Category: culture

We are all main characters …

Fabrizio12 Comments

… to our own story.

And yet, there’s a tendency to read too much in the actions of others. As if they are mere extras in our lives, their only purpose being confirming (or more often denying) what we feel about ourselves or the way we’d like to be perceived. 

When we realise that others are the main characters to their lives, just as much as we are to our own, we understand that when they act, they do so most likely because of something that is happening to them. Not because of us, the way we are, the things we do.

If we are in doubt, we could be humble and ask.

Did you do this because of that?
Was that what you meant when you said this?
Can you explain why you acted like that?

More often than not, we’ll get confirmation that our script – the one in which they are trying to get ahead of us or stab us in the back – is just one of the millions of scripts that run in parallel in the world.

“Does it get me votes?”

FabrizioLeave a comment

Politics, politicians and political parties should lead us towards the future.

They should see what we can’t see, as we are caught up in our day-to-day routines and problems. And they should make sure that our struggles, efforts and work have a purpose. Be it a better lifestyle, an healthier country, a more communal World.

What is happening across the border, instead, is that we are the ones calling the shots. The only thing that matters is our vote, and so instead of asking “does it make sense?”, the only question politics, politicians and political parties want answered is “does it get me votes?”.

I spoke to a very plugged-in House Republican. And he told me, listen, most House Republicans do not have federal workers in their district. So, he point-blank said, it’s not in our interest to end the shutdown.

Lisa Desjardins (full story on PBS)

It sounds crazy, considering the amount of discontent in the World today, yet we have an incredible power. It is up to us to force the political entities to stop acting as managers, carefully allocating resources to do more with less, and embracing once again the leading role that perhaps they once had.

Change perspective

Fabrizio2 Comments

We tend to focus on what others do to us. We live in a confrontational way. It is “me vs the boss”, “me vs the neighbour”, “me vs my partner”, “me vs the world”.

It is true that a good way to understand who we are is figuring out who we are not. Yet focusing solely and repeatedly on the behaviour of others flattens our worldview.

We end up finding patterns when we should appreciate differences, and putting the same label on very different types of circumstances.

“I have been hurt”. “I have been misunderstood”. “I have been offended”. “I have been treated unfairly”.

A way to get out of this loop is the following. The next time we feel somebody is doing something wrong to us, let’s first ask “when is the last time I did something similar myself?“. “When is the last time I have hurt somebody, misunderstood somebody, offended somebody, treated somebody unfairly?”. And then “why did I do that?”.

None of us is inherently a bad human being, if we are honest with our own behaviour and motives, we might get a very different perspective on why things happen, and even what is actually happening. And find that our narratives are harming us and others too.

Post scriptum: as I was writing, I felt the need to differentiate between day-to-day disagreements and petty disputes we have with the people around us (that is what this post is about), and abuse. Physical, mental, emotional abuse is never right, and if you are a victim of that, you should never for a moment believe that the person responsible has any good reason to do what they are doing.

The two parts of action

Fabrizio2 Comments

There are two parts in action.

  1. Knowing what needs to be done.
  2. Doing it.

The first part has to do with learning, and arguably nowadays we are in the perfect context to get to know what needs to be done. Information has never been more available, there is a “five-step” list to get to do almost everything one can think of, education and peer-to-peer sharing of experiences is facilitated like never before.

The second part, on the other hand, has never been so difficult. It is where 99.9% of us fail.

Investing and the stock market is the perfect example for this. There’s a beautiful lesson by Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital, in one of the latest Motley Fool Money podcast (interview starts around 18:50). To summarise it:

Stocks return 9-10% a year on average. We know that. Yet they rarely return between 8 and 12% in any single year. The average is not the norm. Why is that? It’s because of emotional excesses. To the upsides, that then require corrections, and to the downsides. If you think about the value of a company in a 60-year time frame, that is not impacted by what happens day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year. It is pretty stable. The changes in earnings in one quarter is not really important. But people react excessively to these things.

Howard Marks

Nobody wants us to be emotionless robot, yet if we set out to do something important to us, this is a lesson that is better to keep in mind.