some gamelan music for you

if you're ever in the mood for some Malay

This is something a little bit more left-field than the usual left-field stuff I usually do.

It's a website called SudahlaBro.com (SLB for short), a Malay language site that MAM Media hopes to build into a lifestyle, current affairs portal with really good content. Like Playboy, but without the girls.

It's early days yet, and so far we've only come up with a column called 'Suara Bro' (I know), in which I write about things, life, stuff in general.

Suara Bro, along with everything else on SLB is published every Friday morning, so keep an eye out folks.

You can read the previous ones here.

make your own way

if you want to do something new, stay away from the shiny lights.

Glamour is stale, a dead stump layered with extreme amounts of perfume and paint to make it appealing, but ultimately meaningless and uninteresting.

Status does not disrupt to make things better. It’d rather things get worse, so its value grows higher.

And that little trickled-down wealth that you get? That comes with complacency, docility, and dread

there is a solution to everything except death

I highly recommend Scott Belsky's Making Ideas Happen to everyone who's ever had a thought pop up in their head but didn't know how to translate that idea into reality.

there will be people who say the book only repeats things that are already common sense, things like planning on paper, thinking up action steps,etc; ignore them. I've done a little bit of organising and I found the book illuminating. It's filled with practical advice and provides a logical, but more importantly 'doable', structure for tackling your next big idea

personally I love an execution more than the original ideas themselves
there's conflict in making something happen, maybe even tears. You dream up great things, but you end up in interesting, and real, places when you work on your ideas

come to think of it, I think projects are abandoned, or set aside; they never fail. If you can find a problem, you can find a solution, unless you're dead

as long as you continue to do stuff, and I can't emphasise the importance of 'doing' enough, more and more possibilities and solutions will appear in front of you

who knows? You might solve that impossible one yet

Frustration does not refresh stale routines

If you wake up everyday and find your mind traversing the same paths repeatedly, and you play the same chords on the piano repeatedly, and you write the same scenes repeatedly, you probably should stop.

It's time to break that routine.

This link gives some good suggestion for steps you can take to start anew. Among them:

- Journaling: you need to record ideas and get them out of your head – make room for new ideas
- Puzzles: problem solving, you can train yourself to be better
- Creativity Exercises: you need a purpose to be creative
- Purposeful Exploration: find creative inspiration in traditional media – take a purposeful look at these things – pay attention while watching tv, reading newspaper and find ways that others have expressed their creativity. Often we use these mediums to escape but we should look at them in a different way.
- Human Interaction: we are communal creatures – creativity is born from experience including other peoples. All people solve problems – surround yourself with people different from you. We need new perspectives.

Of all the suggestions listed, it's the last one I find most interesting.

Thanks to the RMIT library, I've had a lot of fun reading books that detail experiments on human interactions. These experiments attempt to figure out what brings individuals to react in certain ways through a variety of means: variation of stimuli, subconcious suggestions, and sometime just plain exposure. They try to be as rigorous as conditions allow them to be, after which the data is collected and analysed to come up with explanations for behaviours and actions.

If you're not already alarmed by the thought of manipulation, let me just say these findings trickle down to the world of advertising, management, and marketing. It is in these fields, that these theories gain their practical forms.

Of course, we've veered off-topic slightly there, but there are thoughts there useful for breaking routines.


Change one thing, unleash a new wave of creativity

In trying to understand human behaviour, the researchers changed every possible variable to see how their subjects responded.

In trying to break away from a routine, we could do the same to see what unlocks the door to a new way of thinking. Start with the small things, it's always the details that matter. Have tea instead of coffee. Black instead of with sugar. Sleep on your back instead of on your side.
Work your way up if it doesn't work: take a different route to work, try a new way of talking to people, pick up a new sport.

Something must eventually work. It might already be working, only that you don't realise it. Not all change drops on you like a ton of bricks. Some simmer from the sides, gradually changing the nature of your thoughts.

Through patience, old routines are broken.