Fighters and Seekers

I think there are 2 types of people in the world. The first type thinks that life is about survival. The second type thinks that survival is a given, and therefore life is about finding and being oneself.

I call the first type the Fighter. These people fight to win, fight to be the first, fight to be the biggest and strongest. They take pride for being the richest, the most generous, the least sick, the best looking. They believe that the world is a place full of traps and competitors, and the only way to enjoy life and be comfortable is to control, to organize, and be "ahead of the game".

I call the second type the Seeker. These people believes that there are ways of life, places and environments that offers the most comfort for each unique individual. Therefore they are generally willing to "drop everything and move on" - once they are convinced that their current work, their existing place, or their existing society are no longer for them. They tend to ask "why am I here and what's the point?".

Let me clarify that neither type has the monopoly of material wealth. There are enough examples of wealthy individuals that belong to either types. The two types also do not signify any correlation with intelligence, talent, energy or work ethics. A Fighter can work as fast, as hard and as smart as a Seeker. A Seeker can be as competitive as the Fighter. The fundamental difference is the source of their motivation and inspiration.

Lets compare two famous individuals to illustrate my point. I will pick Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, an excellent pair coming from the same field of work.

Bill created Microsoft from scratch in the 1970s until it became a global empire today. There is no doubt that this company reflects his personality, at least during his time of reign. After the first decade and two when it monopolized the Personal Computer market, it began to receive noticable attacks by the younger companies. Microsoft reaction to the arrival of new bloods is in a form of fierce defense and counter attacks, to protect their status as the biggest, the strongest software company. At its core, it believes in the survival of the fittest. Innovation is secondary, replaced by aggressive financial fights, acquisition, legal fights against competitors. Bill Gates is a good example of a Fighter.

Steve Jobs is famous for his cunning ability to create products that breaks new ground. He was a great innovator who challenges the "can't be done" mentality. No doubt that he is a man with big competitive drive, but he spent his energy seeking for something new instead of defending. He jumped from being a maker of PCs to music player to mobile phone to tablet computing with ease, while others seemed to be stuck on a single product. He may have hired a group of fighters to help him organize and control as things grew, but growth and dominance alone did not seem to be his main motivation. Because of that, Apple has continue to bring innovation instead of acquisition.

Has Bill Gates changed from being a Fighter to a Seeker, now that he has left Microsoft and created the largest philanthropy organization in the world? I don't think so. But perhaps it is better that he uses his Fighter mindset for something more philanthropic than profit driven.

Will Steve Jobs turn into a Fighter and begin to play defensive games against his competitors? I am betting that he won't, or at least he won't be good at it. A true Seeker would continue the journey to express one self instead of trying to defend a legacy.

We can find examples in different walk of lives. Musicians like John Lennon and Michael Jackson are good examples of the Seekers. Michael Jordan and Pete Sampras come across as Fighters while Andre Agassi would be a Seeker. Ronald Reagan maybe a Seeker while his VP, George H.W. Bush was clearly a Fighter.

Despite my bias in favor for the Seekers, I would admit that the coexistence of these two characters is there for a reason. The Seekers likely bring more creativity, introspection and innovation to the world, while the Fighters would create systems and processes to organize and control. I think the world with too much fighters influence will become a hostile, cold and abusive place. A world with too much seekers influence will be chaotic and unpredictably volatile.

Having said that, I think our world at present is out of balance - and as a result of that, we are seeing many escalating abuses of power, irresponsible exploitation of resources while at the same time diminishing creativity. The world desperately need new influential seekers, to restore the balance and make the world a more peaceful, introspective and creative place to live.

The Joo

I was in a taxi just outside of Chennai, Southern India, when my driver suddenly pointed to a large compound of ruins, broken walls, unfinished statues and rubbles. He said - "Joo will be there"......

Confused - I looked at the site and after a few seconds I said "um...Jew?!" I began to think this driver is pulling some sort of a nasty joke.

"Yes, Joo - monkeys, tigers and all that!".....

Another seconds of pause and I said "aaah! Zoo! ok, great!"

Nothing to Fear

Human is probably the only animal species in the world that accumulates more and more fear as they grow older. A six years old boy will be brave enough to say whatever he thinks without fear that someone will take his opinion personally - for example to tell his aunt that he does not like her cooking. Once he grow to be a college student, he may not have that bravery anymore - and settled with a diplomatic answer like "it's nice, aunt....but I am already very full". This university student may still fearlessly criticize the status quo without much regards to the threats of being fired or being alienated by the establishment. Once he grow to be a 30 years old man with a family, he may behave in a much more reserved way.

Then the story continues to all walks of lives. A subordinate may fear to correct his boss - for fear of a career damage. A boss of a company may decide to hide the truth about the financial problem ahead of them, because he fears the impact to the stock value and therefore his bonus and job. Many doctors fears loss of income if they give the true answers to some patients. The politicians on the left fears the rise of the right and vice versa, so they blame every single problem on the other side.

The fears I described above is not the same as the primal fear - the type of fear that we share with other animals. Primal fear protects us from things that endanger our own lives - like when deers run away at the sight of an approaching cheetah. That is a survival mechanism that is shared by every animal, including us. But in our human species, we have developed a second type of fear, which I can only define as delusional fear.

It is delusional because it arise without anything that threatens one's survival. Because of this fear, we complicate our lives by telling lies, building boundaries and creating bureaucracies. I think dillusional fear is not only counter-productive, it is also very destructive. Some people may do harm to others just because of delusional fears. Some companies may abandon their ethical standards just because of these fears. Some politicians may decide to say what they don't mean for the same reason.

At the end of all this, the only thing that will happen is change: a change to our lifestyle, a change to a relationship, a change to our habit, a change to our jobs, a change of the way we see things. This change happens everyday - in small gradual quantum, or in a one-time big bang. Some people like to believe that they are untouchable - because of their position, their money and their network. The stronger one believes in this sense of control, the bigger his/her delusional fear would be. But those are all illusions. We are all just humans, and when the change needs to happen, it will happen anyway.

Therefore I believe that the best way to live is to be the change, and to know that there is nothing to fear.

Time to Reverse

"May I help you with another drink sir" - a polite young waiter in a Delhi hotel asked me in January 2011. That started a little conversation around the economy of India, his farmer parents, his analysis for the future. He said "Not so long ago, 85% of our populations lived in the villages. now it is only 60%. We are not yet a developed country, sir, but we are getting there".

What an intelligent, well informed mind of a young waiter. I thought: If this is the intelligence of a restaurant waiter in India, there is little wonder why the country is bound for great things in the future.

I have no doubts of the quality of the young people in India, but what he said again confirms the general view of the population: that to be perceived as "developed", as "progressive" - you need to have people flocking to the city, living and working in tall apartments and skycrapers. Of course, at the center of all these, is accumulation of wealth measured by Rupees and other currencies.

I was rushing to the airport and did not think it is wise to start a little conversation about my opinion. I wanted to tell him, that urbanization is not a sign of a more mature, wiser society. I also wanted to tell him that the diminishing number of farmers and villagers is a serious problem, not a sign of progress. Afterall, they are usually the first step of a long food value chain until the food arrives to the supermarket. Haven't we heard recently that food prices has gone skyrocketing in most part of the world?

Of course, there are the alternatives. The genetically engineered crops that grow at 3 times the rate of a normal one. The hormone injected fish that grow at double the speed. The soya fed cows that generate double the meat in shorter time. But before we accept those as an alternative, we should check if that really what most people would really want to eat, if they only knew the truth? And even if the consumers do not mind, these have obviously not solved any of our food problems. Instead of solving the 1 billion starving people on earth, we are now facing rising food prices for the rest of the 5 billion earth population!

I wanted to also tell him that the city is no more than a cramped place full of grumpy people trying to make sense of their day. Most of the people will wake up saying "I wish I can do something else". Most will get stuck in a traffic or crowded public transport, and looking forward for their next holiday to the pristine villages. Yet most city people will say that they need to earn the money so that they can pay the rent or buy that bigger house when my family grow. Very few people will consider that they will be able to buy that bigger house or pay a much cheaper rent if they were to live far from the city.

I am not saying that everyone should abandon the city. Just like everything else in the world, the city has its own role in the civilization. However it is not a solution for everyone, and it is certainly does not have any correlation with better quality of life. These thoughts may sound insane even only a couple years ago - but I am confident that the fragile economic, environmental and social conditions of our world will force us to change. Let me suggest a solution for many of us: let's reverse the trend of urbanization.

A Case for Change

As I write this in December 2010, the world leading economists have been broadcasting for a couple of years that there are still large risks of corporate and banking collapse due to lack of cash. Therefore the US government believes it need to keep high level of liquidity - keep interest rate low, taxes low, let people spend and pour money out to the market. Almost at the same time, the newspapers are reporting that the same corporations that have the risk of running out of cash are now so full of cash (more than they have ever had in history) - that they have a "problem" of not knowing what to do with it. Speculators are starting to say that next year is going to be the year of acquisitions - they got to use the money somehow...!

On the other side of Atlantic, many countries in Europe are also in desperate need for cash. On the contrary to the US Government, the European governments believe in imposing austerity - rise taxes, lower wages, tighten the money.

So here are two opposing views from the "developed" countries to solve the same problem of uncontrollable greed. The best hope we can have, is that at least one of them is right.

Then I would ask myself: why do I bother? It is happening in the US and Europe - not in Asia, where I live. The Asian economy is growing rapidly, people are getting richer. On average, we are all earning higher income. The unemployment is low, the average age of mortality is higher than before. So what is my problem?

My problem is that while the average income per capita has grown, the income disparity between the poor and the rich has also grown. While the economy is growing, there is hardly any accountabilities on how the resources are being maintained and replenished. To put it bluntly, getting rich without giving back to the environment is like robbing from our future generation - convenient, but simply wrong. And yes, the average mortality age is higher - but for what? To continue to work for money so that we can be perpetual corporate consumers?

The Asian countries are "developing" on the same path that the US and Europe were creating during their glory days. And we are doing it at a pace and scale of more than 10 times of the western history.

In the mean time, the Asian countries combined are the biggest contributors to environmental problems - and yet we play a passive defensive role instead of a leading role. It also allows itself to be the new frontier for the old style consumerism - serving up its huge population to large corporations as the target base for them to continue to grow senselessly. It also remains the place for irresponsible exploitation, from the ultra cheap labor to the natural resources. Whenever it is in Asia, corporations can close their eyes and ears and pretends that the standard they would not accept in the west is acceptable here.

I am not blaming the western people for this. The Asian countries are home to more than one third of the world population. China, India and Indonesia are in the position where everything they do will effect the world in a grand scale. It is time for Asian countries to behave like mature contributor to the world, and not to play victims. It also means its time for Asian countries to say no to old practices that has led to a state of destruction, such as uncontrollable greed and consumerism.

Path to Prosperity

At the end of a short seminar about ecological living that I attended several months ago in Europe, a speaker did a concluding message saying that to be ecologically responsible: "one should learn to be happy with less". As I walked back I began to wonder what it meant. I certainly want to be much more ecological than I am right now, but can I maintain a feeling of prosperity, if I live with less?

Prosperity means different things to every person. For me, it is the ability to have a suitable house for my family, to do the hobbies that I enjoy, to meet with people that I like, to have comfortable rest, to be able to visit my friends and family when I need to, to feel healthy and to feel secure. I think everyone will need to feel prosperous to be happy - although each person will have his/her own elements of prosperity.

Let's say that I am a farmer in a small village in the 1940s. I would feel prosperous enough with the food from the neighborhood farms or wet market. I would be happy to receive slow, infrequent mails from a relative who lives overseas. I would be happy with an all-purpose doctor, for any kind of illness. I will be glad to have a house built with locally produced materials - as there is no way to import goods from far away. In this condition prosperity can be found locally, naturally and as a result they are environmentally friendly.

The contrast to this is if I were a 21st century urban man. I purchase my food products from the supermarkets, which are often bought from the importers. These importers in turn would buy it from a trading partner overseas. My relatives and friends may live thousands of miles away and I am dependent on the planes, cars and telecommunication equipments to keep in touch. I need my plastic gadgets - the laptops, the mobile phones, the music player, the video game consoles, the CD players because I live in a fast lane. If I am sick I can find all sort of specialist doctors, who in turn have advanced equipments made of high grade plastic and special composites to diagnose and hopefully cure me. The doctor will then give me medicines produced in another country made of various chemicals that is transported through air using plastic and paper packaging.

In this lifestyle, my sources of prosperity are scattered globally, and to reach them I need infrastructure, technology, organizations and money. The side-effect of this lifestyle, to name a few, are the pollution, the global warming and the destruction of natural habitats. As more and more of us begin to realize, these are very severe side-effects.

So I come back to the speaker's statement: to be ecologically responsible, we need to learn to live with less. But how? Do we need to abandon our modern lifestyle all together and go back to the ancient lifestyle? I struggled with this question for a while until I realized that I was looking at it the wrong way.

It never is a fight between the ancient lifestyle and modern lifestyle. It is a fight between simplicity and complexity.

In a life that is simple, we should be able to remember important things in our lives without having to have handhelds ringing to remind us about it. We should be able to know whether we are eating healthy or not by knowing where the food came from and how it was made - instead of through the "nutritional content" listed in the wrapper of the food. We also should have most of our time spent doing things that excite us - instead of things that make us money.

But, with the exceptions of the fortunate few, most of us do not live like that right now. We are doing the opposite to simplicity - we are creating more and more complexity. We are working harder - either to make ends meet, or to make more money. We are working faster, due to peer pressure and hyper-competition, without a time to be mindful. We let ourselves be bombarded by advertising, preaching, campaigning through the media. We become the "consumers" - people who is made to consume more each day, even when we do not need to.

Then comes the viscious cycle of complexity. Our lives have become so complex that we have to "outsource" important things to organizations and agencies. We know nothing about our food and medicine so we let the FDA to approve it. We have no time to think about our well being so let the health consultant does it. We have no time to think about our kids and the different types of education each of them needs - so let the school and government do all the work.

As complexity increases, down goes our prosperity.

I believe the solutions to the world's problem does not come from grand plans from the governments. It starts with each of us solving our own problems - by reversing our complex life and making it simpler each day. By living simpler - we will naturally live with less. Less excess, less waste, less misunderstanding. We need not to reject the progress of our civilization like the technology and the rule-of-law, but they are merely tools. They can be useful, but they can also be misused through bad intentions, and they alone will not bring prosperity.

So this is my take, for whatever it's worth to you: Prosperity is within anyone's reach, as long as one seeks for it through simplicity.

Progress vs. Understanding

I read an article in a magazine in August 2010 about a couple of scientists who disputed the law of gravity that was formulated by Sir Isaac Newton a long-long time ago. The article also reminded the readers that Albert Einstein also disputed this law. I can't help but being skeptical about this article after all that I have been taught since high school, so I went to the internet and did further search. At the end of it, I was surprised by how much we do not know about gravity. Why haven't I heard about this dispute from my physics teachers 25 years ago? Why did they teach me as if this thing has been figured out?


This dispute is remarkable, if you think that we have been flying our airplanes, measure weights, construct our buildings based on the idea of gravity. It is also mind boggling, to think that since two of the greatest scientists humanity ever known (Einstein and Newton) disputed this fundamental law, not much new understanding has been made about it. One can't help asking a question, do we really know anything at all?


It is not to say that human race has not progressed. Just watch a jumbo jet plane take off and you would marvel at our ability to make this massive structure to fly. Overtime, we have continued to progress to reduce the number of accidents and errors, while making the planes bigger and faster. It is quite a paradox to see how we have not advanced much in the understanding of how our universe works, but we have managed to progress very rapidly on this unconfirmed basis.

Another paradox I have seen is in medicine. We all know that we have advanced so much in the medical technology and diagnostic tools, that we are now able to see the functioning of our internal organs while we stay awake and listen to the doctor's explanation. My mother went through a broken hip repair with minimum amount of surgeries - something that I cannot imagine being done even a decade ago.

Yet, despite all this, we continue to play "catch up" on fixing the world's health. While we continue to struggle with cure for AIDS, cancer and Parkinson disease - new strains of viruses appears. Old illness like lepracy and cholera are making a comeback in poor countries. Fear for epidemic has never been more global than it is in the 21st century.


Many people are also finding better answers in the age old Chinese traditional medicine and ayurvedic healing. Those who has gone through the healing testify that the results are remarkably powerful and permanent. These have been credited to cure anything from flu to cancer, as well as to increase your immune system, improve your digestive system and reduce your weight problem. What is most amazing to me, is that these procedures are hardly explainable scientifically.

So it comes back to the paradox, that while we seem to have been progressing rapidly, we have made very little advance in understanding.

I think the same paradox can be found in many other things, from progress in bio-engineering vs. our struggle to understand nature, or from progress in military equipments vs. our struggle in stopping hatred, wars and terrorism. We also struggle in our understanding of each other, despite the progress in communication technology.

So what's wrong with that? one may argue. Isn't it better to progress than wait until we understand more?

In my view, the ambition to progress now and understand later has led our modern society to become "one track minded". We will think that the only way to cure is to advance in medical technology. We will also think that the only way to teach our kids about the functioning of the world is by forcing them to learn what we know, instead of exploring what we do not know. The only way to be influential is to have money or military equipment. The only way to have a better living is to go to the city and work for corporations. At least as long as I have lived, our world has been going full blast following this one track mindset.

In the mean time, we are forgetting that there are still so many things we do not know. Maybe many of people's health problems can be solved through better environment and better quality food, not antibiotics. Maybe a better way to teach children is to let them explore and break the conventions instead of telling them about the conventions. Maybe we do not need bio-engineered crops to feed genetically enhanced cows if the world stop indulging in up sized meals.

I believe that progress without better understanding will only satisfy our short term indulgence while leading to long term problems, hatred and destruction. I believe we will be better off if we go slower in seeking progress, and instead focusing on seeking to understand. Seek to understand why the other cultures behave a certain way. Seek to understand how to teach differently so that the kids can understand better than us. Seek to understand why we are still unable to reduce poverty and what are the things we need to change to fix it.

Afterall, is there really such thing as progress without understanding?