Tag: Young Adults

A transaction processing system, usually shortened to TPS, is a kind of information processing system. Its job is to handle all the transactions moving into and out of a business.

The defining feature is that it takes them one at a time, in turn.

The cash machine

An ATM is the example everyone has used. It serves one person at a time, completes what that person came to do, and then moves to the next.

One thing is worth clearing up about the word transaction. In this context it does not only mean something financial. A request for information counts as a transaction too. The system is not defined by money changing hands, it is defined by handling one request through to completion.

The other way of doing it

The direct contrast is a batch processing system, which collects many transactions and processes them together as a batch.

Neither is simply better. They answer different questions. A batch system is efficient when a large number of similar items have to be dealt with and nobody is standing there waiting. A transaction system is what you want when somebody is standing there waiting.

An analogy from a download

Think of a torrent file attached to a folder of files. You cannot open any one file until the whole folder has finished downloading. Everything is held until everything is ready.

Transaction processing behaves the other way round. Results arrive in real time, one completed item at a time, which is what makes it convenient and what keeps it from becoming confusing.

Why the distinction is worth carrying

Because you meet it constantly without naming it. Your card payment clears while you stand at the counter. Your payslip is produced overnight with everybody else’s.

One of those is a queue of one. The other is a pile dealt with at once. Knowing which kind you are dealing with explains most of what people find frustrating about waiting for a system to answer them.

Experts argue about whether superstitions have any business in a job search. Meanwhile job seekers across the world carry their charms, keep their rituals, and go on receiving offers.

Superstition is among the most contested subjects there is, and never more so than where careers are concerned. It sounds unbelievable, and these rituals have still been part of the story for people who landed the job. Here are the ones that recur.

A glass of water under the bed

Kept there the night before an interview. Those who study the habit connect it to the old and widespread belief in the power of water, and some hold that water carries positive energy which helps a person find work and arrive at success sooner.

Lucky clothes

The belief that a particular outfit brings a good outcome, and that another will bring a poor one.

This one is tied to the idea of personal energy, and it has an odd extension: that anyone who wore the garment before you may have charged it, favourably or otherwise.

Fasting for sixteen Mondays

Monday in Hinduism belongs to Lord Shiva, who is associated with wisdom. The practice of fasting for sixteen consecutive Mondays is widely kept, on the understanding that devotion paid to Shiva assists a person’s professional life.

Keeping silent

A great many job seekers say nothing at all about a possible offer until it has become a settled fact.

Of everything on this list, this is the one that looks most reasonable. Announcing a thing before it exists invites the retelling of it if it falls through, and there is nothing supernatural about preferring to avoid that.

What to actually do

Three pieces of advice come attached, and none of them requires believing in any of the above.

Support matters at every stage of a life, so gather the support of your friends and your family, and then start looking properly.

A strategy failing is not the same as you failing. Some failures are there to shape the person who goes through them.

And for the superstitious: if you have a charm and it seems to work, there is no reason to change your habits. A ritual that steadies you before you walk into a room has done something real, whatever the mechanism.

You will have noticed that some people move through life easily and seem to get ahead regardless of what is happening around them. They turn up as entrepreneurs, artists, innovators, leaders, motivators.

For most people, a good deal of what they would like to do does not fit the life they currently lead. There is no shortage of reasons why you should not attempt to make your life extraordinary. Very few of them are good enough to actually stop you.

Be more confident

Drop the shyness. You are extraordinary and it would help if you knew it.

Confident people carry an assurance that gives them an edge. It comes from understanding your own competence and the value you provide, and from being at ease with yourself in full knowledge of both your strengths and your weaknesses. Convey that to others without tipping into arrogance.

The physical side helps more than it should. Exercise, dress better, and use the open postures that read as confidence, arms out rather than folded in.

Watch who you let into your life

Your energy rises or falls with the task, the company you keep while doing it, and who else is in the room.

Where the people you have allowed close drain you and leave you exhausted, remove them. Where they energise you and leave you ready to go, keep them near and draw on that. It is the difference between achieving more and slowly running down.

Tell the truth

Honesty can be frightening and difficult. Telling it sets you apart from most people, and it also sets you free, because you never have to worry about contradicting yourself or keep track of which version you gave to whom.

A reputation for honesty follows, and people notice and start returning it. Begin today and do not stop. Tell it to yourself as well as to others. Tell it when it is easy and when it is not, because that is what shows you are serious about living honestly.

Practise mindfulness

Mindfulness means paying attention and staying aware of what is around you.

Life moves fast and more of us need to stop hurrying through it and stop doing four things at once. Slow down and notice where you actually are.

Smile and laugh more

This is the simplest of the lot and you can add it today.

Genuinely extraordinary people often seem happy for the plain reason that they decided to be. Optimists, who look at the brighter side instead of wallowing in what is wrong. A well-lived life is full of humour, and humour is the flipside of tragedy.

Laughter leaves a person looking younger and more appealing, and it lowers stress, which is not a small return for something free. Better still, it is contagious. It spreads to the people around you and brightens their lives too.

Happiness beats spending your years in regret, craving what you do not have. We all want it, and we work at it daily, hoping for one true moment of the genuine article. Here are the simple ways in.

Notice the smallest things

A big house is not required. Nor a large salary, nor some grand gift. The little things carry more of it than people expect.

The smell of freshly cut grass. Wet sand. A cool breeze, gentle sunshine, a heartfelt hug, a genuine smile. A good meal, a proper night’s sleep, a hot cup of tea, an absorbing book, or simply some quiet time alone. Any of these can bring real joy.

Find satisfaction

Try not to see the glass as half empty as a matter of habit. There comes a point where you have to stop and ask why you keep postponing your own happiness.

Peace will not arrive while you remain permanently discontented with what you already have. Pause, and find contentment in what you already have.

Let the small things go

One of the easiest routes to happiness is refusing to let little things bother you. Cling to every fault you can see around you and it will never arrive.

Meditate

Meditation calms the mind, allows you to look inward, and focuses you on your own strength. It trains the mind to walk away from what is negative and move towards what is positive.

There is a side effect worth knowing. As you become a more positive person you start attracting others who are themselves at peace.

Learn to forgive

Letting go of old grudges and old anger is essential rather than optional. You have to learn to forgive other people and to forgive yourself.

It is only after summoning that strength and that courage that a peaceful mind becomes available.

Hand happiness to others

Nothing will make you happier than making someone else happy. Learn to value the act of giving for its own sake. Make another person glad and your own heart opens; something in you blossoms.

Love yourself

Only once you love yourself do you begin to be at one with yourself. Accepting who you are, and being aware of your own flaws rather than hiding from them, turns you into a more positive person.

It is unreasonable to expect others to find you pleasant while privately disapproving of the person you are.

Lose the expectations

A great deal of sadness comes from expectations that went unmet. We all hope for things from other people, especially the ones closest to us.

As long as those expectations sit with other people, there will always be a reason to feel let down. Learn to be responsible for your own happiness rather than depending on anyone else to supply it.

And let the anger go

Holding a grudge, or holding on to anger of any kind, produces nothing except resentment. Dwelling on the past only keeps a better future out of reach.

Hatred is heavy luggage. Put it down.

We live in a society where not being married at twenty-five is treated as something faintly horrible. It is your life, and the decision is yours to take.

Everywhere you go, someone asks the same dreaded thing. When are you going to settle down? It gets annoying, and rolling your eyes only helps for so long.

You might be hustling right now, building your own business or making a success of a nine to five. You might still be discovering who you are. You might simply not have met anyone you would dive into a lifelong commitment with. There are a great many reasons not to settle down just yet, or ever.

You are still discovering yourself

This is the stretch of life where you have the independence to do whatever you want, which is exactly why it should be spent on you.

Take up a hobby. Look after animals. Work for a cause. Right now you are your own project, so find out what your strengths are, find out where you are weak, and then work on it. The version of you in ten years will be grateful for the time.

You have not seen the world yet

Travel, which is probably the best advice anyone will ever give you. The world is beautiful and you deserve to see it.

Go on your own at least once, because a journey taken alone teaches things no job and no university can. Go with your friends, because you will regret it if you never did. And go with your parents, so they can see the world the way you see it.

You want to have fun

Set aside the serious, well-argued reasons for a moment. Perhaps you simply want to enjoy your life at the moment.

Nights out. Weekends away, alone or with the people you like best. Meeting new people, and kissing a fair number of frogs before you settle on one. Go and do it. That is reason enough on its own.

Learning to be on your own

Before you can be with somebody, you have to know how to be by yourself. This matters most for anyone who has moved from one relationship straight into the next without a gap.

You need to enjoy your own company and to be at peace with yourself. In short, be your own person first.

You are hustling

Running your own business, or keeping up with a demanding job, means working all hours, socialising when you would rather not, and stepping out of your comfort zone repeatedly. It may mean travelling somewhere far at short notice because an opportunity appeared.

Focus on the career first and the rest follows. Be comfortable in your own life before you start wondering who might fit into it.

The distinction worth keeping

Every woman should be independent, married or single. Handling your own successes and your own mistakes is probably the most useful lesson available in a life, so learn the whole of it. The cooking, the driving, the changing of a bulb.

Do that, and when the right person does walk in, he arrives as something you want rather than something you need.

Being settled was never the same thing as being married. It means being independent.

Every year on 15 March the consumer movement marks World Consumer Rights Day, to raise awareness of what consumers are owed, to demand that those rights are respected, and to protest the market abuses and social injustices that undermine them.

The date comes from a speech. On 15 March 1962 President John F Kennedy sent a special message to the US Congress in which he formally addressed consumer rights, the first world leader to do so. The movement first marked the date in 1983 and has used it since to mobilise action on particular issues and campaigns.

Six rights are worth knowing by name.

The right to safety

Protection against goods and services that are hazardous to life and property. What you buy should meet your immediate need and also serve your long term interest. Before purchasing, insist on quality and on the guarantee, and prefer products carrying a recognised quality mark such as ISI or AGMARK.

The right to be informed

You are entitled to know the quality, quantity, potency, purity, standard and price of what you are being sold. This is what protects you against unfair trade practice.

Insist on the full information before you choose. That is what lets a person act wisely and responsibly, and it is the surest defence against high pressure selling.

The right to choose

Access, wherever possible, to a variety of goods and services at competitive prices. Where a monopoly exists, it means the right to satisfactory quality and to service priced fairly. The right also covers access to basic goods and services.

There is a subtlety here worth noticing. An unrestricted right for a minority to choose can mean the majority is denied its fair share. The right works best in a genuinely competitive market.

The right to be heard

Consumer interests must receive due consideration at the appropriate forums, and consumers are entitled to representation in bodies formed to consider their welfare.

The practical route is organisation. Consumers should form associations that are neither political nor commercial, because those are the bodies that government and others can give a seat on a committee.

The right to seek redressal

Redress against unfair trade practice and against unscrupulous exploitation, including fair settlement of a genuine grievance.

Which requires the complaint to actually be made. An individual grievance is often small in money terms, and that is precisely why people let it go. The impact of the same practice across a whole society can be very large indeed.

The right to consumer education

The right to acquire the knowledge and skill to be an informed consumer throughout life.

This is the one that carries the others. Ignorance among consumers, and particularly among rural consumers, is what their exploitation mainly rests on. Rights that a person does not know about are not rights in any practical sense, and rights that are known but never exercised come to the same thing.

Only when people know what they are owed, and use it, does consumer protection actually arrive.

Anyone who reads widely in self-improvement eventually meets an uncomfortable pattern: you can understand an idea completely and still not live it. You have read the books, you can explain the concepts better than most — and nothing has actually changed. This is not a knowledge problem. It is the gap between knowing and doing.

Why sharp minds get stuck here

Understanding feels like progress. A fresh insight gives a real little hit of satisfaction, and the quicker your mind, the faster that hit arrives — so completely that the nervous system relaxes as if the work were already done. It is not. Reading about a practice, noting it, even imagining it, are all still just knowing. Only doing is doing.

The bridge: one small practice

The way across is smaller than it sounds. Not one more book — one practice at a time. Pick a single act so small it cannot be argued with and so simple it cannot be postponed. One sentence of gratitude each morning, say. Do only that, every day, for thirty days without missing. The content of the sentence barely matters; what matters is that you prove to yourself you finish what you start.

Drop the old story

And let go of the “I should have done more by now” story — it is a quiet excuse that uses the past to justify not starting today. You do not need more wisdom. You need implementation: daily, unremarkable, non-negotiable. Everything else is built on that one proof.

A quietly useful idea from the health sessions: each organ has its own language, and it speaks to you through the habits it thrives on. Give it the habit it prefers and it does its job; ignore that habit and it eventually complains. Here is the short phrasebook.

The map

The heart prefers a daily walk. The brain prefers quality sleep, not just any sleep. The lungs prefer deep, deliberate breathing. The bones prefer weight-bearing effort — walking, squats, climbing stairs. The blood prefers plain water, taken daily. The gut prefers foods rich in the good bacteria of probiotics. Muscles prefer resistance work at least twice a week, not cardio alone. The nervous system prefers meditation. Memory prefers being made to learn something new. The skin prefers daily protection from the sun. The immune system, like the brain, prefers good sleep.

The principle underneath

None of these is dramatic, and that is the point. Health here is less about occasional big interventions than about listening to each system through the ordinary habit it responds to, and giving it that habit often enough to count. Pick one organ, give it its favourite habit this week, and let the list grow from there.

If your enterprise is to thrive and grow rather than die young, five things are worth holding as commandments. They are what carry a venture up towards success and reputation, and the first of them is the one nobody enjoys hearing.

Be ready for trouble

The army has a saying about this. Every plan holds right up until boots touch the ground.

However well you have prepared, things will go wrong, and not modestly. The supplier you built the schedule around will let you down. The employee you trusted most will not appear for work. The client who guaranteed you your opening project will discover, apologetically, that his hands are tied. The agency that sold you miracles will prove unreliable in the week you needed it.

Expect the lot, and more besides. Why endure it? Because the idea has hold of you, and because whatever arrives, you have already decided to come through. So persist. There is something beautiful on the far side of the mess. Hold on and it is yours.

Discipline

When everything around you is chaotic, discipline is the thing keeping its shape.

It is what stops you being carried off by whatever is loudest that morning, and what keeps the hours going into the few matters that decide the outcome. Ventures rarely fail for want of effort. They fail for want of direction for it.

Lead, and belong to the team

The exceptional ones spend their time making other people believe in themselves. Through appreciation, through encouragement, by building the supports somebody needs, and by developing the person rather than merely spending them.

What comes back is out of proportion to it. People reach past what the job asked. They put their names to things in public. They close ranks when matters go badly instead of quietly leaving. They startle everybody with how hard they work. They fix more than was ever handed to them. And all of it carries devotion in it, and a sense that the thing belongs to them, which by then it does.

Being able to hear feedback

No mother enjoys hearing that her baby is plain, and a founder holds an idea in very much that way.

Without noticing, what gets hunted is agreement, and what gets avoided is the only information capable of helping. Yet criticism is precisely what develops a business idea rather than merely defending it. The ego has to be set down so that the useful version can be taken in, because that is what corrects the errors early and lets you steer around a pitfall you can already see coming.

Hard work, with nothing in place of it

There is no way around this one, and every successful person tells the same stories. The nights without sleep. The work begun before daylight because no other hour existed.

It asks for effort, endurance, dedication and a portion of luck, in any endeavour at all. So tighten your belt. Make room for a great deal of coffee. Set aside any idea of balance between work and life until you are standing steadily on your own feet, and prepare to burn the midnight oil.

Positivity makes an optimist of a person, and an optimist spends far less of the day on worry and on the thoughts that circle. Build the habit and you become happier company, someone whose eye goes to the brighter side of a thing and who assumes the best is on its way.

The word to notice is build. This is not a temperament issued at birth to the lucky. Take it up as a way of living and the ordinary business of the day gets easier to carry, and useful changes start arriving in the life around it. Here is what it actually gives you.

The aura effect

You will have heard this put loosely elsewhere, and there is something to it. What you genuinely want begins finding its way to you.

Part of that is simply company. Decide to be positive and you drift towards people who have decided the same thing, or better still towards people who are further along than you and pull you up. Some of the others you convert. You help them notice what is worth noticing in a situation they had already given up on.

That is not a small service to perform. It is how peace gets carried into a vast and troubled galaxy, one person at a time.

Days of fun and folly

This one is close to obvious once you say it. Look only at what is good in a situation and you can pull that good out of surroundings that are mostly bad.

Even through a season of grief there is a flicker of something better somewhere in the day, and locating it is what lets a good day start at all. Not a perfect one. One that began well rather than badly, and then another behind it.

The best thing you can pass to anybody is exactly that. Be positive, then watch the day follow suit.

For a glass half full

An optimistic outlook lets you picture the world as a cheerful place, and anyone who pictures it that way finds something to be glad about wherever he happens to be standing.

It also turns you into a supply of happiness for the people nearby. The optimist lifts others without being asked and works for their good almost out of habit, and that is welcome news for everyone within reach of him.

There is a practical dividend as well. More ways open up to involve yourself with other people, and you take your share of the pleasure of a thoroughly merry world.

Where it starts

Not with a resolution, which is gone by Thursday. With one ordinary situation today, and the decision to look for what is good in it before cataloguing what is wrong.

Repeat that often enough and it stops being a decision at all and becomes simply the way you see. Which is the whole of the method, and the reason the question is how to gain the attitude rather than whether you were born holding it.