DISQUS

Always a good advice! A good friend told me once.

The world is made up of 3 types of events.
1) events that I have control
2) events that I have influence
3) everything else
And always be on the look out for opportunity to bring events closer.

For the negative people in my life, I can choose to cut them out, I can choose to be a positive influence for them, and I can choose to do nothing and ignore them.

I hope you find the peace that you desire!

math geek version of "Sex and the City". This made my day.

So many different things to think about and comment on. This is a bit of stream of conscious comments.

1) Consider that in my twenties, I attended lots of friends weddings. Now, in my thirties, there is a wave of divorces. Clearly getting married was not really true exit from the pool. People didn't get divorces just because of bad marriage. Usually there is a bad marriage AND a better choice.

2) Women doing the choosing makes perfect sense to me. I hope this is not too commercial of an example, but consider a house. Seller puts up a "for sale" sign, gets (hopefully) multiple bids, then selects the ideal buyer. The seller gets two choices. This is similar to marriage proposal situations.

3) Continuing with the real estate example, has the great single woman in the thirties initially "priced" themselves out of the market, by having too long/high of a checklist for an acceptable suitor. As the length of days on the market increases, the perceived desirability decreases to an potential suitor.

4) A Princess wants a Prince (don't want to settle for less). A Prince might or might not want a Princess. So the pool for the Princess is actually quite small (Only the Prince that wants a Princess). Will the Princess have better luck kissing lots of frogs and hopefully one of them turn into a Prince or wait until someone else turns the frog into a Prince. Or wait until the frog turn itself into a Prince. Either way, Prince is not born overnight.

5) In the end, I agree with the "The Atlantic". SETTLE! You take the chance that your choices is less than ideal now, but over the long run a big portion of your initial checklist is wrong or invalidate. I certain couldn't have predicted what matters to me now 10 years ago. And the things that really matter before seems quite trivial. So take Atlantic's advice. Take your mother's advice. Settle is the way to go for happy marriage. :)

Again, great articles.. lots of things to think about.

No new year resolutions for me. I have never ever kept any of them for more than a few weeks. Although, I do have career and business targets. For some reason, I manage to keep most of those.

What's interesting to me are the Chinese characters. Why did you have a English & Chinese vote sheet. Can't believe it took 9 characters to translate Hillary's name. :) Most Chinese people only has 2 or 3 characters in the name. 1 for the family name and 1 or 2 for the first name.

BTW... congrates on voting for the 1st time. I know the feeling, I didn't get my citizenship until I was 24. I also remember voting for the 1st time. Unfortunately, For me the feeling goes away fast. I didn't vote this time because I have totally lost faith when Bush was re-elected for the 2nd term. Perhaps I'll vote for the next president but at this point, I couldn't care less for politics and who has the control of government.

Since i quit the corporate world and started a toy design company 3 years ago, i have been living in this unstructure time. My first thought is to enjoy this unstructured time, it might be a long time before you'll have this opportunity again. Very soon, various projects and commitments will kick in and then all your time is taken by this or that deadline.

To make sure I stay productive, I created 2 lists of things to do. A list for chores, and a list for the creative projects. But don't put deadlines on them. I work off either list depending on my mood and try to balance them over the week. Browsing the web, or just taking a walk can be a creative time if you are in the right mind set. You need to set aside a fix time to be creative, and you can also mix the creative time with other tasks.

Alway carry a notepad with you. You never know when a spark of an idea is going to hit.

Let me know what end up working for you. I would love try a new and different way to find balance in my life.