This is a children story I created while taking a shower for my daughter; she just lost one of her front tooth last month while eating watermelon, thus the story. I dedicate this story on this International Children’s day – April 4th.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who likes to eat watermelon.
One day, she bites into a juicy and crunchy slice of red watermelon and out comes a white seed.
She wonders why there is a white seed among all the black watermelon seeds she spits out.
She shows her mother the white seed and asks her mom to plant the white watermelon seen in the backyard.
The girl waters the seed every day. She can’t wait to see the watermelon.
Many days pass. Still no watermelon.
She waits and waits ….
One day, she goes to the yard and finds a giant tree full of sparkling “white seeds.”
And she sees many tooth fairies flying around the tree and placing and hanging the “white seeds” on the tree.
“Thanks to you,” one of tooth fairy says to her, “we now have a place to decorate a beautiful tree with all the teeth we collected from under the pillows of the all of the children of the world.”
The girl smiles with one missing front tooth.

I received this YouTube video link from Rich Dad: http://www.richdad.com/resource/image/businessschool3day/index01_2.htm
Several of the Rich Dad advisers are in the panel of discussion discussing about their perceive winning. My main takeaways:

1. 4 kinds of people out there in the world: 1) people who needs to win, 2) people who needs to be right, 3) people who needs to be liked, and 4) people who needs to be comfortable. Each of us has some elements in ourselves.

2. The “ungodly” desire to win may result in not associating yourselves with some friends who’s not on the same page any more – the natural selection of friends.

3. Once you get the taste of winning and if you enjoy what you’re doing, you want to keep doing it. It’s addictive.

4. Losing is not bad; it’s how you take it. You should be grateful that you can you another shot at it. Most of the advisers are ‘C’ students, whose desire to beat the ‘A’ students is what drive them to the business world and become entrepreneurs.

5. When people have certain handicap or disadvantages, they would ask “why me?” But If you have certain talents, people usually don’t question “why me?” Instead, one should examine if this is your mission in life to succeed and do better than others.

6. Robert talked about his Vietnam tour as the helicopter pilot. Potential of “dying is the best thing” that could happen. You have the best and not complacent to survive in that world. This transfers to his business life as well.

7. Being a entrepreneur means that you don’t have a paycheck. There is no human resource department to complain to. But it places you to play against the best on the street. It’s a game of winner takes all and it’s rewarding.

The panel first came across as arrogant but then it’s supposed to be a wake up call to the people like me, who probably falls into the category of the people who needs to be comfortable. Does that mean all salary people are losers? Can you continue to win in the professional world? How does that work in a big corporation? Or does it mean going to a start up company and associate yourself with the like-mind who wants to win, not just to be comfortable? Something to think about.

Here are my thoughts after spending 3 weeks (12/10/2007 ~ 1/01/08) vacationing in Taiwan:

1. Foods are still good but no long have the same appeal as before, except for sugar canes. Even when we were visiting Tainan’s eateries, we did not feel they were as tasty as we use to feel. Or perhaps, we ate so many of them at the same time, we couldn’t distinguish the tastes any more.

2. Living in a high-density community like most of Taiwanese does have its pluses and minuses. The pluses are the community resources like pool, KTV, gym, and other facilities. The minuses are the noise level, poor air quality.

3. Transportation (subway and buses) in Taipei is very impressive. The bullet train (Taiwan High-speed Rail) is fast and world-class except for the decor inside the train. The Yoyo card was implemented seamlessly.

4. Lives are hard in southern Taiwan. Things are not cheap (except pastry) relative to USA. Business volumes are way down in Tainan and Kaoshiung (I was told). What’s going on there? Perhaps, the investment money are just flowing out of Taiwan altogether.

5. Taiwan is still beautiful but the tourist attractions are still not world class. Kenting is close but the transportation to get there is still primitive. Maokong Gondola and Yinge and Jiofeng are very nice.

6. Fresh air is hard to come by. Noises from constant marketing promotion (like all the control within a movie theater) fills the air when one enters the department store and movie theater. Compared to Taiwan, USA is a very quiet place with fresh air.

7. Seeing my grandmother. It’s so cool to see my grandmother at 92 years old. She’s still as sharp as ever but is bed ridden – not able to get out of the bed. She was glad to see us family.

8. Seeking out and meeting an old friend after 30 years. Wow! what a bonus to be able to contact an old junior high-school friend by searching on Google. The two families met for a short while and had a wonderful dinner in Kaoshiung. Thanks, Dr. Yeh!

This is by far the longest vacation I’ve even taken that I can remember. It was nice and relaxing – I felt fully charged and was able to tackle the 2000+ emails waiting for me.

Over the 4-day Thanksgiving holidays, my email server went offline for a scheduled AC power transformer upgrade. Since I manage my own email server, I was naturally concerned that my emails may get bounced back to the sender due to the usual 4-hour grace period. I called our IT and was assured that IT will allow a much longer grace period for the emails. I was still concerned that the email server may not come back up right. It’s always a concern when a server goes down. But I’ll deal with it when it happens.

So my family took a nice, peaceful holidays in North Lake Tahoe, without even taking my laptop with me. Why bother? I couldn’t check my emails anyway. After a couple of days, I began to feel bored because I couldn’t browse the web without the laptop. At the same time, I felt stress-free because there is really no work for me to check on. It’s like having no inbox at all, almost the same feeling when you give your boss the 2-week notice to quit. It’s amazing how much our emails are driving our life at work and off work nowadays. We’re like the rat on a wheel – keep spinning. Having no work email access is like walking off the wheel. How wonderful!

Now, I’m back at work. My email server still hasn’t come back up due to the network issues. I feel lost and isolated. I don’t know what’s going on. Is there any emergency brewing that I’m not aware of. It’s a dreadful feeling waiting for the IT guys to fix the network problem. In addition, I had a 7am conference call and I couldn’t check email to find the call-in number. I ended requesting the call in from the host using my personal emails. At least, it gave me some free time to blog 🙂

After this experience, I have determined that emails are both a great communication tool and great stress generator. Good communications come with the responsibility to do something with the information. No wonder our quality of life doesn’t really get improved all that much with all these productivity tools – email, mobile phones, and etc. Productivity does come with a price – more stress in life. Perhaps, there is an optimal point somewhere in between.

I notice that my desks at work and at home get messy once every one or two months or so. Then I would force myself to clean it up, which takes a lot of work to sort things out and throw out or file them away. The same thing happens to my email inbox. I would have the emails accumulated to many thousands and then slowly work them down to a few thousands. I kept asking myself, why can’t I just keep things simple so I don’t have to accumulate things that need to be sorted out or “managed” later. Based on my observation of my own behavior, the basic answers to that question are twofolds:

1. Self-induced: Life is too boring to be kept simple. There are always exciting books to read (I borrowed lots of books from library on a regular basis as you can tell from my book review blogs). And there is a always a tendency to put off doing the boring stuff of reading, sorting and filing. The common excuse I have is that the things may come in handy later or I’ll get to it soon enough. Sometimes, I would initiate a new project/experiment just for the fun of it. Meanwhile, stuff piles on the tables.

2. Externally-induced: Life is full of “shocks” and interruptions. At work, there are crises to fight, new initiatives/fire drills to lead and complete from the management, customers, and colleagues. Every time a new crisis happened, the emails get queued up in order to maintain the historical perspectives or the regular work queued up in the inbox.

Physics’ entropy theory holds up well here. Entropy tends to go up or things tend to go chaotic naturally. To reduce entropy, it takes energy and work.

So here are the solutions I propose:

1. Bound the self-indulgence. I’d like to set a limit on how far I drift away from my simple life. For example, set a time limit on how long a pet project (e.g. composting, books to read) should last. I also set a limit on how long I should spend reading a book. (By the way, the library sets a limit on how long I can borrow the book so I’m set there). I also clean up my desk every two weeks or so to avoid our housekeeper from going through the desk during my absence.

2. Be conscious of the mounting complexity by benchmarking the email inbox: I found that my work is tied very closely to the email inbox. The more I allow the emails to queued up, the more work I queued up for myself. So the best way is to manage the inbox pro-actively. Using the new email statistic software I came up with, I’m now benchmarking against the goal of keeping the emails in the inbox for 60 days or less and continually reducing my inbox email count.

3. More delegations and automate the mundane work: Delegating the work to more competent people may help if managed properly. The key word is “manage properly.” Delegating to the wrong person or not managing properly may lead to more work later. Automating the bill pay process, taking a chapter from the “Automatic Millonaire,” helps to reduce life complexity and keep me from paying late fee.

4. Be prepared/preventive for crisis/external shocks: Keeping an eye out for upcoming crisis can help simplify life a bit. I use emails to do this. I tend to over-subscribe to certain alias so I can watch out for upcoming crisis. Of course, this works against keeping things simple but preventing a crisis from occurring is more valuable to me. There needs to a good balance.

5. Reduce commitments: The best way to lead a simple life is not to have too many commitments/responsibilities. At some point, if you feel you cannot stay above the water, you should reduce the water level (work load). The majority of the extra workload that complicates things is the quantity of them. You’re bound to drop a few balls if you juggle too many balls. Delegate them (#3) or just don’t commit to them.

In summary, streamlining work is a lot of hard work but allowing it to get too complicated may take even more work later on. An ounce of prevention goes a long way.

I came across the Simplicity Pattern video on Youtube. It’s very funny.

Last Wednesday, 9/26/07, I dumped my entire collection (2) of my compost bins into the garbage bin, ending my three-month experiment with composting. I bid farewell and bon voyage to my red worm friends. They’ll probably have a better time with other people’s garbage in the garbage dump. This was done after much urge and complaint from my wife about the stenches from the bins. She’s more concerned with the Qi around the house than being eco-responsible.

Motivated by the good feeling of eco-responsibility and after seeing lots of grass and green stuff being dumped into the yard disposal bins by my gardener, I thought I might do the earth some good by composting and reducing the waste going into the dump. The constant bombardment from the Sunnyvale city’s flier on free composting class also helps to start the cause. I didn’t have the time to attend the composting class, so I borrowed a few books from the library on composting and started reading about it.

It seemed easy enough: mixing brown (dry stuff like shredded newspaper, or dry leaves) with green (wet stuff like grass, vegetable trimming, left over vegi food, and etc.) and just let them sit for a couple of months while keeping the chemical reaction going by adding water to the pile (like a sponge with the water half squeezed out). But it was too easy besides I wanted to speed up the process, so I added some red worms to the pile. This automatically qualified me as the “vermicomposter,” which is the next level up in the composting hierarchy. And it’s probably more fun because there were something live feeding on the garbage, not just bacteria that you couldn’t see. The worms were quite expensive: $20 for 500 worms, and I needed 2x that for a bin. I immediately figured the money for the composting business is inn the “worms.” Now if I could grow/farm the worms …. 🙂

So I checked the worms from time to time. Some of them tried to escape from the holes and died on the concrete floor, dried up like a bacon. The remaining ones continued to grow substantially. They were supposed to propagate exponentially within weeks but I didn’t see that probably because my compost bins were “fertile” enough.

In the end, I came way with the following conclusions:
1. Composting is not for the faint of heart, it takes dedication to monitor the moisture level and keep the compost aerated – not a simple task for just a hobbyist.
2. We produce garbage much faster than the worms and the nature can absorb and breakdown normally due to the long breakdown time. Unless I have a composting factory in the backyard, which is probably doable in a suburban area but not in a city, I would never be able to make a dent on reducing the waste.
3. Red worms are a fascinating species. They play their designated role well but they can do better or work faster. Bioengineering of red worms might do some good in reducing/consuming the world’s ever increasing garbage contents.
4. Adding blending to the organic/vegetable trimming waste, as suggested by the experts on the net, might help to increase the breakdown time by the worms and bacteria, thus less stench. This was a variable I haven’t tried yet.

This was a fun experiment and experience. If I have a bigger house with a bigger backyard, I might try again sometime later. Or, how about making a “worm farm” on a glass container? They might make a good toy for a kid …