On 1/5/2012, a monitor from Portland, Oregon came. As usual, we chatted a little bit before we started getting serious on our work. We talked about jobs and college major. She asked me if my children would consider medical major. There seem plenty of jobs in healthcare.

I shared with her my view on going into medical field. During gatherings with friends, I heard some parents also talk about their children being doctors.

I believe becoming a doctor implies a strong commitment. It normally takes at least 11 years to get through the basic training and residence, not to speak of the huge sum of money to go into medical school. For one thing, without a real passion for it, it will be a real torture to go through such a lengthy period. For another, it would be a colossal waste if, half way or by the end of the long journey, you change your mind and change the direction to something unrelated to medicine.

I have tremendous respect for those in the medical field. Still I would not recommend this profession unless one is genuinely committed to it.

My definition: news consumer is one who reads about or watches news. New creator is someone about whom a piece of news is focused on or written. To be sure, news consumers make up over 99% of the population, while less than one percent is news-worthy enough to be the center of the news.

On 12/12/2011, when I asked my daughter what she was doing, as usual, she said she was reading this. Very often, she was reading about this or that person, a celebrity or some VIP. I told her it was all a matter of how one spends one’s time.

If one spends a lot of time on learning about other people in the news, most likely he/she will remain a consumer of news media and will never rise to the status upon whom a piece of news is created and centered.

Of course, it takes a lot more than time to transform from being a news consumer to that of news creator. First and foremost, one needs time to bring about this leap. As always, it is easy to fall into the 99% rank.

I shared with my daughter the notes from Gregory Berns’s book, posted yesterday. She totally agrees with the view and is fully aware of the role fear plays in the making of a loser.

Fear holds you back from taking any actions when you know you should, like speaking up in class, like talking to the principle about your project, like singing out loud, like starting something new, like venture out alone, like doing something nobody is doing, like being different from the rest of the crowd; like being a minority…

If you allow fear to control you for a long time, you will never open your mouth so much so that your self-esteem touches the bottom and you are even afraid of hearing your own voice. How pathetic that can be!

I told my daughter ultimately the only fear you should have is the fear of wasting your life as a total loser. Guess what? It is the accumulation and the burden of one’s daily trivial fears that contribute to a life of loser.

Many people equate good college to better job opportunities. If job is your only concern, you miss a huge point and you are better off going to a state college and work hard from there, instead of slaving yourself through four years of high school for the preparation for college admission.

I believe top ranking colleges are the gathering ground of the most brilliant people and the main reason for going there is the opportunity to meet and befriend with these people and to form a powerful network for your career development. It makes sense when you think of the fact that a person is judged by the group he is associated with.

One advantage of being surrounded by brilliant people is the abundance of ideas, intellectual stimulation and high aspiration. All this promises a gold mine for one’s future.

What is the purpose of school? Learning? Socializing? Getting ready for a job? I believe school is relevant to your future success at least in one aspect.

With the absence of other records of accomplishments, people normally judge you by your school performance, that is your grades. Hence, if you want to impress people with your smartness, do well in the test, as if you are as smart as your test shows.

Unless you have some publicly recognized achievements like having hatched a product like facebook, you are trapped in the position where the judgment of others does matter.

Personally speaking, I like school but harbour an opposite feeling for teachers. Because I once suffered at the hand of teacher’s tyranny and injustice.

I wish I had met a teacher who inspired, encouraged, and guided me through the course of knowledge transferring. But then, there is no direct test on this. Hence, teachers only teach what is on the test. Beyond that, not many teachers care.

Yesterday I read an internal circulation with a list of employees who have hit 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 employment milestones. I know three people who have been with the company for 10 years, one hit 15 years milestone, another 20 years.

It is amazing that one person has made a leap forward from receptionist to managerial position in a decade, while most people stay the same throughout their employment years. It is very dreadful to picture myself doing the same thing when I hit 10-year milestone. I will make sure the horrible thing won’t happen.

The day before yesterday when I talked to my son over the phone, he revealed his intention of moving on to a new company with a new challenge. He has been with the current one for about four months. He thinks he has learned what is needed to get the job done. When the daily task ceases to be a challenge, it’s time to move on. For him, the job provides a platform for individual development, a stepstone to something better, and the preparation for a higher order…

I am a proud mom.

Thought for the day.
On the surface, the daily trip to the office is never as glamorous as an epic event. It can be very banal and mundane. It can wear away your life quietly before you notice it. For me, the trick is coming to the office everyday and thinking of the changes that I have in my mind and the day when I don’t have to come or I come as a different person. The terrible thing is stopping or forgetting to think.

For the majority of people, they face the dilemma of coming to work physically but not wanting to mentally, the need to be here and the reluctance of doing so. You seldom hear people talk with enthusiasm about their work, instead you hear people ask “Is it Friday?” on Monday morning and hence we have the restaurant TGIF — Thank God It’s Friday.

The challenge is to enjoy the process of doing or pretend enjoying without losing sight of the large picture and a bigger goal. I know it is so easy to say or think about it than the real action.

We all know what elimination means in sports competition, it actually means the same thing in economic competition. To be sure, downward economic turn will eventually generate downward movement for some people, which will lead the way to being eliminated in the competitive job market. A friend of mine sent me on 5/8/2011 a list of people that are at risk of being thus eliminated. Check it out for yourself.

(1) Do not learn anything new after work. A famous Chinese scholar said something like this — the difference among people lies in the way people use their time after day job. I like this one.

(2) Slow or negative reaction to new events and phenomena. This tests your adaptability and willingness to learn and understand the new.

(3) Venture out alone instead of teaming together with others.

(4) Fragile psychologically, that is, feeling hurt easily or unable to stand any setback.

(5) Possessing a single skill.

(6) Near-sighted, no long-termed goal, unable to see an inch beyond their immediate interest.

(7) Low emotional intelligence. People with low EQ lose temper easily, often over a minor matter, which eventually lead to the loss of control over their own destiny.

(8) Hold fast to outdated concepts. The new concepts tells us success means not how many people you have conquered but how many you have helped. You win by helping others to win. You succeed because of the good qualities in you, fail because of lack of them.

Last week, on 10/14, a colleague of mine talked about our former manager who met with another colleague of ours in another clinic. Our former manager left us first for one big company in town, then she moved to another one, a much smaller one.

They talked about job security in a small company and whether or not she had made a wise move. This reminds me of one small company that I used to work for around year 2000. At that time I thought it more secure to be with a big company like Sprint. Within one year of the move, I got laid off during Sprint’s third round of force reduction and the outsourcing drive.

I remember one colleague of mine who tried to get certified for “job security.” But her certification has not saved her during our latest round of job cut. Oh boy, she was extremely upset.

Now I no longer count on any company for job security. The only security that is worth seeking is one’s indispensible skills.

A doctor recommended to me his acquisition editor on 3/23/2011. I sent my book proposal to this editor the next day. I was hoping I could get an update from this editor but was told by the doctor that “It is best to wait for him to contact you. It is a long process. He will contact you when he has something to tell you.”

On 4/7, the doctor told me again not to write to this editor, “…it is a slow process and you must be patient. You will not accomplish anything by writing to … I would suggest you let at least 6 weeks go by before you inquire.”

So I waited for two months and still heard nothing on this regard. On 5/31, I contacted this doctor again about my book plan in China. He told me to contact his editor first. Finally after two long months!

This I did, but no words came from him after two days. I asked this doctor what if I had not heard from him by the time I was leaving for China? All the time I was hoping he could jump out and say something on my behalf since he has the connections and could move things faster. No, instead, the nice doctor told me, “Then assume he is not interested,” which means, well, you can imagine how I felt about it.

The next day, the editor wrote back, full of apologies, because he had forgot all about my book proposal. I know he has not trashed it, as he promised me that he would discuss the book with his colleagues and get back to me.

I was pondering upon the words of the doctor, the two-month’s waiting and the forgetful editor, from hopeful to hopeless and to hopeful again, from doctor to the editor. As with everything in life, it is never a good idea to pin down your hope or your chance of success on others.

On 8/10, when I was in Leawood library with my daughter, I saw a book called Save the Assistant: A Guide to Surviving and Thriving the Workplace by Lilit Marcus. The book cover shows a woman whose head is almost buried by all kinds of paper documents. The sight reminds me of my workplace.

I picked up the book and only went through the introduction. I told my daughter I like the author, though I don’t have the time for the whole book.

The author went to New York City after earning a bachelor degree in English from a state university. She applied for “every job that was even loosely related to what I wanted to do. In other words, I spent a lot of time tempting.”

She ended up being an assistant at a company, definitely not her dream job. The wonderful part about her is she could parlay her experience as an unwilling office assistant, start a website, write a book, and eventually rise above from ground zero. In a word, she finally got her dream job.

This author towers over those college graduates who fail to land on their dream jobs and eventually hold on forever to their temperary jobs.

Yesterday was the first day of my daughter’s tutoring job. It was also her first job. She tutors algebra 2 to a high school junior in her school. The tutoring took place in a local library.

She knows that she would gain tremendously through this experience, in terms of tutoring, responsibility, interactions with others, which no money in the world can buy.

She was tired after school and even more so after tutoring. We both knew in the long run it was better than without.

The new upper management that we will work under has a rather impressive title behind her name because of her PhD in pharmacy and an MBA. When we talked about it, a colleague of mine told me that she planned to take that path in the beginning, but too late now.

That colleague of mine has earned a BS in Pharmaceutical Sciences. She joined the research team about the same time as I did. To be sure, she is a very dedicated employee, devoting 200% of her time and energy to her work, trying to prove to all of us that she could do it all by herself. I once advised her on how to improve her personal intangible asset, like getting a high degree and developing her portable skills, which she had not listened. Now with the arrival of a new baby and herself moving into late-30s, she sounded regretful that she had not climbed higher than her bachelor degree and felt like a lifer in her current position.

Seasons come and go, then back again, but not your opportunities and your prime time in life. I told my children that they should try to get all the degrees that they intend to in their 20s. Don’t wait till they have a bunch of kids and responsibilities saddled on their shoulders.

On 4/6/2011, I received a resume of someone from China. The sender asked me to polish this resume. I sent it back with some unfriendly comments because I felt a bit annoyed over the problems that I identified with it.

First, the resume is 8-page long. So inconsiderate and arrogant! I advised her to cut it down to two pages. Nobody has the time for or even interest in 8 pages of her life, unless the writer is some type of VIP like the president of the United States. Who does she think she is, as if she deserved that much of other’s time and attention? In fact, it turns me off by page two. Pick the few highlights in her life. Leave to her grandchildren the whole inventory of what she considers her past glories. Who cares!

Second, keep it professional and leave out any personal information, including DOB and picture. She is not looking for a boyfriend or anything of that nature. It is rather misleading and damaging to put out so much personal information. Is she trying to impress people with her look or what?

Third, the order of the layout should be (a) work experience and award (b) education instead of chronological one.

I felt impatient over her resume because I expected something better than this from a college professor of English in China. Yes, my tolerant threshold is rather low when it comes to the incompetence of supposedly competent professionals.

During the month of March, I have been working at another location the central business office. One colleague of mine is taking belly-dancing class and has successfully reduced belly fat. She told me of her belly-dancing teacher, who is rather exemplary.

That teacher came from a third-world country. When she first started the lesson many years ago, she gave it free of charge. She only wanted good reference and her first small group of students functioned as her advertisement. They have been her most loyal customers ever since. Some have graduated and became belly-dancing teachers.

Sometimes, people complain of no job or no opportunities and end up staying home doing nothing. Look at this immigrant with language barrier. If she can do it, anyone with some skill can do it, too.

On the weekend of 4/9, I told my daughter one of my childhood aspirations. At that time I read many great novels and learned that most of these books were based on authors’ own experience. So I figured one must have an interesting life experience in order to write an interesting novel.

Hence, young as I was at that time, I longed to lead an interesting and adventurous life, so that by the end of the journey I would have something worthwhile to write.

I told my daughter that so many years and decades have passed and my life, if anything, is as boring as you can imagine and I am not even doing something that I enjoy everyday. It is somehow sad that you cannot go back to the beginning of the journey and re-take it.

For her, it is still the beginning, she should learn something from others’ experience and make most out of the limited opportunities that life has to offer.

P.S. my daughter came back from the summer camp yesterday afternoon.

On 3/20/2011, I have adventitiously become acquainted with a doctor. He is not simply a doctor but an author of seven popular books on diabetes and other related health issues. One would wonder there are so many doctors specialized in diabetes, how could he be able to get his diabetes book published?

Well, the story behind his first book is like this. His medical school friend invited him to a party in which a publisher and the founder of IDG books was also present. He shared his idea about a book on diabetes with this publisher who connected him to a health editor. With that came his first book. Then, one thing leads to another. Now he is a prolific author of seven.

Of course, his above-average writing skills helps. Still, sometimes, I am wondering aloud, “Would he be so successful if he had not met this publisher or any other publisher at a friend’s party?” Maybe yes, maybe no, depending on his determination to get his books published. As it stands now, it is easy to see the tremendous advantage of one’s connections and network.

I read an article by Tracy Erb Middleton, “Sneaky Time-Saving Tips to Use All Day Long” on 6/5/2011. I found them helpful for both of my children, especially my son when he just started working and found time pressing.

1. Defrost and Dash–
Before you go to bed, get ready tomorrow’s breakfast-to-go.

2. Reroute Your Commute–
To shorten your commute time by 10 percent, avoid time-consuming left-hand turns on busy two-way streets by taking right turns instead.

3. Take Five–
Focus on something for 25 minutes without interruption, then take a five-minute breather before diving back in. A pause can actually help you move faster.

4. Shop Smarter– don’t waste too much time shopping around

5. Use the OHIO Method–
OHIO stands for “Only Handle It Once”– and it’s the best way to tackle e-mails and voicemails.

6. Manage Drive-bys
Keeping a spare chair and candy dish at your office desk invites visitors to linger.

7. Burn More Fat in Less Time
Eight to 12 minutes of intense intervals can burn as many calories as 25 to 30 minutes of constant moderate-exertion exercise.

8. Move the Clock
Waking up a mere 15 minutes earlier pads your morning with precious time to leisurely drink your coffee as you open mail or pick out what to wear. To keep from hitting the snooze button, put your clock away from your bed.

This was sent to me by a friend of mine on 3/15/2011. This seems a common sense that if we set a higher goal, we will outperform ourselves in order to reach our goal. In the meantime, we raise ourselves to a high level. Here’s the translation.

When setting a goal, always set it 10 percent higher than our reach. At first, you might have to take more efforts, but after some practice, you will improve yourself. After you got used to this goal, you raise your goal by 10 percent and go extra miles to reach it. This way, before you realize it, you will become an extraordinary individual.

Today is the last day of our company’s legal existence. June 20th marks the first day of our employment with KUMC. I will also start working at another location next Monday.

The KU buyout does not make as much impact on us as it does on the physicians. With our company, the physicians were independent partners. After buyout, they become employees like us, losing their independence. No cry. This seems to be the trend among physicians if they want to stay profitably employed.

When I was wondering about their status, I thought of the conversation with another Chinese parent last Saturday when I was waiting for my daughter’s drawing lesson. She asked me about taking medical field. I told her we must let the children decide on this and the decision must be this: they must have passion for medicine, nothing else worthies the effort and the sacrifice. There are two key factors involved: the number of years that must be spent on medical education and the shrinking salary of future physicians.

On 4/22/2011, I was at our SW site working with a monitor from Ohio. This monitor from Ohio has a PhD in microbiology and immunology. He also has a long and colorful career full of ups and downs.

While listening to his career change history, I was impressed by his diligence and unremitting efforts. On the other hand, I feel bad as it means some kind of waste if he learned microbiology and ended up doing monitoring work. An ex-colleague of mine without a college degree was thinking of becoming a monitor, which is totally possible.

These two people make me think about career and education and how to avoid wasting time. I myself have made two career changes rather involuntorily. I wish I had known better to avoid these changes.

Back to Kansas today.

Some people might be wondering why these five points on 6/3 posting, instead of something on how to be successful in life.

While these points reflect what I value most in life, they were also written specifically for my son. First of all, I have no doubt that he will be successful in life. Hence, there is no need to further motivate him.

Secondly, success tends to go to one’s head if people forget the virtue of being humble. I also see the pivotal role of this virtue in maintaining great relationships.

Thirdly, success also means you are in the position to give, to reach out to those less fortunate, and to make diference, which will truly realize your true value to others and to society a whole.

We are in Boston today, attending my son’s graduation commencement.

I told my daughter that I was going to write a short graduation commencement-speech for her brother. She has the following for her brother.
(1) Be happy
(2) Be kind to all
(3) Less is more
(4) Read children’s books
(5) Live everyday like it were your last day.

I know I could drag on for many pages and frighten away all readers. Not this time. I told my son, “You won’t go wrong if you can follow these five points.”

(1) Above anything else, be a good person, all the time, which is defined as being kind, honest, unselfish, and ethical; and link your efforts to a higher calling than a mere self-serving one. Thus you will not be easily deterred by any temporary setbacks or loss. This is the moral foundation of your success and happiness.

(2) Life is an epic journey. While treading steadily each day, never lose sight of the grand scheme of things.

(3) Learning is a lifetime endeavour. Find your own role model; always have a goal to pursue. Make a point of learning something new everyday.

(4) Our life journey is a humbling one. It takes a great heart to be able to always see the greatness in others and find improvement in yourself. This is the key to building great relationships with anyone and an essential ingredient to your personal happiness.

(5) Keep in mind by the end of the day you are valued not by how much you possess but by how much you give.

Finally, take good care of your body and soul.
Love, always.

Today, we will fly to Boston in the afternoon to attend my son’s graduation ceremony. I was excited over the trip and the thought of the event. After getting the ticket on 4/6, I began looking forward to it. The excitement that I felt about the trip reminds me of the goal that we set for ourselves.

To be sure, people set different goals at different time in their lives. In order to be energized by your goal, you need to set a high goal. e.g. you won’t feel anything if you set your goal at your Neighborhood Wal-mart. If your destination is some place far away like San Francisco or Paris or Boston as in my case, you will feel more excited about getting there.

Similarly, if you target at a local community college, you won’t be as highly motivated and excited as targeting a top-notch institution.

In order to get excited, you must constantly aim high in your life. This way, you will always take out your best and bring out your full potential instead of fooling away your life.

Wesley Yang expresses more hatred of Chinese upbringing through the mouth of Daniel Chu, “When you grow up in a Chinese home,… you don’t talk. You shut up and listen to what your parents tell you to do.” This is a grossly overgeneralization. My daughter commented, “At our house, almost the opposite is true. It is I-talk-you-listen.”

Yang through Chu further said, “I’m trying to undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing.” Is Chinese family upbringing so horrible? He further challenges reader — “How do you undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing?” as if Chinese upbringing were so pernicious that one had to uproot it. Is he trying to instigate an uprising against Chinese family and the values it stands for?

By the way, I consider my Chinese family a normal one, in which my children sing and whistle, hop and skip as they wish. I encourage my children to seek out friendship with whoever they like, black or white or yellow. They go through normal adolescent awkwardness but survive without the “social deficiencies” or “Asian alienation” that Yang assumes all Asian-Americans must be plagued with. And I don’t consider my children’s upbringing experience an exception.

As far as I can gather, Yang is trying to purge out from his system any traumatic childhood experience from his Korean family through this writing. Safe catharsis. If that’s the case, write a personal memoir instead of projecting all the evils on AAA– All Asian Americans!

P.S. the main reason that I have reacted so strongly to Yang is I don’t want to see any people burdened with so much self-hatred. My daughter said I have been talking about the same thing over and over again. That put an end to my relentlessly chewing out of Yang’s writing.

In fact, Wesley Yang hates not only the mainstream Asia values but most of all, he hates his own face. I must say Yang seems to be suffering from some kind of hard-to-named mental illness. He starts his article with a derogatory self-description and with a very unflattering picture of himself, more like someone from a state jail house or more pessimistic than that.

“Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity…” trying to tell readers, “Look, how repulsive I am…” He certainly has succeeded so far. He must have kicked his face millions of times behind the scene, which he believes deserves no better than this.

He reveals his mental illness when he says “Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: ….” I mean why do you care so much of what other Americans think about your face, as if they care to think about it? Your face is your business. Beauty or ugly is your judgment. Don’t flatter yourself as if your face ever deserved anybody’s attention.

Obviously, Yang presents an extreme case of low self-esteem, originated from his inability to accept his physical appearance, the stage that teenagers tend to go through but rarely seen among healthy adults. Of course, it is common among psychologically unhealthy adults.

He then goes on relating his feeling of estranged to that of millions of Americans as if he were not alone in finding his own image so unacceptably disgusting. Such a preposterous assumption!

Here’s what I have to say about your face: You may not be able to choose your race or racial features, but it is entirely up to you as to what facial expression you want to put on and what message your eyes and your whole face want to convey. We all like to see people showing confidence and sunshine in their faces, black or white or yellow. Look at the lovely face of Yo-yo Ma and millions of his like.
Not done yet…

On the value of your culture…
Yang suffers from two major crisis: identity crisis and self-image-hating crisis. He identifies himself as one of the whites but sadly he is not; he loves the physical features of the white and hates his own.

This is his personal problem. To me, the real damage is he speaks on a major magazine and talks as if he were the voice of millions of Asian Americans. Nothing is more hideous than this!

Yang knew he would be able to get it published if he could cater to the popular taste by lashing out this extremely self-disparaging piece against his own race–a popular trick. Yes, he did find his own voice by spitting on the face of his mother and all people she represents. Wonderful job!

If Yang hates Asian values so much, he has the choice of rejecting every bit of them, without having to attack these values across-the-board.

We all came from somewhere and have to move on in life from where we came from. Number one rule is: accept and acknowledge who you are and where you come from. Number two: improve and make change at wherever improvement is needed and changes can be made. To those, white or black or yellow, self-hate is a huge burden on life’s journey. It only serves a hastened self-destruction.
Not done yet…

I recommended to my daughter Wesley Yang’s article “Paper Tigers: What Happens to all the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-taking Ends” May 8, 2011. After reading it, she made one comment, a rather pertinent one, “He has lots of anger.”

Exactly so. In fact, he used one single word to summarize his feelings toward Asian values on filial piety, grade-grubbing, Ivy-League mania, deference to authority, humility and hard work, harmonious relations, sacrificing for the future, and earnest, “striving middle-class servility” — that one word being an F-word. I try to understand why he chooses to use an F word here. My feeble brain fails here. Maybe he thinks it can grab global attention as Amy Chua’s book has obtained. So vulgar!

He must have been severely traumatized by these values. After going through his long writing, I still cannot figure out what is wrong with these values. Why does he hate them so much? Something not right with this writer. What is it?

Not done yet…

At the bottom of social class are people with the least skills. They will be trapped down below as long as they remain unchanged in their skillset. Imagine what will happen to the person working as a janitor or grocery store when he asks for a pay raise. “I deserve to be paid more,” he complains to his boss. He will soon be disposed of and his position will quickly be filled by another person in similar situation. There are a large army of unskilled folks waiting for that paycheck, however meager it might seem.

Remember this golden rule: The less skill you possess, the more disposable and vulnerable you are.

The second rule to keep in mind is: the more people doing your job, the less valuable you are. With a plethora of high-quality IT professionals in China, your computer skill loses value as the market damand is surpassed by its supplies.

I keep telling my children that if you don’t want to be disposed and displaced easily and if want to be rewarded more than the average, you must have above-average rare skills.

On 4/29/2011, Friday evening, two unrelated things happened that shared one similarity. One is the phone chat with a friend of mine in town; the other is chat over Skype with a relative in China.

The similarity is the topic of jobs or rather job-hunting. For my friend here who was laid off two years ago, it is the scanty job market because of slow economy. For the young person in China, he refuses to accept anything that is below his salary expectation.

Both cases make me think hard of the skills that we need to have in order to land on a job. To be sure, the job market is both fair and relentless, in that your pay largely reflects the supply and demand of the skill you can possess. Your salary is the fair market value of your skill. No more no less. In most cases, you get what you deserve.
To be continued tomorrow…

On 2/17/2011, on the way back from my daughter’s evening piano lesson, my son called telling me of his job offer. This is his first one working for a company, though he has been working on his own company, being his own boss, since his high school years.

Instinctively, I started lecturing to him on what a job means, that it means trust, responsibility, opportunity, even though I knew he had heard of it many times before. Here are two things I hope he will keep in mind:

(1) A job is at best an opportunity to learn and gain experience, to build network and connections.

(2) A job is always a preparation for the next step, a bigger responsibility.

On the evening of 12/11/2010, a friend of mine called from out of town. While talking about job perspectives for coming graduates, he told me that many graduates from Harvard and MIT, no matter what majors they had, ended up working in Wall Street for some investment banks.

While it is a good thing that they end up with something that yields big paychecks, I think Wall Street is the ideal place only for those whose sole purpose in life is making lots of money. If that’s not your goal in life, stay out of it.

For some reason, banks always leave my mouth with bad taste. I strongly advise my children against taking this route, mainly because I think it too empty to live through one’s life with no other goal than making money. One got to have some higher calling than money.

Secondly, for a beginner working there, he practically has to invest 100% of time into his work, leaving no time for self-development and career advancement. The worst part is he does not learn as much as he should if he were elsewhere. In the long run, this is a short-sighted choice.

Ask yourself what you want to do with yourself, what is your passion? what really makes you happy, other than possessing tons of money. Next follow your dream relentlessly.

PS. put thing in a long perspective, this is a question regarding what you want to do with your life. After all, one-third of your day will be spent at work. You don’t want to just spend your life making money, as if money were the end of all means.

Last year Salvation Army started its holiday season donation drive earlier than previous years. I guess there are more hungry folks waiting to be fed. You could hear its asking-for-donation bell ringing outside the store in the midst of gusty wind. I met them outside HyVee on Saturday, 12/4/2010 while waiting for my daughter’s art class.

Sadly to say, I noticed not many people paid any attention to them. Some even seemed to make an effort to avoid them. I pitched in some, though I was very much tempted to tell them that they needed to be resourceful and efficient even when they are doing good things.

Normally people would not give out something for nothing. This is especially true during the economic downturn days when most people are short in cash.

In time like this, the Salvation Army should be innovative by adopting some new money-grabbing strategies? e.g. they can mobilize church folks to make crafts or bake pies and sell them outside a store. Look at the girl scouts who seem to be able to make more in a day than Salvation Army in a week.

No matter what you do, there are always better and efficient ways to reach your goal. Creativity and innovation are always a great asset.

Last Saturday afternoon, I talked to one of the visitors to our house, a 14-year-old girl, and learned that she was interested in art and in humanity course. “Because all humanity courses are easy, those in natural sciences are difficult” was her explanation.

I shared with her my thought. “If it is easy for you, it must be easy for everybody. If you are drawn to humanity courses because of its easiness, it must be the reason shared by many. Whenever there are more people in the field for a limited opportunities, it is like many people trying to pass a single-lane bridge. Imagine the competition for the limited resources! If you want glory, remember there is no shortcut to it.”

I am not sure if the idea has got through the teenager, but I know her mother understands it. Indeed, if the minor fails to grasp the future implication of her action, it is up to the parents to make the youngsters see the light.

Last Friday evening I heard of an interesting study on one’s income and happiness. The result of the study reveals that people with annual income range of $60,000 to $100,000 report the same level of happiness.

That is, the extra $40,000 has not made people any happier. You would expect people are happier with the extra purchasing power or a larger house or a fancier car or more dining out and fashionable clothes. But not so. Why?

I don’t have the answer, but the study suggests a few things for us to ponder upon in this holiday season.

(1) Extra $40,000 income does not make an overall substantial difference in one’s life.

(2) Material accomplishment alone is not enough to make one happy.

(3) In this case, is it worthwhile to fight for that extra $40,000, if it means more sacrifice of your time for that extra?

Admittedly, people going through their life’s journey seldom stop and think of these questions.