Two years ago, when I quit the competitive life to embrace the creative life, I went full throttle on several creative projects.

I wrote prolifically to populate my website, dusted a three-year-old manuscript, started working on it, joined multiple courses, started writing on Medium, commenced a Substack newsletter, and began a publication. I am not working, I told myself. I have no excuse to slack. My output should be double or triple as before.

On the contrary, my productivity dropped, and I reached a near burnout stage.

I tend to overcommit to the extent that I become obsessed with productivity…

Did you know that there was no consistent way or system to grade diamonds until the early forties?

Diamond merchants used various, usually broad- terms to talk about the quality of a diamond. Words like “river” or “water” were used to describe colorlessness. The term “Cape” was used to describe pale yellow diamonds from South Africa (following the 1867 discovery of diamonds in the Cape Colony). Words like “without flaws” or “imperfect” were used to describe clarity. And subjective terms such as “Well-made” or “made-poorly” were used to describe the cut of a diamond.

As a result, jewelers found it…

PRODUCTIVITY

Violinist Hilary Hahn started a 100 Days of Practice project. She posted a video of her practicing violin on Instagram for 100 days with #100daysofpractice and invited others to join her. That started a movement.

Austin Kleon (the writer of How To Steal Like an Artist) came up with a grid to log his progress for 100 days. He calls it PRACTICE to SUCK LESS grid.

To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less. — Austin Kleon.

I thought it was a brilliant idea. You can use…

PRODUCTIVITY

“Humans are the new low-attention span goldfishes, thanks to smartphones.” wrote Tim Denning in one of his articles.

The advertisement industry figured it out long ago. That is why the TV ads are less than eleven seconds.

Now the publishing industry is finding that thicker books don’t sell. A four hundred-page novel is considered as long as War and Peace. I, too, put books back on the shelf if they are too thick, thinking I don’t have time to finish it.

Today we are taking in much more information than when there were no computers or smartphones.

Emails, blog posts…

TRAVEL. ENGLAND. SCOTLAND

I am starting a new series of articles about my trip to England, Scotland, and France in May 2019.

After a twelve-hour flight from Singapore, I got my first glimpse of London from the plane’s oval window. I liked what I saw. The beautiful coastline, rectangular pastures, ships entering the open mouth of a river, rows of houses, lines of trees, snaking roads almost clogged with traffic.

Yay! I was in London.

Our plane was on time, but it had to wait for fifteen minutes in the sky queue for its turn to land at Heathrow.

Once inside the terminal…

PATAGONIA: CHILE AND ARGENTINA

This article is part six of the series of articles I wrote about my travel to Chile, Argentina and Peru with my husband in November 2018.

Day three of our visit to Patagonia was dedicated to visiting ice fields and glaciers. We had booked a full-day tour which took us to ice fields and glaciers both in Chile and Argentina.

We were picked up from Hotel Costaustralis in Puerto Natales by bus at six in the morning. …

When I started blogging two years ago, I was terrified of asking people to subscribe to my blog. I thought no one would want to read it, especially when many well-written blogs were available to choose from.

A year and a half later, when I started the newsletter A Whimsical Writer, with Substack, the same phobia gripped me. So many experienced writers have newsletters in Substack; why would anyone want to subscribe to mine?

I couldn’t have been wrong.

People subscribe to your newsletter because they like you, your story, your unique style of writing and want to stay in…

Aristippus, an ancient Greek philosopher of 4th century BC, was the first person who put forth the idea of living a life of happiness. The pursuit of pleasure. He advocated that the goal in life should be to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, maximize your gain.

Aristippus never understood the notion that you could be in pain and yet be happy.

How can there be happiness in pain and misery? A woman who has just given birth. A struggling writer working on a minimum wage during the day to feed his family and…