Author: Andrea Grassi

if you go for the race, you’ll fight on an uneven terrain.
Go for where your passion is. Spend time where your love is.
Make life worth it

The hardest part of life is to learn to not judge and understand what’s behind a choice.
While it is easy for us to judge others we are not incline to do the same to us, we tend to be protective of our choice, partly because we spent so much time on them that we want to keep them valuable.

But wouldn’t it be better to remove ego from the equation?
Sometimes we judge to prove a statement and it’s hard to learn from it. We get stuck.
The tricky thing is that even if we thing we aren’t judging, then we are.
Maybe in a more subtle way, but we still are judging.

The whole point of this post is that as I notice other people judging and discussing thanks to ego, I have to pause and reflect.
Because when you see it in other people, chances are you’ve got it too, and I’m no exception.

The only way to learn is to doubt yourself.

There’s a good rule I follow when I need help and it’s all about what kind of help I need.

If I feel like I can clearly ask what I need, then I ask it.
That’s it.
I ask for help explaining why I need it and how would I benefit.

However this is not always ideal. Sometimes you can’t ask directly.
In those cases I prefer to explain what would I need, but I won’t ask.
If the person in front of me wants to help me that’s fine. Otherwise I’ll live up with the consequences. I’ll figure it out.
In the extreme case I need help but can’t/won’t ask for it, I may additionally ask “what do you think?” to be sure that it’s clear that I care about the question.

Asking for help is human and it’s one of the most sweet things a person can ask to you because when you ask, you become vulnerable.

Our opinions are not set in stone, in fact they change quite a lot and it’s our duty to learn and listen to the change in the world (and even inside ourselves) that make those opinions outdated.

Today I changed one of my opinions about a product (OpenShift). I thought it was too complex and it wasn’t.
I was simply lazy to learn, to understand, to get moving.

Sometimes we need time to re-evaluate our positions, time and humility.
Because when you reevaluate you first say that you were wrong, or that it’s good to give a second chance.
And it’s not in our human nature to give second chances, we prefer to have a fixed world where everything stays the same. This is because we don’t like to go outside our comfort zone and a second chance is exactly going out of our comfort zone again to confirm what?

To confirm that the world is wide and unknown. That things change fast, that we have used many second chances and therefore we should grant second chances as much as possible even if it doesn’t add up value.

Every passion you have asks for a tradeoff, a price to pay for its execution.
Even when the price seems low the lowest thing it can ask is your time.

It’s common to say that time is money, but it’s much more than that. Time is life, is your life.

Your passions ask at least, time.
What to do then when your passions are not truly understood?
The price naturally goes higher because now you feel like you’re “wasting” time.

But to follow them a choice must be made. You either accept the fact that you’ll have to do your own thing or go with what the world ask for you.

From time to time you’ll have to say no to follow your passion. Not because you’re selfish, but because that is the price to pay to follow the passion.
You can’t just say “today I pass”, because otherwise that passion will diminish, will disappear, and the only way to let it grow is to nourish it every single day.