Month: January 2018

When Ms. Emmanuel started talking, it wasn’t the usual boring and inspirational talks on how one should ignore the past or why being imprisoned made her poetry bette. Instead, we were greeted by how she appreciates the past and that she does not wish to change any of it as she believes that every one of her hardships is what led her to find happiness. I think this was one of the key take-away points as it really showed me that happiness can be achieved even with hardships and that sometimes to find true happiness, it cannot be done without facing problems.

Moreover, she also talked about Singapore’s ‘CMI’ system and how she didn’t really agree with it. A reason why I remember this particular perspective of her’s is because I myself many of times have just sat and pondered about how ‘labels’ are put on people and most of the times these labels don’t really seem to match the personality of the person. And seriously, I couldn’t agree more as these labels cause more distances and increase problems than decrease.

Today, we met a social justice photographer who uses her camera as a tool to spread awareness about women rights. One of her major projects being to put an end to child marriage. I think one of the things that really stuck out today other than her focus on having human rights was how she incorporated her passion for photography into her daily job as a researcher. I think this really showed her positive attitude and made me look up to her and believe that yes she can make a change and a difference because she puts in the effort.

Furthermore, she also took another perspective upon the reasons for child marriage, which was poverty, lack of education and food insecurities contrary to many people beliefs that child marriage is a ‘religious issue.’ Moreover, her focus on improving the lives of the whole community instead of just an individuals was also one of her features that stood out to me as it really inspired me to analyse a problems root cause rather than just trying to improve the ‘upfront’ problem.

Also, I think one of her aims to gain women rights to have the girls/women themselves initiate the learning rather than us ‘spoon feeding’ everything. This particularly stood out because I did not expect her to go to measures like literally smuggling cameras in to make sure that the girls learn that there are people out there to support them and that they have the rights to do what they want as long as they take the first step.

Recently, Chetan Bhagat, an ‘authorpreneur’ (which is what he liked to call himself because it sounded ‘cool’) had come to talk to us about his success and his strategies for that success. I had walked into that talk feeling tired after a long school day, but 10 minutes into that presentation I was laughing like a Hyena. Chetan’s humour had made my ears stick to his words for the whole presentation only to be lead to my jaw being dropped when I realized that this was one of his strategies for engaging the audience. Chetan related his methods of engaging the audience to his strategy for writing books and in general living life to its fullest. This strategy being changing the game. When Chetan started talking about changing the game, it really resonated with me as ‘adaption’ was something I have used quite a lot to overcome hurdles in life. Chetan also talked about success, which got me thinking, have I reached success? Have my friends reached success? Have all the people around me reached their goals, gained respect, gotten satisfaction? All these thoughts had been swirling around my brain throughout the second part of the talk until Chetan said, ‘be so busy improving yourself that you have no time left to criticise others.’

Main Ideas Learnt From Today’s Talk by Sports Journalist Steve Dawson :-

How to receive good answers from an interview!

1. Ask open-ended questions: try and make the interviewee think about the answer
2. Set the answer free: don’t set any unnecessary parameters
3. Don’t Interrupt: Let the interviewee speak as they may be getting to a good point and you may miss it out by contradicting their statement.
4. Be a single Shooter: Don’t ask two part questions as in most cases they will only answer the second Question
5. Listen to the answer: Listen carefully and think of any followup questions or important details you may come across.