Pub Inspiration by Harry's

It's Pouring, Come on in.

5 Ways to Achieve Happiness by Brian Tracy

According to Mr Brian Tracy, the 5 ways to achieve happiness are as follows:

1. Listen to your heart.

2. Always be true to yourself.

3. Understand that you deserve to be happy.

4. Do the things that make you happy.

5. Pay the price.

Click here for How to Be Happy: 5 Steps to Living a Life You Love | Brian Tracy.

He says, ""When you decide to make your happiness the chief organizing principle of your life, everything else will fall into place." 

Photo by Isaiah McClean on Unsplash

His challenge to you at the end of the video is recap here:

"What one thing are you going to begin today to ensure you start living a life you love?"

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Likewise, the proof of happiness is in the actions taken.

if you are already living the life you love, good on you.

Pink Panda?

There is Pink Lady, which is a variety of apple, and also Pink Panther cartoons of yesteryears.

Now, we have Food Panda with its distinct rebranding in pink, and I thought to myself that they might as well co-named themselves as Pink Panda before somebody else capitalise on it, if not already done so, and confuse the brands of Food Panda and Pink Panda.    

Unexpected Way to Build Resilience

"Develop resilience and be brave. There are days when it is very discouraging. You have to develop personal resilience to environmental things that come along. If you let every single environmental challenge knock you off your game, it's going to be very, very hard." -- Renee James

When you are knocked down, take a bounce and get right up. Don't stay down; find your inner steel spring.

You will find the following clip useful to help build your strength or resilience in four areas:

1. Physical Resilience

2. Mental Resilience

3. Emotional Resilience

4. Social Resilience

And, they can all be found in games, including computer games. Watch the following clip till the end and you will be illuminated by some of Jane McGonigal's practical exercises on building resilience.

Jane McGonigal
(Photo by courtesy of janemcgonigal.com)

The blurp by TED Talks says, "When game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion, she had a fascinating idea for how to get better. She dove into the scientific research and created the healing game, SuperBetter. In this moving talk, McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience -- and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life."

Click here for The game that can give you 10 extra years of life | Jane McGonigal.

For more on Jane McGonigal, click here to visit her homepage.

Click here for Denyse's superbetter journey. Be encouraged and inspired by Denyse's testimony.

Click here for SuperBetter Introductory Screencast.

Click here for Yu-kai Chou analyzes SuperBetter 1.0 through Octalysis [Day 1].

Laughter is the Best Medicine

While living and making a living is serious business, we need to take a break and get some laughs, as well. 

Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash

Laughter is seriously vital for our mental health.

Click here for Just For Laughs Gags vol 13 part 1.

Don't fall off your chair from laughing though. 

Making Music From Trash

"The world throws us their trash, and we give back to the world beautiful music." -- Favio Chavez

Photo by Johanna Vogt on Unsplash

Click here for World Citizen Artists Awards 2017: Landfill Harmonic and Recycled Orchestra of Cateura.

Test Drive a Range Rover Today -- Above & Beyond

Photo by Grant Ritchie on Unsplash

The following are just some ideas on how to test drive a Range Rover.

Click here for Vehicle Walkthrough - Range Rover Sport – Dragon Challenge.

Click here for Range Rover Sport – Inferno Downhill Challenge Documentary.

Stuffed with Chicken Rice

Be warned, this might turn you off or bring out the foodie in you as you are about to get stuffed with chicken rice.

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

Chicken rice (the Hainanese variety) is a popular meal found in food centres and even hotels all over Singapore. 

While it is not a healthy meal on account of the oil from the chicken skin, its aromatic rice and succulent meat plus complementary dips continue to draw in consumers.

Click here for a write-up on THE 5 BEST CHICKEN RICE IN SINGAPORE by the BestSingapore.com

Click here for a clip on BEST Singapore Chicken Rice, Maxwell Hawker Center Food Tour! by Mike Chen of Simply Dumpling. 

Click here for Singapore Chicken Rice recipe by allrecipes.com

Do You Need Help?

While you are shopping, one sure way to drive you off is when the sales staff appears intrusive or overly eager to help in spite of your 'No, thank you' body language and the encounter makes you feel like a mouse being watched by a feline.

At Innisfree, you can indicate whether you need assistance or not without uttering a single word. The following 2 sets of shopping basket would make it clear.

Left: "No Assistance Required" | Right: "Please Assist Me"

Now that's a pretty smart business idea to be added to your basket. Thus far, the green baskets are leading by a tall margin.

As gleaned from its website, "Innisfree is a natural brand that shares the benefits of nature from the pristine island of Jeju for healthy beauty and pursues an eco-friendly green life to preserve the balance of nature."

Click here to discover Innisfree, if not already done so.

Happy Shopping!

Wu Shengming is a Super Octogenarian

Not many people would bother to watch a documentary on old folks. But, I was captivated by the story of 86-years old entrepreneurial Ms Wu Shengming. She is young at heart and full of zest to live a purposeful live. 

Photo by Carl Newton on Unsplash

According to the blurp on Toggle's website regarding this documentary by Channel News Asia (CNA), "Wu Shengming was once one of China's richest entrepreneurs. But she took a sharp fall when she was convicted for commercial fraud. Getting out of jail in her 70s, she kept her promise to her daughter to turn her life around, and now runs a business empire catering to the elderly."

The photographer, Ms Jia Yanan, assigned to take pictures of Ms Wu gelled well with her and did a fantastic job. Her idea of dressing up in Ms Wu's outfit was brilliant. The highlight for me was when they each shared about their favourite photograph from the photoshoot.

This story appeals on many fronts with insights on: fashion sense, the issue of aging in society, the workings of a professional photographer, having a life's mission, coping with aging fearlessly, how to live life to the full with courage, and how to connect with other human beings.

Click here for Super Octogenarians - EP3 The Eternally Beautiful Entrepreneur. The conversations are in Mandarin with subtitles in English.

After watching this episode of Super Octogenarians, ladies would be inspired to aged gracefully while the guys would learn to love their grandmothers more!


P/s: The videographer and all the other background staff deserve due credits, too, for bringing across this message on aging with wellness.

The World's Greatest Eye Contact Experiment

Communication is done when we transmit a message and the recipient has received it. But, that does not mean that we have made a connection.

For example, you could be talking to a friend but he is not actually giving you full attention or he could be taking peeks at his mobile phone insatiably as if his life depends on it rather than oxygen. 

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Human connection happens when we make a genuine and conscious decision to take the time to give another person our undivided attention such as eye to eye contact, to start off with. 

Beyond eye contact, we could move on to meaningful conversations and doing things together.

Click here for The World's Biggest Eye Contact Experiment 2017: Global Call Out!

Click here for The World's Biggest Eye Contact Experiment 2016 (Official Version).

Click here Train Passengers Sing Over the Rainbow!

It's OK to Fail

When you fail, that doesn't make you a failure. After all, failure is universal; it happens to everybody and everywhere. Think of failure as free valuable feedback or tuition fee to learn something new.

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

In his book "Resilience", Eric Greitens says, "You will fail. Especially in the beginning. You will fail. And that's not just OK, it's essential. Without resilience, the first failure is also the last -- because it's final. Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably co-exist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes."

The flipside of failure is success. "Failure is success if we learn from it," says Malcolm Forbes. 

On an even more positive note, Henry Ford asserts that, "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." Get help from an expert or consultant because they have more experience and expertise to help you figure out how you can do better the next time with some training and adjustments, including a change of mindset.

From experience you would be able to attest that the people who have inspired you the most are the ones who have gone through a trial of hardships, struggles and deprivation. For example, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years in his fight to end apartheid before he was liberated and went on to become the first president of South Africa.  

You will check all the boxes for success as you roll with the punches and get up each time you fail. You are more, much more than the sum of your failures. There is still a lot that is going right with you and you should just treat your failures as mere blips in the course of your life as you learn and grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would have you know that, "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

Daily Refreshing believes in you and that your best is yet to come. All the best!

Go Green with Glamping

When  you combine camping with touches of luxury or creature comforts and environmental-consciousness, you get glamping.

Photo by Timothy Meinberg on Unsplash

That's hospitality at your service in remote locations around the world for you to get close to nature and people living in villages, far away from the madding crowd boxed-up in cities of concrete jungle.

Click here for Jalman Meadows Wilderness Camp | Mongolia. 

Click here for Cambodia's first five-star floating resort.

Click here for Top 10 Most Luxurious Glamping Sites in the World.

Think Like An Entrepreneur - Be Your Own Fighter Pilot

Reid Hoffman is a billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, veteran of PayPal, and venture capitalist.

The following is an adaptation of his take on having an adaptable mindset regardless of whether you are an entrepreneur, business owner or employee.

Photo by Cédric Dhaenens on Unsplash

The learning curve is commonplace enough. Move on to: the learning loop. This means that you have to constantly review how best you are doing what you do and make the necessary course adjustments.

Simply put, the learning loop is "a process in which your goals are constantly modified by experience". In other words, do not stick blindly to Plan A when the environment is telling you that you need to switch to Plan B.

Hoffman likens the learning loop to OODA -- the fighter pilot terminology for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. Following from this he says, "If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed."

Don't remain static; be nimble, agile and keep evolving to thrive in a fast-changing, complex and chaotic world. Things around us and the way that services are provided have been transforming dramatically (think mobile phone, crypto-currency, Food Panda and Uber).

This permanent beta mindset is not an exclusive domain for entrepreneurial success. It applies to your career, too. 

In The Startup of You, Hoffman opines that, "The conditions in which entrepreneurs start and grow companies are now conditions we all now live in when fashioning a career. You never know what's going to happen next. Information is limited. Resources are tight. Competition is fierce. The world is changing. And the amount of time you spend at any job is shrinking. This means you need to be adapting all the time. And if you fail to adapt, no one -- not your employer, not the government -- is going to catch you when you fall."   

Afterthought:

Yes, the learning loop does sound a lot like kaizen -- the process of continuous improvement. The vital difference is that in the learning loop, the goal keeps on shifting and it requires dynamic kaizen to stay on track with the constant shifts and adjustments so as to hit the moving targets or desired ends.

Bibliography:

"Life in Permanent Beta with Reid Hoffman" by Andrew Leonard as published in Entrepreneur magazine, May 2017. 

Click here for What Flying Fighter Jets Can Teach You About Focus, Discipline, and Teamwork.

iCup, iPlate and iFork - The Intelligently Designed Line of Flatware

Have you been to a party or gathering where you have a cup in one hand and a plate in the other hand which made you wonder how you are ever going to partake your food unless you find a helping hand or a flat surface to hold your cup?

Well, Kyle Donovan has found a solution for this and you and I are left pondering "Why didn't I think of that?!"

Photo by courtesy of iFork.com

With his iCup and iPlate, you can now hold both your cup and plate in one hand while the other hand is free to use your utensils or even shake hand with another person.

Click here for iCup iPlate and here for Brooklyn man's invention a hit on Shark Tank.

And, with his iFork and other iFlatware, your eating-end of your utensils will not touch base with the table directly. This nifty touch would work very well with restaurants.

Click here for Fox 13 Tampa Bay iFork Line Review.

Maybe this could work for chopsticks and chinaware spoon, as well, with some adaptation?

  

My Little Garden - All Things Terrarium

Click here to take a stroll in Patrick's "My Little Garden" with the following selected terrariums to give you a sneak preview on the wide array of his creations. 

Photo credits: My Little Garden by Patrick

Photo credits: My Little Garden by Patrick

Photo credits: My Little Garden by Patrick

Photo credits: My Little Garden by Patrick

When you visit My Little Garden, I am sure you will be able to find something which would interest you whether for yourself or as a gift for someone else.

Thanks, Patrick, for brightening up our day with My Little Garden.

  

Keep Getting Up When Knocked Down

Life can well be like a school with free lessons of hard knocks. 

The thing to do when knocked down is to keep getting up and build your capacity to take those challenges in your stride, learn from them and keep focusing on your goal for the rewards which will come about if you persevere.

Photo by Eddie Garcia on Unsplash

Click here for Lionel Messi Training - Motivation ● Mentality Of A Winner.

Click here for The Best Five Real Life Inspirational Stories.

You are a work-in-progress. Persevere until you cross the finish line of the various stages of your life. 

Your past does not define you. Your future is yours in the making and may you find all the help you need along the way. 

Start by being grateful for where you are right now and be thankful to those who have helped you along the way thus far.

Never Give Up, Hang On

It mayn't be a pretty sight, but hang on tight until you get your break or take a leap of faith so as to move on to something new.

As you know, bad times don't last and they are surmounted by the indomitable human spirit. When you go through a tough period, that is the time to dig in and keep surviving for tomorrow and the days after. 

By the by, you will get through your rough spell and come forth stronger in character and as a seasoned individual with a story to share and inspire others. The trial will come to pass. So, keep your cool, be patient, persevere, stay positive and keep looking forward.

Click here for an encouraging article by The Straits Times on The Lives They Live: Low-wage worker got his break at 59.

All Things Valentine

The anticipation and preparation for your big day is like a good warm-up. 

Now is the time to get in the mood for love in the run-up to Valentine's Day rather than hinge everything on the day itself.

That said, you might wanna find some enjoyable romantic movies on YouTube regardless of whether you are anti-Valentine or a firm believer. Love does make this world a better place for all of us and you are the agent for the change you desire to see in your world.

Click here for Best hallmark movies 2017.All Things Valentine 2017 HD and you will find some big moments that are heartwarming.

Open Sesame!

Closed letter boxes

It's "Open Sesame!" when the postman shows up

Oasia Hotel Downtown

From the looks of it, the following iconic hotel has taken 'going green' to new heights.

Pretty soon it could well become a famed 'hotel in a bush' and the sky-scraping gardeners will have their hands full to keep the hotel trim.

A good way to remember the name of this hotel would be to add 'O' to "Asia".

Let the the following blurb from their website enthuses you: "Oasia brand empowers guests to journey well when travelling through three wellness pillars – Recharge, Refuel and Refresh."

Click here to find out more about Oasia Hotel Downtown brought to you by Far East Hospitality.

The Importance of Close Relationships and Social Integration

To my mind the amount of sleep or the lack of it would have a big impact on longevity. 

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

For your refreshing, click on the following a clip, obtained through a chat group, on a study done regarding the top predictors of longevity, barring unforeseen circumstances.

Finding Happiness

How can I be happy? Where can I find happiness?

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

If you are on a quest for happiness, click here for "Finding Happiness" by Dennis Burke Ministries. 

Take your time to read through and meditate over the Word of God as contained therein; it would be well worth your time. 

Slow down, be still, and know that God is real and present with you.

Have a wonderful life!

Inspiration from J. K. Rowling

Click here for Evan Carmichael's J.K. Rowling's Top 10 Rules For Success (@jk_rowling), which  he has summarised as follows:

Photo credits: Jack Anstey @jack_anstey
(Courtesy of Unsplash.com)

"1. Failure helps you discovers yourself

She went from living on state benefits to multi-millionaire status within 5 years.

2. Take action on your ideas

The Harry Potter books have become the best-selling book series in history.

3. You will be criticized

Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers asked that she use two initials, rather than her full name. 

4. Remember where you started

She was diagnosed with clinical depression which she claims gave her inspiration to create the Dementors in the Potter series.

5. #Believe

Twelve publishing houses rejected her original Harry Potter manuscripts, but eventually small publisher Bloomsbury gave her a chance with a small advance. 

6. There is always trepidation

She conceived the idea for Harry Potter in 1990. The 7 years that followed saw the death of her mother, divorce from her first husband and relative poverty until Rowling finished the first novel.

7. Life is not a checklist of achievements

She named communist and civil rights activist Jessica Mitford as her "most influential writer".

8. Persevere

She's the United Kingdom's best-selling living author, with sales in excess of  £238m.

9. Dreams can happen

In 2010, she was named the "Most Influential Woman in Britain" by leading magazine editors.

10. We have the power to imagine better

Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated US$15 billion."

Photo credits: Carlos Cram @cramtek
(Courtesy of Unsplash.com)

To fire up your belly and get you moving to do your thing, you may wanna review the following quotes by J.K. Rowling:-

"I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write."

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

"You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity."

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive."

"We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

May you find good success as you persevere in the pursuit of your passion and dream life.