Author: Andrea Grassi

Things will go wrong, but don’t ever forget the amazing times when everyone was there to support you.

They believed in you, and so should you.

I remember talking with a dear friend about how we should approach “saying something that arise various complex implications” to someone.

It’s not easy, it’s even more difficult when the stakes are high and it’s not an uncommon situation.

To be honest, I don’t think we can find a true solution, a 1 click shortcut, but there are lots of things we can do to improve how we say things to people.
2 Books really helped me going through this topic, one is “Difficult conversation”, which is a really great book about this type of discussions, and the other one (audio) is the power of vulnerability by Brenè Brown.

Both books teach you something meaningful about interacting with other people, and what I’ve learned from them is that we must share as much as possible and be open and honest.

By sharing as much as possible I mean sharing our pains, our fears, our problem.
When we say something, when we ask something, we always do it for a reason.
Going to someone and asking without explaining that reason is selfish. Why would anyone give their precious time and effort towards something they don’t know?

Even though you’re friends, you should share, because it’s not that uncommon to ignore this advice just because we’re friends, but ignoring it will eventually lead to the same problems.

The other advice is to be open and honest, to not fake the situation if it’s hard, to not make things seem easy.

Thinking about it, there’s also another book that influenced me how I approach this kind of issues and it’s “How to win friends and influence people”.
Many things in this book might seem manipulative (and some of them are), but I like to think that it’s how you use them that make the difference.

One thing this book taught me was to allow others to take the decision.
We are used to be the one in control, but what if you allow the other part to decide, by putting them into the right mindset?

You should also be able to accept any results if it doesn’t go as planned, but I personally found out that if you honestly open yourself to others and show them what you care about and what they care about and let them decide it’s amazing how things go.

It kinda reminds me of one post about removing the ego, and it sounds exactly like this.
Removing the ego allows you to remove many needs, like the need to be right.

I will go to japan again later this year and I can’t avoid thinking how much the web hasn’t evolved for many of the japanese websites I saw when I first decided to visit it.

It’s really curious to see that many websites still in a 1980’s look.
It was curious back then, 6 years ago, but now? With all the fast paced growth of the web, layouts and ux improvements, seeing many japan websites retain that old style is sure strange.

I wonder why, maybe there’s a lot of room to grow, or maybe they’re just working (so why fix it in the first place, like craigslist).
Who knows.

Some years ago I was very skeptical of marketing and to some extent I still am.
But after reading Ogilvy “On Advertising” I discovered the many faces of marketing, the good one and the bad one.

Given the fact that the practical goal of marketing is to increase revenue (well, usually), it’s easy as a marketer to choose a shortcut that will boost the revenue in the short term.
Many people in the world do this and I don’t believe it’s only because of marketing.

The “shortcut” is something we see very often, think of politics.
It’s easy to say that we will stop doing war, we will lower taxes and give 1000$ to each unemployed.
Time will then come and show how this claim was impossible to realize in the given time.
Promotions like this are the same thing: shortcuts.

Shortcuts are at the essence of bad marketing and, if I think more widely, to bad behavior in general.
Shortcuts when used in conjunction with relationships might lead to “saying things without explaining”, leading to misinterpretation.
Shortcuts when used in any work might produce results, yes, but might not be sustainable in the long term.

I know…. not every shortcut is necessarily bad, but a shortcut is, by definition, “A means of saving time and effort”.
And while I recognize that saying “Shortcuts are evil” is an over-generalization, I truly believe that we are too much accustomed to bad marketing that we believe shortcuts are a necessary evil.

They are not, shortcuts often deprive us from the joy of learning and improving because you don’t allow learning do go deep into your thinking, you don’t materialize your learning into some actual thing you can apply.
You only know the shortcut, not the general rule.

Getting back to the topic of marketing, good marketing, yesterday I was pleased to see the video ad for google translate .
This is good marketing, it enlighten you, it gives you power, it shows you how you can do more and be more, removing the blocks you have in life.