Thoughts about changing, life, and whatever comes to mind.
Here in San Francisco people are great.
If they see you staring at a map for too long they will ask you if you need help with a big smile on their face.
If you’re a biker in the night that doesn’t have some reflectors they might just give you some of theirs.
If this happens to you and you’re like “wow! That’s nice” like I was, well… Maybe it’s time to raise your personal bar on the topic “helping others” because there’s something to learn here.
Many people plan, some people do.
It’s a big difference between the benevolent friend who will “surely call you next time” but won’t, and the one who does.
Doing requires will, focus and dedication, it requires putting yourself on the line, while planning only requires words.
Planning is required, but it’s not enough.
Few days ago I thought about love, yes, that love.
That kind of human behaviour that empowers people, that allow us to change ourself, to do something we would never thought possible.
Love as a way of be grateful, love as a way to dedicate your whole life to another person, love that’s deep and open.
The openness of love struck me.
I was talking with a friend and she was telling me that “some thing ought happen slowly, they should take their time”.
It was chit-chatting, I didn’t want to get into a deep discussion about feeling, so I just let it go.
When I came home I thought more about it, and what I realized is that she was probably scared.
It was just an impression but you know how it goes, right?
You love, then you get burned, then you think “I won’t love again”, then you love, then you get burn again, and so on.
We start building an armor to protect ourselves from being burned, and over time we start saying things like “too early for this”.
A relationship that’s too early for something might have 2 issue
I don’t think there’s much more to this, either there’s not enough feeling, or your scared as hell.
Then, I realized one thing: Emotions, feelings, are not time independent.
Emotions exists right in the moment, they might grow but only when you nurture them.
If you don’t they disappear, if you do they might still change.
Every emotion that you feel for someone or something exists only in that instant.
It might be very different in the next minute.
They are not an object you can store and retrieve at will, they will perish or change, but never will stay absolutely the same forever.
This made me realize how foolish it is to ignore them, to hide them because they might be troublesome.
Yes, sometime feelings create troubles, but wouldn’t it be possible that that’s the outcome anyway?
Those emotions will eventually come out, so it might be better show them as early as possible, failing probably more, but without ever sacrificing that flame that’s burning inside us.
Every single emotion is just like a Sakura flower, it exist for a small time, and should be nurtured and loved as much as possible, because we don’t get a second chance to see it that way.
A few days ago I went to a sushi restaurant in Arezzo, a good place named Sushi Bar (genius name, right?).
It’s a nice restaurant in the center of the city, owned by some Japanese or Chinese (sorry, can’t distinguish) girl with italian waitresses.
They usually serve good food and sushi, but last time the salmon was a bit too cold.
Way too cold for a sushi.
It was the only glitch, all of the other sea foods were perfect and the miso soup was delicious, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was a shame to have such cold food to eat.
When I was paying the owner kindly asked if everything was alright with the food.
In these cases I’m always battled between sharing and keeping my mouth shut, but since I cared about having a nice sushi restaurant in town I though I’m sure this will help them improve the service
So I kindly told her that everything was perfect, aside the salmon, which was too cold for my taste.
Her reply was something along these lines
“It might be because of the cold outside that you feel that this salmon is too cold”
It was colder than usual, but the way I always tasted sushi was never affected from this.
But what struck me was that I was the problem.
While that might be true I think any enterpreneur should be very interested in receiving user feedback, it’s gold.
In the end I felt a bit stupid, mostly because of her reply, but I kept thinking about it.
If you don’t care about what people share with you, than don’t ask.
If you are not in the condition to receive advice to improve the service, just avoid asking if everything was good, because if the user is always the trouble, sooner or later the user will leave.
Lately Hacker News has added some rules to their guidelines regarding the “gratuitous negativity”.
We’ve all been there, a friend asks for our opinion on a subject of his/her interest, and we give the harsh truth.
Too harsh, probably.
etc… are just a tiny part of the expressions we could use to respond.
And the example I took are probably the easiest ones, not the harshest.
This leads me back to one of my favourite posts of Jason Fried, “give it five minutes“.
In the post Jason shares a bit of his personal life along one of the best observations I have ever come across
“Ideas are fragile”.
That’s true. What’s even more true is that we become fragile together with our idea because we feel such paternity with it that we can’t accept being a detached entity from the idea itself.
When our idea is attacked, so are we.
It’s really easy to attack an idea, to attack an opinion.
We love straw-men or the resulting sense of power when we destroy someone else’s opinion.
But we should care, we should care about other people’s ideas and thoughts as much as ours, because we have been there before.
We have been mocked before, we have suffered, so why don’t we start giving a chance to other people?
We might even conclude that we disagree on the subject, but disagreeing doesn’t need to be aggressive, you can disagree and live peacefully with the fact that the other person won’t be inline with your thoughts.
We all are different and as humans we deserve some better treatment.
A small closing story:
Today I took my brother to take breakfast, and there was a grey car outside our garage that wouldn’t allow me to take out my car.
At first I thought “damn, I hate when they just stay like that. Don’t they think about the people who live here?”
I moved into my garage without saying a word, hoping that the man in the car would just do something.
The car didn’t move.
I entered mine and while I turned it on I saw my brother signaling something to the man in a funny way.
Then I saw the grey car move out and leave space for me.
I took my car out, closed the garage, and when I was about to leave I noticed the other driver took down the glass.
I did the same.
When our cars crossed ways he smiled at me and waved his left hand.
While I repeated the same movements I thought
“I should have given him 5 minutes. What a nice man”.
This event taught me that many people are super-kind, just give them the chance to do so, put them into the right mood and situation and they’ll enlighten your day.
Come on, give me the chills 