Sunday, July 12, 2009

what difference can i make?

i've lived more than a quarter of a century...suddenly today i asked myself, am i capable to make any difference? gave a thought of what i've been doing in my life up to now and a lot of memories came back...

the first thing that came to my mind was a project that was initiated by a group of us during our high school days. we called it "TEENATURES". what is it that we do? i'm sure a lot of us remembered how soft drinks was sold during our schooldays...yeah, it was sold in red paper cups with Coca-Cola logo on it. a friend came up with the idea of recycling those cups instead of seeing it being thrown away everyday. with that objective in mind, we started the "teenatures". we promoted ourselves in the school upon obtaining permission from school management. we told our fellow students to help save the environment by recycling all the paper cups by throwing it into a special garbage bag instead of the normal dustbins in our school canteen. we will collect the cups and store it in a room which was given by the school to the "teenatures". trust me it wasn't smooth sailing...we have fellow students purposely destroying the cups because in their mind, they thought we are collecting the cups to reuse it again...not a lot of people understood the meaning of recycling...it was frustrating for us and in the end we were forced to give up due to the lack of support from our fellow students...

secondly, my mind travelled to KEBATIM....this was a project done by the Fifth Collegians in the University of Malaya. in short it's a project for the orphans....we raised funds, we do a lot of side projects such as colouring contest for school children, a cross country event which is opened to public, we go around looking for sponsorships and many others...all these was done in order for us to have all the money needed during the peak event, where we bring in around 80 orphans to live with us for a week in the Fifth College. we hoped by having them here; by giving them workshops; by bringing them out for field trips etc...they will be motivated to to also be a university students like one of us...

today, we are trying very hard to make a different in the work that we do...we try to make better commercials, we try to make better edits, we try to look for better shots, we try to find the better performance of the talents, we try to find music that works better...

come to think of it, the difference that i'm trying to make now is actually smaller than what i have been doing during my school days. maybe the only thing that seemed bigger is the difference that i'm trying to make for my family and even that i don't think that i've done enough...what a shame...things got even worse after i started watching TED...there's so many great people out there!

so i thought...maybe i should be living my life closer to the fullest...hopefully one day, i can make some significant difference...being 1-800-ahcai.com is definitely not good enough...

is our job that bad after all?

i live my life everyday commuting from home to work and from work back home...everyday i have stories to tell be it good or bad, interesting or boring. most of the time i complained about the clients i have to face everyday and how stupid and ridiculous they are. sometimes the problem at work got so bad that i thought i've had the worst day in my life...

someone i just worked with recently said this to me, "look at it this way, we only have ridiculous clients, clients who asked for a lot of unreasonable stuffs....at least, we don't have clients dying on us unlike some doctors and surgeons, and we don't have to fight to prove our client innocent when our client is actually a murderer or some pervert who raped dozens of women...ALL we have to do is put together beautiful picture." i heard it and i thought, how true is that!