Dr Mat: October 2013

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2013/10/25/Budget-facts.aspxhere are some facts about the national budget.

1) The very first Budget speech was delivered on Dec 4, 1955 by then-Malaya's father of independence, Tunku Abdul Rahman and the country's first Prime Minister.

Education was stressed upon in that inaugural budget. Tunku wrote in his As I See It column with The Star, titled "Life before and after Merdeka": "Government has decided to establish a number of residential schools to absorb a number of education-starved boys and give them five years' secondary education. The Government is also doing all it can to assist in the legitimate expansion of the Chinese and Tamil schools, and granting aid to these schools by providing in the estimates of 1956." (Oct 15, 1984)

2) Including Budget 2014, a total of 56 Budgets have been tabled in Parliament since Independence.

3) The previous Budget was tabled in Parliament on Sept 28, 2012.

4) Budget 2014 will be Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak's sixth tabling of the Government budget since holding office of the Finance Minister in 2008.

5) The first Alternative National Budget was launched on Sept 5, 2007 for the year 2008 by the DAP. As for the Opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat, its first Shadow Budget was on Oct 4, 2011.

6) Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad ended his 22-year-old tenure with a bang by delivering a three-hour budget speech in Parliament on Sept 12, 2003. It was reportedly the longest budget address in the august house's then 44-year-old history.

7) The biggest - Budget 2013 tops the list with a total allocation of RM251.6bil ringgit for "the implementation of development projects, programmes and measures, with focus on the well-being of the rakyat and national development."

http://my.news.yahoo.com/7-habits-of-smart-people-050117346.html
What do smart people do? Read on:

1. They set their goals. Smart people don’t have a haphazard way of approaching life. They always set a benchmark and this is what everyone should follow. Only if we know what it is we want to achieve can we take the first step towards it. And the goal setting has to be done at an early age.

2. They have a step-by-step plan to achieve their goals. Setting your goals is not enough. Sometimes we set such ambitious goals for ourselves that we unconsciously start considering them impossible to achieve and lose our interest. And this happens because we want to achieve too much in too little time. This is where smart people think ahead. They realize that though setting highly ambitious goals is practical, but expecting groundbreaking results at the blink of an eye is not. Only when you break your goals into several mini-goals and work towards achieving each of those mini-goals, you can start climbing up the ladder, maybe not vertically but always upwards.

3. They control their impulses. Smart people don’t jump-skip the reasons before taking decision. The deliberateness in their actions is what makes them stand apart from the crowd. A proper thought goes behind every action and even if the decision proves to be wrong, they don’t start regretting and whining over it. ‘Learn from our mistakes’ is what we read and that is what they practice.

4. They know their limits. People burning out to achieve something that is way too far-fetched is a common sight. It is not that successful people restrict their abilities or skills, but they do know the boundaries they can push their abilities to.

5. They don't do anything half-halfheartedly. Starting something with huge enthusiasm and then losing steam mid-way is a trait many suffer. Smart people set their minds on something and endeavour to achieve that with absolute determination.

6. They're good listeners. This is something that doesn’t come easily to many. Listening to others might just be our dose of wisdom that we so crucially need. It gives us a different insight into our personalities and helps us to identify certain mistakes and make amends for the same.

7. They're not discouraged by failure. How many of us know how to deal with failure? Very few. We all have plans to cope with the most despairing of situations, but when those situations do arise; all those plans go out of the window. This is where smart people serve a lesson for us. They do fail, but they know how to create new beginnings.