Creative Idea Powerhouse

In my past, I did a lot of interviews, and 80% of the time, I have a chance to talk to the fresh minded graduates that just stepped out from their well structured, protected schooling year. I often like to know how well they are prepared to step into this choatic real world, and how they try to connect their schooling lives with the real world, and there’s where I always ask how many subjects they plan to do for their post-schooling years to come? Often I get people looking at me waiting for answers and it is normal especially for our Malaysian graduates.

The education system has well designed and structured, and it gives a simple idea to the student, study hard, scores Grade A or Distinction for all your subjects, and there is a great career out there waiting for you. The system also design carefully to valuate your effort and performance base on scoring. It does give a good way to benchmark the students performance, but it also make the student loss their direction when they step into the real world where benchmarking is not available in some organisation, or it is losely design and link with performance. Many time, you perform hardest as you can as you did so well in schooling time but the result is shocking unfair to you. You start to lose confident, and your big ambitions seems fading away.

Here is a simple guide to those who are school leaver that starting to embark their journey for the next 30 to 40 years. Make it right from the start and you can have a better balance life, or you going to have difficulties after you screw up three or four careers and still have no clue on whats went wrong mode.

You have only 6 primary subjects, and one elective subject to study in your years to come.

1. Career – What you want to achieve in your career live
2. Finance – What is your number for retire (familar with the ads? but it is real figure you need to find out)
3. Friend – How you treasure friends and friendship building strategy
4. Family – What is the ultimate goals for your family in your mind
5. Health – What is your ideal health standard? Smoking? Drinking? Consider these while defining it.
6. Community – What and how you want your community to remember you?
Elective – Spiritual – It is always good and important to have one in you, but it is elective as always.

So 7 subjects, you make your own rules and result benchmarking, but you need to make sure when you graduates one day, you have a good grade for it, be it Passed all, HD for all subjects, or you continue not graduating due to some subjects failed the minimum benchmarking point. You cant graduates with bad health while you want to have a loving, caring, family that will live with you long enough, or you spend most of time outside achiving high performance for your career but neglect your family, or even many businessmen does is hooking up with some relationships and neglect the family. You need to balance your scoring to be able to graduates with good grade (well, mostly people can’t complete their Post Graduates in these subjects due to many reason).

Interesting thinking? What is your passing grades for each of these subjects? And where are you now? Are you having balance scoring or some subjects need your additional attention? Use this opportunity before Year End to draft it and include into your Y2009 resolution! Cheers and good luck to all of you~!