Hi guys..what are you all up to? do you have some free time and do not know what to do with it? (i am gonna sound like a sales person but I swear I am not selling anything, haha)..if you guys like to read books, here's a book that you'll get a lot of benefit from reading..no matter what your occupation is or if you are still in school, whatever you want to be.

The book is called 'Now Discover Your Strengths' by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton.

Now, I am not a big fan of motivational books and self-improvement books. But this one really helped me understand myself better, and I wanted to share this with you guys. 

This books helps you uncover & highlight your 5 most prominent strengths. So, why would we want to know this? Because if we do know what we're good at, it's like a light of clarity is turned on to the path of what career/job function we want ourselves to be in. I also agree on a point stressed in this book: people are often to focused in fixing their weaknesses and forget to play their strengths. Because sometimes no matter how you try to improve your weakness, you won't get better because you do not have the natural talent in that area.

The people who wrote this book did a profound study and interviewed 80,000 excellent & average managers/employees. So I am really confident on the content of this book. For example, their studies show that one of the prominent strength that doctors have is the characteristic of 'restoration'. Which makes total sense because doctor's are always fixing people, restoring them to the pink of health.

What's awesome is that with the purchase of this book, you receive an access code which you can use to do a test online called StrengthFinder. 177 series of question will be asked for the test to generate your 5 strengths. Don't worry, 177 seems a lot but it only takes 35 minutes, and you are encouraged to answer as quickly as you can & not think too deeply about the answers. Why? By answering with your intuition they'll get a better understanding of your natural talents. 

And they give you a long report (mine was 18 pages) giving some insights of your strengths and how to apply them.

Do you guys wanna know my 5 strengths? I don't mind sharing them with my awesome readers:

1. Learner : I have a great desire to learn and want to continously improve.
2. Competition: I always measure my performance against others and strive for the 1st place.
3. Woo: I love the challenge of meeting new people and winning them over (does this mean I'm a kiss-ass?haha)
4. Deliberative: I take serious care in making decisions or choices.
5. Achiever: I have a great deal of stamina and work hard. I get satisfaction from being busy and productive.

And thats just some short description of my strengths. The report gives you a whole detailed paragraph.

Another important point I learned from this book, to be an excellent manager, you cannot treat everyone in your team equally. Everyone has their own strengths & interests, and its our job as managers to assign roles that they can apply their strengths to, and in return our employees will get the job satisfaction from completing the tasks because their good at doing it.

I've showed you something that I sincerely believe will help you guys in your career...so it's just up to you guys to pick up the book and read it. Good luck! =)

Do you see that guys? My first assignment...look at all those pretty red deco all over the page...nice huh?NOT!!!damn i really have to work harder now..

I did not anticipate this but hey, I went to see the Prof & now I know what my weaknesses are. 

And I got a job too! As a lab assistant at the uni's machine lab (macam lab kemahiran hidup kat sekolah dulu but with waaaay more advance machines). And my team's job is to find a strategic way on how to organize the whole lab so that it's more user friendly and convenient. In short, buat sistem susun and kemas barang (I can hear my friends laughing because they know that I am a 'very neat' person!). Haha whatever, as long as I get paid. ;p

hi there! im suppose to be listenning to the presentation right now (it's the last day of my orientation)...but its soo boring~ went to dartmouth's medical school to accompany joyce for her immunization appointment. the clinic here is called dick's house, n its kinda cool cause the place looks so vintage. here's a pic i snapped while waiting for joyce..

cool wallpaper n tiles right? it didnt really feel like we were in a clinic...and here's a part of the geisel medicine school..

n guess what? i will have two electives that i need to enroll in my last term..you know whats so exciting? i can take a class from ANY school! ANY!!! I can choose classes from the law school, medicine school, business school or maybe even acting classes from the art's and science school! Although I doubt that my program director would approve that. Haha....but this is what I love! The flexibility of American universities.

They let us pursue what we want, so we are more motivated to learn since the classes are structured according to our personal interests. 

I tried to do this during high school, we had 3 types of major: science, art & computer technology. My late mom fought really hard with the principle, because I told her I wanted to take both the science & computer major. But the principle refused to approve of this, & the reason was because no one had ever done it before & she thought the work would be too much for me. Which..I'm sorry to say...are such shitty reasons. I was getting mostly A's and B's in class, so I don't think I was incapable of taking two majors. I mean, student's in the US do it all the time.

And I couldn't really do anything about it during that time because no one but my parent's supported me. Even other teacher's were a little skeptical. But it's OK. Everything is working out fine for me, alhamdulillah. But I really hope Malaysian teacher's can be a little bit more open minded. Which I think they are nowadays, since students can take up to 15 (or more!) subjects in high school.

Back to taking classes from other schools...man~ I was so excited cause I really wanted to see how it was like in law or medicine school. Yeah I know they might just let us take really easy & general subjects, but hey...at least I have a glimpse of what's on Mars & Jupiter right? A totally unfamilliar terrain..and I can't wait!

I think I feel more excited now, than the time dad told me he'd buy me a new macbook pro. What kind of human being get's excited over going to class? Damn...I am such a nerd..Haha!