Filed under: Books
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert is a New York Times bestseller.
Gilbert’s central thesis is that people imagine the future inaccurately and poorly, for they may not be always aware (if at all) as to what would make them feel happy because (i) imagination tends be selective on details, and hence is misleading; (ii) imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present, as present feelings always prevail (for survival/self-preservation reasons espedcially); and (iii) imagination fails to realize that when big traumas happen to us, we will mentally justify and “beautify” the situation, ie. our psychological immune system will make bad things feel not as bad as they are imagined to feel.
The advice Gilbert offers is to use other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it.
This is a very rivetting book, filled with fun anecdotes. After reading this book, I now understand why I find the whole non-molestation order saga of mine such a life-dynamic experience for me! And it also explains why it is the most difficult when we are at cross-roads because (and in quoting Gilbert’s words) “we just can’t make the best of fate until it is inescapably, inevitably and irrevocably ours.“
Filed under: Books
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is a national bestseller book by Thomas Friedman. In this book, Friedman analysed in depth with fun anecdotes the effects and the continuous process of globalisation. When he said that the world is flat, he meant that the world has become totally inter-connected due to technological advancement and to the extent that the world has become a level playing field, connecting exactly East and West.
Shift in perception is necessary given the world has become flat. For with the Internet and the world’s huge connectivity, perception at many levels of the world needs to be shfted once people realised the world was not flat. In this regard, my mind would wonder to the recent “Edison Chen photo scandal”, which is at the same time nick-named the “HK Media 911″, which details could be gleamed from this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Chen_photo_scandal.
