Category: Blog

I’m an avid reader of hacker news, a place where developer and techies come together to discuss, confront, and show off, about tech topics of the most various genre. 

It’s a great community, aside from the fact that many of the projects backed by ycombinator are, obviously, startups.

I’m not a big fan of startups, I very much prefer the boostrapped businesses, because of their sustainability.

Yet lately some people came to me to ask if they could invest into my company.
It’s temptin, you know? Getting “free” money to do whatever you want.

But what does it really means? It’s not going to be free, you’ll be working for someone, you’ll be negotiating terms wiith other people, which might or might not be a good thing.
But most of all, your goal won’t be to please your customers, but to please your investor.

Yes, I know, I’m exaggerating, and I’m sure that it’s not black or white, yet I don’t feel I could be suited for this. In the exact moment someone puts the money in the system ; I “owe” him/her something, and I cannot hide this thought. 

It’s like when you get a free product, it’s hard to leave a negative review.
That is the hidden price you pay.

Asking a favor is such a simple thing. In real life you would head to the person and ask it, if it’s a small favor.

If it’s a critical favor, one you depend on, you usually need to add a lot more context, to explain why is this important and how it’ll change your life.

Without it is like asking to have sex with a girl you’ve never saw. Chances are it’ll end up with a no.
But if you do add context, the result might change.

Askina favor on the internet isn’t much more different, the main difference is that the medium is faster. You can ask it anytime, anywhere, instantly.
It’s slippery, because we ask critical favor like simple ones, forgetting about the context.

And chances are, you’ll end up getting a no.

A dear friend of mine decided to work less, as I did many years ago. Not because of status, but for his own sake.

Working less means making space, defining priorities in life, stepping back from what’s not important.

It requires courage, because staying in the game is much more comfortable than stepping back, because if you stay in the game you can continue the way you did. Stepping back instead requires you to shift the mentality, to change the way you work.

Stepping back isn’t about working less nor it’s about caring less. In fact, it’s about caring more without becoming a slave in the system.

In these times everything demands our attention, our time. Stepping back means deciding that we are the one that put a price tag on our time, not the other way round.
At first it’s hard, but slowly it might show you a different take on this world. 

There is a limit to what we can do, to the quality we can achieve. Passed that limit, we’re useless, but we aren’t able to notice. 
If you’re entrepreneur it happens all the day. You receive an email from a customer at 8pm. What are you gonna do? Reply?
Even reading it is a decision that’ll impact your life.

But how important is that email? Chances are it’s not critical. So why even bother replying so fast?
Stepping back means not even taking this chance, because your life is much more important than this.

Feb 28, tomorrow seems like italy will be invaded by snow. I was going to work this morning and the temperature at my departure was -7°C, low, cold, freezing cold.

While driving to work the temperature changed a lot, going up to -4 and down to -6, stabilizing at around -5 when I got there.

Nothing magical here, and as you might now: It doesn’t snow at this temperature because it’s too cold. To snow you need to be around 0°C. That’s the line dividing cold and snow.

Went back to work and coming to my hometown afterdinner. The temperature outside was a stable 0.5°C.

No oscillations whatsoever.

This is what mesmerize me of nature, its perfection. It’s obvious when you see the results, but yet I am always amazed by how perfect nature is. We’re going to get snow, and we’re going to get it with a stable round zero temperature.

Love, nature.

A coworker today shared a great article he wrote.

A long article, I’d say.
My first reaction was: How the hell did he find the time to write this long piece?

I was speechless, I thought he’d surely sacrifice his time with his family to do this.

Coming back home I gave it some more thought and one thing popped into my mind: I was looking at the result of his work. He might’ve written it in few months, few weeks, few days. I didn’t have any clue about it because the resulting article couldn’t obviously state this information

When looking at the outcome, it’s easy to jump to the conclusions. To think that it was impossible for us to do, that we should admire anyone who did that.
While it’s true that we should admire them (if they did great work), we should not forget that the outcome doesn’t show the struggle, the failures, nor the time that took to reach that point.