Why Keen?

Born without sight
but I can see reason,
I reason that people and animals hurt like me, because I feel hurt.

Born without sound
but I can listen,
to the silent care that others give, even when I do not know them.

Born without words
but I can show, in ways that you can reason or listen too.

I cannot see, hear, nor speak your words,
but I think I understand your love, don’t I belong with you too?

Imperfect Creation by Why Keen

It is that time of year again, when we re-assess our lives and ask ourselves where we’ve been and where we are going. In , Robert Kiyosaki described his life changing skiing trip in December 1984 with his wife Kim and his best friend Larry. Robert and Kim were down to their last few dollars, and Larry was on his way to building another business.

Highly inspired by this story, Hwei Min and I decided to have our own annual retreat, where we set goals and set to achieving them. Looking back, it had been four years now.

I still remember our first retreat in 2005. It was a huge paradigm shift for both of us, as we actually planned a long holiday trip that wasn’t a holiday trip. We planned to go to Genting because that was one of the cheapest option then. We needed a place that was different enough from home, yet cheap enough that it wouldn’t burn a hole in our pockets. Of our four day three night itinerary, three and a half days were jammed packed with discussions and visioning exercises, and only half a day for shopping. (By the way, the fact that Hwei Min was totally aligned to this plan was a hundred per cent why I am so blessed that she is my partner in business and life. How many ladies would be open to such an idea?!)

It was a huge leap of faith because no one seemed to understand the importance of what we planned to do. Everyone asked us, “Genting, for four days? What are you going to do up there??” I remember everyone’s reaction when I told them we were going up the mountains to talk.

Anyway, this year had to be different because of our little boy, we can’t travel too far. Here we are now, at Orchid Country Club for two nights, he’s here, by the way, oblivious to the fact that we would be dreaming, and planning for all our future, and making it a reality. And in fact, that HE was a a dream turned reality, our little bundle of joy.

For more than two years now, I’ve been in a creative line, and I must say, the stress level has never gone down. I always feel this fear that my “creative juice” would run dry, so to speak.

So, while idling surfing for some TV to watch (I don’t watch anything on the real TV nowadays), I found this interesting video by Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity, and it struck a chord.

She mentioned about the origins of the word Genius, very interesting. Genius is like a spirit guide, or a deity, and it is believed that there every human being has a Genius attached to him/her. Here’s what I found about the word Genius on Wikipedia :-

—
Genius in Roman mythology is the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every individual person, place or thing
…
Every nameable mythological figure was a genius of some sort; but further, the rational powers and abilitiies of each and every human being were attributed to his soul, which was a genius. (Source : Wikipedia)
—

So Elizabeth Gilbert proposes that all artists try to put their burdens as well as their ego on this disembodied entity, their genius, and let it take claim or credit for the magnificence or failure of their work. Aha…

By the way, I’ve tried. Though it was a little silly, I actually spoke out loud and said, “It’s now up to you”, especially since I was under a very tight editing schedule for my last wedding shoot, and you know what? It was one of my better works. So maybe it works, huh?

Here are some of my shots from a wedding my genius helped at:-

You know how most of us are thought that 93% of communication is body language, and only 7% is verbal? Well, it’s time to let go of that myth. It’s a classic case of oversimplification and making use of statistics out of context. Here’s a short video to illustrate, watch it, it’s an interesting 5 minutes:-

And here’s more about Albert Mehrabian on Wikipedia, the psychologist whose work is still being misquoted at communications seminar.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, body language does count a lot when it comes to holding the audience’s attention, so the lesson is still accurate as far as I am concerned.

I’ve discovered this little gem on the Internet not too long ago, the TED Talks, an annual event where various speakers contribute new ideas in the form of lectures, often with demonstrations of cutting edge technology.

There are videos of the talks available for free, and this is so much better TV than 90% of negativity we get on TV nowadays. Watching any one of these videos make me feel so hopeful for humankind!

Anyway, found this talk at TED 2004 by Nancy Etcoff about something very close to my heart. The science behind Happiness. Would probably be discussing more later on, so stay tuned.