Early morning Garlic Rice.

It’s 3 AM on a Monday morning. I spent my whole day lying in bed, daydreaming and thinking of a topic to write on my blog. I also surfed the internet just blankly staring at my Facebook account. It’s kind of silly because I thought I wouldn’t like Facebook at all, but I ended up abandoning my Friendster account because now I find facebook much, much interesting and interactive. I don’t wanna get started on Twitter or anything else I’m good with FS and FB, besides, I’m still going to be talking to the same people anyways. Might as well keep it simple.

I’m soooo bored right now and I’m looking at my mom’s kitchen and I’m thinking of what to do. I saw rice on the stove and eggs in the fridge. I’ll just cook garlic rice and egg while everyone is asleep. Hehe. For the first time in my life I actually miss working!

It’s kind of weird when you say stuff like ”I miss my job”. I feel that I’m such a loser and that I don’t have any friends or social life. On the contrary, I do have a life outside of of it..and the thing is I’m enjoying them both! I read a quote once that said, “Find something you love and you’ll never have to work another day in you life”. It feels great to enjoy work and then find time to enjoy life outside of it. My boss sometimes think that we stress ourselves too much, but in reality we are still disappointed in ourselves that we might not be doing enough. Weird, I know. We’ll at least no one forces us to go to work. Not to mention that we have the best boss ever!

Unfortunately not everyone shares the same passion as we do at work. So I decided to post a few things that might help you endure the boring and sometimes harsh workdays:

Choose to be Happy at Work

Happiness is largely a choice. I can hear many of you arguing with me, but it's true. You can choose to be happy at work. Sound simple? Yes. But, simplicity is often profoundly difficult to put into action. I wish all of you had the best employer in the world, but, face it, you may not. So, think positively about your work. Dwell on the aspects of your work you like. Avoid negative people and gossip. Find coworkers you like and enjoy and spend your time with them. Your choices at work largely define your experience. You can always choose to be happy.

Do Something you love Every Single Day

You may or may not love your current job and you may or may not believe that you can find something in your current job to love, but you can. Trust me. Take a look at yourself, your skills and interests, and find something that you can enjoy doing every day. If you do something you love every single day, your current job won't seem so bad.

Make only Commitments You Could Keep

Many guys spend more time making excuses for failing to keep a commitment, (haha...codename: BB Gandanghari)and worrying about the consequences of not keeping a commitment, than they do performing the tasks promised. Create a system of organization and planning that enables you to assess your ability to complete a requested commitment. Don't volunteer if you don't have time. If your workload is exceeding your available time and energy, make a comprehensive plan to ask the boss for help and resources.

Avoid Negativity

Choosing to be happy at work means avoiding negative conversations, gossip, and unhappy people as much as possible. No matter how positively you feel, negative people have a profound impact on your psyche. Trust me it does.

...So there you have it, I hope you could pick up on some of the stuff that I wrote and I hope you get to use it at the workplace.

Now back to my garlic rice ...

Crossroads

Just this afternoon, I was able to unearth my stash of pictures and letters from friends way back in high school. I never gave it much thought like it was just another trip back through memory lane seeing how ugly each of us where and how we tend to write in mushy, drawing-a-flower-right-next-to-your-name kind of way. Back when the days where most Filipinos never even had an idea what the internet was…and yeah there were no cell phones yet. No SMART no GLOBE…only JAZZ Page and Pocketbell…wait, no, that was college. Okay! PLDT with nagging party lines.

I was planning to read through each letter and note that I had received, trying to remember all the happy memories that I could during those days. The letters I uncovered were about our catholic recollection, simple notes to self, a few hello notes from friends, dedications at the back of old high school photos and a few goodbye notes from close school mates that were pretty sure they were not going to be able to get in touch ever again because their families are moving out of the country or moving so far that it would make it impossible….that was before Facebook.

I was just browsing through the pile but when I chanced upon one letter way back March 1995, I had to stop searching. This was a letter from a dear friend of mine which was our Valedictorian. This was given to me days before our graduation and this was a very significant letter because it was the culmination of what was basically how we experienced our high school days and how differently we lived our lives until we were united with one common goal. During our sophomore years, she was the bright girl I was the all around guy. Fate will deal a cheap shot and pair us up as tease favorites. So we ended up not really talking to each other anymore she was so annoyed that her friends would cleverly lead every conversation back to the two of us. I thought she was angry at me and knowing that she is the cream of the crop, a valedictorian to-be, I just stayed out of her way. She studied her way to the top of the student council to become president and I crawled, groaned and scarred my way to the top of the schools military training program. That “minding my own business” status continued until the summer before we became seniors. When the top 10 incoming seniors were required to do military training before the school year starts. Once again, we were put in the same melting pot. …AWKWARD. We never spoken to each other in like 2 years and now we need to work with each other. That was when I learned the concept of maturity. When you got to do what you have to do then do it right no matter the situation maybe. We were both able to set aside the sophomore thing and we worked together for the whole school year. Ironically, we became good friends afterwards. She wrote that it was a shame that we wasted those years trying to avoid each other instead of being friends, but was also happy that we were able to make up for lost time during senior years. I agree with her on that. It was a very, very long letter that had everything since sophomore years ‘till graduation expectations. Imagine stationery as big as 8.5 x 13 paper with small hand writing not to mention that she wrote stuff on both sides…and there were four pages of it. As with everything else, it would come to an end as we both graduated. Her family moved to Laguna as she studied to be a vet. Nowadays everyone could get connected, and through the magic of email, we were able to communicate once in a while and do some catching up though we never had the chance to see each other face to face since we graduated. She’s now a great veterinarian.


I guess life really has its own way of solving issues for us. No matter how hard we avoid or not talk about it. It deals cheap shots on all levels, whether it be friendship, business relations, family or love. Makes us want to think, “why me? why now?” because it’s all quite unfair. Eventually after some time, we get to look back and say “Oh, so that’s why ….”

May it be because it was not really meant for you, or maybe you were just being taught something as a requirement for getting a big thing? Just checking if you are mature enough to receive something that you would deserve and enjoy? Or maybe, just separating two very different people so that they could live and grow the way they’re supposed to be.


Eventually, the world would make a path where you could meet again, let you decide on your own if you would share a common road, or smile at each other and take separate ways…then wave goodbye carrying all the good memories you had before you saw the first crossroad.

Life is good…when you know where to look. (I suggest on the positive side)

Tagaytay Pix

These are a few shots of the team after our overnight vacation in Tagaytay. It was a very nice vacation, everyone is all smiles and everyone forgot all their problems even for just one day. Hope we could do this more often.

argh ...

Haha!!! It's been sooo long since I updated my blog. Why? I concentrated with my new job and things are looking up! :) A lot of things changed since I last posted a blog. One of the biggest change is that I could again smile a lot. Cheerful days are back and I hope it stays :) Hope I could continue posting messages in between my busy schedule that includes work, work and work. :) For the record, I'm not forced to do what I'm doing there. I just love love what I do. :)

Gosh It's been so long that I forgot my password already. hehe.

Failure is nothing.

If you feel like giving up, keep in mind that we can still prevail if we just keep on trying. Failure is always an option. It makes us see areas of opportunity, it becomes our chance to exploit what we don't yet have and develop it into something where we can excel.

I got he video above from Youtube. This 1 minute long video explains just how life plays out, and what we can do to rise up from adversity. Everyone could relate to this..

Is everything in your way?

Is everything in your way or ur just too stubborn to move?

That's the nagging question for the day.

Have you ever felt that every thing is just not working as you planed it to be?

Have you ever felt so bad about it that you spent all your time whining afterward?

If this is you, well you belong to 85 percent of the world's population!

Whining get's you no where...fast. You get the wrong kind of attention if you do so. Most successful people don't whine, ...they try again. If you think that everything is just getting in your way or stopping you from what you want to achieve, then move! Don't stay there. The more you don't move, the worse you will think about your present situation. The earlier you start to work on a solution, the better. It keeps your mind out of the failure and it puts you back on track. This though is not for the weak hearted.

If everyone can do it, we'd all be rich by now.

Think about the other possibilities, ask for advise, don't hesitate to ask someone who knows better. That's how humans got to the top of the food chain ... by standing on the heads of giants. We learn from the success and mistakes of our predecessors and ultimately we figure out the things they never did.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the first practical telephone. Never could have he imagined that you could send text messages now. If he was to come back from the dead, he would not recognize his own invention. Thanks to the improvements done by his successors.

So always find a way to make things work, ask, go around the problem, look at it at from a distance, from another angle or look at it from someone elses point of view. There are a lot of things we can do when we think that the whole world is just playing mean to us.

...Just move. It all starts when you move.

Reaching your Goal ...

Just recently, I went to a seminar regarding goal setting and how to systematically reach your aspirations. For a person like me who is used to trial and error most of my life. Almost everything was new to me and it was very educational and eye opening. The system was presented in a manner in which all simple presentations are done. It was presented in a linear fashion, in which the whole seminar is dependent on the Power Point presentation and your mind just want to yell out..Fast forward!. It was interesting at best, but I wasn't there to criticize the presentation. I was there to learn and make sense of what they were trying to impart. After all, I know I will benefit from it.

I will go into details of what I learned during that day, but I’m going to do it one blog entry at a time so that I could focus on just one topic on every post. I think that’s the best way anyone can absorb anything effectively.

By the way, I attended two seminars of different topics. This is all about the first one. This one made me realize what I wasn't doing, and the one’s that I was doing wrong.

Of all the things that you can do to make your dreams into reality, there is always and I mean always one very essential thing that you must do to start things rolling. Without this, there is no anchor that you could hang on to when you get lost in the cloud of doubt that surrounds your goals.

You have to write it down.

Yup, you have to put your goals into writing. Putting it in black and white clearly states your purpose and it prevents you from loosing your focus. After all, without focus, you would be chasing your own tail every time. This also helps in giving you an idea of how much progress you gained towards achieving what you want to attain.

To start, get a piece of paper and write down 3 goals: Immediate, short term and long term. Obviously this represents what you want to accomplish at a certain point in time. Immediate could be a span of a few days to a few months. Intermediate is around one to two years, and long term is longer that 2 years of course. This gives you a way of tracking your progress and this also helps you maintain focus during you busy schedule. Post this somewhere that you would see it when you start and end your day.

Why it works: This gradually changes our attitude about the situation we are in. If you know what you want, eventually you would figure out what to do. You develop a way of making things work regardless of the circumstance. And in life, as we all know, it's our attitude about something that makes us like or hate it. Same as if we are to fail or succeed.