Category: Blog

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.

• The idea won’t work
• It’s horrible
• I can’t even watch it
• Seriously?

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.

I remember a friend who believed that to write a good piece he needed to be a bit drunk.
Not totally drunk, but in a middle state of “I’m not sober and words just come out”.

Hemingway did the same thing.

I happened to write too on those moments, words flow easily sometimes, they don’t get stuck in all the mind-tricks you get day by day.
But in the end, is it good enough?

I wonder if this is just a shortcut to express our emotions.
Since I personally believe that to any problem there’s a good question to ask, here I would ask
“Why aren’t we able to express emotions without alcohol?”

It’s the mind, right?
When we are drunk all the social status gets thrown away and you just do what you want (or so it seems).
But why am I making it such a big deal?

The thing is wouldn’t it be better if you could express your full range of emotions whenever you want?

It’s not about drinking, it’s about being mindful and recognizing that there are some blocks within ourselves that we need to figure out.
If we’re not fully aware of this, we should work on it.

Emotions are the most powerful thing we have ever come across, we can’t leave them just for the drunk moment.
We should allow emotions to come freely, we must work towards a version of ourself that doesn’t need any external input to express deep joy, gratitude, passion.

Yes, it’s because of our society.
The same society that concludes “If you’re too kind or sensitive you’re gay”.
Since we care about society, we obey those rules.
But those rules are moving us away from what we are.
Because we are scared to show love, we are scared to share emotions.

There aren’t scary emotions in this world.
There is a scary mind, though.

Today I discovered that Flickr has finally updated its Mac Uploader, what a news!
Since the apple cloud photo announcement I looked at Flickr as an alternative solution, given the enormous amount of free space they offer.

What bothered me was that they weren’t integrating.
There wasn’t a way to upload all my library to the Flickr server unless using third party programs (Like Backup to Flickr for iPhoto, which has done a magnificent job).

But today the good news is that Flickr has moved into the right direction, automatic upload from the iPhoto storage, without even the need for a click.

This seamless integration is what keep user thriving to use webapps.

We all want bridges to be removed, we want apps that integrate into our daily life without requiring attention.
The easier, the better, because we are already flooded with information, and all we want is “The Dropbox way”.
Install and forget it, but know how to get it when you need it.

Seamless, that’s it.

One thing learned yesterday:
Always do something that leaves a trace

You will want to look back at your past not for gazing or dreaming, but to see your progressions.
When you start learning at first you’re goofy, you produce terrible results.
If you keep practicing you will eventually get better, but it will be a one step at a time result.

You might even hardly notice.
You might even think you didn’t progress at all.

That’s why tracking is important.
I don’t think we should track everything, because, seriously, we -as humans- are not designed to keep track of things.
It’s useless.

But we can do something that leaves a trace, this way it will be easier to track down what we’ve down.
This blog is something that leaves a trace and it’s a perfect example of “traceable thing”.

Anything that comes with a trace is something you want to do.
Everything that disappears in time is something you should think about it twice before doing it.

Because if it didn’t leave a trace, you might have dreamed it all.