Transit at Amsterdam

Hocker. Marijuana. That's the image of Amsterdam for most people, including me before I stopped as a backpacker few years back. And I like it, not for the sex nor the drug. The under-sea-level city has its own charms. I guess.

When I have 5 hours transit time in Schiphol Airport, heading to the city is the best thing I can think of. In other words I was praying for a smooth flight from Osaka, for not affecting my plan.

Flight landed on time, confirmed my connecting flight, convinced the immigration officer that I can come back on time. Spent some time to get a ticketing machine which take coins, make sure I'm on the right platform. 10 mins later, I was in the world of canal again.

***

Here is some travel trips!

There is direct train from Schiphol to Amsterdam Central, €7.10 for same-day return ticket. You can purchase the ticket through the ticketing machine but I only found one that's take coins. Others take credit & debit cards. You also can buy the ticket from the counter, but the queue is long and according to wikitravel, you need to pay extra €0.50.

***

I don't have any plan for Amsterdam. I don't even have any map in my hand. I followed the crowd. My memory was my guide. One turn, I was at the China town, where I had had the 2nd best Chinese beside London. And another turn I ended up at the red light district, where girls in lingeries waving hands at you in their very own glass cubicle. Another turn, I bump into a flea market right in-front of a church.

I spent the whole 2 hours wondering around the street, crossing bridge after bridge, taking pictures, and while I was tired, I took a seat next to the canal, put aside the camera and enjoy the scenery with my own eyes. Travel without any plan, without any must see attraction was surprisingly joyful and relaxing. Like always, time flies in happy moments, it turned dark then only I realized I don't have much time left. Grabbed a french loaf tomato sandwich, jumped into the train and I'm leaving this beautiful city behind again.

Book: What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

Finished another book by Malcolm Gladwell - "What the Dog Saw".

I first came to know about Gladwell in his third book - "Outliers". I was attracted to his writing and soon, his first and second best sellers - "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" have also became my favorite books of all time. When I accidentally came across this book in the bookstore recently, it straight went into my shopping cart.

Back to the book. "What the Dog Saw" is not really a brand new book since it is a collection of previous article that Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker for the past few years. However, this book still worth reading because the articles explore a few topics deep into history of it own, and following the lines you will find really interesting fact that will change how we understand our world.

One of my favorite in the whole book, is the one titled - "The Ketchup Conundrum". Do you know why there are dozens of varieties of mustard but only one variety of ketchup? Do you know who had changed the approach of how food industry deal with product development, from searching the best Pepsi to the best Pepsis?

What the hell am I writing about? Pepsi? Pepsis? To answer your question, please check out this TED video:

Interesting right? Want to find out more about what is the different between choking and panicking? What running in the dog mind? Go grab the book or visit the author's archive. Hope you enjoy it!!

Outliers: The Story of Success

I come across this book from Chase Jarvis's blog where he posted on the topic "The secret to success in photography". In that post he listed up 2 important points:
1) Be Undeniably Good. and
2) Dedicate at least 10,000 hours to whatever it is you're looking to master.

The second point caught my attention, and I followed up the link to an enlightening talk by author of this book "Outliers: The Story of Success ", Malcolm Gladwell, where he discussed about the concept of success in a totally different viewpoint, he say "Genius and creativity don’t necessarily spring forth unbidden, they require time and support to experiment, to try and even fail." I enjoyed the talk, and ended up ordered the book from amazon, finished it up in less than a week.

"SB-600 on the top of the book to create a nice shadow underneath it"

Ya, this is an interesting book. It has always been a myth that why do some people succeed far more than others. Usually their story mostly focuses on intelligence and ambition. However, in this book, the author explored deep down to the story of these people, and he summarized up a logic, that are so fascinating which we tend to overlook.

We cannot denied that these successful people is smart and they are extremely lucky in their life where they were born in the right time, and following up a series of opportunities that granted their success. Nevertheless, they all have something in common that we always overlooked: the effort and time, these people dedicated to, before they were given the golden opportunity to shine. This is the basic rule for success: the Theory of 10,000 hours. We have a sense, that genius is the key player in success, but what the stories in this book remind us is actually that's not true. Success need enormous amount of time and effort.

This is the classical episode cited from the book, story of the Beatles.

"The most important episode in the history of the Beatles is what happens to them in the late '50s and early '60s when, for some totally random reason, they are just a garage band in Liverpool. They were invited to Hamburg, Germany, to be the house band for a strip club.And they play seven days a week, eight hours at a time, eight-hours sets for months on end. When they start off they are not a good band, they are a terrible band, but they are forced by virtue of having to fill eight hours every night, night after night, week after week, month after month, they are forced to master the popular-music repertoire, forced to play together compellingly as a band, forced to be inventive, forced to compose music, forced to become complete musicians. And by the time they leave Hamburg, their apprenticeship is complete and they are finally at a level where they can start to explore popular music in the genius way that they do. By the time the Beatles come to America in 1964 at the start of the British Invasion, they have played together live 1200 times. Beatles are off the charts in terms of the amount of time and energy they devote to their craft and that is a powerful and fundamental reason for why they did as well as they do."

This is not the only story: Same story happened for Bill Gates. Ya, Bill Gates, the software tycoon. He also spend enormous amount of time playing with programming code in front of a computer before he was skilled enough to start up Microsoft.

Of course there are still other factors that you need to find out from this book. But here are something that I found it interesting:
1. The story behind plane crash and why Korean Air crashed the most?
2. Asian is better in Math? The culture hold the key to the answer.
3. Is IQ really matter?

Ok, I will stop writing here and let you explore the book yourself. Hope you find this book inspiring too :)