bullbearnme

Some books find readers because of the circumstances in which they were written. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow, a short nonfiction book built around a university talk given by a professor who knew his time was limited, and at what readers can take from it about gratitude, childhood dreams and how we choose to spend our days. What the book is The Last Lecture is a work of nonfiction co-written by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal columnist. It was published by Hyperion in April 2008. The book grew out of a lecture Pausch gave at Carnegie Mellon on 18 September 2007, titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. By then he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had been told that his illness was terminal. Zaslow was in the audience that day and wrote about the talk in his new...

Not every motivational book is long, practical or packed with research. Some of the most memorable ones are short stories that leave you with a single image to carry around. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a brief allegorical fable about a seagull who cares more about learning to fly well than about fitting in, and about what readers can take from it for everyday practice, curiosity and self-belief. What the book is Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a novella by the American author Richard Bach. It was first published in book form in 1970 by Macmillan, with black-and-white photographs of seagulls in flight by the photographer Russell Munson. It arrived with little advertising, yet by the end of 1972 it had reached the top of bestseller lists, largely through word of mouth. A film adaptation directed by Hall Bartlett followed in 1973. In 2014 the book was reissued as Jonathan Livingston...

Some books motivate through quick wins and clever tips. Others motivate by showing how a person held on to a purpose across decades, through setbacks that would have broken most of us. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, a long but rewarding book about patience, conviction and the slow, steady work of building a better future. What the book is Long Walk to Freedom is the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid leader who later became the country's first democratically elected president. It was first published in 1994, the same year Mandela took office, and it covers his life from his childhood in the rural Eastern Cape through his education, his work as a lawyer and activist, his long imprisonment and his release in February 1990, up to the period around South Africa's first fully democratic elections. The book has an unusual history. Mandela b...

Some motivational books push us to do more. Others ask a quieter question: are we spending our time on what actually matters? In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie, a short memoir that has stayed popular for decades because it turns big questions about work, relationships and time into conversations anyone can follow. What the book is Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson is a memoir by the American writer Mitch Albom, first published by Doubleday in August 1997. At the time, Albom was best known as a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press. The book went on to become a number-one New York Times bestseller and, according to the author's own website, has been published in 45 languages. It was later adapted into an Emmy-winning television film starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria, and into a stage play. The book is about Morrie Schwartz, a sociology ...

Some books motivate by telling us to dream big. Others do it by showing what a big idea looks like once it meets wind, salt water and daily routine. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, a classic true adventure that still has useful things to say about planning, courage, teamwork and keeping an open mind about whether we were right. What the book is Kon-Tiki is a work of narrative nonfiction by the Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. It was first published in Norway in November 1948 as Kon-Tiki ekspedisjonen, and an English translation by F. H. Lyon followed in 1950. English editions have appeared under titles such as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas and Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. The Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo describes it as the best-selling book ever written by a Norwegian author, translated into more than 70 languages. The book is Heyerdahl's own first-pers...

Some of the most encouraging books are not about winning at all, but about how people kept learning when nobody was watching. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at David McCullough's The Wright Brothers, a biography that offers a grounded, practical kind of motivation about curiosity, careful testing and steady work over many years. What the book is The Wright Brothers by David McCullough was published by Simon & Schuster in May 2015. It is nonfiction, a biography of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers from Dayton, Ohio, who made the first powered, controlled flights of a heavier-than-air machine with a pilot aboard, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in December 1903. McCullough, who won the Pulitzer Prize twice for earlier biographies, built this book on the Wright Papers, including diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence. That source base shapes the book. Rathe...

Some of the most motivating books are not written as self-help at all. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, a work of narrative history that offers a steady, grounded kind of encouragement about skill, patience and doing careful work even when few people are watching. What the book is Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race was published by William Morrow in September 2016. It is nonfiction, built on archival documents, interviews and years of research. Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, near the NASA Langley Research Center, and she has explained that she knew many of the families connected to the laboratory before she understood how much of its history had gone untold. The book follows several Black women who worked as "computers" at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, known as NACA, ...

Motivational books often promise that a single idea will change everything, and the better ones are more honest than that. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at Angela Duckworth's Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, a popular psychology book that is genuinely useful when it is read as a set of thoughtful ideas rather than a magic formula. What the book is Grit was published by Scribner in 2016. Its author, Angela Duckworth, is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Before her research career she worked as a management consultant and taught mathematics in public schools, and she has said that teaching is where she first noticed that the students who did best were not always the ones who seemed most naturally gifted. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013, and her TED talk on grit, given the same year, became one of the most widely watched talks on the platform. The book is narrative nonfiction mixed with resear...

Motivation does not always arrive through biographies or self-help books. Sometimes it comes from a novel that is simply fun to read and happens to model a useful way of thinking. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at Andy Weir's The Martian as a story about calm, methodical problem-solving, and at how a reader can take something practical from it without pretending a thriller is a manual for life. What kind of book The Martian is The Martian is a science fiction novel and Andy Weir's debut. It has an unusual publishing history that is worth knowing because it says something about persistence in its own right. After struggling to interest literary agents in earlier work, Weir posted the story chapter by chapter for free on his own website starting around 2011. Readers asked for an e-book, so he put a Kindle edition on sale at the lowest price Amazon allowed. It climbed the science fiction charts, an audiobook deal followed, and...

Some of the most motivating books on a shelf are not self-help titles at all. They are true stories, carefully researched, that show what people actually endured and how they kept going. In this piece, I, Lim Swee Heong, who also writes online as bullbearnme Swee, look at how to read Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken in a way that draws out real perspective on resilience without turning a hard history into a slogan. What kind of book Unbroken is Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a work of narrative nonfiction by Laura Hillenbrand, published by Random House in November 2010. Hillenbrand had earlier written Seabiscuit, and she brings the same style here: a biography built from extensive research and interviews, told with the pacing of a novel. The subject is Louis Zamperini, who grew up in Torrance, California, was a troubled and rebellious boy, and became a gifted distance runner. He competed in the 5,000 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, fini...

I’m Lim Swee Heong, also known online as bullbearnme Swee. Last year, I received private messages on Moomoo from an account whose messages made me uncomfortable. Separately, I have experienced ongoing online harassment for approximately eight to nine months, including allegations, defamation, and disclosure of my personal information without my consent. My friend Tracy Do Thi Lan Anh also had her personal information obtained and disclosed without her consent, after which she experienced harassment alongside me. I believe the suspect was responsible for that disclosure, but responsibility remains a matter for the ongoing legal process. The person messaging me claimed she was connected to a local “stock guru,” said she had a group, and asked whether I had one too. She then repeatedly asked for my personal information. I did not share it, and I reported the account and messages to Moomoo support. I cannot independently verify who operated the messaging account or establish a connec...