Category: book

The NYT best seller book “4hr workweek” was rejected 27 times.

Think about it when you feel like giving up, ’cause you don’t know when you’ll get to your 28th.

It happens. You work so much but you seems stuck into a maze. No solution on the horizon to be found.

What to do then? You could continue searching for it, but there’s a fine line between success and failure, between understanding when’s the right time to quit.

That decision is part of your job. And there’s a time to put up the white flag, to accept the fact that you don’t have skills or time to get to a solution in the required time. You need more, but you also need to make it work.

That’s when a wrong solution is fine. You comply with the request, knowing perfectly you still have a work to do, but that work cannot be accomplished so easily.

It’s the MVP concept, applied to real problems.

Let’s say you felt betrayed by a friend and now you both hate each other, how do you manage that? You might try to ignore it, fake the relationship, or think about how to fix it.

Maybe you won’t be able to fix the issue with him/her, but at least having such desire is a good thing.

But how to do it?

You might be tempted to go straight to him and say “Oh you’re such a bad friend, you don’t care about me, you only care for yourself”, but what’s the point here?
The message is all about you trying to blame someone else. What’s written here is that you want more care, but it’s not even written, it’s hidden in the words. 

Given this phrase it’s obvious that the outcome will raise a heated discussion with no great way to exit it without some extra problems.

Also, if you frame the question that way you are not talking about the problem itself.

So, what other options do we have here?
First: the way around question

This is easy: You ask the opposite question: “Did I do something wrong that made you upset?”

Here’s the thing: We only know our version of the story and it would be pointless to desire a resolution witouth trying to understand what’s their point of view, right?
I know that it might sound like if we’re not protecting/explaining our reasoning, but it’s not about being right. It’s about discussing and understanding.

Option 2: What I felt

Sometimes we forget that if we explain our struggle and if we open up our vulnerability, good things might come.
So another option would be to say “I really felt betrayed and lost when you did X, I thought about it all day and it made me really sad, why you did that?”

It will clearly open up the discussion, but we’re not judging the action, instead we’re exploring our world of emotions and asking them for reasoning behind it.
Obviously if the reasoning is sound we should accept it because, as I said, we’re not trying to be right or to prove someone wrong.

And that’s about it. 
There will come a time when both option will fail, and in such cases if you’re out of ideas you might as well accept the fact that this isn’t the right time to discuss this. 

There might be some extra walls to pass in their/your defence that we can’t simply overcome today.