Tag: change

Comfort and necessity

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If you treat comfort as if it were necessity, you’ll soon run out of steam in the pursue of it.

Comfort is unlimited, constantly temporary, almost always divisive. It is easy to forget and very difficult to reverse. Not impossible, but if you’ve ever moved from a 100 square metres apartment to a 60 square metres one, you know what I mean.

Necessity, on the other hand, is limited, pretty much stable over time, and unifying. We tend to forget about it, but when we do, necessity stings and we are brought back to reality.

When deciding where to invest your resources, material and not, make sure you understand the difference. Comfort is a mirage, necessity is concrete. Comfort disappoints, necessity empowers. Comfort blinds, necessity grounds.

Deep roots

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The disappointment you felt when they told you there was no promotion for you in the near future.

The anger at your boss, for not acknowledging the effort you put into the project they are getting praises for.

That argument about who was supposed to do that thing nobody wants to do.

The feeling your job is never going to be good enough, no matter how hard you try.

All these things, and many more, they are not born in the moment, as a sudden reaction to a single event. They have deep roots.

They are the product of previous experiences, of your childhood, of how your parents used to talk (or not talk) to you, of the many relationships you’ve had so far, of the thoughts you used to have when you were a kid, alone in your bedroom, before falling asleep.

They are incremental. They tend to repeat themselves, sometimes in slightly different ways, and to accumulate. Up until the point you are unable to experience much more else.

And so, the only thing you can do about it is to conquer them. Own them.

“I have stakes in this”, “I care”, ” I might feel as I did when..”. These are great starting points.

Do not hide them, repress them, push them down.

Find them, name them, remind them.

You might not be able to do this on your own. That’s fine.

The perfect excuse

Fabrizio5 Comments

They don’t care.

It’s the perfect excuse, an impenetrable shield when we have something to ship.

It’s perfect and impenetrable because of course they do not care.

Why should they? Why should somebody that is not you care about the job you have to do, the impact you are trying to have in the world, the change you are out to make?

Perhaps, all of that is going to impact more people than anything else before. And yet until the impact has happened, until everything is done and complete, until you’ve moved on to something else (and perhaps even for a little while after that), no one will care.

If we are doing things with the expectation that others will confirm their validity, that they will see how great they are and give us some sort of reward, we are already set up for failure.

Important job is for ourselves in the first place.

It’s the type of job you would do when nobody is watching, when you are left alone, when you have no team and no company. It matters to you, and that’s why you should go ahead and ship it. All the others will give it a look, at best, and then move on with their big thing.

The duality of change

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Change is natural, and yet we repeatedly fail to accept its nature.

We fail when we are the passive recipient of change, as we cling to what was before and find increasingly intricate ways to justify a position we often did not support before realising change was upon us. And we fail when we are the active agent of change, as we seem not capable to appreciate the difficulties change brings in others lives and allocate enough space for discussion and venting.

Change brings resistance and opportunities, dialogue and self-absorption, evolution and involution. It is a continuum of statuses, and where the people affected will eventually land highly depends on how deeply we appreciate the duality of it.

This is something to consider if we are interested in deep change. The alternative is to continue approaching change as a one-sided decision, hoping others will quietly resign to it.

The things you did today

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The things you did today, the meetings you attented to, the people you have exchanged ideas with, the tasks you have dedicated your attention to, the distractions that took you on a tangent, the breaks to recharge the batteries.

What place do they have in the long term picture?

It’s great when things flow effortlessly into the right place, when all we do seems light and serving the right purpose, and yet more often than not our daily routines feel like a start and stop, two steps in the right direction and three in the wrong one.

We do not dedicate enough time to understanding what our long term looks like, what are the reasons why do what we do, and what we will from now on accept and what not.

It’s only by raising our heads up from the narrowness of the short term that we can figure this out. And when we have done that, let’s go and pursue it with relentless discipline.