Category: Blog

Being too busy is a nice story, but in the end it’s the evidence that there’s a problem to solve, an issue to fix.

Being too busy might mean you don’t delegate enough, you don’t let people around you grow enough.

Being busy might mean that you are doing too much to be irreplaceable, and thus you can’t even go on a vacation.

Being too busy is a choice you make. Don’t do it.

There’s a reason I don’t like overconfident people.
First: I was one of them.

When you’re overconfident you tend to assume you’re right. Your words will always lead to you winning a game. It’s all about winning, it’s all about being right, it’s all about affirmation.

Arrogance, that is a distintive element that many people who are overconfident share in common. And it’s because, if you even doubted once, you’d be more humble, you’d have a different way with words.

I like people that admit when they’re not in total control, when they don’t know everything. In those cases I can fill the gaps, help them, even work with them towards a common goal.

With overconfident people it’s much harder because there is no space for error, for misdirection, for correction.
Yet errors always happens, correction is often needed, agility and flexibility is not something you can do when you’re battling about being right.

You need humility to change the course of your actions in the eyes of the people.

There’s always this trick, the idea that what we crave, what we passionately desire, is something we should obtain.

It’s not. Like any drug addiction what we want is not necessarily what we need, what we want is an expression of our point in life, our goals, our dreams, our aspirations.

Those aspirations are not fixed. What you want when you’re 15 is quite different (I hope) than what you want when you’re 40.

Things change, we change. That’s why we should not look at what we crave as a solution to our problems in life, but our problems in the short term. Our aspirations can change from day to day because we discover things, we get passionate, we get lost in new dreams.

But life, the thing that stays _after_ those dreams, is something else.
Look at life as something that you build, not something you obtain or succeed in. It’s like the sagrada familia. An amazing building that takes an entire life to build that you won’t see finished, yet it’ll look amazing anyway.

Life is something we forget about.
The beauty of it, that is.

We forget about all the small things that make life special, all the care that people brought into our life.

We forget that life can pass, it can disappear in an instant. We forget that we should care, that we should not take things for granted.

That a smile might disappear, that we might not get another chance.
That’s why we need, from time to time, to be reminded of life, the life we don’t see in the movies. The coffee in the morning, the hello when we come back home, the laughter when we’re stupid.

Feedback is such an amazing and powerful tool that we forget how much we do get manipulated by that.

Think about the time when you wanted to start a new thing, and a friend told you that it wasn’t such a great idea.
Did you feel that kind of disappointment? Did you get a little less enthusiastic?

Or what about the opposite? What if a feedback pumped you up so much you did an all in into a project that was a failure to begin with?
And maybe the feedback from your friend was just a polite way to avoid confrontation?

These are the pitfalls and they occur not because people are not to be trusted or feedback to not be listened, they occur because we get manipulated by feedback instead of seeing feedback as an additional input to understand a scope, a project, a situation.

We should look at feedback as we would look at the results of the test. By understanding the domain, the context, and the information we should seek the info that helps us choose what to do or to improve, but we should not consider them, if taken singularly, a complete representation of the outcome. They can’t be.

And the hardest past is to dismiss the good feedback and look at it objectively, while accepting the bad feedback instead of dismissing.

By doing the opposite of what we usually do we can aim for a more objective processing of the information, because the biggest pitfall of all is the ego that, pumped by the good feedback, forgets everything else.