After the Taste Asia 2 event, another blog meet happened. It was a spur of the moment thing and was all fun. I bet you didn’t know did you? It was hush-hush.
It happened in what is fast becoming (or is) the Wi Fi city of the Philippines: Davao!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I love being in Davao because of the fruits, fresh air fresh catch, and most of all because of its friendly and warm people.

The Davao Bloggers are no exception.

Despite the sudden downpour, I met up with Ria, Andrew (both came in from the rain), Jun M, Dom and Blogie at Hoovenson’s “geekville” SPRO Coffee Shop. I also got to meet Ayeza of Bisayabloggers, who happened to be there with some friends.

Dominique, Ria, Blogie, Andrew and me. (Jun M. had to go home and give his brother the keys to his room but promised to come back.)

Dominique, Blogie (with his trademark beret/cap), Jun M (who came back) and me. Ria and Andrew went ahead to a party.
They were very accommodating as we discussed the Mindanao Blogging Summit, their blogging activities and then some.
The topics swung from blogging, to tech, to education, to books, to personalities, work, the Davao blogging, Mindanao blogging and the apparent lack of a Cebu blogging community, to Manila-based bloggers and so on. They were all passionate about blogging and their respective advocacies.

Dom brought out his Uno cards, but forgot the manual. Thanks to Google and SPRO’s free Wi-fi and Wikipedia, we were up and running in no time. Of the four rounds, I lost two. Ria was grrrr-ing at Jun M, Andrew and Dom who made it hard for her to win.

So she vented her angst on me and won. Darn those draw cards. I could say I let her win, but I lost again after she left so it wan not a fluke even if i wanted it to be. In other words, I’m lousy (or unlucky) with Uno.

Next time, Guilottine na lang Dom. But I definitely had fun. As the evening wore on, Dom showed some of his wares: World of Warcraft Trading Cards and Talecraft, which apparently are the brainchild of a Filipino (including the artwork) - which are good for creative story-telling and writing. (I really think Talecraft has a great educational potential for communications subjects. I was supposed to bring home a deck but I forgot. Arrrgh!

The talk shifted like sand in the desert so to speak. From the state of Philippine education, the Omega Man, Nightfall, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Jordan, we could have spent the whole evening until dawn and we would have never run out of things to talk about. Oh, and did I mention that Jun M’s blog traffic spike because of his MF post and he eventually exceeded his bandwidth? And that Blogie didn’t even know what it was about, who just like me rarely watch TV and read the newspaper. (I say, if something gets bad enough, somebody will eventually tell you about it. Like this one.)
It was a pleasant experience meeting the cream of the Davao blogosphere. I am willing to bet that the PR machines will be getting in touch with these guys soon. With the 1st Mindanao Blogging Summit on October 27 in Davao City, their part of the country may become known as the Premiere Blogger’s Destination of the Philippines.

Thanks a lot and i hope to be back soon.

Leo Buscaglia, in his book Papa, My Father, relates:

“Papa believed that the greatest sin of which we were capable was to go to bed at night as ignorant as we had been when we awakened that day….
So Papa devised a ritual. Since dinnertime was family time and everyone came to dinner unless they were dying of malaria, it seemed the perfect forum for sharing what new things we had learned that day….

In retrospect, after years of studying how people learn, I realize what a dynamic educational technique papa was offering us, reinforcing the value of continual learning.

My daughters Iani and Tesa love the Disney Playhouse show  Jojo’s Circus. At the end each episode, someone asks, “What did you learn today, JoJo?” JoJo explains what she has learned in the course of the episode.

In my travels for work along NLEX, Bamboo asks:

I’ve made it a point to learn something new everyday before I sleep.  When I conduct training, I share this daily goal to my class and challenge them to do the same. So when their eyes light up with new knowledge I tell them half-seriously, “You can sleep now. You’ve learned something new today.” Some take it half-jokingly too and fall half-asleep.

Learning need not be confined in a formal setting or the classroom. It can come in all forms and sizes and each person learn differently. Yet we all need to learn, everyday.

When we stop learning, that’s the day our life ends.

Living is learning. Learning is living life.

So, what have you learned today?

Many of us wish that there were more than 24 hours in a day to accomplish all the tasks we have set to do for the myriad of roles we have. If only we had more time.

 

The real solution is not to gain more time. It is to balance roles.

 

In our quest to be production and efficient, we tend to accept a myriad of roles that keep ultimately eats up our time. We find out later that our main roles are suffering because of the other less important roles we have assumed. We often complain that our roles as a family member suffer because of work, and vice versa. Many of us seem to think that in order to be good in one role we have to neglect some other equally important role.

 

We do not know what our real roles are. We just assume anything and everything whatever comes our way.

 

Roles we have should emanate from our mission. Our mission in turn, grows from our principles.

 

Stephen Covey illustrates this as a tree. The leaves are our roles, which grow from the trunk which is our mission. The mission however is attached and shoots up from the roots – our principles.

 

Principles => Mission => Roles

There is a great difference between doing the right things versus doing things right. We may cerebrally know this truth. But in reality, we do not practice what we know. From an unconscious, almost rote level, we tend to get busy, doing things right. Unfortunately, we miss the whole point of doing the right thing because we are too preoccupied. For us, as long as our hands are typing, the paper work is piling and we get that rush of “doing”, we feel we have done our job.  Only to find out that our output does not necessarily match the actual needs of our company.

 

Just recently, I agreed to take on some editing job thinking it would be good extra income.   It was exciting at first, but the reality hit me when it came into conflict with my main roles. It was eating up time that I have sworn to spend with my family and long term interests. In other words, although I was doing things right, it was the wrong thing to do.

 

One of my long term interests is in eLearning. Since my first encounter with the possibilities of non- asynchronous, empowering and drastically life-improving changing mode of learning, I knew in my guts that this is what I wanted to pursue. Investing time in learning the industry and networking with people with similar interests has paid off. Though I still have a lot to learn and accomplish, I am now at a level that makes me an asset for my company and those we serve. Aside from that, I have started a personal project that will probably lead to more opportunities for learning, collaboration and contribution.

 

We have to constantly ask ourselves: What is the best use of my time now?

 

Let’s do the right things and not only be concerned with doing things right.

Ideas from the book First Things First by Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca Merrill:

Doing the Right Things vs. Doing Things Right, and

Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.

There’s this story about a man who climbs a ladder of success to the top, only to find that his ladder was leaning on the wrong wall.

The Four Human Needs and Capacities: To Live, To Love, To Learn and To Live a Legacy.
Balance isn’t running on between compartments; It’s a dynamic equilibrium. It’s all parts working synergistically in a highly interrelated whole. Balance isn;t “either/or”. It’s And.

You think because you understand One, you must understand Two because One and One makes Two. But you also must understand And.