I’m cutting this one close. I’ve just come back from the Cape Town 27 Dinner. This is a morph from the geek dinner concept, but check out the link and if you’re in the Cape Town or Johannesburg area, log your name in the wiki and join us. It’s an awesome event, where you get to meet and chat with some great people around dinner.
It’s nearly midnight for me, so I wanted to get the quote of the night out before it’s too late, otherwise it’ll be a quote of tomorrow morning.
So, here it is. It’s a bit overused quote, but oh so true and very important.

Imagination is more important than knowledge…
- Albert Einstein

Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
- George Bernard Shaw

In light of yesterday’s quote of the night, I thought I’d share a secret interest of mine.

Throughout my childhood and high school days, I was never much into books and reading. In fact, I don’t think I read any of my setwork books completely, from cover to cover.
However, since the first Harry Potter movie came out and my niece started reading the books and was carrying on about it and the movie and they missed out so many details, etc, I decided to read the book she had and see what all the fuss was about.

It was the first book I couldn’t put down, and so from there I read the other books my niece had up till book 3, and then she got book 4 and I read that one also, and then there were no more, so I read them all over again, and then I couldn’t wait any longer for the rest to be published, so I went a searching.

I went a searching on Kazaa, and found a fanfiction book and was naiive enough to think it was the next one in the series, but justifiably so, it was brilliant. And so I came to find out about the huge world of fanfiction that surrounds the Harry Potter series. I dove right in.

I stop staving them to my PC after about 40 books from 25 authors, so I must have probably read about 80+ full length fanfiction novels and about 50 smaller, incomplete books to date and I’m still reading them, not at the fervency and I once used to, but once in a while I’ll browse around and read something from the fanfiction community.

This not only got me enjoying reading other “more senior” novels (usually suggestions from my sister), but also got me interested in writing. As yet, I haven’t written any books or anything, but it’s something I’m interested in. At the moment the only writing I do is blogging, but, hey, it’s a start.

Some of my friends and family know I’ve read Harry Potter and they know I really like it, but I don’t think they realize how deep my interest went as a result of community of fanfictions. It’s a bit embarrassing, as I’m 24 and these are seen as kids books, even though the fanfictions generally aren’t. They include themes and go to places the original books can’t due to them being targeted to kids.

Anyways, so that’s my secret. Comments welcome.

Wow, this is a great one.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
- Ray Bradbury

I’ve always loved quotes, and over about the past 2 years have been collecting those quotes that I’ve come across that just “clicked” with me. You know, those quotes you read, and you don’t need to have had personal experience with it to just know it’s true.

I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to read a quote every night and just think, or meditate, about it before going to sleep at night. Try to internalize it.
The reason I don’t do it in the morning to get me started on my day, is that as soon as I start my day, I’m distracted immediately by my work, and whatever I’ve read is completely out my mind. I’m a guy, I can’t think of more than one thing at a time

So, what I want to do is commit myself to posting a “quote of the night” every evening (South African time), so that, a) in case anyone is interested they can subscribe to the quote of the night I myself will be pondering on and b) so that I don’t forget for myself to keep up with it.

So… without further ado, the first quote of the night is.

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
- Albert Einstein

Hmm…

I’ve just been listening to an audio recording of The Happiness Show, episode number 123, where George Ortega and Claudia Bassin chat with guest Ed Smith about happiness, success and choosing the right job.
Ed suggested a technique for choosing the right job, that sounded really neat to me, so I thought I’d give it try. Here’s how it goes.

1. Throughout 10 days look for things around you interest you.
2. Any potential job or career attracts your attention, write it down on a piece of scrap paper and put it away in an envelope you keep with you.
3. Each day set aside the pieces of scrap papers you’ve collected, and at the end of the 10 days, you should have 10 piles of paper scraps of things that you piqued your interest at some point.
4. Chuck all the piles together and jumble them up.
5. One by one open each scrap of paper, and see if those things still interest you and set them aside. You might find some ridiculous job choices, as you are writing these job choices down on impulse throughout the 10 day period, but if something still strikes a chord with you 10 days later, that must mean something.
6. From those scraps that still strike a chord with you, try to find similarities and overlaps. There’s the career for you.

Ok, so in my previous post I mentioned I’m pursueing personal development. I also mentioned I’ve been reading a couple of personal development blogs, I also mention that I bought a whole bunch of books recently.
Well, here’s my my personal development resource list. If you can recommend anything else, please do.

Blogs
- Steve Pavlina.com
- Life Coaches Blog
- LifeDev
- Ririan Project

Blogs (Still to get and read)
- Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Harper Business Essentials) - Jim Collins
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t - Jim Collins
- Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great - Jim Collins
- Endless Referrals, Third Edition - Bob Burg
- Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill
- Richest Man in Babylon - George S. Clason
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey

I know those aren’t a lot of resources about personal development, but I don’t want to just read and read and read, and not actually try to integrate the concepts into my daily life.
If there is anyone actually reading this, what do you think? Is there anything better I you think I should be looking at?

Update: I actually forgot the other book I wanted to buy, was Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. I added it to my wishlist on Amazon, till when I finally finish reading the books I already ordered.

I don’t believe much in New Year’s Resolutions, I believe now is as good a time as any to change for the better.
However, there is one resolution I made around the end of last year into the new year, so I suppose you could call it a New Year’s resolution, and that is to pursue personal development.

I recognize I have a lot of thing’s I need to work on in all areas of my life and the more I learn about myself, the more I study and learn from other successful people and role models, the more I realize how much work I need to do in my life.

I’ve subscribed to a bunch of personal development related blogs, listened to a bunch of audio programs and through our VeloCITI Business Acceleration Program I went through a pretty extensive personal assessment, by Roland Cox from Aspiral.

Over the past couple months people have been recommending lot of books for me to read, mostly relating to my business life, but I’ve been so preoccupied with other stuff that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading them. So today was the day I went to Amazon and got all the highly recommended books I want read.
So, yay! I should be getting all books in about 2 weeks.

Woot! I just got back from a 4 day trip canoeing on Orange River. I’m sore and tired, but I had a great time and definitely look forward to doing it again sometime in the future. I uploaded some pictures I took from my cellphone to flickr, so you can have a look at a few of the photos so far, but there’s lots more to come.
Still to come are pictures taken from the River Guides (those will be some good shots, as they’ve got pictures of us in the rapids) and others in our group.

Every year at this time of the year, we have an international food evening at our parish church, and every year my mother makes and serves the food at the Portuguese table, while I help by bring the food to the church hall and setting up the table. Yes, I am Portuguese. My mother and father were both born in Madeira and came to South Africa where my 2 brothers, 2 sisters and myself were born and raised.

Anyways, and every year they have traditional Madeira folk dancing as part of the evening. Now that I got my new phone I decided to record it. Although the people dancing aren’t “proper” Madeira folk dancers, it’s something special to me, as it represents something from where my parents came from and in essence where I come from.

Here are 2 pics I took. One just as the evening was getting started, one later one at night.

And then here’s one of the video’s I took. Excuse the quality, I only realized afterwards that there was a higher resolution option which I could set my video recording to on my phone.