Has wealth changed you?

Dan Brown, when asked this question by an interviewer following his meteoric success with his books.

No. I still get up at 4a.m. to write. And every morning I face a blank page. The characters don't care that I've made money. I have the same friends that I had before, and I'm married to the same wonderful woman. I drive a four year-old Lexus. I don't think about money. I have it, but I'm not drawn to fancy clothes, or yachts, or fancy cars.

Organized Religion

Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage.. An assimilated historical record of man's quest to understand the divine.
- Robert Langdon in Angels and Demons

Dissonance

CLIMBING, OR MY LACK THEREOF

After much reflection, I realised that I was at my happiest in the final year of university. No, the reason was not getting FYP out of the way, nor getting over two traumatic failed relationships. The reason was because I finally fulfilled my dream of living the life of a pro-athlete. I overloaded on academic modules in the earlier semesters with the view of enjoying a lighter load in my final semester, timing it to coincide with the bouldering competition season. The earlier semesters were hell, but as a result I was granted the time to put climbing at the top of my priority list. Priceless.

Banal

One of my favourite columns in The Sunday Times is the Me and My Money feature. The articles typically involve rags-to-riches stories, inspiring ordinary people with 'if-I-can-do-it-so-can-you' anecdotes. These are stories of hard work, financial prudence, fiscal discipline, steely determination and shrewd business sense, revealing much about the myriad of strategies successful people have adopted to rise to the top or escape from the rat race.

But recent features have become increasingly mundane, even to the point of being plain senseless. Are the journalists running out of people to interview? Take this weekend's (18 Nov 2012) feature for example.

I'm a Big Kid now

My manager requested that I let the intern tag along with me while going on my daily rounds. At first I was concerned that she will slow me down. I do, after all, work at a blistering pace. But after a moment's consideration I decided that I was game. It was not too long ago that I was an intern. And I remembered how being brought out of the office and onto the field was a real treat for me back then!

And so she tagged along for the afternoon. Partly for her benefit, I only arranged for 3 inspections that afternoon. I didn't want to inflict mental trauma, you see. The day passed smoothly, but on the drive back to office, I knew the inevitable question was looming. I should know, it used to be one of my favourite questions too. Is this your typical day? Adopting the 'honesty is the best policy' approach, I informed her that a more typical day involves 4-5 inspections. On more busy periods, you can do upwards of 10 cases per day. "My personal record is 12 inspections in 6 hours", I smiled broadly. "What we did today was a walk in the park", I added.

"You have to run so many cases, where do you find the time to type the reports?", she countered. Ah hah. There we have it, the elephant in the room nobody could bring themselves to talk about.