Teeth and life

The year is 2022. The age is 41. In fact I just turned 41 3 days ago. This post is inspired from my recent visit to the dentist. I had to do a root canal treatment, remove a wisdom tooth and fill a few holes. Sitting there on the reclined dentist chair, I had nothing else to do besides opening my mouth wide for a few hours so my mind went wild thinking fondly of our teeth. And that sparked thoughts - our teeth has so much correlation with our life. Specifically with our connections with family and friends. I will now share this story of teeth. When we are born, we don't have any connections besides our family who then gets acquainted with us over time. That's all the milk teeth you start with. As we get older, you realise that some of them drop off, and newer ones come up. That's pretty much as we are growing up, we make friends and develop more relationships beyond our family. If we take good care of our teeth, I mean our friendship and relationships, they will last for as long as we want them to. Once in a while, we might end up with a tooth pain. Ignoring the pain doesn't let the pain go. In fact it will only make it worse. The pain we face in our relationships are the same. They do surface occassionally not for us to sweep them away, but just like a tooth ache, they will stay until we address the root cause of it. If we leave the pain be, it might develop into something even worse and we might need to uproot or remove the teeth/ in the case of the friendship, letting it go. And just as it's like in life, as we age, we do tend to have a smaller circle of friends, those whom we are closest to and prefer to spend quality time with. Our teeth also reduces in number as we grow older. So the moral of this story is - take good care of your teeth and your relationships as they both deserve all your tender, loving, care to thrive.

Career hop

Career or jobs that we do are often seen as mundane, daily tasks we carry out under an agreement done with companies. We agree to give 8 hours of our time in exchange for doing favours for them. If we are an expert in what we do, we are often hired easily to do this. There are also professionals who are in high risk positions, who are paid a premium for carrying out their daily tasks as they face the risk of many uncertainties in carrying out their duties. As an example, a lawyer can risk being sued for being perceived as being unethical or unprofessional while a doctor can be sued for failing to save the lives of a dear one. As for me, no one shared or told me about this career economics growing up. I went with the flow, and pretty much stayed on course (with the flow) for the rest of my career years. I started my first job in sales, earned shit loads of money (in 5 digits for some months) and never had enough financial education to guide me on what to do with all that money. So i spent them on myself, travelling, expensive gym memberships etc. Even so, I still struggled to pay off my loans for education and car. I still had dreams though. I wanted to own my own home, pay off all loans and live a debt-free life and that's what I have successfully achieved for myself at the ripe age of 40! I was officially debt-free (or semi cos the house loan is still being serviced). But here's my reflection on what helps a person move up. Imagine yourself facing a moving lines of ladder or ropes. You are still slightly short of reaching that next step up and you need a helping hand. For some, ther is a ready hand waiting to help. For the rest, they need to try and find a way to hop onto the steps and hopefully manage to climb up and keep moving up the next fleet of steps. So the lesson in this is - build your network! Contacts help people they know. How often do you see Good Samaritans today? Take me for an example. I managed to secure employment because a non-asian leader decided to take a gamble on me. She trusted me and empowered me to be who i ended up becoming. How many leaders/ managers today are willing to do that. All that employers are looking for are- performers. I can perform but whether they like me or otherwise is another question altogether. So the next time you are in an interview scenario, apart from being yourself, build that network sitting across you so that you will start growing your own list of contacts who can then lend you a helping hand when you need it the most!