Choose What You Want to Believe

By Abiola Alatishe

Whatever you do in life,
Try to remember that nothing is too big to achieve
And nothing is too small to ignore,
Hang in there, even if it's with the last thread
It is well.

You may be on life's path
Not having an idea how and when you'll get there,
The most important thing is that you have a sense of direction,
All you have to do is to take each step one at time,
And you'll get there.

The idea behind life is about meeting people,
The beauty of live is loving people,
The essence of life is about making impacts,
The joy of life is leaving footprints in the sands of time.

Have a wonderful relationship with God,
And know where he wants to place you in life to function,
For without him,
You are nothing.

On your journey through life,
Absorb everything you hear,
But choose what you want to believe.

For a Reason

People always come into your life for a reason, a season and a lifetime.

By Brian A

People always come into your life for a reason, a season and a lifetime. When you find which it is, you know exactly what to do.

When someone is in your life for a ‘reason’, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed outwardly or inwardly. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, or to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally, or even spiritually. They seem like a godsend to you, and they are. They are there for a reason, you need them to be there. Then, without any wrong doing on your part or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they just walk away.

Sometimes they act up or out and force you to take a stand. What we must realise is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled; their work is done. The prayer you sent up has been answered and it is now time to move on.

When people come into your life for a ‘season’, it is because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn. They may bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it! It is real! But, only for a season. And like Spring turns to Summer and Summer to Fall, the season eventually ends.

‘Lifetime’, relationships teach you a lifetime of lessons; those things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person/people (anyway), and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas in your life. It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

Selfless Friendship

By Baxter Black

Friend is a word that I don’t throw around
Though it’s used and abused, I still like the sound.
I save it for people who’ve done right by me
And I know I can count on, if ever need be.

Some of my friends drive big limousines
Own ranches and banks and visit queens,
And some of my friends are up to their neck
In overdue notes and can’t write a cheque.

They’re singers or ropers or writers of prose
And others, God bless them, can’t blow their own nose!
I guess being friends don’t have nothing to do
With talent or money or knowing who’s who.

It’s a comfortable feeling when you don’t have to care,
About choosing your words or being quite fair.
Cause friends will just listen and let go on by
Those words you don’t mean and not bat an eye.

It makes a friend happy to see your success.
They’re proud of your good side and forgive all the rest.
And that ain’t so easy, all of the time,
Sometimes I get crazy and seem to go blind!

Your friend just might have to take you on home,
Or remind you sometimes, that you’re not alone.
Or ever so gently pull you back to the ground,
When you think you can fly, with no one around.

A hug or a shake, whichever seems right
Is the high of giving, I’ll tell you tonight,
All worldly riches and tributes of men,
Can’t hold a candle to the worth of a friend.

Staying Positive

Happiness can boost your productivity, motivation and ambition

With increasing pressure to achieve results, understaffed teams and uncertainty about the future, happiness at work can be hard to sustain. But there are a number of things that managers can do to stay positive, perform to the best of their ability and deal with new challenges as they make their way up the career ladder.

Avoid the two-year itch

Managers are at their happiest and performing best, during the first two years at an organisation, and after that their performance and positivity tends to drop significantly. Managers can avoid this danger zone by seeking out new challenges and taking on new responsibilities to keep them stimulated and motivated.

Develop skills for the future

Before you reach the two-year mark in your organisation, find out training or qualifications are on offer and talk to your boss about how these may help your career progression.

Develop a vision

To develop a vision, you need to analyse the environment in which you work, forecast how it will develop, and you are to where you want to be.

Find your optimum stress level

While too much stress can have a negative impact, a certain amount is actually a key ingredient for the happy manager and their team. The challenge for managers is to keep stress at the right levels.

Master your workload

Focus on developing the skills you need to break down your tasks and conquer your to-do list. Softer skills, such as goal-setting and delegation, will help you to get things done in an efficient way.

Keep an eye on your team

The happiness of your staff is a reliable indicator of their performance, so be sure to act on any signs of unhappiness amongst your team. — The Guardian

9 Google Search Tricks

Use these cool shortcuts to find things better and faster

Not many users know the little tricks that can be used to get more out of a simple Google search. Following are the top nine Google search tricks:

1. Use the ‘site:’ operator to limit searches to a particular site. It is particularly handy because many sites’ built-in search tools do not return the results users are looking for, and some sites do not even have a search feature. If you are looking for Google related posts from UltraSpectra blog, for example, try this search: Google site:ultraspectra.com.

2. Search within numerical ranges using the ‘..’ operator. Say, for example, you want to look for information about Nepali blogs and their progress 2009 till 2010, you could use this search: ‘Nepali Blogs’ 2009..2010.

3. Use Google to crunch numbers by using its built-in-calculator — try entering a calculation like 110*(654/8+3). Yes, your computer also has a calculator, but if you spend most of your day inside a browser, typing your calculation into the browser’s search box is quicker than firing up your calculator app.

4. Get quick currency conversions through Google, simply by typing in the two currencies. For example: Type 5,000 Pakistani rupees in dollars to get the result. However, it only has the more mainstream currencies.

5. Use Google as a spelling aid. Entering a word into Google is a quick way to see if you have the right spelling. If it is incorrect, Google will suggest the correct spelling instead. Additionally, if you want to get a word’s definition, use the ‘define:’ operator to return definitions from various dictionaries (for example, define: blogging).

6. Use the ‘or’ operator. This can be useful when you are researching a topic but are unsure which keywords will return the information you need. It can be particularly handy in conjunction with the ‘site:’ operator. For example, Google Or ‘Google X’ site:ultraspectra.com.

7. Find out what time it is anywhere in the world. This one is really handy if you want to make sure that you are not phoning someone in the middle of the night. Just search for ‘time’ and then the name of the city. For example, try: time Islamabad.

8. Exclude specific terms with the ‘-’operator. You can narrow your searches using this operator. For example, if you are looking for information about UltraSpectra but do not want any discussion related to Google, you could try: ‘ultraspectra.com’ – google.

9. Search for specific document types. Google can search the web for specific types of files using the ‘filetype:’ operator. If you are looking for PPT files about blogging, for example, you could try: ‘blogging’ filetype:ppt.

Some Interesting Google Tricks

If you search "Who's the cutest" using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky," it will say "YOU ARE"

— Milan Aryal (@MilanAryal) October 20, 2013

If you type "Google gravity" and then hit "I'm feeling lucky" on Google the entire page will lose it's gravity and you can play with it.

— Milan Aryal (@MilanAryal) October 16, 2013

You can use Google as a timer by typing "Set timer (x) minutes" into the search bar.

— Milan Aryal (@MilanAryal) October 11, 2013

If you search "askew" in Google search, the page will tilt slightly clockwise. Try it now.

— Milan Aryal (@MilanAryal) October 10, 2013

If you type in any flight number into Google you can see exactly where the plane is.

— Milan Aryal (@MilanAryal) October 8, 2013

When you search for 'Tilt' on Google, it will make the search results page tilt slightly to the right.

— Milan Aryal (@MilanAryal) May 14, 2014

Right Now is Okay for Happiness

The truth is, there’s no better time to be happy than right now. If not now, when?

We convince ourselves life will be better after we get married, have a baby, then another. Then we are frustrated that the children aren't old enough and we’ll be more content when they are.

After that, we’re frustrated that we have teenagers to deal with. We will certainly be happy when they are out of that stage. We tell ourselves that our life will be complete when our spouse gets his or her act together, when we get a nicer car, are able to go on a nice vacation, when we retire. The truth is, there’s no better time to be happy than right now. If not now, when?

Your life will always be filled with challenges. It’s best to admit this to yourself and decide to be happy anyway. One of my favourite quotes come from Alfred D Souse. He said, “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin — real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time to be served, or a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life”.

This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So, treasure every moment that you have and treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time... and remember that time waits for no one.

So, stop waiting as it is time to decide that there is no better time than right now to be happy. Happiness is a journey, not a destination. So as Randall G Leighton says, “Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt and dance like no one is watching.”

Candy Crush Life Lessons

There are so many lessons for our lives in random candies falling in a game.

By Marianne

If you have a smartphone, tablet or Facebook, you’ve probably played the game Candy Crush Saga. I fell prey to it about a month ago using it to relax at the end of a long work day. It’s fun, it’s relatively easy (or it was), it’s often frustrating and it has hidden rewards when you least expect it. That’s if you play it mindlessly. Once you begin to understand the game, everything changes. As I was playing the game, it reminded me that life is the same way. It’s fun at times, often frustrating and has hidden rewards when you least expect it. Once you understand the game of life, the strategies that help you design your life the way you want it, everything changes.

There are so many lessons for our lives in random candies falling in a game. Here’s what I learnt —

• Just like the candy falling, events good or pad, people happy or otherwise, fall into our lives right from the start. We can’t control what or who shows up. We just have to keep playing the game of life. What we can control is how we react to them. We can get frustrated and give up, or figure things out and keep playing.

• As we start to play (grow), we learn. Three of a kind forms a row and it drops out. If we want to win the game, we must be looking to eliminate those things that stand in the way of success, whatever that means to us.

• Jelly means stuck! For many levels of the game, the goal is to remove the jelly. In life, we need to come up strategies to help us get unstuck too. We just need to gather the ones that work for us.

• As we go through levels (grow up), life gets tougher. The good news is we get smarter — if we practice. If we keep noticing what works, if we learn. Learning is the key. It always has been. If we stay mindless we can still play the game and occasionally win, but we don’t get as far as we could and it can be a very stressful journey.

• Those special rewards can be repeated over and over once we figure out how to make them happen. Some give you great power in the game hust as in life. They’re like great strategies. You come into life without knowing the best ones for dealing with stress, relationships, health and money. You can stumble on great ones every now and then and feel lucky. Or you can learn them from books, TV shows, from someone who’s figured them out and use them in your life so that you take charge of how to make your life easier and more successful.

• You can ask for help. After you’re played a certain amount of time, the game has beed designed to stop you. Now their goal is to have you so hooked, you’ll pay to go to the next level. Or you can ask friend, usually on Facebook. I love that. I’ve never paid. I can wait till it lets me play again. I choose to be patient. In fact, I’m grateful that it stops me so I don’t spend too long playing games no matter how much fun or additive they are. I have a business to run and while I can justify a few minutes distraction, I certainly can’t let it use up too much time. I haven’t asked a Facebook friend for help yet but I like knowing I could. People would help me — at first. As long as I helped them when they needed it and didn’t constantly pester them with requests. Same as life. Help a friend when you can, but don’t take advantage of that friendship.

• Don’t forget the goal. In the game you’re looking for three of a kind, for special candies but if you forget the goal of the game, you lose. And you lose quickly. Whether it’s to remove all the jelly the candies are stuck in or to bring all the fruit home, you’ve got to keep your eye on the finish line. You can play the game of life with no goal but you won’t get where you want to go. You’ll be blown about like an airplane without an autopilot or GPS. You life will be an endless game of maybe, an often frustrating one.

But if you know your goal, if you learn and use strategies along the way, if you’re patient as obstacles pop up — and they will both in the game and in life — you can really enjoy the process as you go along the journey.