It is not by wealth, power or fame that I consider one successful but the passion, integrity, happiness and love he has for himself, others and what he does.

Reasonable Optimism

“Optimism is most helpful when it is really convincing. So aim for a reasonable goal. I tell a boy to try to be sixth if I know he can do no better. If your friend is second assistant bottle-washer today, don’t tell him he can be company president tomorrow. If he doesn’t believe you, it will do no good. Get him working furiously to become top bottle-washer. If your son got a D on the last history test, tell him you’re betting he’ll make a C on the next.” – Dean Cromwell

This post (from my previous blog entitled Smart Reading) elicited a comment from Manila Bay:

Hi Ner,
Thanks for dropping the message.
Btw, I like this best... [quote]

So doable and really so useful (heh, am gonna say those things to my teen-age boy who does just enough to get him by when he can do much more to get a B…)
Thanks again.

Since I'm shutting down that blog, I'll be re-posting some of its posts here under the same filename.

Doing Away with Idleness

I've come upon idle time for a few days now due to a non-existent LAN here in our new area at GT. So what to do while waiting for time to pass by?

Usual thinking would surmise gaming, chatting or viewing of streamed videos. Procrastination has been my element and this idleness isn't new to me, but after 23 years of near-expertise on laziness, you just want to come out of it. (Unless you think you're nothing more than a couch potato. Ouch.)

So I rummaged through my favorite links list to find something informative in the net and found StevePavlina.com. It has numerous articles on personality development and more than a few piqued my interest. Good stuff thanks to Kiko, which happened to have left the site on my browser when he "borrowed" my PC at that time.

So there, I said to myself to continue reading on personality development. (Plus the fact that I've added it on my written short-term goals. Something I took from Bo.) Then I remembered that Sir June, one of my bosses, sent us a link on The Working Manager and I searched through it on my mail. I was surprised that the site changed (but I shouldn't be since approximately two years had passed since I received that link) and the then free courses are now to be paid. Thank God for the two-week trial and I'm now copying my way through the articles. :D

Moreover, I stumbled on Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management in my book collection last weekend. It's not actually a hardbound/paperback book but kind of a booklet with practical advice on management. Sir June was the one who recommended it also and sent us a link on a free copy of it two years ago. I can't give you the link now because it was removed from the site. Sorry but, hey, I found Mike Duffy listing some of these rules to help. :) Perhaps I could blog on that next time. ^_^

So, till then, hope you try out those links I got not just on your idle time.

Remember, learning is a lifetime process. :)