goodbye CPL




















As two men look through prison bars,
One sees mud; the other stars.

Murder, he wrote. At 11/24/2006 02:32:00 pm

One-downsmanship

Murder, he wrote. At 11/23/2006 11:14:00 pm

The Wedding

"There is a rumour that the ROM is setting up a branch on Whitley Road. For it is there that you meet your mate."

Chuckles resounded around the Chapel. A bit of a weird way to start a Homily, but maybe not so, considering that it was, of course, the wedding mass of Ms Gail and Mr Leong. For sure, the sheer number of intra-staff marriages in the College betrays a community of over-zealous teachers with social lives confined to within the college gates. Ok perhaps not, but it should be noted that the greatest hazard of becoming a teacher is Occupational Inbreeding. Soon a separate caste of intrusive, innately powerpoint-proficient, red ink resistant human will walk the campuses of schools worldwide.

They shall posit numerous hypotheses in the gleeful knowledge that only one is true, and ardently attempt to sucker you into justifying the false one. Deflating your ego in the process, they happily stick vicious pins into your line of reasoning. They might display obsessive-compulsive behaviour in feverishly memorising the names of the whole level, and inexplicably bang their heads onto classroom doors. He might mercilessly, unrelentingly, pick upon the one student who approximates most to himself, thirty years ago. And some will possess the cheek to cut canteen queues ahead of growing teens who need the nourishment, in all honesty, a whole lot more urgently.

But I digress.

It was a simple Wedding Mass, Choir formed by students past(mostly) and present. A lot of nice personal touches. Mr Leong even ventured to sing a love song for Miss Gail. How sweet and daring. :D

It was really great to catch up with some of my Council Juniors, CAC Seniors, teachers, the big man himself, but especially my Council-mates. Of course only some of the guys were able to take leave, but then again not many of the girls could make it either, due to school commitments. We proceeded to Island Creamery for Ice Cream, where I could taste nothing but Butter. Apparently the taste buds of everyone else were working fine, so it just left a butter taste in my mouth.

The Personality Mirror

Went for some Personality-measuring thing today. Remember the DISC thing we did back in SJI? Yeah it was something like that, but different. So basically, I answered a Questionnaire about myself, they 'tabulated' my responses using the computer, and then they went through about twenty 'facets' of my personality. And at every step of the twenty they were basically asking me whether I concurred with my own views of myself. How reliable my views were in describing myself, and whether I agreed with my views.

I dunno, it seemed a pretty useful exercise.

Thank God I didn't have to pay.








Really sorry I missed this year's one, guys.

Murder, he wrote. At 11/23/2006 10:38:00 pm

Things you do when you're Bored.

Put your music player on shuffle. Press forward for each question. Use the song title as the answer to the question even if they don't make sense. You'll be surprised though.. NO CHEATING!

Okay! So I put my playlist on and pressed Play ...

How are you feeling today?: Border Song

Will you get far in life?: I'm the one who wants to be with you

How do your friends see you?: Hallelujah

Will you get married?: Love Me

What is your best friend's theme song?: Suck My Kiss.

What is the story of your life?: Stairway to Heaven

What was high school like?: Cruisin'

How can you get ahead in life?: Heaven

What is the best thing about your friends?: Get on Top

What is today going to be like?: Walking on the Sun

What is in store for this weekend?: I write Sins not Tragedies

What song describes you?: If

To describe your grandparents?: I'll have to say I Love You in a Song

How is your life going?: Dare You to Move

What song will they play at your funeral?: Wish You were here

How does the world see you?: Kissing You

Will you have a happy life?: It must have been Love

What do your friends really think of you?: Losing my Religion

Do people secretly lust after you?: Nobody wants to be Lonely

How can I make myself happy?: Might Just Take Your life

What should you do with your life?: Under the Bridge

Will you ever have children?: Nobody's Home.

FIN.

Murder, he wrote. At 11/22/2006 08:28:00 pm

The curious incident of the Dog in the Night-before-POP-time.

Today when I was taking 25 back home from the (1)Bedok Camp vicinity, I was really worried. (3)I had carelessly made the choice to take the bus home, eschewing the Mert ride. About five minutes into the journey, (4)five minutes too late, I realised that I would most probably get really (2)giddy and nauseous. Probably not if it had been Any Given Thursday, but probably so today. Somehow, throughout the ride I remained comfortable. (5)The explanation as to why I was able to feel healthy throughout became apparent to me when I alighted the bus as my stop loomed. (6)The driver was female.

note: (2), whatever you may understand it to indicate, is deliberately out of place, for purposes of effect. ( Those last few words don't make sense but for some reason they sound nice together. To me. :S )

(1) After 6 months in SISPEC, I received one of the most unlikely (and unwanted, honestly) postings w.r.t. myself. Guards! Guards! First of all I really wanted something a bit more cerebral like signals. Also, I had the impression that Guards was for the fit and beautiful(k maybe not beautiful.. case in point sgt chris from F*xtrot) people who could take lots of physical stress. And, goodness me, Guards Conversion Course! 5 weeks of pure tekkan draped in the thin veil that is the training programme. And the pure shite that they do over and above a normal Infantry brigade! Honestly, I don't know if I'll be able to take it.

Well I'll be trying, but things may happen you know. Sometimes someone is just at his own limit. And he may just feel like peng-san-ing. You never know.

(2) After 4 days of rehearsal (if you count the rehearsals we had on the day of the parade itself), I was actually a little bit thrilled to be the marker for my contingent in the parade. Marching out separate from the rest of your contingent, together with the other 6 markers, and coming to a halt at your own spot was what seemed like a daunting task at first. Fortunately, all that practise, the repeating of the drill sequence over and over again, made me confident. As an added plus, I would not have had to mark time together with the rest of the contingent while the ridiculously over-lengthy marching band tune played.

The night before the parade I suddenly fell unwell. It was just before we were to receive our posting orders. I remember wondering somewhat foolishly, whether that was to be an omen. Well, I got 3 Guards but that story belongs to (1). After my posting the malady worsened, I was so giddy and nauseous that I could hardly walk without feeling the ground spin (slightly) and one of my strongest ever urges to puke. Went over to my PC, and he advised me to sleep it off, like all good PCs do. Didn't want me to miss the parade. Well I didn't want to miss it either.

I was so shivery and f*cked-up after that. I had to wear a pair of jeans and polo shirt over my grey Army vest and shorts, and on top of that I also had to drape the blanket all the way over my head. Those who are accustomed to my sleeping habits will know that I hardly ever use blankets. And I was still feeling cold.

And the next morning I woke up feeling equally f*xtrot. My PC's good advice had, unfortunately, not worked. And Sgt-major still wanted me to take part in Commander SWI parade. Which was totally unrelated to the POP. So I formed up with the rest of the company, marched about 300 m to the parade square, and stood in Senang Diri for about 5 minutes. That's really chicken-feed stuff for SISPEC trainees, or for that matter, anyone. Soon Sgt Hafiz came over, asked if I was okay and then noticed that I was sweating buckets. Apparently my lips were really pale too. So he brought me to Sgt-Major who told me to go rest in some air-conditioned room in the grandstand of the square. Okay I'm rambling.

Somehow, Sgt-Major insisted that I go for the parade rehearsal after the commanderswi parade. Even during that rehearsal, where we skipped all the lengthy speeches and prize presentation and various songs, I was struggling to keep on my feet.

Miraculously, after lunch and a nice shower(which, to his credit, was suggested by sgt-major), I felt much better. Took a short rest and walked (wouldn't have dared try this had it not been my POP day) to the parade square early, as instructed to us markers.

Well, I was fine throughout most of the parade. Up until the Reviewing Officer's speech. It wasn't that long, but I wasn't in very good condition to receive any speech. Towards the end of the speech, I began to feel those oh-so-familiar afflictions again. And I was struggling to breathe smoothly. After that came the SAF Pledge, which I could only mouth. I couldn't even say the words which I had committed to memory so recently. Then half a minute or so later, even opening my mouth just seemed like an unecessarily-rash taunt to my innards to upheave all that they had received in the last 8 hours. So for half of the SAF Pledge at least some in the audience must have noticed that I was not reciting it. I know my parents did.

And then the National Anthem came. I tried singing the first few words? bars? lines? and then, if I'm not wrong, I started to wobble. I actually stumbled but thank god I resumed my balance. Blackness was literally swirling in around me. I could hardly see a thing for a good ten seconds. But thank god, I survived the anthem. Up next was the March-off, and even before I reached the grandstand I could feel that I was going to be okay after all. Then when we did our Eyes Right ( the thing you see at every NDP... when the contingents march past the president and the grandstand the all tilt their heads right and look up on command as a form of salute), I swear I almost cried.

First thing I saw was my parents. My Mum clapping enthusiastically and my Dad giving me a two-handed thumbs up. I'll never forget that moment. Never.

When we disappeared to the back in preparation for our re-entry, everyone was so concerned about me, especially those around me in the parade. And it seemed really genuine yet not over-genuine. I was, quite frankly, a bit overwhelmed. And so after that the parade, in my point of view, went well.

Earlier on in the parade there was a boo-boo. But I shan't describe it in respect to the parade commander. The golden bayonet winner Cpl Welson. I was amazed by how the rest of the parade went without a hitch after his first mistake. Hats (or berets, in this case) off to him for that. The Greatest Glory lies not in never falling, but in getting up everytime we fall.

Now as I reflect, I wonder how I actually managed to keep from fainting. This may sound cliched (but then things tend to, in emotional writing), but words to this effect were ringing in my head at one specific moment. [ Oh shit, oh shit, this is it, I'm going to fall. ] I wonder how I actually managed to keep from fainting.

I think it was the fact that my parents were watching me. To fall in front of strangers is bad enough, it would have been the most unequivocatingly humiliating moment in my life. But to fall with your parents in the crowd, is just a totally different thing. But I really have to thank Lee Jie. He was saying things like 'Now is not the time, Olsen', 'You've come so far don't quit now' and 'Just take deep breaths'. And although I know it wasn't extremely hard to say all that, and that anybody else would have said it, it still really helped me out. Thanks man. Owe you one, buddy.

And I'd like to believe there were also other people watching me from beyond the grandstand. People who wouldn't have wanted me to experience something so embarassing that they had to do something about it. Thank you.



(3) Since I'm gonna be stuck at Bedok Camp for a long time, I was testing out the feasibility of getting one of those kinky NSF concession passes.

(4) To an Army Boy trying to get somewhere after book-out, whether it be a daily or weekly affair, wasting time is NOT EVEN AN OPTION.

(5) I sometimes craft longer-than-usual sentences in my blog as a thumb-to-the-nose to those English Language tyrants at SJI. ;)

(6) Sometimes what commuters really need is for The Long Ride Home to be a nice and pleasant one.

And I don't care if this overly-emo piece of writing does crap to my rep or whatever. This I just had to blog about. But how I thought of this retarded little format, is beyond me. :D

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

Murder, he wrote. At 11/16/2006 10:29:00 pm

What It Takes to Be Great

Fortune on CNNMoney.com

By Geoffrey Colvin

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was "wired at birth to allocate capital." It's a one-in-a-million thing. You've got it - or you don't. Well, folks, it's not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, "The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts." To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness. The irresistible question - the "fundamental challenge" for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields. Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

No substitute for hard work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule. What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He'd had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, "The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average." In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years' experience before hitting their zenith. So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice. Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends." Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance. The skeptics Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game? Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude. Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn't do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you'd expect: Ericsson notes, "Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s." The more research that's done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti. Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.) In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up. Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

The business side

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all. Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude. Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it. Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company's strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

Adopting a new mindset

Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset. Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don't seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won't come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, "it's as if you're bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don't know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don't get any better, and two, you stop caring." In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren't lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call "mental models of your business" - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow. Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft's (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways. That's a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That's the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from. The authors of one study conclude, "We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice." Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why." The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up. Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

Filched from Gaius' blog. Highly recommended at http://recklessmusings.blogspot.com

Murder, he wrote. At 11/09/2006 08:46:00 pm

Where the cold wind blows.

So having come back from the-place-that-shall-not-be-named, I find out a few important things about myself.

I really am that lazy, and I sure as hell need to work on that!
I love Douglas Adams' writing style. Makes me laugh. Incredibly intelligent man.
Cooking outfield just doesn't appeal to me at all. Even when it's biting cold at night.
I need to love myself first before I can love another. (man that sounds incredibly gay but wtf)

Feel like blogging in detail about the whole place-that-shall-not-be-named experience, but if you have been reading carefully then you'd know what to expect. Ok, maybe I'll give a few highlights.

My detail Foxtrot12 came in 2nd for the Navigation Exercise, which was also a test. Lionel's (weiqi's friend from blyc, i think?) detail was first, a full 2hours ahead of us. We made it to the end point just as the harbouring time drew threateningly near. We found the last 3 checkpoints and the End Point in under 2 hours! Having spent the whole of Day 1 finding only 3 checkpoints, you can imagine what a feat that was. The Astute reader would figure out that we actually found 9 checkpoints on day 2, 3 times of what we found on day 1. Yeah only thing that disappointed me was the fact that I got the lowest peer appraisal score in my detail. I was a bit indignant, actually, and still am. But maybe I should have done more Navigation instead of lugging the signal set up 400 metre high knolls singlehandedly, I dunno. Gimme a shrug man.

Then there was that 9 day shite. Was kinda tough, but more in a testing-your-mental-resilience kind of way. In a How-many-days-can-you-tahan-without-washing-your-b*lls kind of way. Well actually we were all proffered field showers on the sixth day so I guess the answer all around would be 5. Toughest part was walking to the objectives. Did I say walking? I actually meant climbing. And we did the overwheling majority of our climbing along perilous ridge lines, where one careless slip would surely lead to grievous bodily harm at least, in the cold frigid darkness of midnight. But it was cool, I was lucky enough to be able to stay in base camp for many section missions.

R and R was a blast. In that 4 days I managed to regain all the weight I lost during the previous 19 days. Lots of shopping, eating. I was even approached by a pimp on my last day. The thing that really alarmed me was the fact that he called me shuai ge. I mean it's one thing to talk to strangers, but lying strangers? I high-tailed it out of the place.

Throughout the whole outfield there was this particular song kept playing itself in my head. Prolly because I was intro-ed to it on the first day in the-place-that-shall-not-be-named. And it was really catchy and kinda had the homesick vibe. Ah, what the hell. I've been doing it for my last few entries, I guess I'll just post its youtube video up.

Murder, he wrote. At 11/08/2006 06:33:00 pm