Many civil servants or individuals are under going further studies either full time or through distance learning offered by various institutions of higher learning in the country or overseas. The latter becoming more popular among matured working adults. I am included joining those in an adventure in learning. A number of you who are pursuing your studies, and I, being a new graduate member of Sarawak's State Civil Service. I would suggest, too, that as we begin this new adventure most of us have the ability to succeed and that we are motivated to do our best.

It seems to me as we embark on this exciting experience - or continue it for that matter - there are few things that we need to keep in mind. This is no less true at which University you are in or what department/position you are from.

First off, how well do we manage our time? Most people, in and out of education, could improve in the management of time. There is a great variance between how we think we spend our time and how we actually spend it. Time, after all, is a very precious commodity. It is something that cannot be purchased or even rented. It is perishable and cannot be stored. In short, when it is gone it is gone. It is regrettable, then, that so many of us end up by wasting time and we rationalize by saying "If I had more time, I would read that book, or attend that lecture or seminar, write that chapter or even write that letter."

Have you tried time analysis or made a study of the use of your time? It not, try and keep an accurate log of your activities and the amount of time actually devoted to them. I am not talking about how you recall having spent time or how you imagine what you did with your time, but what you actually did with it. You may be amazed with your findings.

It is also a helpful exercise now and then to 'prune' the time-wasters. If you are like me, there are always a few things to prune. Think of the things that need not be done at all. Think of the things that are almost totally unproductive. Think of those pursuits that might be accomplished in half the time. By the same token, consider those matters that actually demand more time but we can only give them pieces and dribbles because the big chunks of time have been used.

Some of us may have begun this fresh educational adventure with more in the way of intellectual endowment than others. Some may enjoy more robust health and greater financial security, but there is one area in which everyone in the civil service community is equally endowed. Each of us has 168 hours in a week. How well are we going to manage our time?

There is another ingredient that is quite important if we are to successfully complete the journey we have started. How much 'frustration tolerance' do we have? Now that is a relatively new term for describing an age-old state of mind. The term frustration' comes from the Latin frustra and it means 'in vain'. It means to be blocked by circumstances, which seem to be beyond our control. It means wanting something which, for the time being, appears to be beyond our grasp.

Does this all sound familiar? For example, there is that thesis chapter that you thought was nearly ready for approval but your academic supervisor had other ideas. There were those credits that you thought met all the academic requirements but school officials disagreed. There is that menace called "writer's block" which has raised its ugly head again. No need to mention if your boss is not supportive or inconsiderate kind. And on and on.

In reaction to such frustrations, and a thousand more like them, we can behave more like them, we can behave as some cats behave in some of the familiar psychological experiments. We can react with neurotic hostility; we can find a convenient "scapegoat" and vent our hostility on a person or thing. It can be another student, a fellow officer, an administrator, or an entire institution. Or again, we can react with defeatism and despair. We can fall all over ourselves in self-pity and behave in a manner that resembles "kittenish helplessness".

Finally, we can try every known means of escape - we can change colleges, change jobs, chuck it all, get drunk, or do a line. It is well to keep in mind, however, the advice of the old Dutch housewife to the young teacher in Edna Ferber's So Big, "You can't run away from life, Missy, you can't run away far enough."

Aristotle once observed that a person could not be happy in an instant; the possession of happiness takes a lifetime. The same is true with education. There is no such thing as education in an instant. It is a long, slow, arduous process. There are no shortcuts. There is no substitute for hard work, dedication, practice, patience and endurance. It might be as well to recall the instruction of the tennis coach to a beginner in tennis. "Keep your eye on the ball." Or, again, to the player who has the good fortune to play at Wimbledon, "Forget the crowd, forget the bad call, forget the error you just made, concentrate on winning the next point."

There is yet another question that is of the utmost importance in any academic quest. Are we prepared to engage in critical thinking? A university experience should be an opportunity for the testing and retesting of ideas. It should enable us to improve ourselves in distinguishing between propaganda and fact. This is admittedly no simple exercise for from the cradle to the grave we are bombarded by a constant stream of half-truths and downright falsehoods and "unlearning" is difficult. Moreover, there are times when we prefer the comfort and security of the status quo. Leo Robson, an eminent social scientist once said, "One of the difficulties is that people want the answer to a problem and they want the answer simple, incontrovertible, absolute, permanent, and universal. Men can't stand uncertainty. They want certainties because they need reassurance against their own uncertainty, their anxieties, their own fear of the unknown and they have never come to terms with the horrifying fact that some things may never be known but life can go on with honor and in truth. People react violently when someone asks them to restructure their model of reality or truths."

To me, the function of the thinker, of the scholar, the philosopher, the scientist and the teacher is to challenge what seems foolish or more irrational, or wicked, or even opposite, to search for the truth no matter where it leads and to try to find that it is, not what you want it to be, or hope it to be, or prefer it to be. To be an intellectual means that you have made a deep commitment of yourself, to love ideas, to examine and explore, and test it and even try to find the conditions or the experimental conditions in which your ideas can be shown to be not true. We who search for truths and for wisdom ultimately must come to the conclusion that wisdom consists of the capacity to confront disturbing ideas, even intolerable ideas, with openness.

A pair of final points for us to keep in mind as we conduct our adventure in learning: It is not just how hard we work at our task but how well. I am told that Swiss watchmakers don't rely on cheaper prices to meet competition, nor do they rely on lower labor costs. Rather, they turn out a somewhat better watch.

Finally, remain intellectually curious and willing to learn. Michaelangelo, while working on one of his last pieces of art said, "I am still learning." I suspect this expresses rather well the mission of Sarawak State Civil Service.