Hedonist and the Rat-Racer

I am a great believer in "learning through reading" in consistent basis. Occasionally, I hope to share with you some of the interesting articles that i bumped into. Well, the story starts with this:

Dr Ben-Shahar, a former Israeli squash champion, is a lecturer at Harvard University's most popular course: Positive Psychology. I'm sure what he teaches must apply in some way to entrepreneurship.

He talks about two extremely opposite personality types who cannot find happiness: what he calls the Hedonist and the Rat-Racer.

The Hedonist lives only for the moment –– for instant gratification –– but ultimately finds it an empty existence, from never building towards anything concrete. The Rat-Racer delays gratification, working hard for the future and making many sacrifices that cause unhappiness, believing that happiness and fulfilment will arrive once he or she finishes university, or gets a promotion to a better position, or earns so much money that life becomes more fun. (Ben-Shahar also talks about the Nihilist: someone who's given up on finding happiness in both the present and the future. We all know some of those.)

Ben-Shahar says we should seek the middle ground between the Hedonist and the Rat-Racer: to live in, and enjoy, the present moment, while working towards sustainable future happiness. Easier said than done, perhaps.

Ok. it seems pretty obvious that the "middle ground" between Hedonist and the Rat-Racer is the perfect category that we should strive for; my question is: what shall we name the "middle ground"? I haven't got a clue yet. Let me know if you have an idea.

Welcome to Mapdooblog!

Mapdoo is a few days short of half a year old since its official inception and today is definitely a special day as I’m really excited and honored to write our first blog post. At Mapdoo, our objective is to build the leading location search engine and we strived to "bringing you to places". We are focused on organizing Malaysia's information and making it universally accessible and useful through the maps, and the Mapdoo Maps Beta service is a giant step forward in helping users to find the local information they need. We are convinced that searching for places shouldn’t be a miserable experience. Mapping system and information about places should be made lively available to everyone for free. Through this blog, we want to share with you some interesting perspectives from inside and outside of Mapdoo and to ask for your feedback to help us achieve this goal.

We’ve been planning on having a blog for some time, but unfortunately we have not had enough resources and team in place to do it effectively. Also the major part of the reasons we were not able to launch a blog sooner was mostly due to the focus of everyone in Mapdoo is pushing tirelessly for the introduction of Mapdoo Maps Beta soon (yes... soft-launching real soon!). However due to the limited resources i'm afraid we couldn’t devote the time to blogging regularly. Anyway I see the need to start off conversations through the blog between Mapdoo employees, our future users and the mapping industry to share our thoughts on the world of location search engine, and to give our readers some inside perspectives on Mapdoo.

We look forward to you joining us on what is going to be a fascinating journey.