Three Quotes

Three quotes that have made my 2013 extra-productive thus far:

1. When life gets tougher, it means that you have just leveled up. - Anonymous

2. Living healthy is 20% exercise, 80% what you put on your plate. - Anonymous

3. Small minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas. - Eleanor Roosevelt
(I prefer to reverse the order of this quote to put it to greater effect)

Bonus quote:

4. Be educated rather than entertained. - Anonymous

When life gets tougher, it means that you have just leveled up.
Remember when computer games just used to be like that? Each boss got tougher, but it also meant that you were better equipped to defeat him. Try beating the final boss with the number of experience points you had when you first started out in the game. You're going to have a hard time.

I came across this flowchart on the internet that gave me quite a chuckle.

I'm not going to turn this into a theology/philo lecture, but truth is, I think Christians and other God-fearing men and women of their own religions have got it worked out. If you leave room for pessimism to fester, it will send you spiraling into an unrecoverable spin. On the other hand, being proactive/positive allows you to take anything that's thrown at you and turn it into a celebration of life's multitude of experiences. So that's why I'd like to continue leveling up whenever I can. And praise the Lord while I'm at it.

Living healthy is 20% exercise, 80% what you put on your plate.
Back last year in October, I sustained a real shitty injury while playing squash. I went in to retrive a ball   only to twist my ankle so badly I swear I heard a crunching sound while I fell. That took me almost 3-4 months to recover. Only to get back in the courts to sprain the OTHER ankle. All that added up to almost 5-6 months in recovery and lack of exercise. My conclusion was that all the weight that I had put on after my squash competition season last year had culminated in those injuries. My ankles have never been in a good shape after all the years of sports I've played, including lots of long distance running. So being heavy and putting all that extra stress on my ankles made me more unstable and susceptible to injuries. It was an accident waiting to happen, granted the dynamic moment required of squash.

So I've been eating healthy the last month or so, apart from slowly getting myself back into the sport. And it's worked wonders so far. 5kgs lost and I'm feeling lighter. Cycling's getting easier and I'm feeling happier every time I finish a meal without feeling thirsty or bloated. The secret? Eating clean and reducing the portions. And the motivation? Aim to have a healthy and injury-free lifestyle. Looking good comes as a side effect, but one that you and I would gladly welcome.

Sometime back, I was talking to a CS, and he had this advice for me. To become a rarity amongst flight crew in their 50's, you must achieve the following:

1. Have a healthy crop of hair.
2. Have a flat belly.

Yup, just those two. You'd be surprised to find the large number of flight crew (that includes cabin crew) who are struggling to manage that in their 30's, let alone in their 40's or 50's.

Hence this is my challenge to all reading this: start with something as simple as healthy eating and healthy living. Take your supplementary vitamins if you have to, but eat clean and avoid greasy stuff. Eat clean, while getting to know your body in what are the food types it needs. Carbohydrates (and fibre), proteins, and fruits (that come with high doses of vitamins)

My general rule of thumb is any meal that leaves me looking for water after consumption is not considered clean. Take a bowl of fishball noodles for example. If it's the 'dry' fishball noodles, you'd likely be drinking water after that meal. But have it with soup instead, and you'd be able to taste the difference. I'm not one to shy away from savoury treats, but it's a good reason why it's called a treat.

Small minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas.
I once got unjustly sent out of class by my General Paper (GP) teacher. Her exact words to me were "get out of my class." I took it literally and left the computer room that we were in and went back to my home room to complete my other assignments. I got sent to the principal's office because of that and I argued my case till kingdom came and went. I was then sent back to class without a punishment, and my GP teacher and I stopped talking for a couple of months after that.

GP is a subject all JC students take (or rather, used to take) that's equivalent to a subject test/discussion on general knowledge. Aside from that memory of my GP teacher, I have to say that the rest of my recollections of GP classes are practically non-existent. Possibly because I was a cocky prick back then and thought that my bullshitting abilities were good enough to score me an A. I got a B.

9 years after graduating from JC, I have started reading the discussions and commentary columns in the newspapers again. I have taken to reading Times magazines again to renew my knowledge of the issues going on in the world. All because this quote hit me really hard.

Falling into the trap of gossip can be a really easy one. It's a bad habit that consumes conversations and makes them non-productive. It's brainless; entertaining nonetheless, but then this is where the last quote I've mentioned dispenses its wisdom: Be educated rather than entertained"

Of all the lifehacks that I've come across, this has to be one of the most productive. Instead of watching that re-run or "best-of" segment of How I Met Your Mother or Friends, why not watch an episode of Air Crash Investigation and take important notes for future research on aircraft systems and human factors (or pilot error)? Or sign up for a course with Coursera, to pick up from where you left off on that university lecture 2 years ago.

Productivity isn't hard to attain, but all a matter of habit. I wouldn't say that it's entirely one that makes up a pilot's mindset (who says pilots can't be lazy on their off-days?), but certainly is a habit that keeps a pilot on his toes, especially when re-education and being up to speed on events is a recurring job in this line.

Stay healthy, stay smart.

Taking Ownership

I received a call at 6:53am yesterday morning, from my NS unit informing me of some rather unfortunate news.

For the uninitiated, National Service (NS) is a obligation for all Singaporean males. We serve 2 years of conscripted military service and after which we are bound with reservist duties as "NS-men" till the age of 45-50. I may be wrong so if any readers know the exact age at which we are released from the armed forces (SAF), please correct me. As for me, I've given up trying to keep track. I just want to serve my tour and be done with it.

You might as well have said that I had just awoken from a 20 year coma, because after barely 3 hours of sleep from the previous night, one of the young lieutenants (or 2nd lefs, as we Singaporeans call them, following the British pronunciation of the word as 'left-ten-nant') had decided to brutally interrupt my beauty sleep. Shifting my eyeshades up (don't judge me, I have a reason why I believe in them) towards my forehead, I answered that phone call from camp with all the fortitude I could summon to hide the fact that I was still as groggy as a person under the Imperius charm.

Sparing you the details of the entire situation that had broken out in camp, what ultimately transpired was a story of lies, deceit, and dishonesty. Sounds like the plot of a Taiwanese drama serial but I kid you not when I say that this happens just about every now and then in a SAF camp. So the moral of this whole story: If you want drama, sign on with the SAF and forget your Taiwanese dramas on Channel U. 'Live' storytelling trumps TV anytime. NOT.

As with all plots, it started with a single unfortunate incident. With the addition of another incident and topping them off with a good measure of lies and a few unpleasant exchange of words, I have now got a soldier who is about to be court-marshalled. After counseling him, it has all come down to the fact that all this could have been avoided had he taken up responsibility of the offence he had committed, and not shoveled his own grave by piling layers of lies upon one another.

This incident brings be back to a conversation I had with a Leading Steward (LS) about more than a year ago. I had asked him if there was one thing that if he could change about the company's culture, what would it have been. His answer was simple. Ownership.

SQ's cabin crew family counts itself in the figure of roughly 7000 people, with four ranks split among them. From bottom to top, they are the

• Flight Stewards/Stewardesses (FS/FSS) who wear the blue tie/kebaya
• Leading Stewards/Stewardesses (LS/LSS); green tie/kebaya
• Chief Stewards/Stewardesses (CS); red tie/kebaya, and finally the
• In-Flight Supervisors (IFS) who the wear purple tie/kebaya.

(picture guide taken from http://www.singaporeair.com/jsp/cms/en_UK/flying_with_us/singaporegirl.jsp)

If we were to talk about an airline like Emirates (EK) or Qantas (QF), it would be a given that such equivalent ranks exist within their respective cabin crew departments as well. But perhaps the one thing that sets SQ's, or rather, most cabin crew operating as part of an asian airline such as Korean Air (KE) and Malaysia Airlines (MH or MAS), is the hierarchy at play amongst ranks. Asians do tend to pay a lot more attention to seniority and rank as compared to most western cultures.

So naturally, you'd expect the FS and FSS-es up in the air, to be doing most of the work on the ground. The bosses from each flight - the Chiefs and IFS-es are the equivalent of senior management who come down hard on the people caught in the middle (or junior level management)- the LS and LSS-es.

Now what has all this got to do with aviation, you may wonder. Stick with me, I promise I'm getting to the point soon. (Yeah, sorry if I can get a little long winded like that)

I think my friend, the LS, had a very good point to make when he said that the one thing he would have liked to see changed is the attitude of people taking ownership of their faults and responsibilities. I have to concur because I see far too many people who adopt a "fight or flight" mentality when it comes to handling issues, be it at work or at home. What's so wrong with being wrong? What right about being right all the time?

My soldier was a typical example. He tried to "tai-chi" his way out of the situation, implicating his very own platoon-mates in the process. He was being dishonest while trying to make himself look faultless. I'm not sure if he realised it at that point of time, but his guilt as apparent as a kid trying to convince everyone that the cookie crumbs on his shirt did not come from him stealing from the cookie jar.

The same thing applies in the cockpit - or in flight school, for that matter. One of my most invaluable lessons while in the Singapore Youth Flying Club (SYFC) came from a certain instructor who forced me to identify my errors and provide a rectifiable solution to them. That's how we learn, and learn fast. (Read The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle for more on this)

In a similar way, our mistakes should be seen as something we take ownership of. It's part of a pilot's mindset. In taking ownership of our mistakes, we own them and we convert them into our learning points that will stick with us for the rest of our careers. So what if our faults have consequences? That doesn't mean that we should fight against them or take flight from them. Fighting consequences by lying to cover up mistakes lead to even bigger lies, or consequences even. Look at history for a good example of how many crashes were attributed to pilot error, or under the sub-heading of not reporting events that went amiss during the flight.

In my humble opinion, the leadership responsibilities that Leading Stewards and Stewardesses play up in the air are very similar to the ones that us Cadets or newly minted SOs and FOs hold. Just as the LS/LSS-es are in charge of their FS/FSS-es, galleys, and meal services of their respective aisles, we cadets are in charge of the mistakes and learning points that we make in our entire learning process. In the same way that LS/LSS-es have to be accountable to their bosses, we cadets have not our bosses, but our careers to be accountable to. There is no point in keeping mum about a mistake and allowing bad practices to form habits.

So if you're hoping to get through the interviews, I hope this post sticks the mindset of mistake ownership firmly in place. Nothing disgusts an interviewer more than coming to face with a cadet that cannot place himself in a position to learn or be humble enough to admit that he has made a mistake.

Now anyway, it's time for me to go back to my comfortable JCL-turquoise eyeshades, and wish me luck so that I don't get awoken by soldiers trying to score offs and night-outs with me for the next one hour.