Good day, I hope you guys are keeping well. 

February was a challenging month. My younger son was hospitalised for UTI and I did a brain MRI. It was my first time doing a brain scan. The sound from the machine was nerve-whacking and the headphones did not do much. Once I was in, I thought about and prayed for all the sick patients and people I know who had to go through this experience multiple times at a much younger age. A few people came to mind including Michael Crossland and his family, a great Aussie bloke who inspired me a lot in the last couple of years. After a bit of wandering, I distracted myself by trying to recall and visualize all the conversations from the previous podcast episodes on Transformative Purpose. I am glad that I was able to fall asleep just past the half-way mark. The result was good, they did not find any anomaly for my occasional migraine and my son recovered just in time before the latest wave of Covid in Hong Kong.

Have you thought about what is making you feel a certain way? And what are you doing about it?

I learned that news has become my major source of negativity. I have stopped following news for almost three years, something which I have only shared with those who are close to me. Since then it has a profound impact on how I feel day-to-day and is one of the best decisions I have made in life. We learned about ethics and socially responsible marketing in Marketing 101and frankly the focus of media has become much more about capturing eye-balls, getting the highest views, shares, comments, regardless of means. It instills bias, promotes divisions and draws wrong conclusions to spread fear. It has all the wrong metrics.

The world is not lack of saying, it is lack of doing. There’s a big difference between acting to manifest and speaking to manifest. The former requires us to try and do something in order to make our world a better place. It’s easy to be a critic. Anyone can vent, whine and complain. But when we do that, we emit negativity to those who are around us. It does not rally people to walk together towards a workable solution and promising future. Our voice is our biggest strength and we need to put our action where our mouth is. 

What am I reading and what did I learn this month?

Habits are easy to start, hard to sustain when we are faced with unexpected life events during these unprecedented times. One of the things I learned from James Clear from his Atomic Habits book is that it is okay to miss a habit for a day. But when we miss them for two days in a row, we are forming a new habit.

Act to manifest.