Author: Andrea Grassi

Today a friend opened a street food bar in our city center.
As both employee and enterpreneur I cannot stop thinking of how big the leap of opening a shop is. It’s a total leap of faith.

To me, building a business, was only a matter of testing and refining. Once I got people that wanted to pay for the product I decided it was worth it.

On the other hand certain type of products cannot be always tested. Food can be tested obviously, but to what extend? How can you be sure that someone would pay for it or that it’ll get enough visibility/success to be sustainable?

It’s a different beast and it requires courage and faith to move onto such uncertain path.
When writing this I was reminded of how we tend to forget our own struggles. When you watch someone you admire, or a successful business we often think “I couldn’t do that. I’m not able, not capable enough”.
But the truth is that we always face our struggles and often we get over them.
There will always be someone that, looking at our work, might say “I couldn’t be able to do that”.
The only difference is in our belief, not in our abilities.

What is our top priority today?
Buying an iphone, having a raise at work, being rich, being famous?

They all seems plausible but in the end we forget that our main goal in life is to live life itself.
Money, fame, work, they will all pass by. What stays is our life until it ends.

Work is not a priority, an iphone is not a priority. Protecting your health is a priority (without being overly extreme obviously).
Living your days is a priority.

Work is important. As such we often confuse it with critical.
No, work is not critical. It’s part of our culture and society, is the soil that allows the society to grow, but it’s nowhere near something fundamental to life itself.

Life is much bigger than that.

When writing articles one might wonder: how do you come up with good topics? 
I would say: look at your life. We all spend time thinking all day long, we have opinions on everything, from why did starbucks open a shop in milan to how to fix poverty, or comments on how to improve our job.

All these are topics we can discuss and use as a starting point for an article. They’re tricks to write.
What will then become the final article might be totally different, it might be something about languages, or how the poverty is created by amazon or whatever. We don’t know.
A topic is simply a way to ignite writing, but it’s only when you write that you refine your thoughts, you give them a form, you model them.

And as absurd as it might seem, even talking about how to find a topic, is a topic.

As humans we learn and through learning we begin defining a way of building ideas. That’s why, after learning how to use a hammer, we would use it for everything.

We want to go deep, to learn it to the max.

Hammering, though, it’s not the best thing to do in each situation. We will always be facing new issues and problems and criticism. Listening is fine, acting is fine as it is not doing a thing to change.

What we should keep in mind is that even though we have an hammer, maybe we shouldn’t use it to play cards.

One nice concept about workout is the deload week. Basically after 4 weeks of intense (sort of) workouts you take a rest week. 
Why? The body adapts, grows, and the week after you’ll be better than ever.

We could apply it to any kind of topic and I think we could see similar results. Just like sprints in software, a deload week would allow the minds to refresh, to take a moment so they can be more productive right after that.