Because a really good read is a commencement speech delivered by Adrian Tan. One of his advices: Fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

And that is just the end part of a text filled with some great quotes:
"I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them."

"Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live."

"Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence."

"It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong."

Oh, man.
We got another truth of the day delivered this morning by Jimmy Twin. "I would chose you anytime, but you must be aware that the world has apparent problems with appreciation."

Because you order a no-room grand drip coffee (medium black coffee) every morning and more than 60% of the times, they get the order wrong. And you can not think how someone could get a simple coffee order wrong. So, you tried various tactics to place the order by changing sequence of words and pauses. They were:

1. Grande drip, (pause) no room
2. Drip coffee (pause) no room, grande size
3. Grande, no room (pause) drip
4. Grande drip no room-no pause
5. Grande no room drop-no pause
6. No room, grande drip-no pause
7. No room (long pause-count 123 in your head) grande (short pause-count 1 in your head) drip

Number 7 is the winner! If you follow 7, you have the highest likelihood of getting the medium black coffee you want.

And because you've attended our second favourite institution of learning (not counting life itself) Singularity University, who challenges all their students to have a positive impact on 1 billion people withing 10 years of launching their projects. And because at some point it will be a good idea to fall in love.

Although clearly beautiful, we are slightly sceptical to the choice of sweater. Maybe you made a minor error in the closet, or as our old American man of choice, Russ Ackoff, would say:

One never learns from doing things right because, obviously, one already knows how to do it. What one derives from doing something right is confirmation of what one already knows. This has value, but it is not learning. One can only learn from mistakes, by identifying and correcting them. But all through school and in most places of employment we are taught that making mistakes is a bad thing. Therefore, we try to hide or deny those we make. To the extent we succeed, we preclude learning. Furthermore, there are two types of mistakes: errors of commission, doing something we should not have done; and errors of omission, not doing something we should have done.

Needless to say, a theory much applicable to the field of romance too.

It is wonderful to once again dream of forests filled with wild animals instead of google docs.

During our siesta yesterday, we had relocated to a South African farm with a man who found us, completely lost, crying in the woods and whos arms felt like the missing puzzle piece that made life complete. We have never felt a more sublime feeling, wild horses were running across the hills and nothing else mattered.

Tonight, slightly less magical, we dreamt that a guy we think we like, but who never replies to text messages, had a big argument with his girlfirend at the table next to our family's at a luxury hotel in Tokyo. He stood up at looked us in the eye and said, very intoxicated, "Ah, you! I didn't mention my girlfirend because I wasn't sure about what was going on, but now it's over. And I guess you understand by now why I haven't called you."

Maybe it is a disturbing sign that life is more exciting when you are asleep. But as long as some hours of the day is filled with adventure, we're happy.

It always reassuring to find our thoughts put to words by Nobel prize winners. Love in the time of cholera is an wonderful example of the genius of Gabriel García Márques and the human race's infinite and eternal search for passion.

From the first moonlit night, both of them broke their hearts in the fierce love of inexperience. But Angeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner's cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs was a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival. With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse."

I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

Although, we dissmissed this book as American-bestseller-chick-lit-crap at first, we soon came to appreciate its greatness, if not that of Miss Gilbert herself. One of the girls found it a suiting topic for a wintertime tea break, and as most things concerning optimism and romance, in our world it is timeless.