Come on, give me the chills

Thoughts about changing, life, and whatever comes to mind.

Author: Andrea Grassi

  • failure is not an option

    Read any self help book, watch any motivation video, read inspiring biographies and you’ll soon discover a trait among those people.

    They didn’t surrender. Failure, for them, was not a viable solution. They couldn’t accept it, so they continued their work until it made a difference.

    It’s normal to admire such dedication, to be mesmerized by these stories. 
    These stories are much like the teal&orange in blockbuster movies. It’s a success recipe. People like it, it works.

    I do think we should not consider failure an option, but in these stories there’s one thing that doesn’t stand out the way it should.
    Failure is not an option if you ask for help.

    Rarely we saw a man that built an empire by himself.
    They were all helped, they all asked for help during the darkest moment.

    Asking for help doesn’t stand out though, so the message that pass through is that we shouldn’t consider failure, but this message doesn’t give us a way out.
    Because there will come a time when we won’t have enough power, enough money, enough energy. And in those times we will fail unless we ask for help.

  • last in, first listened

    That’s a sad truth, we’re more likely to listening to a new person we don’t know very much than an old friend.
    His/her advices might be more well received than our friends, but why is that?

    It’s not that the friend becomes instantly useless.But we are less inclined to listen to him.
    There’s prejudice, we think they are saying that for a reason. And there’s the fact that we don’t really listen to them, but we’d like them to listen to us.

    A friend becomes a listener, while in the beginning he was an advisor. And as such, the new, unknown person that seem skilled like our friend become our new advisor.

    It’s not always like this, but to have a different outcome you have to play it in reverse. The friend must find the perfect time to share the information so that it can be listened, understood and applied.
    Missing that it’s like missing the flight. You might find another one, but you’ll be late.

  • shiny and pricey doesn’t equate quality

    I’ve been to pitti fragrance today, and one thing I learned is that we can be easily fooled.

    Fooled by packaging, fooled by stories and narrations, fooled by nice people. 

    Shiny things, pricey things, don’t always mean quality. They some times show a great skill (marketing) but hide a mediocre product. 

    To have success, you need both. A great product, a great message.
    Shiny might then be only a thing you want to add if needed, but nowhere required.

  • never tell your goals, on keeping your words

    I don’t consider myself successful in the way most people think. I’m not rich, not famous, nothing of these things.
    Yet I do think that I succeded in learning such many things.
    Learning to sing from zero, to build up some basic muscles, to run, to jump rope, to talk, to write, to inspire even if for small moments people, to change diets and diets, breakfasts, learning new programming languages, and so on.

    It’s not to brag about it, but to make a point about how was all of this possible.

    You might think it’s because I’m good at learning and even though this might be part of the equation I think the reason is different.
    I didn’t tell anyone about many, if not all, these things. I kept them for me until I was fairly decent about it.
    Why?

    Well, first and foremost because of the reactions many people have.
    One day I wanted to write a letter to my bosses, to give them a different perspective. Why I letter? I like to write and I wanted to convey a message while they were relaxed, not in the daily rush.

    I told about this and the first reaction was “you’re crazy, it’ll all go bad, why you dare do this?”.
    Guess what? It went good.

    Perceptions matter, and though they are part of the story that led to my idea about the letter they couldn’t be told while I was sharing the idea. It was impossible, but people react on what they know, and if they know only a part of the story they might jump to wrong conclusions.

    The second, critical, thing is: We might want to say them only to pump up our ego.
    You know when you say something like “I want to learn bungee jumping” and everyone goes like “Oh man, that’s wonderful, I always dreamed of it, bla bla bla”.
    You get that nice little feeling that you’re the best, that you’re one step ahead, but will this imply that you’re going to do it? Nope. It usually leads to the opposite result because you’re already got what you wanted, a plause.

    This leads us to the third and final element: Don’t do it for others. Don’t do it for your ego. Don’t do it for some temporary plause.
    Do it for you, for the pleasure of learning, of practice, of being in a constant state of learn, fail, succeed, repeat. But please, don’t do it for your ego.

  • changing the routine

    We should not fear a routine change, a habit to abandon. We do change and as such we should adapt, improve, relearn and install new habits.

    Testing them even though you’re not 100% sure about the benefits or the outcome, just for the sake of understanding them.

    Because the only way to understand something is to try it firsthand, that’s when the process becomes clear and you learn.

    Writing this because I’m obviously testing something new related to food, the ketogenic omad diet, an extreme diet. My goal in this case is to grasp the benefit of both and, if they are good, integrate part of them into my daily life.