Heart of Gratitude

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: “I am blind, please help.” There were only a few coins in the hat.

A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, “Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?”

The man said, “I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.”I wrote: “Today is a beautiful day but I cannot see it.”Both signs told people that the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people that they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

Moral of the Story: Be thankful for what you have... Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively.When life gives you a 100 reasons to cry, show life that you have 1000 reasons to smile. Face your past without regret. Handle your present with confidence. Prepare for the future without fear. Keep the faith and drop the fear.The most beautiful thing is to see a person smiling…And even more beautiful, knows that you are the reason behind it.

Many people will say that economics is boring and economists are dull. Even economics students themselves are among those silly wet blankets, complaining about the course contributes nothing to their career and fame. See, this is one of the severe problems of Malaysian mindset; they categorize and rank the education courses according to whether blue or white collar, salary, and others’ mouth. This type of thinking will actually impair the development of knowledge. Since we judge the course’ possible profitability, we will be also judged by those TIMES university ranking and so on and you can stop wondering why local universities were low-ranked.

Despite the fact that there are a lot of naysayers, there are a lot of cheerleaders in our life too. Just like the story above, there are few person who actually walking by and tell me that economics textbooks are wonderful! Ms Low from St John Institution, Dr Lau, Dr Yew, and Puan Natasya from University of Malaya, thank god =)