To make a long story short, I tried getting it out with a bent paper clip for two hours, and then gave it over to my moms (I like calling her “moms” instead of “mom” because it sounds less formal — truthfully, I’d prefer “mama deuce” but that’s a bit drastic — yes, a line stolen from Notorious, which was a great movie). Never question moms. She took twenty minutes nudging it out by pushing it side-to-side (the memory card was smaller than the SIM card slot — working with that, she used a clip to navigate from side to side, an undoubtedly tedious process). I love mom.

When she gave me the phone, she looked at me and said something about “preventative action”, and how being careless could lead to a mess.

Why do we Read Manuals?

I usually don’t. But my moms taught me that manuals exist to prevent people from making careless mistakes. When we try assembling furniture without instruction and try relying solely on common sense, we can run into mistakes that result in disassembly and re-assembling from the beginning and having to read instructions anyway.

Thus, reading manuals actually exist for the purpose of taking preventative action — preventing us from running into the careless mistake in the first place. If I was more careful about which slot I’d placed my card in, I wouldn’t have had to waste time, effort, and stress on this object.

I used to aspire towards being carefree and worry-free — but this lesson taught me the importance of worrying and carefulness — and attention detail. A typo here and there, and my credibility can be ruined. If I had attempted to get a job earlier in the summer, I would probably be employed. There are many factors in life that I had left to chance, due to my viewpoint of being carefree, but I think I’ll start to change.

What do you think?

No one likes admitting weaknesses, and once we admit it, we feel like we’ve fixed it. Not even close. Admitting weakness is a hard part, but it’s still far from the final step.

My cousin and I were playing table tennis one night (typical asian activity). The tides turned against me, and I was starting to lose a game that I had clenched. After my defeat and during a practise rally, he says to me: “Herbert, your back hand is horrible. That’s why I always hit to the left, and that’s how I win.” Truthfully, I hadn’t noticed. “Remember, you can’t let people take advantage of your weaknesses like that.”

I was shocked. It was such an oddly simple lesson, but one that I hadn’t realized until that point. And to his credit, I practised my backhand and was able to defeat many of the opponents that I couldn’t before (hey Rohan, haha).

You might be protesting, “Table tennis is one thing, but it can’t really be compared to real life! Come on, Herbert!” Sometimes, real life can be astonishingly simple.

1. Recognizing weakness.

The first step has to be recognition of your flaw — my cousin had to point my weak backhand out to me. You will know trustworthy people in your life that will point out real flaws — but they won’t stick around forever. My cousin had to go back to his home in Alberta. I had to learn to dissect myself and find weaknesses. What was keeping me from being the best? My laziness. My lack of motivation. My conformity. My desire to be accepted (arguable?). My complacency. Boy, I wasn’t feeling too great about myself.

2. Admitting weakness.

Sort of the second half of the first step — but nonetheless, one has to accept that the weakness indeed real in order for one to being change. It took me a while to admit that I am typically not too hard of a worker, and that I am too easily satisfied with many things in life.

3. Examining weakness.

Study your strategies. What is it about your weakness that ruins the activity? My frail backhand was caused by an improper grip on the table tennis paddle.

Similarly, in Starcraft (a strategy game that I love playing), I noticed that I never had as many units as the other guys did — which is why I always lost.

With my laziness, I realized that my lack of motivation was the root of the problem — if I had something to work towards, then I would do it. Problem is I don’t have much passion for anything “important” — I like having a good time and going out with friends and playing games, but asides from that I couldn’t really find anything that I really wanted to attain or a goal that I wanted to achieve.

4. Solving weakness.

After adjusting my grip, I was able to hit and aim much faster than before — although through this period, I had to adjust my whole game because of the grip adjustment. I suffered many defeats before I finally got used to the grip.

With Starcraft, I had to watch many replays in order to figure out how my rivals harnessed enough resources to build certain buildings, or create certain units. Once I got the general idea, I started implementing the solutions — and my record now has a lot more wins than it did before.

With my laziness, I started asking people for what motivated them. I got a similar answers — success, money, personal pride. My search will continue on until I find something that I can identify with, of course — but laziness is a lot harder to fix than some table tennis grip or a Starcraft routine, right?

5. Practise.

I played table tennis until I was able to beat a friend who I never could. To this day, I still play rallies with him until I’m able to win one (then I call the session off because I’m usually too tired to continue, haha). In Starcraft, there’s no alternate solution — practise is always essential in gaming. Learning hotkeys, developing strategies — all part of the process.

Taking small steps to improving productivity (a goal of mine that identifies with my value of time) began decreasing my weakness — I identified this goal due to my value of time (and spending time wisely instead of uselessly). For example, I started using an agenda and referring to it to ensure that I never forgot anything. I used to run a tech site at CutEdge.org, where I once had an excellent routine of just spending fifteen minutes to write articles. Of course, I took this model over and implemented it into Human Writer — and although this article took a lot more than fifteen minutes, it all started with the notion that it would only take fifteen minutes (only to have me realize that it had been a good three-quarters of an hour upon finishing this article).

6. Initiate strength.

I realized that if I really want to be good at something, I need to take a lot of initiative into learning and practising it. So take the initiative to do it — find alternative solutions, talk to other people that are experts in the activity, and implement the solutions.

With laziness, I started reading Lifehacker and other productivity websites, for solutions. Similarly, I went to my local Chapters and read a few chapters of Getting Things Done by David Allen (he’s really got some interesting processes). Implementing these processes is a whole other thing though, which is why I place so much emphasis on practise — if one just reads the advice and doesn’t practise it, then he would have been better off spending his time elsewhere and not reading the advice in the first place.

Oversimplification?

I’ll admit that I have a bit of doubt — I feel that I might have oversimplified a bit in terms of process. There will be a lot of self-doubt, self-conflict, skepticism from your peers, doubt from your friends, and struggle to keep moving. But, at the same time, a lot of problems seem huge at first, but don’t actually take that much effort to solve (story of my high school career right there, perhaps?). It never hurts to try, and it never hurts to fix weaknesses. Don’t let people exploit your weaknesses, and never feel that the weakness is too much for you to fix.

All the best.

I say there are plenty of excuses, but we can all admit that reading is important. Reading contributes significantly (not as much as talking, perhaps?) to our well of information. Reading also introduces new ideas, fresh concepts, and greases the wheels of our minds. Humans need this, especially in today’s day and age. And obviously, writers need this more than an ordinary human — to study other writing, to study styles, material, ideas, expressions, and themes. But, the problem with reading is its time-consumption — reading does take a long time for most, writer or human. Hell, reading takes a long time for me — so how do I manage to cut down some of the time?

I remember a year or so ago, I downloaded an eBook by Scott H. Young titled “Learn More, Study Less!” After downloading a sample chapter, I realized this wasn’t an empty promise — it was the real deal. And speed reading was just one of the many topics covered. I don’t want it to seem like I’m giving away premium information for free, and I’ve found a link to speed reading incorporating using a pointer finger on the Internet anyway — so I figured it’d be fair to introduce the idea.

Reading with a Pointer

Your eyes don’t stay fixed in one spot when reading. Eye tracking movements have shown that your eyes actually quiver and move around considerably. And every movement away from your position in text requires a few milliseconds to readjust. Can you imagine how much faster you would be able to read if you could keep you eyes from wavering off and then having to bring them back all over again?

Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/advice-articles/speed-reading-using-a-pointer-537793.html

This seems like a very minor tweak, but I’ve found that reading with a pointer helped me speed up only a bit — however, I would also like to mention that it worked wonders for my comprehension. Focusing on the pointer helps me turn off all the other noise in my head and just focus on the text in front of me.

It’ll feel funny at first — when I started reading with a pointer, I had to adjust the way I held the book (I have small hands, so it was actually more difficult than it sounds, haha). I also felt kind of self-conscious about my movements — especially when the class had time assigned to read, and everyone else was just sitting normally, haha.

This isn’t the only method of improving speed reading, but for me it is probably one of the most simple changes with the most significant effect. Try it out, and see if it works for you!

Let me be more specific: writing always should achieve a goal — whether the goal be self-exploration, practise, exposing issues, gaining readership, or sharing of knowledge. Fact is, there should always be an objective behind the writing — otherwise, what is the point of writing?

One might argue that much poetry has no objective value, but I beg to differ — many authors use poetry as a tool to express emotion, to share their feelings with the human collective.

Fiction? Fantasy? Science fiction? Used to identify alternate realities — what could have been, and what could be waiting.

It is self-evident that all writing must have an objective. In fact, as I have discovered just recently, it is impossible for writing to not have an objective — so what is the objective of this piece? The objective was to establish the importance of the objective, but also to set a goal for this new blog called Human Writer. Human Writer blends two aspects of life — humanity and expression, and explores significant issues, techniques, lessons, resources, and aspects of both. I notice that I might’ve used some flowery language, but let me make myself blunt: I will not bend into any pretensity. I am a normal human being — not an elite, intelligent, wealthy scholar, but just another human being. I eat. I drink. I shit. I will make mistakes, but it is with my hope that we can both learn from them. I write for you, but I also write for myself.