What if one day we lose our ability to see? We can still feel the table our arms are rested on, taste the dry air in the room and smell the perfume you put on this morning but just cannot seem to open your eyes to see. What if this is just like personality where you can feel, taste, and smell a person but you cannot truly see a person’s personality for who they are?

Freud spoke about how we are more than just one presenting layer of the mind, but in fact three; the Id, Super Ego and Ego which forms the depth of our mind. Not only did he mentioned that the Id is a large part which is not presented out to people to see but he also mentioned that the Id, Super Ego and Ego in metaphorical terms was like an iceberg. Revealing only the tip of the ice while submerged underwater could be a whole colossal piece of ice. After all, the Titanic which was made to never sink sank to an iceberg; do other humans sink to other people’s submerged icebergs as well?

About two years ago while I was working for a company, I was given the opportunity to sit in a meeting which would determine my manager’s stay in the organization. The organization was complaining how he do not seem to be growing according to the planned career path despite being in the organization for four years and his peers were complaining how his time in the office is spent on watching YouTube videos and comedy series which were non-work related. Tedious task which requires learning a new skill like entering data inside the company’s system was also ignored and it has been a repeating pattern we saw.

Yearly increment was not given, neither was bonus because of the lack of performance. Reprimands were given but only provided short term solutions. People who have worked long enough with him seems to say that they have seen his true colors while new joiners in the organization tends to stick by him like ants to sugar. We were at the brim of should we let him go from the organization or retain him.

It made me wonder, are we as individuals blind to personality and only uses bits of tiny information we gather through smelling, touching, and tasting the person’s personality?  We all get a base line from the first impression of a person during the first meet and as the 90/90 rule of first impression states that people make up their mind about you in the first 90 seconds of the meeting only makes me question more about how much do we actually see in 90 seconds?

For some people, it was much easier to gather these tiny bits of information by looking at the water which submerges the iceberg due to clear clean waters but for others it may just be like staring into a pool of mud water, impossible to gather any bits of information at all. Or maybe some just makes you see the iceberg tip and wanting you to believe there is nothing more.

The meeting got to a tense halt when we began talking about an incident where Person B was supposed to be getting a payment for his completion of the project. The project was completed but there was no payment made to Person B because the manager failed to inform the payroll department and obtain payment approval from the upper management before proceeding to confirm Person B’s payment. The manager was confronted but he mentioned that his task in doing so was to protect the company just in case Person B does not follow through and passed the blame to another manager for neglecting to voice out earlier. The manager got away with it and the other manager took the blame.

My issue here would be that his reasoning seemed believable but at the end of the day, if you were to rob a bank and say that you were only doing it to save a life… you still did rob a bank! The ego which Freud talks about presents itself most often in public balances both the Super Ego (driven by being accepted by public moral) and Id (driven by child-like instinctual needs) to make the tip of the ice berg presented to everyone. Could it be that the Id’s need to avoid pain was strong enough to gain the Ego’s vote over the Super Ego in scapegoating the other manager?

Then again, it really did seem as if the manager did believe in what he was doing without much cognitive dissonance. Not much guilt nor sorrow was seen into it and me being in the first hand watching the whole situation happen I could not help but to think that maybe the Ego reasons out our behavior to reduce cognitive dissonance in efforts to maintain our self-concepts.

The meeting just got more tensed when more issues were brought up on the manager which lead to more questions on how much lies have we been lead to believe throughout the years of his service only to made me think about how much we have been staring at the tip of the iceberg before it actually hit us hard underneath.

In the end we decided that we could not see the future of having him in the organization. It came to a point that we began removing his job tasks and obviously telling him that his future in the company was bleak, was then he finally resigned. I myself date not say if the move was right or wrong but it gave me an opportunity to see how the 90/90 first impression rule came into play and how the 90% we see is not the 90% more under the tip of the iceberg.

That just makes us humans that more complex that we really cannot see an individual’s personality until we get close enough, and that maybe when we get close enough it is almost impossible to avoid the inevitable of hitting the big iceberg. Freud said “Being entirely truthful with oneself is a good exercise”, but it is at all possible when we ourselves; the ego can’t see beyond the murky waters?

I decided to pick up my camera this morning as I went out to do some chores. It was really weird that despite being a public holiday, it seemed like wherever I went, it was pack full of people! This were the few stops I hit before heading back home.

Canon EOS 7D + Super Takamura 50mm f/1.4
ISO 100 | f/1.4 | 1/200 

Some fake Crocs for sale outside Damansara Jaya’s Maybank. Had to do some banking but it seemed like the ATM machine there was not working! But what really caught my attention were the colourful Crocs! Heck, look at the one above with a yellow Patrick! and even the Angry Bird with a ribbon!

It gets really weird when you want to buy something fake but don’t want it to look sooo fake and you end up with a pair of crocs with a normal yellow Sponge Bob on it and an awkward yellow Patrick!

Tatas

Canon EOS 7D + Super Takamura 50mm f/1.4
ISO 100 – SS 1/200 – f/1.4

Been a while since I last went out and started snapping. It does feel good to be snapping photos once more. 

Owh and I’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding the weird strange lines in this picture which makes it unique. I did not do anything to it (eg. wave my hand in front of the camera 1000 times in 1/200 of a second to create the lines). It’s just the way the bokeh is made using film lenses on digital SLRs.

Since starting my Masters Degree class early this year, I notice that the class was populated by two major age groups. The young individuals (like me) who just graduated from their degree, and the older individuals who had steady careers and most of which were set for life. In a way, when it all first started it did make me feel intimidated that these older individuals might be wiser and smarter than me, after all… I’m just a 23 year old kid dabbling in whatever I can, but few things popped up throughout the whole course regarding learning.

I would have to say anyone can learn but there are 3 Keys to Learning -

1) Openness

An aged classmate of mine highlighted in class how she did not believe in Freud’s work. True enough that a lot of Freud psychology work could be deemed as dubious, however I can’t deny that there are few things which Freud created which holds a lot of credibility up till today. Not all Freud work are bad, but as soon as we label them as bad, we automatically block of all learning from it.

A habit which we often do is to create short-cut filters in our head where we instantly create mental walls against informations we do not like. It is a lot easier for us to block off what we are not interested in (you can see this is Malaysia’s high school education with limited subjects to choose from) and once we have done so, it’s a lot harder for us to open up the blocked off wall.

Experience is a good thing, however never let experience hold you back.

Don’t judge to quickly as people may say. Be open to new ideas, new concepts even though some may be as old as Freud. Take in as much as you can, after which if you find the knowledge to be unimportant, unrelated, unproductive… leave it. At least you still know it one unimportant, unrelated, unproductive way to not do it again.

2) Interest

I’ve always had the interest in learning (well… at least after high school), and despite me having the tendency of not performing in exams I always found the need to continue learning more and more. It was never the grade at the end of the semester which kept me going but it is the feeling I get when I learn something new. It excites me, It drives me, at times it even keeps me up awake at night just thinking about the things I’ve learnt.

There’s no point dragging yourself kicking and screaming to learn something new. Automatically once more, you’ll put up a wall to prevent your learnings. We live in a generation where variety is given. Find something of your liking, a passion you have, something you know you’d want to learn or have.

It does not matter if you’ve learnt it before, if you’re interested… you’ll learn it again and again and again!

3) Fun

It’s no doubt we live for the sole purpose of fun! What would life be without it? If you are telling me that you’re goal in life has no fun factor in it, chances are you’ll not be heading anywhere!

Research show that when we are having fun, we learn better and faster. I guess that pretty much explains why were so good at games like DOTA and WOW! When we look back at learning as we progress in age, it seems as if fun has been sucked out from it slowly but surely as you notice the colourful pictures fading off our books.But that being said, attributing fun externally can’t be fair as well. There are many ways things can be or become fun!

I guess age really does not matter than as all 3 keys seem to be observable throughout all ages. Old or young the same. The saying that Old Dogs is just putting a wall up. The difference maker is how much of each key have we invest in our learning?

It seems that life tends to throw me in all sorts of loops and having to juggle work and class and even some more work on the side seems to be getting rather interesting.

I’m terribly sorry for not updating my blog lately, but I had a lot of catching up with life to do. I’ll do my best to update what’s left of my blog here.

I’ve also got to start snapping some photos, my camera has been underutilized for a while now and I need to scratch my itch!