Category: Blog

Words have value, but what happens if you keep repeating the same words over and over again?

The value of the words decrease, their importance once high goes lower.

It’s as if words have a source of energy and power, but this power is finite, and it gets consumed every time you repeat them.

If you want to leave the value of your words intact use them once, use them wisely.

I was walking just right outside the beautiful Milan railway station where, at this hour of the day, a cold sunset was about to lie down in the city horizon.

At 5pm many young guys group together outside the station in the main “park” (it has no greens, hence the enclosure”) to train with a skateboard.

They are young and most of them are newbies in the field.

I kept watching them, day after day, until today I suddenly realized how stubborn, difficult, and exceptional training they did every single day.

When training to jump with a skateboard you fail, often, fast.

Unless you are gifted chances are the skateboard won’t rotate properly or you will fall down hitting the ground.

And they do. They crush on the ground, they fail to put the weight correctly causing the skateboard to not rotate properly.

But in an amusing way they continue training like it never happened.

The thing is… There are no intermediate steps, you fail or you succeed. And after this many failures they still continue to try no matter what.

I can relate to this. There are many times when you try try try and you fail the same way, but you have to continue and the reason is because you don’t know that you are progressing (and you are).

The only thing you can do is keep failing until you get to learn the right amount of weight you must out onto the skateboard.

Fail until every single action align in a perfectly orchestrated movement, and for the first time you succeed.

After that first success you will fail many times until those “configurations” are a mechanical part of you. You will continue until you can discern the reason of failure in a perfect way (“I putted less weight during the rotation”) and master the technique.

It’s easy to give up, but many times it’s only because we don’t see the progress.

Prejudice is a word that haunt us.

Prejudice means we think before reading people actions.

A prejudice is born when some actions are repeated, so you expect a person to behave that way, but a prejudice is also a virus.
A virus that will infect all the nearest thoughts.

In fact, prejudice spreads itself, and once it starts spreading is everywhere.

For example, you might think that a friend named Tod justify himself too much, so every time Tod speaks you think “not another justification, please”.

That’s ok, it’s prejudice.
Let Sarah, Tod’s friend, enter the room, and justify herself.

Would you think the same way?

Well… if you were with Tod probably, but in other situations maybe the thought wouldn’t cross your mind.
First problem: Prejudice stays in your mind and may affect your opinion of people who were not the target of the prejudice itself.

Now let’s consider the situation when Tod just makes a mistake, and he’s explaining.
Just explaining, or maybe sharing something with you.
We are outside the justification issue Tod has, but still our mind might be tricked in thinking “oh no, not again”.

This is not prejudice alone, some other triggers are pulled, yet the main virus was prejudice itself.

It’s not easy to judge ourself to discover how infected we are by “side-thoughts”, thoughts that weren’t in our mind but were implanted by other correlations, like prejudice itself.

Personally I found a good starting point is to take some time and think “Am I giving the same opportunities to everyone?”

There’s no way to start big. We all start small.
One breath, one line of code, one phone call

There comes a time where you feel like you already experienced someone’s else problems or life.

When they come at you with their ideas, expectations, whatever, your reply implies that you absolutely lived in their shoes, you know what they’re doing.

As a grown person, you might also say “right now you might think this, but you’ll change over time”.
It might be true, this might actually happen, but is this behaviour correct?

Should be that much arrogant to persuade another person that there’s no other way? That we are inside a tunnel no one can change?

Young people have the vision of change, the idea that the world can be changed that they can change it, while grown ups usually say try it and fail, I’ve been there

Many of us, moved by stubbornness, have tried and failed, but the idea is still there in every young man and woman, yet we always try to dissuade them from pursuing such enormous goal.

I still don’t think it’s right to dissuade people of this.
We are not talking of trying to do something illegal, we are talking about improving the world, about becoming better people.

Why in the world would you ever want someone to run away from a goal like this?
Maybe we don’t want them to succeed.

Maybe we are just scared as hell that if they succeed, we were wrong all the time, that we failed, that after all it was only us fooled by the system.

Even if they won’t succeed it’s worth if we let other people believe they can.
We should not teach the calm life that you can control while following a scheme, we should engage people into pursuing their creativity at full speed and scale, with empathy and not arrogance, with knowledge and not ignorance.