Tag: self-improvement

Your own authenticity

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Consistency and authenticity are about doing what you expect of yourself, not what others expect of you.

Even when something is useless, even when nobody is paying attention, even when 99.9% of people would act differently, even when you will not get any reward. Doing that is what builds your persona, your character, your set of values, your story. And by doing it repeatedly, you are authentic.

Others are unfathomable, they falter, they change, they do not know you and what you are around to do. They know themselves, and they can choose, each one of them, for their own consistency.

Take ownership of your own.

About helping

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Helping others is not always easy, but it’s always the right thing to do.

Of course, “others” does not mean everybody. You have limits, boundaries and restrictions, and being aware of those is very important for your support to be effective. Similarly, “helping” takes different shapes in different situations, and you will find that what you did to help somebody might simply not work to help another.

Start with yourself, get a solid grasp on your own life, and then relentlessly open up to the others and be present. This might sound like a long way, but it might be the only alternative to “let me know if you need anything”.

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 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.

Discipline

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Often, the word discipline is used in a negative sense.

We associate it with control, rule, restriction, and this is because for a long time now (about 800 years) we have used it to described an almost monastic situation in which somebody punishes themselves for something done that is against what their environment believes is the right, appropriate way.

Originally, though, the Latin word from which discipline comes (discipulus) meant pupil. The link with learning and studying is deep, as it is the idea that to learn something you need to put in the work, day after day, in a disciplined way. In a sense, this is a form of control that is not imposed from the outside, but rather comes from within, from the desire to know and apply the knowledge. It is a way of life, a moral way, a way according to which one knows what needs to be done to achieve something and therefore, relentlessly, they commit to doing just that.

According to Buddhism, discipline is one of the six perfections (paramitas). And it is threefold.

  • First, discipline means understanding what needs to be done, giving up all malicious deeds, all selfish and harmful actions.
  • Second, discipline means applying what is being learned to all circumstances of life, committing to the disciplined way, without cutting corners, looking for shortcuts, or forgetting the principle when a favorable situation appears.
  • Third, discipline means benefiting others, with the understanding and the actions, thinking of others as in terms of “how I can benefit them”.

Discipline is not as scary or restrictive as we are used to think. When it sparks from a deep awareness of who we are and what part we ought to have in the world, it is actually the only way to achieve what we set out to achieve.