From this rule, the 80% are the followers whereas the 20% are the creators. Creators gains more wealth by giving and sharing more value and the followers often follows these creators and have less wealth. This sounds very disproportionate but it is a very balanced system.

Accepting Social Conditioning By Default

The reason for this happening is what I call accepting social conditioning by default. Most of us are born with parents, and it is from them that we learn our survival or living skills from. We will accept and inherit by default things like religion, god, behaviour and social practices (celebrating christmas, new year, birthday, etc) from our parents. This is what experts call “external factors” of social conditioning.

As we age, we will learn, accept and inherit social conditions from our colleagues, friends and mentors. Without realizing, you are already categorized as The Follower, and the more you follow, the more uneasy you will feel as this will restrict The Creator inside you from being able to express themselves. Wealthy people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs realized this at a very early age and rebel against the Social Conditioning System, they dropped out of college and went on to fulfill their goal as a Creator.

Dropping Out From The System

I’m not sure what got into me but I’ve always been a born rebel. When I was a kid, I always questioned why my family has a worshiping altar. They have idols like Guan Yin and Guan Gong but I don’t find them cool, at that age (I think maybe 5 years old?), I prefer to worship Ultraman, and I think many would agree with me!

As I age, I saw and found more flaws in the system, very much like how Neo felt in the Matrix. Having lucid dreams was one of those experiences that brought me to the edge. As a result, today I am a person that don’t believe in Demons (I won’t be afraid of them even if they exist), I don’t worship Gods (I will not respect them even if they exist) and I don’t believe in fear (I will try to conquer them one at a time).

What I believe is myself and myself only. I’m not saying that everyone should start worship me instead of God, but what I’m trying to achieve in this lifetime is to have as many people believing in themselves like how I believe in me.

The Follower In Us
Believe me, being a 24/7 creator is a very tough job that even I think isn’t worth it. The reason we are living now is for us to have a chance to enjoy life. We do that by being both the creator and the follower. The follower in me loves Lord Of The Ring Trilogy and still finds that the best movie so far, and I enjoy listening to Rap music. You follow on areas that you do not excel in.

The Creator In Us
Every individual is unique. This statement is true even if you are born as a twins, you might have similar biological structure but your soul and mind is truly unique. Being unique guarantees each and every one of us to have the chance to do something that nobody else is able to achieve. Since I started believing in myself, I’ve shed many fears like fear of the dark, fear of heights, fear of approaching females, fear of roller coaster rides (no matter how high, fast or whatever), fear of correcting superiors/customers when they are wrong, fear of losing a job and many many more.

I think I excel in the fear of demons department, so much so that even if they exist they will fled the very moment they see me because I will tear them apart and send them to hell again. The problem is I’m not sure if they can die twice. With this kind of courage, I’m able to help friends close to me to shed their fear of demons and spirits. Even my most timid friends are doing quite well now. Somehow they are able to rub on my fearlessness and benefit from it. One of my dreams are to be able to sleep overnight in a morgue full of dead bodies, so if you know of anyone who can assist me, please let me know. I’m even willing to pay for the experience!

Living Life To The Fullest
In the end, what matters most is everyone is able to live their lives to the fullest. We are all Creators from the first day we live and have the right to create whatever it is that we want, so stop being a full time follower and for once follow your heart and gain the courage to create. It will not be easy, but the Creator will always be there to encourage fellow Creators and will reward those with persistence.

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So does that mean that we can live our lives any way we wanted? In actual fact, yes, because we are gifted with free will but is this ‘the way’ or ‘our way’? Well, that depends if you are truly happy adopting this kind of living. For me, I would like to live my life the way that I wanted but at the core of it, I still have my life purpose. That would make me more focused, complete, driven and whole…

The Five Pillars Of Life

In search of the way to live in a congruent and effective manner, I’ve come out with the Five Pillars Of Life. It is the result of all the living concepts that I’ve came across and fine tuned to be compatible with my life. I think after you’ve applied some minor personal adjustments, this concept can be applied to everyone. This is mentioned briefly in my first post The Beginning Of Life but I think this time I should elaborate more on how can we apply them in life.

The Five Pillars consist of Physical, Mental, Spiritual, Financial and Social. You can think of them like your five fingers when your palm is facing up. Imagine balancing a card on your five fingers pointing up, even when all of your fingers are of a different length, you will be able to hold the card by adjusting your palm and bending your fingers, but this will become more difficult if the difference in finger length becomes more or maybe you just simply choose not to use a particular finger or two. Doing this might tilt the card and force it to collapse entirely. This is the analogy that I would use to describe the same challenges in life, maintaining balance.

Physical

The Physical Pillar refers to the body, our avatar that we use to interact in this physical world. This is the most important pillar in my life and I am quite confident that it will remain that way throughout the course of my life. If you’ve read Social Omnivore, Excessive Workout Can Kill You and The Cause For Unhealthy Diet, you will notice that I take very much care of the well being of my avatar.

Those who pay no attention to their avatar will make no effort to maintain a healthy and efficient body. There are even some who wants to be fit but they cannot control their diet, simply put, those who’s action are not congruent with what they have in mind. These kind of people needs to strenghten their Mental self first.

Mental

The Mental Pillar is where the mind resides. This is the pillar where you improve on your intelligence, decision making, creative thinking, discipline and anything that relates to the thought process. Even with a healthy avatar, it won’t be efficient if you have a weak mind, after all, your mind is where thoughts are formed. Without a strong mind, you cannot express yourself honestly through your avatar.

A very good practice to improve on your mental self is to go for hiking, the more difficult, the better, especially those trips that needs you to be in the jungle for a few days. For many times, my strong mind is what keeps me going when my physical self surrendered. Your mind provides an energy beyond physical.

Spiritual

My spiritual journey started way before I knew it, as explained in Dream Control . I’m always curious about the universe, the paranormal, life and death, and the way our lives relates to it. I’m also curious as to what happens after life? These kind of curiousity led me to shed away my fears day by day until it got so scarse that looking for fear is one of my hobby now. Without fear, I have the ultimate courage to discover the truth, the answer to life.

Social

The Social Pillar is one of the pillars that I focused on at a later stage in life. I had a very unique kind of childhood experiences (I will explain when I’m ready) that resulted in me having very little (or none) social skill. As life goes on, I have no other choice but to develop them.

If you are still wondering if you can live this life alone, let me answer that now, you can’t. I’ve came to a conclusion that life is designed in such a perfect way that you have no way but to learn to love and live. I also believe in reincarnation and that those who took their own lives (by committing suicide) will be reincarnated over and over again until they finally learn the meaning of life.

Financial

Our society today has given money so much emphasis than they deserve, I have no choice but to include it in as one of the pillars. In my opinion, your financial condition should be very sufficient if your other four pillars are properly strengthened and balanced, but special attention needs to be given to it (a few years, perhaps) should you plan to be financially free before retirement.

Maintaining A Balance

As explained, an effort should be made to balance the Five Pillars to maintain a smooth sailing life with less obstacles. It is very normal for a particular pillar to be chosen as the core pillars and perhaps two other pillars as a supporting pillars, in my case, Physical as the core and Mental and Financial as the supporters. It might be entirely different in your case, perhaps 1 core with 3 supporters, whatever really, as long as it works.

When you begin to feel that there’s a void at a particular pillar, like when I have no choice but to strengthen my Social pillar to move forward in life and also to my Spiritual pillar when I doubt the existence of demons and gods, it is time to focus on them. I encourage for you to pick a pillar to focus on as a New Year’s resolution, different pillars every year.

It is my assumption that most people wouldn’t care about their Spiritual pillars all their life but I think when they are really old and sick, and all they do is sleep on a hospital bed, since they have nothing to do, they will think about it. Imagine, “All my life I’ve believed in God and right until my dying moments I still couldn’t see or feel him/her, have I been mistaken all my life?”.

Perhaps your mastery in balancing these pillars will decide if your life falls under one of these 2 quotes from my Mentor :

“Life is suffering” – Buddha
“The reason to live is to be happy” – Buddha

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1. Book Review : Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina

I always believe that everyone should own their home, regardless of the size and location. If you can do better, you can always upgrade to a better one, and if you’re in a bad situation, you can always go back to your home. I would also advice those who are keen on investing in a property to at least want to live in this house. Should your investment does not work out as expected (no buyer, not able to rent out, etc..), as least you can still use it as your home instead of letting it rot but still pay for the installments monthly. Another advice is that if you already have a car, try not to tempt yourself into buying another car instead of getting a house, always remind yourself that the car is the worst investment of all time!

I was purchasing a completed service apartment by applying for a Flexi loan. The procedures might be slightly different for you if you’re getting other types of property, and maybe under development, but I believe the overall experience should be more or less the same.

The Hunt

Choosing your home is no easy task. Even when I’ve decided on the condo/apartment that I wish to buy, I still need to view the units and make sure that it is the unit that I will be staying for awhile. One wrong decision here and you’ll be demotivated for a very long time (30 years usually). Perhaps this is the challenge for us who is buying a completed property, but I still think properties under development will have their own set of challenges. Lucky or not, I spent 3 months looking for my unit, and I got exactly the unit that I had in mind when I started!

Booking Fees

During my 3 months search, it got so competitive that I brought my cheque book with me when I went for viewing with the property agent so that I can place the booking on the spot if the unit is suitable. Most of the time, it is first come first serve basis when it comes to booking.

There was same issue the owner had with the existing tenant that hold me back from issuing my booking fee on the spot. I had to thank my agent for being able to convince the owner that I’m very serious in buying and there’s no need to ask for other agents to help sell the unit.

Once everything is cleared, I placed my booking fee. It should be around 2% or 3% of the purchase value, and you will need to sign on the Letter Of Offer. Bear in mind that the Letter Of Offer needed to be signed by the buyer (Purchaser) and the seller (Vendor) to be of legal value. Which means that the owner can still accept offers from other agents. Once the owner signed the Letter Of Offer, your agent will give you the original copy. With this Letter, you can now start applying for loan. At this stage, referring to the Letter Of Offer, you should have 14 working days to get your loan approved. You will be penalized/fined if you don’t, so start working on it!

Loan Application

My brother is a banker, so I got very detailed information on the types of loans available and how to apply them in a way that it gets processed quickly without delay, to avoid the penalty. There are generally 2 types of loans, Conventional and Flexi. I’m not going into the details on the differences of these 2 but basically Flexi loans (the one that I chose) have the flexibility for you to deposit and withdraw from a current account that you own, and the loan interest will be calculated daily based on the amount of extra cash that you deposited into the account.

Each bank has their strength and weaknesses, some has better interest for completed properties, some has better interest for Conventional, some has better interest for Flexi, some provides higher value for your property, hence the ability to get higher loans, and so forth. So it is wise to apply for several banks for more options.

To apply for housing loan, you need a set of these for every bank :-

1. Letter Of Offer
2. Copy Of Identification Card
3. Copy Of Income Tax Form
4. Copy Of Income Tax Payment Receipt
5. Latest 3 Month’s Salary Slip
6. Latest 3 Month’s Bank Statement
- First Page (That States Your Name And Account Number) & Statement, Certified True Copy (You Need To Go To The Branch To Get It Stamped) – Depending On Bank’s Requirements.
- Make Sure Your Statement Matches With The Amount On Your Salary Slip Or You’ll Have A Very Difficult Time Getting It Approved!
7. Name Card Current & Previous (If You Just Changed Job)

Getting A Lawyer

Once you have your loan approved, the next step is to appoint a lawyer to process the deal. Most of the time, the Purchaser’s lawyer alone is enough but sometimes the Vendor might want their own lawyer to protect themselves. The lawyer will prepare the new Sales & Purchase document where it will be signed by both parties, the Purchaser & Vendor. During the signing, you will need to pay the remainder of the down payment (usually 10% minus the amount you paid during booking).

At this moment, if for any reason that you’ve decided that you do not want to sign the S&P, you will lose your booking fee. And also, in the event that you sign it before getting a bank loan approved and that loan ended up being rejected, you will lose your 10%. So make sure to get your loan approved within 14 working days before signing the S&P! Once signed, all you can do now is wait for your lawyer to process the transaction.

It is very important to set up your current account before the release of fund from the bank, or the funds will have nowhere to go to. This is quite a tricky step if you are not confident of when the First Disbursement (the release of funds from the bank) will occur. Since the bank will charge a service fee (Rm 10 per month in my case), it is also not clever to set up your account too soon because the bank will charge you every month for nothing. Since I expect my First Disbursement to occur in between the 3rd and the 6th month, I set up my current account on the 2nd month.

Towards the final phase before I get the Key to my property, I was asked by my lawyer to do a joint inspection with the Vendor on the property. I think this is just a formality as I don’t think the previous owner will pay for any visible damage since you’ve already paid for the property, it’s yours now!

I will then need to contact my lawyer to let them know if the property is in good condition and if they should proceed. Once you give them the green light they will proceed to process the loan and will instruct the bank to release the First Disbursement. In my case, since the previous owner bought the property in cash, I do not need to wait for the Second Disbursement. This reduced my waiting time by 1 to 2 months.

The Key!

Once the First or Second Disbursement is released to the Vendor, the lawyer will contact you to pick up the Key! Congratulations! The first phase of your headache is now over! At this point, most buyers will want to at least do some renovation, according to budget and taste. This will further increase your wait to an extra month or two.

So that’s all you need to know to get your own property! Like in all of my articles, I hope to provide some kind of value, not just empty blogging. So once again, welcome to the year 2010!

There’s no place like home!

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Perhaps you can call it Law Of Attraction that lead me to have the review copy of this book. I did not plan to buy it, I just knew that somehow I will end up having a copy of his book. A week after announcing that his books are in the printing process, he gave out an opportunity for bloggers to get his free review copy of Personal Development for Smart People. I sent in a request and to my surprise I got it. That was totally unbelievable! This will be the rare opportunity for me to repay Steve for his relentless effort towards self development.

The Universal Principle To Conscious Growth

Steve’s book will explain the three core principles that defines a conscious effort towards self development which are Truth, Love and Power, and their extensions Oneness, Authority, Courage and Intelligence.

Truth – All forms of expressions and communications must be rooted in truth. To start of your growth you must first accept who you truly are, even if you do not have enough strength to overcome your weaknesses at that moment.

Love – Is the strength of the connections that we have towards other human beings, animals, places or even things. The stronger it is, the more you are aligned with conscious growth.

Power – Refers to your ability to alter reality. This includes your ability to create your unique personality, successful career, wonderful relationships and anything that you desire.

Oneness – Is the combination of truth and love. Love is knowing that you can connect by choice. Oneness is knowing that you are already connected. Oneness is pure unconditional love.

Authority – Is the combination of truth and power. Truth without power accomplishes nothing. Power without truth generates wasted action. The principle of authority teaches you to purposefully blend knowledge and action to produce intelligent results.

Courage – Is the combination of love and power. Courage allows us to see through short-term challenges to achieve a long-term goal.

Intelligence – Is alignment with truth, love, and power. Every step we take in the direction of truth, love, and power is a step toward greater intelligence.

Once you understand them (or even if you haven’t), Steve provide substantial practical application of his principles in areas such as habits, career, money, health, relationships and spirituality.

Habits – With the proper alignment with truth, love and power, you will gradually drop those habits that no longer empowers you, for example, cursing, smoking, drinking and speeding. You will then pick up empowering habits such as being punctual, organized, like helping others and reading.

Career –  Your career has two components: your medium and your message. Your medium is how you express yourself, but your message is what you express. For example, a doctor’s message could be about healing, compassion, scientific discovery, education, vitality, or a variety of other possibilities.

Money –  Money is the primary social resource. Money is essentially social credit. It’s an IOU from society, enabling you to extract a certain amount of social value whenever you spend it. The more money you have, the more society owes you, and the more value you can extract.

Health –  Your body is your avatar (the image that represents you) in the physical universe. It’s the character you control, and you’re the consciousness that controls it. All of your experiences in the physical universe come through your physical body. It’s your primary vehicle of interaction here, so it makes sense to take proper care of it.

Relationships – Human relationships are a tremendous source of learning and growth. Sharing your life with others is one of the best parts of being human, but it doesn’t come without risk. Unlike other aspects of personal development, the stakes are higher with relationships because your mistakes could potentially hurt someone deeply. There’s no getting around that risk completely, but the decision to align yourself with truth, love, and power will help guide you through the major stumbling blocks. When you make mistakes, do your best to forgive yourself, forgive others, and move on.

Spirituality –  Spirituality refers to your collection of beliefs about reality. As you use the power of conscious choice to bring your life into greater alignment with truth, love, and power, the long-term result is spiritual wisdom and peace. Your life reaches a new level of clarity where all the parts begin working harmoniously together.

My Personal Thoughts

Honestly, Steve helped me achieve self development to some degree even before I read this book. It includes :-

- Reducing coffee
- Reignite my passion in developing lucid dreams (more to Erin on this one)
- Being a vegetarian (not completely yet due to social conditioning)
- Quitting alcohol (I still drink socially, again due to social conditioning)
- Started blogging

Personally, I’m not a fan of forms or structures, I prefer to go formless and be free of fixed rules. However, Steve did a great job aligning them to a point that it makes great sense. I felt a tingling sensation after finishing reading the book, a feeling that’s always there when I discover something insightful, and I smiled. I’m elevated by Steve again!

Personal Development for Smart People is a great package that includes a very structured approach and also filled with very practical exercises that you can start working on to create a more conscious world to live in. I really would recommend it to anyone who wishes to enhance themselves, to find their purpose in life and even those who need just that little motivation to start improving.

(Click here to download his free Intro & Chapter 1 of Personal Development for Smart People)

Coupled with his online contributions/articles in www.stevepavlina.com , the value that you are getting far outweighs the money that you are paying for this book. This guy is really devoted to raising the world’s collective consciousness to a higher level. Let us join him to create Oneness World!

Improvements are contagious. Modify yourself!

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1. The Pillars Of Life