Category: Blog

Recently I was talking to an old friend of mine that is in Japan. He’s a very smart guy and has really great goals.

I couldn’t help but notice his interest for success, both in terms of wealth and appearance.

I changed a lot of opinions about this topic. First I was all about the so-called romantic view. Money isn’t important, love beats us all, etc. 

Then I got into the money bandwagon and I was like “how could I have possibly be so naive?! Money isn’t a problem and we all should earn it” and so on.

The change was not sudden but it sure changed me in many ways. 

Even though I was now interested in money I stayed away from the many programs that talk about money without considering the human part of the equation.

Now I changed again my mind because while I still think that money is important and relevant, I choose time over money.

Money can always be earned. Time cannot.

And while we might even think that we are slaves to money, the real master is time. A master to which we cannot hide.

Time, quality time with the people you love, cannot be bought. And although it’s clear that you can improve the quality with money, you cannot obtain time without time in the first place.

Now let’s go back to my friend. He seems now in the phase where you sacrifice time for other things. It’s a moment of growth and for that I admire him.

But after the talk with him I couldn’t stop thinking about success.

What is success, after all? How can we define success?

Considering the elements of popularity and wealth success could be defined by the amount of respect you get from other people and the amount of money you earn through your work (money that comes from other’s pockets btw).

When I defined success like this I started thinking about the fact that we don’t own  our success. Others own our success because it’s based on qualities and elements given onto us.

We earn it like a social status, but the social status is nowhere ours.

It’s not like our sex or our eye color. It’s not like the dress we own.

We don’t control success in this terms (yes we can create it, but we would never own it anyway).

Defined like this success is like when we are some players in a game. We can rank higher, but it’s not our game.

The strange thing is that we own our time. We are the masters of it. Yet we sacrifice it for something we can’t own.

This morning while preparing to leave Italy to Japan I noticed my Dropbox folder where I store any trip receipt/information.

There were a lot of folders, not that many but enough for me to think that I traveled a lot. 

To avoid forgetting I do a couple of things

• Keep a journal
• Take photos
• Do videos

The journal is on paper and its scope is to remind me of the beautiful things I saw. 

Its goal is to recall an exact moment in time.

The photos recall the overall things I’ve done. While the video serve the purpose to recall the spirit of the journey.

It may not be perfect, but to me it’s a great solution to not forget about the wonderful things I lived.

Sometimes chaos seems unforgiving, you get the idea that beyond chaos there’s only failure.
In those times it helps to find a helping hand, a friend or a mentor you can count on.

Chaos is an excellent way to learn you skill because it unbalance you.
The only thing you must stick to during those times is the path. Your path.
No matter the reason, keep following it, don’t ever detour.

If you chose that path in calm times it means you’ve gone through all the thinking to make it sure it was right.
Chaos add uncertainty and fear, which may lead to fake conclusions dictated only by urgency, and your path, your life, deserve more.

You deserve more.

The more time it passes, the more I’m sure about this: good questions are a turn key for many things.

A great question allow people to have a spark in creativity or to go beyond, it can solve problems because of the different point of view inherently included in the question itself.

Most of the time we feel blocked because we don’t know how to handle the problem.
In fact, the thing is that we are blocked because we don’t have the answer to the question “How do I handle this?”

Such question can be rarely answered alone, it takes a few more steps in between to get to a solution, and those steps are essentials.
A way to discover the steps in between are questions.

But how to get a good question to solve a problem?
The first thing is to do small jumps.
There is no “final” questions, so you shouldn’t expect to have an epiphany and find a question that solve the problem in one shot.
What you must aim to is to move incrementally to widen the scope of your knowledge, both by confirming that you understood and moving forward and enlarge what you know.

After a few questions like this the problem will be probably more defined and/or split in subsequent pieces. That way the problem can be handled and solved with no issue.