Tag: advice

  • Sincere advisors

    Sincere advisors

    Cherish those who hold you to a higher standard, not those who pacify you when you’re wrong.

    Of the rarest of creation, I believe, must be the sincere advisor.

    If you find one, cherish them, because their commitment is to your upliftment, and not to their own ego.

    Photo Credit : Naadirah Ismail

  • Free Advice on Document Writing

    Here’s my pet peeves when it comes to document writing:

    1. The document is worded the way the author thinks rather than how it is supposed to be read
    2. The content is answering a question that is irrelevant to the subject or focus of the issue at hand
    3. The audience is completely forgotten in the pitch of the document
    4. The formatting is inconsistent and tardy
    5. Slang or other informal terms are used

    If you want to make sure that your document serves its intended purpose, and that it will be read, then keep the following in mind:

    1. Write it the way you want it to be read, not the way you’re thinking it out loud. It shows.
    2. After every statement or three, ask yourself if you’re still answering the right question or responding to the right need. If not, delete and rephrase. The last thing you want is a really good answer to the wrong question! 
    3. If you’re writing a document intended for junior level staff, go into approproate detail that will be needed to guide them in what they need to do. If it’s for senior management, including irrelevant detail will lose their attention as well as give the impression that you’re petty or nitpicking.
    4. Take the time to align your margins, justify your text correctly, and apply suitable capitalisation to your headings and sub-headings. A shoddy looking document is that much more difficult to take seriously.
    5. Using cool terms that are the latest social buzz may sound cool to your friends and social networking buddies, but it leaves a bad after taste in a formal document because it undermines the professionalism of the reader, and assumes a level of familiarity that is most probably inappropriate.

    Hope that helps. And I hope that some sorry sod is spared the pain of having to read a crappy document as a result of these simple points being applied.

  • Question: An abusive father

    Grew up with a father who hated me from day1. Beat me black&blue everyday. Mother stood up for me. He tried to kill her once with knife to throat. But he was so loving to my lil sis. At the same time mother was stronger, more dominant than him. Ive always hated him so the divorce when I was 8 made me happy. Divorce took 3 yrs 2 go through. He wanted money from mother. He still harassed us so we moved twice. Years later mother started treating me the way father did physically&emotionally. Every minute of day scream and hits and mean words. Id wake up with butterflies in belly everyday scared of whats going to happen. would sit on park swing for hours after school to avoid going home. but both mother and father were always loving and nice to my lil sis. i love her shes an angel so i understand. aunty and uncles horrible to me too. not lil sis though. so i always said i must be cursed. years later everyone blames me for divorce&family breakdown. deep down it really hurts. What good…

    As harrowing as an experience as that is, it has a few blessings in it that are not immediately evident. And I say this with every sensitivity that such an experience deserves, because I can relate to some of it. What you may not realise is that you’ve been afforded an insight into the insecurities of adults that most people barely even realise exists. This results in many, like your parents for example, not knowing how to deal with these insecurities when it arises.

    As a parent myself, I can assure you that it’s easy to project my shortcomings on my daughter. It’s easy to believe that it would all be so much better if only she would listen, if only she would behave, if only she would comply, if only… But when I sit back and reflect on what’s really happening, I realise that it’s simply me feeling incompetent as a parent because I’m failing to connect with a seven year old in a manner that she can relate to.

    A fear of insignificance, incompetence or likeability is at the core of every single person’s anger. And don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. I learnt that from the man that influenced by his lazy father in that arm chair, and I’ve found it to be true every single time I got angry ever since. Some of the good that came out of your situation is that the divorce happened, and that is good because it would be unimaginably worse if both parents became angry at the same time and you had to bear the brunt of both sides simultaneously.

    The important lesson in all this is that you need to understand that they’re projecting their insecurities on you. Taking ownership for our shortcomings requires us to accept that we’re flawed or weak or incompetent. So most people refuse to accept that they’re less than perfect, so they blame others or environmental factors for everything that goes wrong in their lives.

    The moment you accept that your parent’s actions were a reflection of their insecurities and in no way is rooted in you being who you are or who you were, you’ll save yourself from the trap of acting out the way they do when you reach their age. The only way to break the cycle is to recognise it. So this is your opportunity to extract yourself from that cycle, and to see it for what it is. And by breaking that cycle, you would be giving birth to a new and more wholesome cycle of life that you’ve always yearned for. Chances are, your parents probably also yearn for the same, but they’re too distracted by their anger and insecurities to realise it. So perhaps in you breaking the cycle, you’ll force them to start reflecting rather than constantly projecting.

    Final thought on this is that as humans, we’re prone to memory by association. They may see your presence as an association to a time in their lives when they weren’t proud of themselves. So it once again makes it easy for them to deflect attention away from themselves and instead project it on you so that they don’t have to deal with the reality of their shortcomings. Apologies for the length of this response, but I hope it helped to provide an alternate perspective on something that is difficult to see any good in.

  • Question: Absent father figure

    Daddy issues from age 0-present, does that count? Basically I would be such a better person if I had a different more accepting and encouraging father figure. I can’t say those experiences are past me, we still see each other every day and there’s still pain and anger I get out of our relationship. Shoot?

    Daddy or parental issues are always traumatisingly interesting. Someone once told me that their father was their greatest influence in their life. But they were influenced by him because he just sat and read the newspaper in his favourite arm chair every single day, and that made them wish never to be like him. If they weren’t exposed to that lethargic state in a parental figure, they probably would never have been disgusted by it, and would probably never have developed the drive or ambition to be better than that.

    In your case, if your father is not very supportive or encouraging, and you’ve still managed to achieve significant milestones in your life, then consider that that is a testament to your ability to succeed independent of such support or assistance. It strengthens you in ways that will only become evident and deeply appreciated much later in life. It also gives you a very real view of how you would need to focus your relationship on your own kids, should you have them someday. 🙂

  • Rhetoric has no place in giving sincere advice

  • Advice and Death

    Advice given by one in a moment of adversity is often sincerest. Death visits us at times that are not always of our choosing. We’re often left bewildered because we live with the endless optimism that today will not be our day. And because of this reality, when death does strike close to us, it shakes our core because even at that point of denial, we’re mourning the loss of someone close to us, when in fact we should be mourning our own lives that are fraught with missed opportunities. 

    Apart from just taking the time to appreciate others while they’re here, do we appreciate what we need to do to part in good standing, or are we always leaving for tomorrow that part of our lives or estates that we should have resolved yesterday? At times when we’re reminded of death, we should look at the state of those left behind and consider whether they were left burdened, or blessed. We live lives of probability, otherwise we’d be too worry-stricken to be functional. We survive death on a daily basis, several times a day. When I’m not distracted, which is on rare occasions, I consider the probability of being within inches of death every single time I pass an oncoming car on the road. But I’ve survived passing them so often, that it hardly ever strikes me as a moment that could end my life before I completed my next breath.

    By design, we take life for granted even when faced with death often.

  • misanthropyaddict:

    Wow. How distastefully generalizing and appalling to see. This is why although I find horoscopes to be curiously interesting, I take everything within them with a grain of salt and only read them for amusement rather than as a way to understand life or as a way to live (in the sense of using such horoscopes as “advice.”)

    I personally would say that I try my best not to be selfish and mean… although I’m an Aries. To judge a person or judge one’s self based upon horoscopes and zodiac signs is quite ignorant because you are placing your intellectual reasoning and decision making into something that we don’t have complete assurance over. Plus, the fact remains in that horoscopes use wide generalizations to come to their “predictive advice” seen in horoscopes. Generalizations that most who live in the west and who believe in these things (who really, truly believe in these things rather than as a passing amusement/entertainment) are able to draw a (false) connection towards.

    I know Sagittariuses who aren’t necessarily mean nor inherently selfish.

    I know Tauruses who are deeply insincere and have put on fake faces/played games to get what they want (“false love”.)

    I know Libras and Scorpios who have told my secrets, rejected my friendship, and came to the wrong conclusions about my emotional state of being. Oh, Virgos have also rejected my requests for friendship too. Hmm.

    I know Aquariuses who are false/fake (put on a mask to act certain ways for appeasement), who have abandoned me and others in their life, and have lied to me many times over simply because they were bored of having me in their life or annoyed by me and used lying as a means to avoid me.

    So… I’m glad this image showed up on my dashboard. It reminded me of that generalized nature in which horoscopes deceivingly gamble with; although in the end if one takes such ideas seriously, one will be giving up their judgement and decision making (their cognitive and rational intellectual functioning) towards something we lack clear evidence for (in terms of proof that it has credence in having some kind of “truth.”)

    (Source: http://plaiin-dreamer.tumblr.com)