A Piece of My Mind

Last Friday, some friends and I went to Dome after work, checking out this 50% discount given to Mandiri Visa cardholders.  As we were looking at the menu, like Damar who immediately set his heart – or should I say his stomach? – to chicken fettuccine, while Arif was more of a salmon pizza guy, I was attracted to their avocado-vanilla ice cream mixture.  “Mmm, wait,” I said to the waitress.  “Would it be possible if you change the coffee into chocolate, not put the milk, and change the vanilla ice cream into chocolate ice cream?”  She smiled: “Of course.”

I don’t wanna be one of those people who always special-order at restaurants, saying things like: “Could you cook the noodle with olive oil and keep the basil out of it?” or “I want blue cheese instead of mozzarella on my bruschetta, a little more mushroom but a little less green pepper.”  But I can’t help it when it comes to milk and coffee.  While coffee gives me caffeine-jitter – don’t you think it’s really funny that a Starbucks-Coffee Bean regular like me is actually allergic to caffeine?  Hehehehe, yeah, I think so too – milk is just … how should I put it … yucky?  I don’t know why, but every time I catch the smell of a glass of milk, it just makes my stomach unsettled.  It’s funny also; if you know the fact that I was born premature and could only consume milk until I was the age of three.

Amidst the fact that I was and am still having a physical rejection towards consuming milk in any form which I could still catch the smell (so you might wanna stop giving me one of those milky candies or even white chocolate), I am a huge fan of the Got Milk commercial and print-ads from the California Milk Board.  Have you seen one of these geniusly hilarious advertisements?  In one of the TV commercials directed by Michael Bay, a miserable history buff failed to answer a radio station’s trivia question because his mouth was full of peanut butter and he was mumbling the answer unintelligibly, being run out of milk and was unable to wash down the peanut butter in time to win a USD 10,000 cash prize.  In another commercial – and this was my personal favorite – a guy was having an after-life experience, thinking he’s in heaven because he was presented with these delicious gigantic chocolate chip cookies in front of him.  With a mouthful of cookies, he ran to the refrigerator, finding a dozen of empty milk cartons, choking helplessly because he couldn’t wash down the food, realizing that he was actually in hell instead of heaven.  Great sense of humor!

Anyway, the Got Milk campaign is also one of the most heavily celebrity-endorsed campaigns in the advertising industry, spotting the who’s who in the fields of sports, entertainment and media, and even fictional characters from TV and film such us The Simpsons and Austin Powers, posing with their own style but all with a visible milk moustache, each with a monologue that reflects their unique individuality.  In a print ad with Kim Cattral – the legendary Samantha of Sex and the City, for example – she was sitting at a bar, with a killer LBD and a martini glass, not with a martini in it, but milk!  Celebrity heartthrobs like the star tennis player Andy Roddick and the famous TRL VJ Carson Daly promoted the coolness of drinking milk, while Hillary Duff, posing with a zillion shopping bags in the advertisement, said: “Shop and not drop.  9 essential nutrients active body needs.  Perfect for 1-day sales.”  And I could help but laughing when I read the Got Milk print-ad with Austin Powers: “What’s my bag?  It’s milk, baby, yeah!  The calcium in lowfat or fat free milk helps to prevent osteoporosis and keeps my bones strong.  So I can keep my mojo working overtime.  Oh, behave.”

You must be wondering why the U.S. Government is actually spending a huge amount of money in this Got Milk campaign, hiring everyone from David Copperfield to Jessica Alba, David Beckham to Gisele Bundchen to promote the culture of drinking milk to Americans.  As you can read in whymilk.com, America is having a calcium crisis today, with the fact that three out of four Americans don’t get enough calcium in their diets, preferring soft drinks and beer to milk in their daily life.  This unhealthy consumption habit also led to a 20-year slump in nationwide milk industry.  The Got Milk campaign, which was created by the advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners since 1993 for the California Milk Board, is applauded for its success in resuscitating the sales of milk, by brilliantly promoting that consuming milk is not only the healthy way of living, but also the cool way, after all, everyone from the teenage singing sensation Lindsay Lohan to the star of the O.C. Mischa Barton is doing it.

And as for me, would I start drinking milk?  Well, ask me that question again when it starts to taste like freshly squeezed Californian orange, and Brad Pitt and Eric Bana are doing the Got Milk print ad, shirtless ; )

Although American football is not a very common game here, I’ve always been an avid fan of the game, and honestly, it’s not because of all those hunky football players swarming the hallway of my high school.  From Dan Marino to Steve Young, the Dallas Cowboys to the San Francisco 49ers, I love them all.  Unlike the game of soccer which can drag on and on for 90 minutes plus over time plus second over time plus a penalty (it’s endless!), football (mind my English a little bit here, I know it’s confusing for Asian to read this because to them, football equals soccer) is always set at full pace, from lining up on the line of scrimmage to scoring touchdowns, the whole play would probably only take a few minutes.  Casual observers of the game might say that the game victory relies mostly on speed and strength – this is a kind of sports where tackling your opponents and knocking them down is pretty much legal.  But the beauty of the game actually lies upon the playbook: the secret array of tactical movements designed by the coach to guide the players – from quarterback to linebacker – to move closer to the opponent’s goal line and eventually score touchdowns.  Each play in the playbook is unique and highly confidential as the opponent would definitely find a way to stop the team if they already know where the players and the ball are moving.  I think it’s only fair to say that high profile teams like the Cowboys and legendary coach like Steven Madden would treat the playbook as the bible of the game, relying on the unpredictability and speed of the play to reach victories.  Leaking the playbook is considered to be as fatal as leaking the secret recipe of Krispy Crème’s glazy donuts or the Colonel’s recipe of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Surprisingly, the playbook is now proven to be not only applicable on the football field, but also on companies, General Electric to name one.  Since GE was still under Jack Welch’s management, the managers were determined in working around their imaginations to create ways to make work more efficient.  And now, under the management of Jeff Immelt who succeeded Welch in September 2001, GE is striving towards one very audacious aim: to grow organically two or three times faster than the world GDP.  The main difference between GE and NFL is: GE has not been secretive about the elements of the process; the so-called GE playbook was spelled out in the company 2005 annual report.  As they said it, that’s because the payoff is not in the diagram but in the doing.  The playbook is useless without the commitment of individual managers to – as Immelt put it – “make it personal.”

Unlike Steve Madden’s playbook which is usually very intricate, from Hail Mary to Shotgun, the GE playbook is actually pretty simple: it consists of six circles, each represents a step in the process.  When Thomas A. Stewart from Harvard Business Review asked Immelt the fact that the diagram is circle with no clear starting or ending point, but Immelt tends to begin with “great technology” every time, he answered: “I start there instinctively.  I’m not sure I have a scientific reason, but it may go back to my experience in appliances.  The thing is, you can be Six Sigma, you can do great delivery, you can be great in China, you can do everything else well, but if you don’t have a good product, you’re not going to sell much.  That goes for turbines; it goes for TV; it goes for financial services.”  Personally, I think he’s right.  Through great technology, GE is determined to always have the best products, content, and services.  And where do they go from there?  Developing world-class sales and marketing talent, and demonstrate the value of “one GE.”  This is a concept that one salesperson of GE can represent the company’s entire range of offerings to one client or customer, actually going beyond the convenient cross-selling.  GE has the idea of enterprise selling: approaching four or five vertical industries and a couple of big events like the Olympics and providing a significant share of those companies’ needs and wants.

Achieving organic growth as large as twice or three times the world GDP is literally impossible without selling across boundaries.  Through the globalization initiative, GE hopes to create opportunities everywhere, and continues to expand in the ever-developing global markets.  As for the top three circles in the playbook, it’s pretty damn clear what they want: a group of growth leaders who will inspire and develop people who know how to help customers and of course GE itself grow, excellence in satisfying customers and again driving growth, and last but not least, a spirit of innovation: generating new ideas and developing capabilities to make them a reality.

To tell you the truth, I was stunned a little bit when I read the playbook: it’s so simple, so few steps, yet it’s leading towards a very utopian concept of growth.  Is it too much – I know this is such an understatement – to target USD 12 billion of annual growth through just six steps?  But I guess God is in the details: achieving this kind of growth depends on making it the personal mission of everyone in GE, from individual managers to field engineers, from the CEO to salespeople.  It’s about making everybody eat, breath, and live the playbook.

Like Emmit Smith who nearly never fails to help his Dallas Cowboys score touchdowns through his long yards, the GE people are all most valuable players, big-timers, and believers.  GE may publicly disclose the recipe, unlike the legendary Krispy Crème or KFC, but the secret does not lie in the secret, the secret lies in the beholders.

On my last business trip to the capital city, I was walking around Plaza Senayan when a glass window of a store just grabbed my attention in this jaw-dropping kind of way.  Across the shiny clear glass was written: Jimmy Choos.  And I was like: “Damn!  The day has finally come!”  It’s been ages since I was wishing that Jimmy Choos would open its flagship store in Indonesia.  Yes, you could get Jimmy or Manolos or Louboutin at Fj.L, but it was just abso-fucking-lutely awesome to see the flagship store arriving here, where you could catch the shoes at the season right when it actually happens.

It’s really amazing, really, to think that women can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a pair of shoes alone.  You men are probably rolling their eyes when they read this: “Why women are so obsessed with their shoes, needing more than twenty pairs, and even spending a ridiculous amount of money on each one of them?”  Well, guys, read this til the end and you won’t have any objections the next time we drag you around the mall just to look for a pair of black pumps for work.

Last Friday, I was feeling a bit bored with the environment at work that I decided to haul the financial folders and the laptop to the nearest Starbucks or Coffee Bean.  So there I was, sitting at the corner with a cup of Green Tea Frappe and a laptop, listening to Jamie Cullum’s Singing in The Rain on iTunes, totally consumed with the income statement projections in front of me.  But as I sat back staring at the numbers that I was gonna fiddle with, a couple of twenty something women walked in.  Call me superficial, but I just have this tendency to recognize women walking by either in this oh-my-God-what-was-she-thinking or damn-tell-me-where-did-you-get-those-shoes-because-I’m-so-gonna-go-there kind of way.  And that afternoon, their looks were so eye-catching that I just had to gaze at them. 

The first one, oh damn, don’t let me get started with the first one.  Yes, I recognized the black Mango ruffle shirt and the fabulously skinny True Religion jeans, but I just had to say: what in the name of God was she thinking?!  While the shirt was perfect and the jeans were dangerously sexy, the whole ensemble was ruined by this hideous pair of nurse shoes that she was wearing.  Oh yeah, you heard me correctly, this woman had the guts to leave the house wearing a pair of white and red nurse shoes, making her faultless shirt and jeans looked trashy (honestly, this was the nicest way I could describe it.  If only you were there). Okay, I know that this kind of shoes is so in right now, but you just have to know what to wear and when to wear them.  With cropped pants, yes.  With capri khakis, yes.  With jeans and skinny tank top, yes.  But with ruffle shirt?  A big NO-NO.  With all the money that she had to be able to afford a pair of True Religion and a killer hair highlight, she should definitely buy herself a clue.

I was taking a deep breath now, really wanting to just come over to her desk like a fashion police and pull her to the Guess store in front of Starbucks and force her to change the – I can’t believe I’m saying this again – nurse shoes into a pair of sexy stilettos from Georges Marciano himself.  So allow me to move to the second one, her friend, now sitting in front of her with a cup of Tazo English Breakfast.  At a first glance, she didn’t look as glamorous as her friend.  Her soft-pink princess blouse was probably from Mangga Dua, and her pair of jeans did not scream Seven or Citizens of Humanity or even French Connection or Miss Sixty.  But I was literally gasping for breath when I noticed the goddess-like shoes on her feet.  It was a pair of – insert drum rolls here – pink stilettos from Christian Louboutin, making her whole ensemble somewhat understated but dangerously sexy and classy once you look at her shoes.  While the shoes of the first woman totally trashed her expensive looks, the shoes of the second woman really brought out the new meaning of looking extremely hot without even trying.

So the next time you were walking by Jimmy Choos or Narciso Rodriguez, just start thinking about saving to buy a pair in the near future.  The perfect pair of shoes is also the perfect way to express your fashion-forward, whimsical self, making your own signature statement, and bringing up your ensemble to a whole new class.  If you ask me, Carrie Bradshaw is not a shoe fetish; she’s just a woman trying to look her best at all time, thanks to her miles of Manolo Blahnik stilettos.

At my last shopping trip to Mangga Dua with my fellow shopping boys, Jan and Wawan, amidst the fact that our real agenda to go there was to look for some funky shirts (you know those skinny t-shirts that they sell in Thailand for only 5 bucks?) and some stuff for my mom, we ended up making the first pit stop at a retail toy store, just rummaging through the piles of toys, from stuffed animals, model cars, sea monkeys, plush toys, hot wheels, to board games.  I know we’re not kids anymore, but don’t’ you just remember the excitement whenever your parents or grandma or grandpa took you to Toys ‘R Us a zillion years ago?  It’s exactly like that.  Wawan, I know, is a collector of dinosaur toys, from T-rexes to brontosaur to a huge brachiosaur are lining up in this rack in his bedroom, next to the huge Jurassic Park poster on one side.  Us girls used to say that whenever he gets married and have kids, his sons are probably gonna be really psyched that their dad has this huge collection of boy toys.  And as for me?  The last item on my most-wanted list was a plush Mr. Incredible, but they didn’t have any, so I started looking through their collection of model cars. 

I remembered when I was still working at the head office, I used to spent part of my lunch time to look for cute model cars at this big market behind my office building.  One of my most precious finds was a black 1956 Ford truck, exactly like the truck that Rob picked me up with on my high school prom, except that his was turquoise and white.  And that afternoon, I was actually looking for Formula One model car, preferably from the McLarens-Mercedes or BMW-Williams team (I am a huge fan of Kimi Raikkonen and Ralf Schumacher), the mini model that I can put on the dashboard of my car, but they didn’t have any.  Once, I was actually offered a Ferrari F-1 model car, with exact scale size, but guess how much it costs … 1.5 million rupiahs!  Yeah, right, I’m not gonna splurge that much money on toy alone!  I’d rather buy a pair of jeans at Miss Sixty, if you asked me.

Well, anyway, I ended up buying this 911 Porsche Targa, rally model, while Wawan picked up a couple of Hot Wheels, and Jan ended up with this glow-in-the-dark thingy that you put on your ceiling and it glows whenever you turn off the lights.  Although we are usually Zara-Next-Marks and Spencer-French Connection kind of shoppers, but that afternoon was really … how should I put it … delighting?  Exciting?  It might not be as crazy as walking into an FAO Schwarz, but anyway, it was just awesome, you know, to be able to pick any toys that we want and pay for them ourselves.  I’m pretty sure you still recall how you used to beg and beg and beg and shed many tears to ask daddy or mommy to buy a remote control car or a Malibu Barbie when you were kids.  My parents said that I was a really really naughty kid growing up (don’t worry, it’s still normal spoiled naughty kind, not to the level of evil possessed like Damien of The Omen).  Being the first born in my family and also born premature, I was spoiled beyond belief.  At one time, they said, it was already around 11 PM, and I still hadn’t slept yet, watching this action series on TV, and I was actually crying and crying and throwing fits asking for a pair of binoculars!  Hahahaha, I laughed every time my mom told me that story.  Well, my parents actually went out, looking for a toy store that was still open at that hour, because I wouldn’t stop crying until I held a pair of binoculars in my hands.  And my mom said it was actually worthwhile to go hunting for those when I was finally sleeping so peacefully, holding a teddy bear and that very pair of binoculars.

I don’t’ know about you guys, but while the white teddy bear and those binoculars are long gone, I do still have many toys lying around in my room.  From a Sully figure from Monster Inc (I actually bought a Happy Meal at McDonald’s to get Sully) on  top of my TV, that 911 Targa on top of my DVD rack, a PS2 that I stole from my brother room (I am totally addicted to Gran Turismo 1, 2 o 3, bring them all to me!  Hahaha, now you know why I know all of those car names.  And if you think I’m a racer in real life, man you’re totally wrong, I can’t even drive!), to a small Koala stuffed animal (affectionately called Mr. Koala) that I bring every where I go, because I can’t sleep without it.  I would go on business trips to many cities, and I bet the cleaning people at my hotel room are wondering why this adult woman has a Koala on the pillow next to a bunch of financial folders and briefcase!

If you’re asking me why I still have all of those things, I don’t really know the answer, and I’m not gonna pretend to be a psychologist and explain to you about the whole childhood-attachment kind of thing.  But I just wanna say this: each time I look at Sully’s big grin, I smile also.  Every time I was about to fall asleep and saw the Koala lying next to me, it just feels like I have this cute, friendly friend who’s gonna protect me from all the monsters under my bed.  Just like when I was a kid.

I’m sure you also have a piece of memory from your childhood around you right now, either it’s in your bedroom, in your car, or even on your desk at work.  And I know from time to time, some friends who see it might make fun of it or make fun of you, saying: “Come on, give me break, you’re an adult!”  So when they do, just smile, big wide huge grin like Sully, and say: “There’s a kid in all of us.”

Although I am a Sushi Tei afficionado, I’ve never been a really big fan of sushi itself … well, to be honest, I don’t even like it.  The first time I became acquaintance with sushi was actually more than a year ago, when I was having dinner with some friends, also at Sushi Tei.  A chicken katsu-potato croquette-chocolate wafer-ebi tempura-ocha regular, I never even bothered to look at the menu before, ordering to the waitress from the top of my head.  But that night, one of my friends was actually a die-hard sushi fan, so he started ordering ten kinds of sushi,from unagi to California Maki, urging me to try some of them.  So, we sat there for hours, talking about anything from money to music, munching on the sushi, one bit at a time. And I did try some, I can’t even remember the name, but there was one with raw salmon on it, there was one with caviar, and there was one with tuna and corn.  And I didn’t throw up, like the first time I tasted beef after being a non-read meat consumer for ages, but let me just put it this way: it would be just fine if I don’t have to eat sushi again for the rest of my life.  My profound apologies to anyone who’s planning to invite me to a sushi bar in the future, but the idea of eating raw flesh with avocado just seems appalling for me. 

Sushi is not really the kind of food that you could immediately fall in love with the first time you eat it.  Some of the sushi lovers that I talked to said that it probably took them five to seven trials before it grows into an addiction.  I would really like to talk to Vegemite lovers and ask them how many tries it took them to finally become an addict.  FYI, Vegemite is this yeast  extract spread from Kraft that Australian people are crazy about and always eat it with bread as they would jam.  The first time I tasted it, correction: the first time I smelled it … oh God, it tasted AND smelled like terasi a.k.a belacan!  And imagine eating toast with terasi!

Anyway, you must be wondering why I’m suddenly writing about something that I don’t really like.  But I really love this idea that Marian Keyes, the author of Sushi for Beginners, put forth in her book.  Through the complicated life of the characters in the novel: Ashling the assistant who’s dealing with her boyfriend’s betrayal, Lisa the editor who’s wondering if the single-minded career obsession has been worth it, and Clodagh the Stepford’s wife who’s beginning to feel that her seemingly perfect life was actually hollow and meaningless, we learn that facing big changes and difficulties in our life is a lot like eating sushi for the first time … it will taste bitter and weird and repulsive at first, but as we get used to it, we might grow to like it, or even love it eventually.

Because the new things in our life are really like sushi in a way, intimidating and unfriendly, giving us impression that it’s gonna be unpleasant, before we even taste it or embrace it.  And similar like learning to ride a bike which would cause you many bruises and cuts falling off the first few tries, you never gave up, did you?  You just kept getting back up on the saddle and pedal some more, until you actually feel the soft, summer breeze on your face once you can really ride it.  So, like any other changes that we are forced to face every day, from career ups and downs, new place, new relationship, new enemies, new friends, to new life in general, I think we just need to have a sushi-lover mentality: try it and try it and try it until we get used to it.  We might end up liking it, we might still find it revolting, but at least we learn a lot about ourselves by going through with it.

And as for me, the next time an invitation to enjoy raw fish on rice and seaweed comes, maybe I won’t reject it so quickly … who knows what might happen then ; )

Yes, the World Cup season is finally over, bravo to the Italian team for winning the most prestigious soccer championship on the planet!  But let me share you a little bit about my experience of finally being infected by the highly contagious football fever.  I know I have said before that the only reason I would want to watch a soccer match is if my husband is playing professionally or if he’s actually flying me to foreign countries to see it.  But I guess last week was an exception. 

My company held NoBoRa (Nonton Bola Rame2), at the German-Argentina semi final match, Friday after work.  The naughty us said that it could be called Nobra, and then girls who actually came to the event would show up wearing no bra hahahaha!  Anyway, the NoBoRa was also held nationwide at the same time, and we could see each other through televised conference, and it was also a charity event to raise funds to help the earthquake victims in Yogya and

Central Java

.  So, for a good cause, and also for a good time with our other friends (the boys at work has become really excited to see the match, the fever was probably running up at a hundred degrees!), my friends Fenny, Rini, and I decided to come and join the big bash.

But then we thought, why just join the bash, why not create a buzz?  So we went all out, and when I said all out, I really mean the whole shindig of becoming a die-hard soccer fan.  Fenny, Rini, and I went shopping like crazy, looking for soccer uniforms from mall to mall (we even sacrificed our lunch break to go shopping), walking along the street of the sports clothing stores center in this killing pair of stilettos.  We were gonna buy the German soccer uniforms, but too bad the kiddie size was out (if you’re wondering why we’re looking for the kiddie size, well you know, it’s just a hell lot sexier if the soccer shirts are tight and super-skinny, right?  Hahaha!).  Armed with our brand new Argentina shirt (baby blue and white stripes just went so bright with our blue eyes – thanks to contact lenses), we thought: hey, it would be really really abso-fucking-lutely awesome if we also dyed our hair blue and painted our faces with the Argentinean flag!  Rini gave up on the idea and went home, saying she’s just gonna change at home and be back at the office just before the event started.  As for Fence and I, we went to our regular hairdresser.  And they suggested that we should make our hair curly for the night!  I said hell no!  But the hair-dying thing seemed delicious.  Too bad, just not our luck, they were running out of blue or white dye-spray … so there goes the idea of dying our hair.

But, I guess it’s just the destiny of being famous (hahahaha!), with or without the notorious blue hair, we still got the biggest attention that night, the crowd (especially the Argentina soccer fans) was screaming their lungs out in excitement as we joined their corner.  Wanna know another cool thing?  Even the board of directors and our CEO all spotted in the glorious baby blue and white like us!  A zillion screaming and a thousand pictures later, we decided to call it quits, leaving the scene just before the game starts.  Hihihi, you must be wondering.  Oh well, it’s not the game that we love, it’s all the bash and the fun and the excitement that we crave.

Anyway, soccer fan or not, that night was really fun-atic, it was just really exciting to see all the die-hard fans supporting their teams, getting caught in the whole football fever fiasco.  Can’t wait for my next nonton bareng!

It’s funny where a simple thing can take you sometimes.

When I was searching for new songs to download to my iTunes this afternoon, I came across a song by James Blunt called Good bye, My Lover.  Already a big fan of his soul-searching voice through the song You’re Beautiful, I downloaded it, taking Jamie Cullum’s Singin’ In The Rain off the playlist.

Bad decision.

Bad bad decision.

Because I ended up stopping what I was doing, just sat there at my desk staring blankly at the monitor, ignoring the blinking mobile phone, it’s like the whole thing around me was being sucked away, leaving me in this empty bubble.

As a name that I’m trying to forget popped back in my mind.  And then it was just like being strapped in an experimental chair, with wires engaged to my brains, and there’s this damn machine that’s feeding slides and slides of forgotten memories into my head.  The way he smiles.  The way he laughs.  The way he talks.  The way he looks at me. The way he jokes.  The way he begs.  The way he thinks.  The way he puts on his tie.  The way he walks.  The way he blinks his eyes.  The way he smells.  The way he sleeps.  The way he grows his 5 o’clock shadow.  The way he prays.  Even the way he eats.

I thought the hardest thing in the world is wanting something that you can’t have.  But it was actually letting go of something that you want.

I’ve been addicted to you

Good bye, my lover

Good bye, my friend

You have been the one

You have been the one for me.

Jean Chatzky – the financial guru who hosted NBC Money talk how and wrote the book You Don’t Have to Be Rich - once said: “The most priceless wealth is not how much material thing you own, but the ability to do the things that you love.”  Forgive me for being a materialistic bitch, but when I first heard this, my autobiographic response was: “Who cares if you’re doing the thing that you love or not if you’re making ten thousand dollars a month?”  And we are more than often so preoccupied with our routine life and daily job that we forgot to truly chase our innate desires and dreams.

For me, the words of Chatzky didn’t really hit me deep until I was alone, sitting with a stack of pending analysis that I was supposed to do right in front of me, and a business plan that I was working on the other end of the desk.  The business plan is for this company that my friend Fenny and I are starting, can’t really tell you what our business is actually because now it’s all hush hush!  Call me arrogant or anything, but I’m pretty sure that I could finish the whole loan analysis in no more that a couple of hours, if I just put my mind and heart into it, but somehow both the mind and the heart were leading me to reach into the business plan folder and just started fiddling with it, knowing very well that this was actually twice as hard as the analysis and probably would take me all night to finish.  I don’t know how to actually explain this with plain words, but don’t you just know the feeling of excitement when you’re doing something that you love?  When the whole rush is taking over your body and your brain that time just flies by?  When you don’t care whether you’re making money or not as long as this rush keeps feeding your metabolism?  When all you want to do is that and nothing else?

And for as far back as I can remember, there was only a couple of times or more that I’ve had this rush, and honestly, it wasn’t when my first big pay check arrived, or when I was promoted to be a manager, or when I bought my first car.  It was when my students actually enjoyed my teaching, even though I was only making no more than a quarter of my fixed income right now.  It was when a million ideas were bursting in my head that I stayed up all night writing my book, although knowing that this might not bring me money until many years to come.  It was when I spent hours painting the icy lake when I went camping many years ago.

God, how much I miss that rush, the unexplainable ummh deep inside of me that keeps me going and going. A friend of mine once said to me: “John Grisham quit being a lawyer to be a writer, not because he’s not an excellent lawyer, but he just wants to pursue his true dream.  Do you think you will someday be like him?  Quit being a banker to write?”, to which I replied: “Grisham is already making millions of dollars from his books, you know.  And right now, it’s my job as a banker that pays the bill, I’m not at a phase where money doesn’t matter anymore that I can just drop everything and start from zero to pursue my true dreams.”  And honestly, being me, having an idealistic mind with materialistic habit is definitely not easy.  Because from time to time, my love for Citizens of Humanity jeans will overtake my dream of teaching kids in remote villages.  My affection for Tag Heuer watches will override my desire of being a full-time aspiring writer. 

So as I’m also struggling to get to the point where any dreams can be pursued without looking back, let me just share another quote with you: “Do what you love, love what you do, do what you do out of love.”