Warning: Spoilers ahead!
I like “Friends” as a movie, they’re funny to watch, I watched the whole series (some of the episodes multiple times) and had quite a bit of laughter; But I just can’t take the ending out of my mind; See some facts of the last episodes on Wikipedia, though I’ll comment only on the last minutes of the show;

So, what makes the last 5 minutes of the show so sad?
a. For the first time in the show, the atmosphere switches from happy, joyful, all-jokes, to a sad, so so sad one; You want to see the joke, and it gets even worse;
b. In the last scene all the girls are crying, and in a scene prior to that Ross can barely withhold his tears;
c. Everybody’s feeling sad in the last scene, to the few jokes you can barely see a smile;
d. The list of changes in the last part is very sad by itself (there’s a stress associated with large movements, which can be interpreted bad or good, see below):
- the most important apartment in the whole movie is left empty;
- Rachel and Ross get back together;
- Chandler and Monica move to a new house, they have babies;
- Phoebe and Joey will be left alone;
- Rachel cancel her departure to France and probably loses a good job offer;
Why is it so hard to bear? Look at the list above and see – movements in housing, new relationships, new members in the family, separating the groups, canceling job promotion and canceling switching continents; These are all hard to bear changes; Put them in a five minutes worth of time and you’ve got yourself a problem; I wish there were hope – Rachel and Ross will be happy, Chandler and Monica will have a great family and will be happy, Phoebe and Joey will adapt to the new lifestyle of their friends; I could cope with that, but throw me a bone, be a little be happy in the ending; Nope, everybody is sad.
e. In the last scene of the whole movie, everybody turns their back to the camera and leave the apartment; You wait and wait for a sign of happiness; No, boy, none whatsoever;

Did I tell you I like the ending in “Le notti di Cabiria“? You just have to see this one to make it the counter-opposite; Very sad ending;

______________
Bottom line: do watch “Friends”, it’s a great show; If I’ll ever see again some past movies, “Friends” will surely make the top spots; Their humor is incredible; But the last episode is a bit, oh-just-a-bit, dramatic; Which, if you consider that the aim of a movie would be to create a feeling within you, is not that bad; I’ll get over it, life will be fine again and we’ll have a laugh looking in the past.

Happy reading!

Story #1:

Two days ago, on 2009.10.13, I went to buy some natural supplements for a friend of mine. That specific supplement is only produced by one company in Romania. My friend went to two stores in Bucharest of that company, but didn’t find the product. Knowing I live not far (where “not far” is about 3 miles), I went to buy the products directly from the headquarters. On the map, things were clear – there was a street right perpendicular to the main road, it was at number 2, easy task, right?

Right … Well, I go there and no one knows where the street was supposed to be. I ask about four persons, I get mixed answers, finally I ask a person: “do you know about this street?” “Yes. Are you by foot or do you have a car?” “I’m a pedestrian” “Hop in, I’ll give you a ride”. And he did it. He gave me a 1.5 miles ride, he waited for me to buy the product in the car, and he drove me back to the city. I forgot to mention, the company I was buying the products from had the headquarters somewhere in a field. Stray dogs, bad weather (it was about to rain), poor roads, this was a mix which might have made it hard for me to reach my target. And yet this good man came from nowhere and helped me.

He was a person doing deliveries. I really like Cargus better now.

Story #2:

Following the event, I went to Piaţa Obor to buy stuff. Of course, I go to the place where peasants sell vegetables and fruits. I buy some cheap carrots and I don’t pay that much attention to the money. Now the surprise! The seller basically yells at me: “Hey mister, take all of your change!” (it was 2$ worth of money). Now I’m sure that he didn’t make a fortune by selling me 1 kilogram of carrots, but he did me a very nice gesture and returned my money. Nice.

Story #3:

Still in Obor, I go to buy some bread. There’s a bread factory right at Obor store with a selling point going right in the street. They claim to have traditional bread, with quality products. Still, their bread is a bit more expensive than the rest. And the prices are set so that by buying 1 kilogram you get a better value than buying 0.5. Also, they have quite a variety of breads. So I had a bit of a dilemma on what to buy, even if it was not the first time I bought bread from there. But the sellers were, this time too, nice with me, and helped with my choice and answered to my questions. And going home, I really really loved the bread.

That’s about it.

Small book description from Amazon:

Using simple language, real-life examples, graphs and checklists, this book explains how to view your organization and customers in a new light and deliver the exceptional customer service you need in order to differentiate your business from those of your competitors. In this revised edition – which includes a new chapter on e-service – Chris Daffy provides practical advice and examples from Europe, the US and elsewhere on service strategies and techniques to make you famous for your service.

The author has a personal web site.

Now, the review. There are two things which I look whenever I read a book:
a. What the book says;
b. How the book says what it says.

So, what’s there so nice about this book?
A. What the book says:
a. The things I read most on the book were common sense; You can get the same feeling whenever you read some instructions on, let’s say, how to open a door; You already know the process, you do it in your own way, but it’s still comforting to read; Still, you can get new information just from things like this – imagine reading on how to open the door with your elbow; Anyone can do this, but it gets you thinking; The book does a similar thing – it tells you thing you already knew, but you still learn from this;
b. Besides the general truths, known by everyone, the book also gives you some twists; Since you get those twists without ever expecting it, they’re even more pleasant to read; Example: “the need for customer obsession”; You would expect from a book like this to tell you about customer care; But obsession? The author first explains this into a small sentence: “The only way to embed customer service into the culture of a business is through management-led obsession.”; Another twist: “Customers are the business”; (the word are is actually in italics)
c. The thing you’ll get most in your mind are nice structures – Patterns of behavior; “How should I act whenever I meet this situation?”; The book won’t give you a direct answer to any question, but by presenting some basic structures to think about, you’ll take better decisions.

B. How the book says what it says:
a. Case studies – I love this; Not only does the book give you a general affirmation, it presents a real example for this;
b. Bullet lists – This makes text so much easy to read;
c. Three types of text formatting: specific fonts for titles, while for the normal text there are bold, italic and normal text;
d. Logical argumentation – The author likes to play with you; He first tells you something, and then continues to make an argumentation based on that; You have to like this;
e. Essential things put on a list – Synthetic, all the information in one place;
f. Recap – The chapter ends? Why not do a recap? Great idea;
g. Questionnaires and check-lists – This is the closest one could ever get to the atmosphere in a seminar or workshop; You do-it-yourself – check boxes, fill-in data, test results;
h. Graphs – Whenever needed, you’ll find them there;
i. Style – The author is funny and polite; You’ll relax by reading his book.

What conclusions to draw from here? You can read the book as a politeness code – it’s all about behavior and interactions between humans. Sure, it’s a business model, but the applications are there for you to learn and apply. The things the book says to you are not really shockingly new, but they will create you a framework in which to apply real-life situations. And the style of the book, the way in which it is written, allowed even me (I get very easily distracted from the text itself of a reading) to read the book easily.

A recommended book by me. Make a gift to you and get it.

How would I improve voting on these systems? I think the paradigm most people have is one of these:
a. “I will vote for me to get well”;
b. “I will vote for my friend/relative/business contact to be well” (which, in turn, will get into the a. situation).

The thing I would do to have a better voting system would be changing the paradigm to:
c. “I will vote for others to get well” (which, after a while, might as well lead me into a., but it’s not a direct connection, like with the b. option).

How would the paradigm I suggest change the reality in the three types of votes at the beginning of the message?
a. Political vote – Let’s say an old person votes for the political which only supports social measures; Sure, that person might get its pension higher, might get a smaller tax on some public funds, but:
i. the society itself might not develop as well;
ii. a rise in the pensions might lead to inflation, which might cut all the benefits of the increase, and put a burden on other people’s income;
My suggestion would be that old people vote for the best choice for the society, not for themselves; I think this is optimal for all society;
Now let’s say that X candidates for mayor; He has a lot of friends; In the same time Y candidates for mayor; Y has better skills with management and soft skills, but, being gone for a few years from the town, has fewer friends in town; Now, with whom should X’s friends vote for? I’d say they should vote for Y, this would be better for the city itself; Thinking for the good of others might lead into good for themselves;

b. Voting on Internet systems – Voting for yourself on the Internet is quite simple; Having a dynamic IP, an ability to delete cookies or switch browsers makes voting for oneself easy; And, at the end of the day, what do we get if 10 people of 100 fraud the system and are on the top 10 list? We get a fraudulent system, in which the best player is the one who cheats the most;
Then there’s the case in which I have 200 friends and send them all a message – “Hey, you’re my friend, you should vote for me!”; And the winner of such a system is not the person with the best value, it’s the person with most friends;
I showed above why voting for yourself or for your friends brings lower value into this world than voting for the good of others (thus voting for the best representative); So, the next time you see a list of 100 persons, and in that list there is just one person who shares the country with you, you should vote for the best person in the list, and not for the one person that shares a country with you;

c. Voting on casual events (choosing a team leader, for instance) – Yes, you can vote for the one person that:
i. Brings you the most benefits (you vote for yourself);
ii. You know very well (it’s a friend of yours);
But, for the good of the society in general, you should vote for the one person that is the best representative of the society.

Real life examples: you favor liberalism, and there are two candidates – one that favors only liberal measures, no social protection and another one that favors liberal measures, but keeps an eye open on the social measures. I think that for the well being of the society in general, one should vote for the latter. Sure, you, as a great business person, may not need pensions and state-funded schooling, but your society needs it. And, as unexpected as it may seem, if everybody else than you does fine, you’ll do fine also.

Now let’s say you’re on an instant messaging system and you get a “Vote for me” request from a friend. Hard as it may be, you shouldn’t vote for your friend.

You open a newspaper. Bold letters, large font: “Vote for Brancusi, the greatest sculptor in Romania in an international competition”. Well, how should I put this in simple words, but do you really think that Brancusi is the best artist in the world? If you don’t think so, vote for the person that deserves to be on top.

I hope I cleared a few things for you.

So, the model basically says that there are three ego-states for people:

• Parent: a state in which people behave, feel, and think like their parents did; So, someone might be very upset with other persons being rich, just because its parents were like that;
• Adult: a state of the ego which is about processing information and prediction emotions that might interfere with this process; This is an objective thinking of the world;
• Child: persons tend to behave, feel and think like they did when they were children; From here come emotions, creativity, spontaneity.

Now, from my perspective, most adults tend to think like either adults or parents, while the elder persons tend to think in parental ways.

How about the children? Of course, a lot of them are into child thinking.

I personally like the adult thinking the most.

But here comes an observation of mine: children also tend to think in parental ways. Why? Because most of the time an adult won’t say to a kid: “You should think”, it says instead “It’s best to do this and that”.

And this leads to some patterns in parental thinking. At least this is what I personally observed.

To sum up things, some children tend to have a rather interesting way of thinking just like a parent.

I kept thinking about that article, and I want to share it with you. Here come my thoughts on this article.

The article says in a nutshell that with about 10,000 hours of practice, one can get to the top in their chosen discipline. That’s it. 10,000 hours of practice, and you get to genius level.

Sure, the article claims, both talent and luck are important too, but the most important criteria is just working hard.

Why is this so important? Simply put, it gives me a reason to continue to struggle for a better me. A lust for self-development, a dare for a better me, a hard work to become the professional that I need to be. All it takes is a lot of effort. That’s it.

What’s 10,000 hours? If one works about 8 hours a day, it would take an average worker about five years to get to 10,000 working hours.

But if you only count the time worked in a day, not travelling, not doing training, not doing networking, that period of time might increase.

On the other hand, if one works extra hours, in the evenings and week-ends, that period of time might also be a bit shorter.

But the bottom line is just great: there’s hope for getting there. One can get to genius level.

One can be a master in his domain with just about 10,000 of hours worked.

The news made me feel so good. How about you?

First of all, I’ll present my experience with these. I have first joined an Internet forum in the spring of 2002, just a few months after I got to have Internet access a few times a week on a regular basis.

I joined a rather large Romanian forum (it still is even today; Large number of persons in there, great flow of messages).

I stayed on that forum until, five years later, I got to 1,000 messages. I don’t know about you, but writing 1,000 messages on an Internet forum, in a time frame of 5 years, is quite a lot. A lot of effort to read what others have said, to comment upon, to be active. You get the picture, lots of activity, and lots of reading.

I also was active on a smaller Internet forum, with only 300 messages from my part, but the reading was quite big in there too.

And some smaller accounts on various forums, some even created by me, but due to lack of activity these matter less.

You can say that I’ve wrote more than 1,500 messages on Internet forums so far (perhaps even 2,000).

What have I learned that I didn’t like that much?
1. At the time when I joined the first large forum, in 2002, Internet was scarce in Romania; Few people had Internet access, mostly due to costs and downsizes (PC, Internet line, hard to get a good connection, you had to be a bit IT-savvy) compared to revenues and advantages (small salaries, few web sites on the Internet to benefit from); What this barrier meant was also a great filtering system: the people that frequented the forum I was on in 2002 were usually either very good with IT or earning lots of money (so good with other things); And most of the time it was a combination of the two; Great people, I can say, lots of things to learn on a personal and professional (mostly IT) level; Time passed, and Internet access became easily available; The old generation slowly left the forum (only a few remained), while the new generation came in a hurry; Well, I can say that the level of expertise on that particular forum greatly decreased and I decided to leave;
2. What I also didn’t like about forums was a spirit of sarcasm; This was right from the beginning; There was a very false and annoying feeling of “I know everything” from the persons on the forum with most messages; You asked a not-that-smart question? Bang! You got an acid reply; You said something that could be interpreted? Here comes a sarcastic reply; This is a bad habit I learned on the forums, and which I try to repair now.

What did I learned that I love?
1. A lust for the fight itself; In the forums there is always an intriguing thought, a dispute, an argument; I learned a lot of things on how to handle a debate by participating in forums; What a lovely thing this is;
2. A pleasure for the smart things; Writing things on forums helped me understand myself better and better structure the information on the world I live in; I am the person I am today partially due to the fact that I’ve participated in forums.

I hope I haven’t scared you with the bad thoughts on forums and I hope that if I get bad feelings on blogging, I’ll write time as they arrive, not wait for years, like I’ve done with the forum postings. Overall, my forum experience is great, but nowadays the generation difference makes it a rather unpleasant experience. But I did have a great time back in 2002+.

First of all, have a look at the picture below:

Basically, the most common thoughts when seeing two different patterns of thinking colliding are this: thinking that we (or the others) are great, thinking that we (or, again, the others) are bad, of being neutral on the whole thing.

As you see, there are three feelings we can have both about others, and about ourselves. Let’s analyze all six possibilities.

A. How do we feel about ourselves?
a. If we think that we are right, this is great for the psychology; Great ego, great pride, great feelings, yahoo! We’re over the world; One problem though: you may see you so good compared to others, that you may feel like crushing them; It’s also poor on developing oneself (why would you need to improve on perfection?); But it is a very optimistic way of seeing things, and it’s good for the spirit;
b. If we are indifferent to ourselves, we can’t improve; But we do have this option: not to care; What’s the advantage of this? We do have a pretty good ego, a stable way of seeing things, rather calm; All-in-all, not that bad;
c. Let’s say we have bad feelings about ourselves; This might lead to some problems like depression, or bad feelings on ourselves; It might also lead into progress, so all is not lost; I like this view a lot on the development issue, although it’s not that great on morale;

B. How do we feel about the others?
a. If we think that others are great, we have two options; First is to try and copy them, in order to improve ourselves to be as good as them; This is not just admiring them, it is also copying their behavior; You want to be like them; The other option you have is to just feel great about the others, and try to spend time with them in order to feel good as long as possible; But most of the time one feels the urge to improve by looking at his models;
b. We can be neutral about others; This will lead to no progress, but this will also lead to no bad thoughts, like envy; This is quite comforting zone;
c. We may think that the others are wrong; One would express that the others are wrong usually by gossiping, talking from behind (not saying things to one’s face); The alternative, being plain rude and telling people that they are wrong, is not much better either; Why is thinking about others as doing bad things faulty? I think there are plenty of reasons even from highly skilled persons in this world to acknowledge that there are persons better than themselves; So, most of all it’s illogically to think that there are only bad people in this world; Anyhow, seeing the bad things in other gives you bad mental processes and doesn’t really help you improve (what can you learn from others like that?);

How do these combine?
a. If you see others doing bad things and you doing good things, there’s no way you can improve, but you might have a very good personal feeling;
b. If you see no need for improvement in either you or others, and you also have no feelings on the good things in others, you will be calm, no problems, but you will still not improve;
c. Finally, if you see the bad things within you and the good things within others, you have room for improvement; Although this might be stressful, this is the method I like most.

Yes, there are more mixes than that. You can feel good about yourself on some things, and bad on others. You can be indifferent to others or care too much about someone else. You can think badly on two persons and great on other four. Life is more complex than that, I acknowledge that.

Most of the improvements in life come from seeing others doing great, or that we don’t do well. Usually this is solved by trying to imitate the world or trying to change ourselves.

If you see bad things in others and good things in yourself, your mood might be great, but your need for improvement will be lacking some resource.

But, all in all, we do have an option on how to live our lives, and even if we are not always right, even if others aren’t always right, we do need to acknowledge that:
a. a progress can be a great way to improve (see the good in others, the bad in you);
b. a happy feeling can exist if you see others doing bad things and you doing good things (but this will have no improvement);
c. you may also wish to be indifferent.

I hope I’ve cleared some ideas in you.

I’ve seen quite a few cartoons. Most of the classics, most of the top rated cartoons on IMDb, and even some TV series (while I was younger). I won’t get into too much details, I’ll just say that me and cartoons always got along quite fine.

My list of favorite movies only includes Le notti di Cabiria, and a few others, about which I’ve only written in Romanian. No cartoons in the list so far, besides WALL·E (2008), Ratatouille (2007), Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001). But why do I still watch cartoons in general, as a movie genre? They give me these following reasons to continue watching them:
1. They’re funny in a nice way; There are a lot of ways to be funny, but I mostly think of crude humor (not that bad, all-in-all, but still rude; mostly done with a surprise), intellectual humor (the a-ha! humor, in which you get an insight), and a kind rumor (this is not about a-ha, it’s about a surprise, like the rude humor, but in a gentle way); I mostly like intellectual humor and the kind humor;
2. I learn things; It may sound stupid, but it’s not the same if two persons say the same thing; It’s not the same if I get an idea from a cartoon, or if I generate it myself;
3. Things are said at an easy-to-comprehend level; I can watch a movie and still don’t get what the director meant; I can see a documentary with a thought that’s provoking, yet not that well easy to perceive; Yet I can go to bed every evening and say: Hey, I got what Walt DISNEY meant to say with that joke! I’m so good!
4. They are beautiful designed; From old cartoons (like Snow White and Pinocchio), to new ones (like Finding Nemo), I get a beautiful experience just by watching a cartoon; None of them is especially beautiful, and they are all in the same time lovely;
5. They bring me heart-breaking memories; It tears me into pieces to think about childhood, and watching a cartoon devastates my thinking.

To sum things up, I mostly watch cartoons because they are a learning experience (mostly of emotions and interactions) and that learning experience is done in a lovely fashion.

I’ll start with the following example: We have a chess match between A (a grandmaster) and B (a weaker player, but still a professional player). At some point there is this sequence of moves:
- A does a rather poor move, but a very creative and atypical on (everyone’s surprised);
- B doesn’t speculate the wrong move, and moves even poorer (but in a straightforward way; he doesn’t get creative);
- A goes on to win the match, even if he moved poorly at one time.
Now chess commentators come and see the sequence of moves. “Oh, what a great move by A player! So intriguingly well played. I didn’t see that coming. Such a lovely idea! Beautiful execution. I love it”. No commentator would dare to say “Even though we must admit that A won the match, he done a poor move at that moment. B should have speculated the mistake, because this is what the move was: a mistake.” So, I’d say that one chess player can win a game, and all his surprising moves (even though some might be actually wrong), will be glorified. Whoops, not-so-great thinking.

Now let’s go to another sport: football. Let’s have these situations:
- Player A is an forward; He scores 3 goals (he does a hat-trick);
- Player B makes 6 great passes to A, another 5 passes to other players, which directly result in 5 goals (his passes are transformed into goals);
- Player C is the goal keeper and catches 3 close-to-being a goal.

Now it’s the end of the match. Commentators praise A for scoring, C for keeping others from scoring, while B gets just a grade – 9 out of 10 (good grade, but still he gets no comments, no appraisal). Everyone else in the team gets one grade, B is one out of many. But no commentator would say “Hmmm, that was a good sequence of passes from B.”

Why is that? (now we’re getting somewhere) The goals given by the forward can be evaluated. The goals received (or not) by the goal-keeper can, with a small margin of error, still be evaluated. But the pass itself is mostly evaluated by the outcome. If I put a good pass, and no goal follows, then – “Hmmm, not that good play for B”. If I put a good pass, and a goal follows, then the result is “Hmmm, that was a good pass, but have you seen the goal of A? A was extraordinary!” You can’t easily say – “It was a good pass, no matter what the outcome was. Great passing by itself!”

What can you take home?
a. People in general (not only critics) tend to evaluate based on end result; While seeing a patient die shouldn’t make a surgical operation successful, you should take into account that the operation itself can be independent from the end-result (you can have a great surgical procedure, even if the end result is not great);
b. Sometimes, the most glamorous character in an event is not the star in the spotlight, it may well be a rather obscure character;
c. If football is a game played in teams, football evaluation usually takes place in the easy-to-spot results of individuals (goals given by the forwards or balls caught by the goal-keeper);
d. Most results are from a play of team, not the final executor.

I hope I did provide you with some insights too.

What would my answer be? I told you before that I will not leave my country due to the views of Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI on the subject. Not physically, at least. But, on the other hand:
1. Two of the most important blogs I own are in English, and are targeting mostly an English audience (you wouldn’t say that by looking at my traffic analysis, but still);
2. You can see on my Last FM profile that a lot of the singers I like are not Romanians;
3. Most of the movies I watch are not from Romania (I actually have a small phobia on watching Romanian movies due to the small budget, thus lack of quality);
4. My Google Reader application is filled with English feeds (I actually started adding some French sources too);
5. A lot of the things at supermarkets I buy are not from Romania;
6. Most of the electronics I have are out of this country;
7. As an Internet-geek, I use a lot of web sites outside Romania;

Still, I can say that:
1. All my relatives are Romanian;
2. My friends are Romanian;
3. Most of my workplaces I worked were filled with Romanians;
4. The persons I meet daily are (surprise, surprise!) Romanians;
5. I read mostly Romanian news;
6. The things I buy at the local marketplace are from Romanian persons (I wouldn’t call them peasants, but it’s not far from that);
7. Most of the time I speak, think and read in Romanian.

So, I would say that most people I’m surrounded with are from Romania, while a lot of the things I do, read and use are not Romanian-specific. It is a surprising fact to see things like this. I didn’t expect foreign customs, items and creations to be so important in my life. Writing this article was quite a discovery for me.

I decided to have a look today at some major job-searching web sites in Romania: BestJobs and eJobs. I looked for [MBA] keyword on all three. Here are the results:

and:

BestJobs had a total of 4,959 jobs, out of which 8 asked for an MBA; ratio MBA / total jobs: 0.16%
eJobs: 3,596 jobs in total – 5 of which asked for an MBA; ratio: 0.12%
__________
Total: 8,555 jobs in total – 13 jobs asking for MBA; Total ratio: 0.15% jobs requiring an MBA.

So, as of today, only about one or two jobs seen out of 1,000 on BestJobs and ejobs require MBAs.

Also, please note that “require” is a relative term: you have a plus by having an MBA, but I don’t remember seeing any job posting putting the “Mandatory” requirement. It would be nice to have it, not mandatory.

What should I learn from this?
a. Either jobs that require an MBA are not posted on BestJobs or eJobs;
b. Either Romanian jobs don’t really require MBAs.

But I still want to get one.

I think you should do an useful think for condemning communism and sign the Prague Declaration!

The appeal has already been followed by names:

• Václav Havel, former dissident and President of Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic, Czech Republic
• Joachim Gauck, former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi archives, Germany
• Göran Lindblad, Vice-president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Member of Parliament, Sweden
• Vytautas Landsbergis, Member of the European Parliament, former dissident and President of Lithuania, Lithuania
• Jana Hybášková, Member of the European Parliament, Czech Republic
• Christopher Beazley, Member of the European Parliament, United Kingdom
• Tunne Kelam, Member of the European Parliament, former dissident, Estonia
• Jiří Liška, Senator, Vice-chairman of the Senate, Parliament of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic
• Martin Mejstřík, Senator, Parliament of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic
• Jaromír Štětina, Senator, Parliament of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic

You can follow their example and sign it too.

Motto: “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
(by John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton)

I think that everything in life has to do with the concept of power. In every relation that involves human interaction (be it professional or personal), there is a negotiation involved. And this thing also involves a concept of powers. One must negotiate his (or hers) status, rights and obligations. Which things am I allowed to do? There’s a negotiation on this.

Things get trickier when one party has a lot more power and abuses this power. How does this translate into everyday life?
a. Google was chosen best employer in the USA because it gave his employees a lot of playground area; Sure, Google has enormous powers over its employees, but he does give them well enough freedom to fully act on the job; He lets go of his powers, and empowers others;
b. In personal life, I think I personally get along best with people I can control a little (they let things go my way); How do I do this? By also giving up things on my own (I let things go their way);
c. In most of the times when there is an argument, some party abuses its power controls.

What I like most about power is that it is so closely related to being proud. The logic goes like this:
a. (pride) I am better than you / so good / the greatest / the ultimate – so this means
b. (power) I have the option exert power on you, thus I have to do it.

It’s a faulty logic on both levels:
a. You are not better than any one living person on this Earth; on a core level, we’re all the same; You can have better skills, ethics, behaviour, resources; But on a core level, people are right about equals;
b. The fact that you can exert power on me, doesn’t mean you have to do it; You also have the option not to do it; Do it and problems arise.

Or at least that’s how I see things right now. How about you? What’s power in your life?

These are the things that make me the happiest person in the world and you, my reader, a person I’ve shared this with.

For this aim, I would like to present you with a clip that I like a lot. You can see it on YouTube (external link).

It’s about William WALLACE, who tries to convince an army to join him in his fight for freedom of Scotland (in the Braveheart movie – 1995).

What do I notice by watching this clip? At first William WALLACE tries to convince an army that comparing the advantages of the present moment with the disadvantages of fighting against a larger army (right now, in this moment), you have a clear choice: right now there are more advantages.

But the army isn’t convinced. No one wants to trade a state of comfort and well being for a risky fight. In the present there are problems.

And then William WALLACE does a wonderful thing: he puts the minds of his people into the future. He makes them dream, he makes them wish for something better.

With more enthusiasm from his part, the people follow him.

I think this clip summarizes perfectly the importance of having a vision, something to hope for: even if in the present there are many bad things that you may not like, by focusing into the future, you can do some hard-to-believe-yet-perfectly-natural decisions.

Yes, it may be hard to believe that fighting against a larger army can bring you any value, but it’s perfectly natural to take this step, considering the advantages. And the army believes him, and follows him to the fight.

So, how are visions created? The very first thing to do is trying to imagine you, others or the environment in the future. The next step would be imagining you are right into that step. Coming back to the present (like William WALLACE does it), would you trade your well being in the present, to reach that great future?

So, returning to the question from the title – what is a vision? I think that a vision is more of a hard-anchored necessity than an abstract dream.

How do you feel about that

I think the one thing that’s most important when writing a press release is … (drums rolling) telling the full truth.

Sure, in Public Relations (acronym – PR) there are alternatives to that:
a. Omitting some truths;
b. Emphasizing the least important things from the journalists’ perspective;
c. Promoting the products and the company.

I think that if you do a Press Release (same acronym – PR) and try to mask the truth, sooner or later the journalists will penalize you for that.

The journalists suffer since you present a not-that-true Press Release.

What could happen?
a. In the first scenario, the Press Release won’t be published at all;
b. The journalist could try to understand the whole picture by himself; He won’t get the full idea, he might get things wrong, and that’s even worse than not having a Press Release published at all – it’s published with the wrong data.

On 13th of February I was reading “The Brothers Karamazov” (by Fyodor Dostoyevsky) and one thing hit me: addiction can’t be fought by trying to fulfill it. You just live with it, it never stop if you try to satisfy your desire.

I once had a feeling that solving an addiction is a simple thing: one just tries to solve it, forces things (imposes, sets a goal), and it goes away. And when addiction comes back, and you really want that thing, the solution is to try to solve that one moment (since you are already out of addiction). This will make things better (I thouhgt), and in the long term you won’t feel the urge anymore

Well, I was wrong. Addiction will always make you have an urge. (or at least me) The solution to solving the urge is simple: keep the urge. Don’t try to satisfy it. This is totally unlike me: I have a tendency to solve a problem by making things worse. I know, it feels bad, you really want that thing, but living with the urge and not satisfy it is the best thing to do.

So, as a personal observation to my urges, it seems I can’t solve an addiction by stepping into it.

I just felt like sharing this with the world.

I’ll first make a detour and give you some other reasons for which anyone should vote. Then I’ll get back to the main point. So, there are many reasons for which anyone should vote. I will list a few in here:
1. For the past. You can imagine yourself on a timeline. People before you went to great pain just for you to vote. Some people died for you right today. You are not forced to respect this, but you can take this into account. Act by voting – it’s a way of showing respect. But if you freely choose not to vote, you aren’t disturbing either, you have this option too. This option to vote is for others – in the past;
2. For the future. Think of the future generations. Your vote will mean a difference in the future. Vote to show that you care about your future. Leave a mark now on the day that will come tomorrow. This reason to vote is for others, also – but in the future;
3. You belong to some very specific groups of people. You are a part of a profession, you belong to an age group, and you like some things and dislike others. You are part of a family, you have a circle of friends, and you represent a local area (narrow or large). You are influenced by what you read, think. You are what you ethics and moral codes tell you to be. You can represent all those groups of people, with similar interests and occupation, with one single vote. This vote is for others also – in the present. It shows that you care for all of them. Not acting in the day of voting doesn’t necessarily means not caring, but voting does show caring. It shows a lack of self-comfort for the good of others. It’s a small sacrifice, not less valuable than other kinds;
4. You can finally vote for you. Vote for your interests, to be better represented, to have a slightly better life. Vote that you earn more, that you send a message. Show your power by doing a very easy thing: wake up, go to the voting cabin, vote, and return. This is your power. This is the point I want to emphasize in this blog post. I might be wrong, but voting for oneself just might be the reason for anyone to vote.

So, I give you just one reason for which you should vote: because it’s a rational thing to do. You can be sentimental and vote because you like someone. You can use your passion and feelings and vote because you hate someone and want him to fail the elections. Yet the one reason for which you should vote it’s a rational one: because you can express your option on which a certain person or a certain group of persons would benefit your interests best. By voting you help others make a better life for you. It’s that simple.

Let me explain this: your interests may not be focused on yourself only. You can vote for the interests of your community. You can vote for the interests of your country. You can vote that a class of people feel very good. But, in the end, you will follow your basic interests (and yes, they can include helping others). You can vote for the future or the past. But in the end, you will vote because your own inner principles guide you into thinking that the past and the future are important. So, even if you wish to vote for the future or past, you still follow your personal principles.

Case study: what is my interest in writing this message? I wish that more people expressed their caring for the world. I wish that the politicians were represented by the whole population. People should not be divided into “people that are actively pursuing their interests and actions” and “others”. I wish for a better world. And voting helps make one. Thus, I am favorable to voting.

What would a secret interest of mine be? You and I have a shared interest: we are part of the web. Since by reading this message you use the Internet, and more specific you read a blog, you are likely to vote for someone that favors IT (Information Technology) industry in general, Internet in particular and, very specifically, who likes blogs also. If you’re a frequent reader of mine, you might also have other common interests and with me (more than just blogging and commenting over Internet). So if I manage to influence you to vote, you are likely to vote for someone with similar interests into my own good. So your vote will also benefit me. Ironically, even if I do know about this way of thinking, this is not the reason for writing the message (or so my brain likes to trick me into thinking). The reason is the reason above: I wish people expressed their view of the world.

Now you know all my secrets. My final advice: vote! Vote whenever possible, inform yourself very well before vote. But if this is the case, take a wrong step, rather than no step. Fight for a better life by using just a small physical effort: go and vote. Act when timing requires it: vote! If it’s not for the past, if it’s not for the future, if it’s not for others, then vote for you. If it’s not for your emotions, vote with your brain. But vote!

What’s in the message?
Short intro
A. What’s the magic 8-elements list I’ve made?
B. Pre-cooked food – how to get it?
C. Nuts & seeds – why this is top food and why it doesn’t take much time to eat?
Conclusions

Short intro
First let’s define the terms: fast means buying fast, carrying them easily, storing easily (at most in the fridge), no cooking, no warming the food, easy to get in the table (almost no cleaning or washing) and most of all, eating it fast. So, we exclude foods like local berries (you buy them slowly, you have to wash them carefully), anything that has to be warmed first or stored in the freezer. We also exclude foods like a lot of fresh vegetables (how can you carry them fresh? and making a salad is a time-wasting solution).

Oh, and a warning: I’ve got no medical training whatsoever. My suggested list of foods is not scientific, nor very precise. But it’s the best I can do, and you should check with your doctor if the things that I eat are good for you. You should probably check the things you currently eat if you’re there, but that’s a different point.

Why am I doing this list? Because most of the times when you think there is absolutely no solution for eating fast (and bad) from a fast-food, you ignore other solutions that are also low-consumers of time (but in the same time healthy). And I’m here to crush the way you try to fool yourself.

A. What’s the magic 8-elements list I’ve made?
1. Meat: Oceanic fish in olive oil; that’s right, I’m talking about eating food in cans; Ok, this is probably not the best option you’ve got for eating fish – boiled fish is best, fried is better; but fish in a can is actually a not-that-bad solution; due to a thing called “smell”, fish is hard to prepare; it’s thus a good option to get it in a can rather than no fish at all;
2. Milk: Low-fat milk (in Romania we have this mostly in plastic bags; it’s easier to carry in the card packaging; and it’s easier to drink – directly from it) – it doesn’t need going into refrigerator; buy it, drink it; have it on your desk, drink out of it a few times a day;
3. Milk: Low-fat yoghurt – in spite of its name, this generally has a higher amount of fat; but considering the fast-food alternatives I’ve given, this is a not-so-bad food;
4. Fruit & Vegetables: Pickles (cute cumber, fibster, red beet, the list can continue) preserved in jars; this is not so pleasant to eat, but if you manage to do this, you’re fine; they also have quite an amount of salt in them;
5. Fruit & Vegetables: A lot of fruits that can be eaten fast – bananas; peaches, apricots, apples, pears, plums; that’s about all I eat fast; others take more time to peel (try a coconut), to eat (melons) or to wash (berries);
6. Fruit & Vegetables: Some vegetables that can be eaten fast – cute cumbers, tomatoes, pimentos; That’s about all I know in Romania;
7. Various: Pre-cooked food (I’ll have a special chapter to this);
8. Nuts & seeds: Slow-eating food (but it’s the kind of food you can eat and do a different task in the same time; so you can do multitasking; special chapter for this one too);

There you go. I’ve just gave you more than 8 different solutions (besides 2 and 3, there is more than one solution listed). Now for the special chapters.

B. Pre-cooked food – how to get it?
The bad thing about this pre-cooked food? You either have to warm it right before eating (and this takes time), or eat it out of the fridge (“No fridge” you suggest? Bacteria will fill your food in no time). In either solution given by me, the food doesn’t taste that good. But it’s healthier, or so I think.

1. Buy: You can buy much healthier food from a supermarket or restaurant-to-go on your way to work; This solution, although not cheap, is better than going to the nearest fast food; sure, it’s great to have your food warm, just made for you; but you can buy food from the supermarket, keep it at work in the fridge, and eat it cold at lunch; it’s not an optimal solution, but it’s the solution with the smallest damage to your health;
2. Save: Let’s say you go out in one evening, and for some reason you don’t eat everything, or you have to go fast, no time to eat; have your dinner packed and eat it the next day;
3. Cook it yourself: this would extend the 1-8 list above a lot; There are some very simple solutions like boiling some eggs, going to not-that-complicated solutions like making food from boiling freeze vegetables;
4. Have someone cook it for you: this is actually both much cheaper than buying it from supermarket and it’s also healthier; you have total control on what gets inside; maximum health.

C. Nuts & seeds – why this is top food and why it doesn’t take much time to eat?
There are various seeds – from sunflower and pumpkin seeds (no hull), to nuts and almonds. They are generally not cheap at all, but neither is fast-food. Their biggest problem? It takes a lot of time to eat them. I mean you can go nuts eating those … almonds. But you can put them in a small can, do your computer or paper work, and eat it from that can. You can use a teaspoon for avoiding germs from and to keyboard. Basically, all the time you consume is the time to put the seeds in the can and the time to put that in your mouth. While eating them (the slowest process) you can do a different task. I know, this is not the best thing to do in a perfect world. In a perfect world, you’d eat them in the morning (so they have time to be digested – nuts and seeds are hard to digest, you should note), you’d chew your food slowly, you’d eat in a different place than the desk you work at, you wouldn’t do multitasking while eating etc. These are all god advice, but if you can’t cut on time, I think my solution (eating seeds and nuts in front of the PC or paperwork) is not that bad.

Oh, and carrots can be eaten just like seeds – you can do a different thing while eating them. They are so hard to chew.

Conclusions
To summarize my message to the world: there are a few good alternatives to fast-food. If you can accept warming food before eating it or eating cold food from the fridge, the list becomes larger. If you can also eat seeds and nuts while working (your work is at a desk, for example) the list can be even larger. But in the end, all I gave you are paths to take. I’m not the one who decides to walk on them or not. And no one’s going to be there for you, eating nuts and seeds at work, while fast-food is everywhere. You’re all alone.

PS: If it makes you feel any better, I do most of the things above all the time. Not doing it would mean a reason to quit jobs.

How do one tries to divide a story about the greatest movie seen in all of his life? I don’t know the answer, but here’s my try.

Contents:
1. The movie context
2. Want a sneak preview?
3. What makes the movie just a bit special?
4. What makes the movie really special?
5. How did she suffer in her early life?
6. After this, what’s the hero’s suffering throughout the movie?
7. What’s ultimate suffering for the character?
8. What’s the preceding part just before the part that tear me apart?
9. What’s the thing that moved me?

1. The movie context
First of all, this movie is in Italian, it’s filmed in the 1950s, black & white. And I have yet to see a more beautiful movie. You might want to see the movie yourself, make an opinion on him and then read my review. It has spoilers. And reading about it will lower the intensity of discovering things by yourself.

The movie was directed by Federico Fellini. The main character, Maria ‘Cabiria’ Ceccarelli, is played by Giulietta Masina. It lasts about two hours and it is also immortal.

The movie won an Oscar from the Academy Awards in 1958 for the “Best Foreign Language Film” (Italy). One year earlier, at the “Cannes Film Festival”, Giulietta Masina got the “Best Actress” award.

2. Want a sneak preview?
Have a look at the Le Notti di Cabiria movie trailer on YouTube.
Read some facts and opinions on the movie from IMDb page for Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957). I found the comments to be accurate.

3. What makes the movie just a bit special?
The main character has some sad, angry and upset moments (at the beginning, after a near-death experience, she is very angry), and some happy moments. The transformation is beautiful. You just have to love her when she smiles and laughs. But that’s just a small reason for making this movie the best movie I’ve seen in my life.

I want to stress out something right from the beginning: she’s a person who’s upset. She’s angry, fast tempered. But then she smiles, she laughs, she has an innocence. I’ll tell you next that her life was, is and will be hard. And nowhere in the movie do you see her upset for too long. She goes from this to that in no-time. You don’t feel her sufferance in the movie. It all seems natural, she takes hits with a joy, when she falls she bounces back. And the final, oh the final … But we’ll get to that.

4. What makes the movie really special?
The love for life. In just a few words, the movie can be summed up like this: a person selling her body for sex, having prostitutes as friends and poor persons as neighbors, living at the outskirts of Rome (at the end of this movie I would call this character a Great Lady) suffers throughout the movie. Her final reaction to this huge suffering is astonishing.

5. How did she suffer in her early life?
Well, having a mother that would make you prostitute for money, earning money as a prostitute for decades and living in a poor area would imply suffering.

6. After this, what’s the hero’s suffering throughout the movie?
Heart: She suffers at the beginning of the movie when she is almost killed by drowning for some money by her lover.
Body: She suffers from being almost poor and from prostitution situation

7. What’s ultimate suffering for the character?
1. In the end of the movie, she suffers this huge disappointment: for the second time in her life someone intends to kill her for her money and almost does it; it was a person she loved with all her heart and intends to marry;
2. In the scenes depicted in the movie she starts to see hope in her life from Virgin Mary and she prays to her; I think this is the first time in her life she hopes something from Divinity; she prays to Virgin Mary for a better life, out of prostitution; she almost gets a new life being almost married, then all of the sudden, at the end of the movie, this new dream vanquishes; she would probably return to prostitution, but this is not clear; what happens to her hope in Divinity? well, this might fade also;
3. At the end of the movie she sells her house and she gets from the bank all of her money; these are all stolen; all her belongings are sold; all that connects her physically with this world (house, money) are gone; I think she still has a suitcase and she’s got the care of some friends; that’s about all she has left in this world; the fact that before hadn’t had much either is yet another argument: just the few things she had (a house and some money in the bank) are stolen from her; it’s hard to see this happening to you.

So, at the end of the movie we have a character that:
1. Has suffered throughout her life from lack of love (poor treatment from parents, no real person to love her, just a close friend and some acquaintances);
2. Every time this person tries to get love (at first from parents who don’t love her, then from the lover who tries to kill her at the beginning of the movie, then from the lover at the end of the movie who again intends to kill her), she is rejected; the final rejection, from the person she intends to marry, is hugely difficult (it’s yet another time she gets a huge hit from the person she loves most in this world; please note that her parents sent her to become a prostitute);
3. Her very first attempt to get close to Virgin Mary (and Divinity) is at first leading to huge hope (a marriage almost occurs, she leaves prostitution, she’s got a new life), then a huge disappointment (the marriage is gone, her occupation in the future is unclear, her new life is poorer than before);
4. Has had a life that could be described by everyone at least as “hard”: physically beaten, emotionally abused, hard conditions for living, poor social status;
5. Has almost been killed by drowning twice; and this by persons she fully trusted and loved;
6. At the end of the movie she has lost her house (which she sold) and all her money in the bank account.

8. What’s the preceding part just before the part that tear me apart?
At the end of the movie the sufferance is complete. She is almost killed, the almost-husband leaves her, he gets all her money (including the money for the house), she is somewhere in the woods. Before the second lover leaves her, she asks him to kill her. She insists. She actually yells at him to kill her, while crying. He leaves her, taking her money.

9. What’s the thing that moved me?
And then it happens. The one thing that makes me want to see this movie infinite times. The one thing that makes you love life with all your heart. The one act that makes a prostitute (or ex-prostitute) do one of the best acts a human being could ever make: laugh. How come, you ask? In the final scene, she is surrounded by some happy people, she is walking, they walk alongside her. They are all joyful (they don’t know what happened to her, and it’s night), and she looks at them and she takes their joy: she laughs. After all her tough life. After just going through a horrible mind-blowing experience, she takes from the unsuspecting happy people that surround her the joy: she laughs. She loves life. She’s happily living in the present. The laughs that changes the world. She changes reality. Nothing is the same. She has a tough life, she’s hit and none of this exist in her: she laughs. There’s more than hope: there’s victory. Now. Right now she laughs. The world was changed by the joy on her face. Is it hard for her to this? Tears fall from her eyes, and her laugh is barely visible. But the joy is there. The happiness is present.

This movie is the best proof I’ve seen on screen that life deserves to be lived. There is no second movie after this. Ultimate movie. Highly recommended. It’s the reason to see movies. It’s the reason to create an account on IMDb and vote just one movie. And then comment on the movie. One comment only. It’s a reason to change your email signature. It’s a reason to change your Yahoo! Messenger status for weeks. It’s the one reason for buying a DVD player and one DVD only.

What are the topics in this blog post about?
1. Assertiveness;
2. Balance;
3. Career;
4. Consciousness;
5. Continuing education;
6. Continuing professional development;
7. Courage;
8. Fulfillment;
9. Goal setting;
10. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs;
11. Mastering habits;
12. Momentum;
13. Motivation;
14. No pain, no gain;
15. Problem solving;
16. Procrastination;
17. Time management;
18. Waking up early;
19. Wealth (Money).

Here goes my blog post on each of these subjects:

• Assertiveness – In the “Fight Club” movie (see Fight Club movie page on IMDb) some characters have a task of staring up a fight with someone. In their words, starting a fight was difficult, because people would go to a lot of trouble rather than go fighting. So up to a point, it’s easy being assertive. But in Romania being assertive is more than that. It’s considered a bit aggressive just to express an objective point of view. Thus, being assertive is aggressive in itself. So people, with this confusion in mind, are thinking they’re aggressive when expressing opinions. And if this is the case, they are actually becoming aggressive, passing by the assertive solution. What is the solution, after all? I found that it’s best to be assertive no matter what. Never go to the aggressive state, but other than that – be assertive (even if it is perceived as agressive). You should express what you think in an assertive and non-aggressive manner;
• Balance – Oh, the magic word, the never-given solution. What is balance in life? How does one find it? Just to be 9 hours at work probably means that job gets most of your life. Just having a part-time job means that life has more importance than your career. What’s the middle path and how can one pick it in such a way that the balance is maintained (so that the middle path doesn’t become an extreme solution by itself)? These are all questions for which I fail to have an answer. My solution is a bit extreme: only put emphasis on health. Below this, do everything on being happy. Below or equal to this, put everything on getting things done. So, as long as I’m healthy, I can have fun with my friends or by myself or have a productive work. This is balance to me: health first, results or fun afterwards. I’m sure that this is not the middle way. But it is my balance and I’m so happy with it;
• Career – I guess the most important thing about a career is related with your goals in life. If you wish to gather a large sum of money (by tremendous efforts) until you’re, let’s say, 40, and afterwards you wish to retire, then you might consider an alternative. How about gathering that a less-than-large sum of money until you’re 60, but all of those years when you’re gathering money you have all the fun of your life? How does this sound – going to work and feeling you’re alive? Loving what you do? And also how does it feel it doesn’t take to be 40 to be able to have a relaxed way of doing things? This is my approach to career and I love it. Also, when reaching 40 and retiring, are you sure you’ll feel fine not doing a thing at all, for all day long?
• Consciousness – I’ve found in my personal experience that sleeping well (not too much, not too few, about 8 hours) is great for being conscious. I’ve also found that after a few days of bad sleeping and one day of good night’s sleep, after that final day you’re even less alert than in the days of not sleeping well. I also found that with age consciousness, for me at least, increases;
• Continuing education – In 2005 I graduated my Faculty. Did I stop there? No, I went on to do my Masters’ Degree. I graduated in the spring of 2008 (I’ve given my graduation paper its full importance). Will I stop here? I don’t think so. I plan to do yet another Masters’ Degree, in Informatics. Will I stop after that? Probably not. I intend to take classes even after I graduate this. After faculty, every class I took was payed. Why do I do that? I consider wisdom the greatest wealth a person can have. I also fail to see what better alternatives I have for studying. What can I do anything better than study?
• Continuing professional development – Each morning from Monday to Friday I take the subway to work. In the evening I take the subway from work. Sometimes I sit down, sometimes I stand up. Sometimes the subway is close to being empty, some other times it’s very crowded. No matter what, I always read in the subway – mostly newspapers and sometimes magazines and books. I can actually read in every mass transportation vehicle – train, bus, van. Why do I do this? I’m doing my best to recover some of the so-called wasted time of travelling and I actually do something in that time;
• Courage – I don’t think that courage is not having any fear at all. Rather than that, it’s overcoming the fears and doing things you wouldn’t normally do. Going against the current – now that takes guts!
• Fulfillment – I fill fulfilled by doing the things I want. I love my job, my personal life, my health. I love helping others. I love human interaction. I consider being happy as one of the most important things in life. Carpe diem! is not a Christian quote, since it makes you not think on what is after your body dies, but it does put some emphasis on giving 100% of what you can give;
• Goal setting – Some see their lives many years ahead. I admit only being able to see it for the next six months in some details and only for about two years in vague details. Thus, my goals mostly refer to a few days ahead, and rarely do they pass a future month. I think I should write them down, but I fail to do this at this moment. My goals also change a lot, influenced by the things I read;
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – I’ve seen a presentation by Sir John Whitmore in Coaching ‘08 conference. He said that the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for most individuals has changed in recent past – more and more people have higher needs now than in the present. Today it’s not a matter of surviving for most people, it’s merely a question of satisfying greater and greater needs. I can’t say if he’s right or wrong – my needs have always been high and I don’t remember periods of time of not having something to eat;
• Mastering habits – I greatly use reminders and To do lists for mastering habits. Those help me a lot in setting some patterns which I later try to follow again and again. Google Calendar has a SMS notification service that works also in Romania. I use it alot;
• Momentum – I think that the biggest problem for losing momentum while surfing online is email. If you have an email notification service (so you instantly find out when you have new email) the problem is even worse. I try to read my emails more and more rarely and only read the very important ones when they arrive. Sometimes I fail to do that;
• Motivation – Life is all about motivation. Life is more than a third work (and yet another third sleep). Third of your time is free time and most likely you are motivated to spend it just fine. But how about the motivation for work? It is more than one third of your life, are you motivated into what you do? I am and I hope this can be seen. This is the key in life – be motivated to have a wonderful life all the time, not only when you’re with friends and family;
• No pain, no gain – I’ve heard it again and again in different wordings: in order to succeed you have to be uncomfortable with a state of discomfort. It’s the only solution for life. I will not present you what I’m dissatisfied with. I will only state that to a lot of people my life has a remarkable similarity to failure – I don’t eat tasty foods, I don’t do a job that is a hugely financially rewarding, I do actions for free that would make people go “Why would you do that?”, I put my body into physical efforts that at least for the short term are not easy to bear. And yet I’m ultimately happy, enjoying every second of life, and to me the stuff I eat, the job I have, the free actions I do, the sports I do – they’re all great;
• Problem solving – A trainer called Jim BAGNOLA used to say “We’re professional problem solvers”. I couldn’t agree more with him. This is life: to solve problems in such a way that you learn from this experience and you become better at this. I’ve had so many problems (not more than others, of course), that this has to be true: I truly am a professional problem solver;
• Procrastination – Putting a task for doing later is not procrastination. It’s just that you set a specific time for the task, time which is not this very instant. But postponing a task once you’ve set it – now that’s procrastination. You have to do the task when you said you’d do it. Sure, you can have exceptions, but once exceptions become part of your routine, that’s called procrastination. Procastrination does have a good part: it helps me be ultimately motivated to do a lot of things at once and get results. Perhaps having a lot of time is the sure path to being late;
• Time management – To me the best time management method is cutting things you do. You can choose to do only some things, and put very little emphasis on other things. Also, focus on the 20% that bring you 80% of the results (by Vilfredo Pareto principle – you can read the Wikipedia article on the Pareto principle for this matter);
• Waking up early – From what I’ve read, a not-so-bad schedule for sleeping is 22 to 6. It’s also good to sleep at about the same hour each evening. It’s nice to weak up without an alarm clock. When you’ve done all that, you may have a good waking schedule;
• Wealth (Money) – Is money important? Definitely. Are money more important than how you feel in the present time and how healthy you are? Definitely not! So, putting a good priority on the present day and not on the future, while maintaining or improving your health status is a good solution to successfully manage the money-life balance.

Did some of this leave a mark on you? You can also leave a mark on my blog by commenting below! Thanks for visiting this blog post.

Contents
1. Attention
2. Self-awareness
3. Memory
4. Spatial perception
5. Negotiation skills
6. Conclusions

1. Attention. For the whole period of the Predeal winter school we had training, we created some papers via teamwork, we did some physical and unless you didn’t speak Romanian you couldn’t keep your mouth shut for too long. I’ve also read from a book on my way home. Except for communication, these were all activities that I’ve had troubles keeping up with in the past.

The great news: in the winter camp I could understand what the trainer was saying (also due to the fact that I was allowed to come up with my own comments), I gave good feed-back on the team’s activities (really no problem focusing on the task, but I could add that this was not a very challenging task for my attention), and naturally I could focus on what other people were saying while speaking (maybe because they didn’t use hard-to-understand words).

The not-so-great news: although my attention was good at reading the book, it wasn’t that great, considering it was supposed to be a book easy to read, from a field I should be fairly familiar with (psychology). It was a Romanian book (my native tongue), with fairly understandable words. In 2002, when I discovered I had a trouble with the attention span, I tried my best to find ways to work on it. The most obvious trouble was with school: I couldn’t follow any teacher’s class (even if writing, I still didn’t remember a thing from the class, I didn’t even know what the class was about; I could follow seminar activity though), and I couldn’t read any of the school manuals. Back then, I didn’t considered the fact that I was not paying attention to what others were saying to be a big deal. Now I do, and that problem is solved. Anyhow, not being able to read a book was a primary target five to six years ago, and I still have problems on this. They are nevertheless much smaller (I did understand and followed 70 to 80 percent of the book).

Why is attention so important? Besides things like reading a book, a thing of deadly importance is crossing the street. My only accident like this happened when I was about 4 years old, on a zebra – I was not attentive, and a motorcycle threw me to the ground. Nothing bad happened to me, I was just very scared. Also, most of the other almost-to-happen incidents happened while crossing the street on zebras. It just that I don’t pay attention.

How did I learn to focus better? First of all, this is a hard to answer question. There is not a single factor that helped me better focus on things, and it’s not always easy to see a direct correlation activity-focus. So, how did I learn? I will skip the less successful factors, and only present the top one: via sports. Tae-bo, Karate, Korfball, even home exercises (gymnastics with or without dumbbells) – they all helped. My focus also improved, I think, due to healthier lifestyle – better eating, better sleeping.

What’s still to be done? I read a lot of time each day. Unfortunately, rarely do I read a book. I read news articles (via Internet when at my PC or via hard copies when in the subway), blog posts, web pages, and generally a lot of information goes before my eyes. Yet a book is harder to be skimmed, I can’t go from page 30 to page 50 and still understand a thing, and if I lose focus for two minutes, then the whole books becomes hard to understand. So a basic trick on improving my skills on reading books would be not only reading more materials, like I already do, but actually reading books. Skimming is not easy to do in a book, and with time and practice, I think, my skills will improve. Also, continuing on the healthy life style (eat, sleep, do sports) can’t do any wrong.

2. Self-awareness. Now this should have been one of my top skills and my mouth dropped when in the winter camp I found out a thing about me that should have been obvious. It goes like this: following a dispute with a person whose expertise I highly valued, I found out that I have a different than most other persons perception on how human relations should be. I valued conflict and no-peace as a way to improve on things, while most other persons, including the person with whom I had the dispute, valued peace and harmony. I went on my past experiences to test this presumption, and found it to be true. The fact that it took a winter camp in Predeal to find out this simple thing was a hit to me. “How could have I been so unaware of this contrast in the way I and others view human relations?” Other than that, I received a lot of feed-back, and I can’t say my personal observation were low, so I already knew some things being told: I already noticed some things, but it’s still good to see how others perceive you.

How did I learn to be good on self-awareness? Well, simply put, by practicing. I just thought a lot on my skills, my thoughts, my way of acting. It’s not a skill I wish to improve upon, but the fact that in the winter camp I found out a very important thing to me that was not obvious shook for a bit my belief that I’m good with self-awareness.

3. Memory. This is a short one. On the winter camp: I basically can’t remember any name. I share a room with a person for 6 days and still not know its name, I can be in a team and work for hours with somebody, and have no idea what that person’s name is. Generally speaking: I remember well my experiences, I can understand and recall an argumentation, but names, faces, what people wear, who said what, addresses, paths I’ve already been to, buildings – I seem to be much lower than average on remembering these. I don’t think there was ever an improvement on my memory skills (and this thing can hardly be improved), but basically due to increased attention, and a healthier lifestyle my memory is a fraction bit better.

What’s still do be done?
I can still live healthy and my memory functions are helped a bit by this, but that’s just about it. The memory itself can hardly be improved.

But I can uses reminders, have a Calendar, use objects to remind myself (I leave one object on my backpack, so I know that I will take with me) – basically help my life go on in spite of bad memory.

Also reading on memory improvement techniques might help (most of the articles I read are on health) – a recent article caught my eyes. It’s about “Ten Minutes Of Talking Improves Memory And Test Performance” in “Science Daily”.

4. Spatial perception. Each time a close person asks me “How was the winter school?”, I answer “I hit a girl in the face with the fist” and then I explained what happened. Now it’s obvious that a bad thing happened, but why would I start my description of a 7-days school with one of the poorest experiences? First of all, it’s a rather funny story (in a rather awkward way for me), and a story which creates strong emotions. Both are good things. Then it helps me live with the story. If I can tell my best friend the bad thing, and he has a reaction, and that reaction is calmer than mine, it helps me calm myself. And when people think about “hitting in the face” it’s usually the region: mouth-nose-eyes. It was actually in the forehead, so a bit more easy to handle. Coming back, the story about me hitting a girl is quite exemplary for my spacial perception, so I’ll tell it. Me, a boy and two girls were at a improvised contest: “Who can throw a snowball further with the left arm?”. They all throw, the boy was quite good at this. Then I try. To have an imagine of my strength, I can do 50 push-ups, and I weight about 77kg /170 pounds. I’ve done about two years of karate before 2008. Also, my left arm is stronger than right. So I try to do a normal course of the arm (a rounded course in a vertical plan). But in the last moment I decide not to hit in a vertical plan, but do a horizontal throw. So the direction of the fist changes in the last moment, and it lands in the forehead of a girl. How hard can I hit someone? At karate, I didn’t do as advised: “Try to hit your opponent, but the strength of the hit should be much lower on the impact itself”. Instead, I avoided hitting anyone. This went well for one and a half year of karate training – I had experienced opponents, and not hitting them was easy. At some moment a complete novice comes to karate, and I get to train with him. When he was hitting, he had a bad habit of moving his head to the front. The unavoidable thing happened: I hit him in his left eye each time I tried to hit the air. He was surely suffering. I hit him again. And again. I got used with his style and avoided this after a while, but three hits in the eye must have left an unforgettable memory. So I can say I can hit someone pretty hard.

For now on I can say this: I got involved in one team play outdoors, and managed to hit someone in the face (forehead, to be precise). I once went to the mountains, and I got the record of most falls on the ground (snow, ice and slippery boots helped). Indoors, I ran into a flip chart and put it down. I did manage to do one thing right: go to a nearby forest and carry some wood repetitively for almost an hour (but I was cautious enough to stay away from the ax).

So overall, my spacial perception is very low. How does this affect my life? First of all, I can’t drive. Driving is out of the question. I had no intent of hitting someone, of falling on the ground, or of putting a flip chart down. But, unlike driving, these are mostly things that are relatively unavoidable, and relatively I can live with mistakes on common actions. Living with “I hit someone with the car, and I drove although I knew I had a problem with spacial perception” is not acceptable. Then bumping into people, although vastly reduced from what it was years ago, is still so common that it’s a bit of a problem. And the final thing: if there’s something on the floor there’s a high probability I’ll either step on it, or I’ll trip.

What did I do to solve this? Sports and playing theater. They all helped more or less, but still there’s room to grow. There’s not to much thing to be done other than continue with sports (playing theater as an activity is very close to waste of time if not thoroughly made and not paying attention to time itself).

5. Negotiation skills. I will not end this post with the grumpy conclusions that everything I do is failure. So I’ll change the time frame a bit, and present a different story. On March 9 2008 I go to buy flowers. Context: from 1 to 8 March a lot of flowers are sold in Romania, and the sellers also buy a lot of flowers in this period, some of which don’t get sold. This implies that on March 9 you are most likely to buy some unsold flowers from March 1. I wanted to buy only three flowers, so the reasoning of “I buy a larger quantity, give me a discount” couldn’t be used (this would be an easy-to-do negotiation). So I go to a local market and look on flowers. I ask the price of some flowers that seem not to be old. The answer is like this: 8 RON a flower thus 25 RON a bouquet of three flowers (so instead of cutting the price due the quantity argumentation described above, they actually increase the price with 1 RON, perhaps due to the not-so-valid “we do the packaging” reason). I ask for 7 RON, I get a “No” reply. I went on to other flower sellers, the quality was poorer, while the price tag was about the same. Now here comes an interesting point: I only wanted to buy from the seller with beautiful flowers, no matter what the price tag is. But he doesn’t know this. So I come back to him and look a bit hesitant, almost like leaving. He starts the conversation “Come on mister, should I give you this bouquet?” I say “7 RON”. “No, this can’t be done”. “7.5 RON”. “What’s the difference between 7.5 and 8 RON? Settle for 8 RON?”. (Here comes my solid opinion: If there is no difference then …) “7.5 RON”. I had already left him one time due to the price, his own defense argumentation (that it’s only a small difference) was being used against him, and I was persistent. Tricky situation. He asks a different person, who was doing the bouquets (as if this was the first time in his life he had heard this question) and gets her permission. “OK, should we give you this bouquet?” And he shows me a pre-made bouquet. The trouble with pre-made bouquets is that they usually contain old flowers, since they’re harder to see within the package. So I say “No” and I manually pick three flowers, one close to another, so he can’t comment on the fact that he doesn’t have time to pick flower by flower and he already made me a concession. There were all good flowers, so I lost nothing on choosing them close one to another. He tries to give me two of the flowers I picked, and a different one, which looked a bit older, and I insist on having my exact three flowers. “No fancy packaging, just a small one, right?”, he says (it’s a “Yes”-ending question, fighting is a bit not easy). “Right”, I say. I had three reasons on this. First, a book on politeness written by Aurelia MARINESCU says that flowers should not be packed at all, so a smaller package is fine. My flower bouquet will also look different than a typical bouquet. Also, paying 1 RON for packaging seemed like a bad idea. While the lady packages my flowers, the guy looks at me and says a lovely thing, although in a bit annoyed way: “So you like to negotiate, mate?” I smile and say “Yeah”. I want to pay him. I generally have exact amounts of every conceivable sum of money, but this is done due to the fact that I know how to keep small money in my pocked and give the large banknotes. So I give him 50.5 RON (instead of the requested 22.5 RON), and he should give me 28 RON. He couldn’t not give me 0.5 change with the reasoning “I don’t have that small amount of money on me”, and I anticipated this. He asks for an exact amount (it seems he didn’t have or wish to give me even 28 RON), and I still don’t give him 22.5 RON, but 52.5, and he gives me 30 RON. The lady finishes packaging and I then take my flowers.

What’s my negotiation skills done me? First, a reduction of price from 25 to 22.5, which is a 10% off. This is quite big considering that my argument is none than “I won’t pay you that much, it’s too expensive”, and all the prices in the market were the same. I knew the exact prices for the flowers in all of the market. I bought the most beautiful flowers in the market, picked by me. My flower arrangement looked different due to packaging. And although the seller can forget about me in two weeks time, in case he remembers me, he will know that I negotiate, and will not insist that much. I also have a precedent of a winning negotiation with him, which will be in my advantage. As a funny thing, I also changed a 50 RON bill into 10 RON bills.

How did I learn negotiation? First of all, I got to cope with the stress of negotiating via conflicts where I live. The people I live with right now are tough negotiators, most of the “talk” in the house is done arguing, so I learned how to talk like that and cope with the stress of negotiating the hard way. I also have some theoretical background on the negotiation process from the graduation paper done on negotiation (strategies and techniques) for the faculty final exam. These two refer to: stress within the negotiation process (zero to me), strategies to do while negotiating (I know some basic stuff). But there is another element, very important itself: a good argumentation. This was learned on Internet forums. You see, on an Internet forum most of the communication is done by fighting with the other person’s opinions. This might be good for thinking process, this might be bad for peaceful communication in day-to-day life, but one can’t argue the fact that writing on a PC forum improves one’s argumentation skills. I don’t wish to improve on this skill, it’s pretty good.

6. Conclusions
1. Even hard-to-deal-with processes like memory can be improved some way or another (for memory: sleeping well, eating well, becoming familiarized with a field, paying more attention);
2. Most strategies on fixing something on yourself can and should focus on the bad thing itself (attention, self-awareness, memory, spatial perception, negotiating skills), but on ways to adapt your behavior to it (talk to be attentive, think to have a better self awareness, use reminders for better memory, use maps and ask people for spatial perception, try to understand the other person’s opinions for negotiating skills);
3. It’s best to evaluate your skills from time to time (I constantly note what my sports performance has been after a training, even one in the “comfort of my own home”, like a commercial says);
4. Some skills have small direct implications on other’s people’s life (not memorizing names, poor self-awareness on things one says), and others have huge impact (not being attentive while crossing the street, bad spatial perception while driving); don’t let the huge impact implications ruin your life (find ways to cross the street and be attentive; don’t drive);
5. Knowing your best skills is one thing; Using them each time you can is another; You can and should use your best skills each time you get an opportunity.

Has any of the actions described here made an impact on you? Leave a comment below.

Contents
1. 1991-1997 period
2. 1997-2001 time frame
3. 2001-2005 period
4. 2005-2008 period
5. Conclusions

1. 1991-1997 period. I’ve had my first computing unit (they called it Home Computer, but looking backwards it didn’t seem as too much of a computer) in 1991, when I was only 9 years old. I’ve manually typewritten lots and lots of “games” (very very rudimentary) on the HC91 (you had to type a program in order to make it work; so instead of running Microsoft Word, you had to program it each time you wanted to run it; for a lot of time I couldn’t save a game or program I’ve just written, and when I was finally able to, saving on cassette recorder was slow). 6 years later (1997, I was 15) I was writing my first advanced game, based on a game seen on a real-life PC. I didn’t got to end writing the game. The same year when my family sells the HC and I’m one of the first on my street to own a PC (it had 4 MB of RAM and a hard drive of about 100 MB). The switch from Basic programming, even if it was to Windows 3.11 and Norton Commander, seemed a huge step. I was like WOW. The next year, 1998, I upgrade my PC and switch to Windows 95 (again, I was stunned to see what it was capable of). What’s a characteristic of this period is the fact that I’ve spent a lot of time in front of a computing unit and I was very fond of it. Even now, when I think of Windows, I still use a lot of skills learned in Windows 95. I still know MS-Dos command lines very well.

2. 1997-2001 time frame. My first career decision comes in the middle of 1997. I had a personal model in life in a Romanian writer (my first life model, and the only one I’ve given up to; I won’t mention it here, because it’s a negative reference). Anyhow, when he was about my age he went to a social sciences high-school, and it seemed obvious for me: if I want to follow its steps exactly, I’d had to take a social sciences high school myself. Bizarre or not, I didn’t care about what I wanted to do, I just wanted to do the right thing in life. My parents strongly opposed a social high-school in a large city nearby, and I decided it’s best to follow their advice and go to an Informatics class in my small town (the Informatics class in almost all classes gathered most of the best pupils; they were the elite classes; this does not imply that the high school itself was an elite too). Did I love the Informatics class? Oh, yes: beautiful times. I learned a lot of things on programming, I was programming myself at home, writing small programs (like the size of this blog post), and loved what one could do with software. By 2001 software and computers were my most important hobby. In the first three years of the high school my career path was simple: I’ll do programming. Looking back on the first career decision (picking a high-school), it was better to follow what I liked best (and this was also what my parents noticed), and don’t just imitate the decisions of a writer at the end of the XIX century (anyhow, I doubt that there was an Informatics class in 1890).

The last year of high school comes and my father makes this affirmation: you’re good on PCs and you’re good with English (the latter was not necessarily true), but in order to be a manager, it’s best that you know some Economics and do an Economics faculty. The reasoning is rather faulty: in order to be a manager it’s best that you do an MBA, no matter what a faculty you do. And doing an Economics faculty is not-that-much of a good preparation for the tasks of a manager. But at that time Economics was a wonder field to me, and little did I know about it. So I enter the final year of the high school with a dilemma: should I follow my passion and do IT, or should I do what I thought was right and do Economics? Due to the way the school-leaving examination was made and the way University exams were made, preparing for both IT and Economics was natural. Thus, I could and actually did postpone the decision with no damage. Another decision was in which county to study. I trusted the opinions of two Informatics teachers in my high-school when they said “The capital of Romania is best: largest city, best opportunities, not-as-bad education”. So I favored Bucharest due to their advice. Two weeks before the exams on the Universities, after my school-leaving examination was done, I am faced with this observation (which was in my head long before this): PC monitors affect eyesight due to intense concentration and due to the fact that at that time most monitors were CRT (see Health concerns on CRT on Wikipedia web site). I put health before everything and say: I won’t do IT due to the fact that I already have some eye problems and working all day on the PC would damage my eyesight. Economics was a better alternative and after 4 years of Informatics forgetting it all and going from scratch didn’t look bad. I never actually thought: what I like, what I’m best at, what I should do. The logic was: in order to make money, you should better be a manager (actually careers can go into being a specialist with no human management tasks also). In order to be a manager, one should know IT (and I was good at it, at least for the requirements of a managerial position), English (pretty OK), and Economics (now I think one manager should know Economics almost just as much as it should know other fields in the company directly involved with his activity, like marketing, human resources, law). More than this, Economics is not as necessary for a manager as a MBA, which can be taken after any faculty. Finally, since my only obvious lack of knowledge was in the field of Economics, I thought I should do an Economics faculty (this was actually an OK motive). Looking at a list of faculties in the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest (just at the list, nothing on curriculum), I liked International Business and Economics most: not only I will study Economics, but also English. Unfortunately, foreign languages in the Academy of Economic Studies were studied from a business perspective, so I could only improve my business vocabulary, not the general language level. Also, I missed the fact that International Economics means that you won’t generally study the economy of country, or the management of a company, or do accounting, or trade. Instead, most of the courses have been on International Economy (so between institutions in different countries or between different countries). It’s that simple, but at that time it didn’t seem so obvious. So picking the faculty was faulty even for study Economics. Four years later, I could say that from the faculties in the Academy of Economic Studies it was the best option for me, so two wrongs (learn English & learn economics – both bad) can make it a right. After I picked a field, I applied only for International Business and Economics faculties in three regions of Romania and I was lucky enough to be admitted to all. I could pick a faculty where I was already given a scholarship (in Constanta, a city nearby my small town residence), or I could go to Bucharest, where the competition would be fierce (no scholarship in there). Iasi had no scholarship for me, also no real competition, but it was just at the other side of world. I followed my previous Informatics’ teachers advice and went for Bucharest.

3. 2001-2005 period. Four years in the Faculty fly fast when you’re in an NGO (after 5 failed admission interviews to other NGOs), go to every imaginable event for a lot of time (conferences, seminars, fairs, theatrical plays), and basically you leave the hostel in the morning and get home each day after 21 (this was not the typical daily routine of a unemployed student). All the four years I was hungry to learn: read on psychology, talk whenever possible, improve communication skills, all-in-all understand the world. Now we’re in 2005. In the forth year of the Faculty, one month before the graduation exam, I get a job at a consultancy company (with a clear picture in my head that even if I don’t like numbers, at least I’ll know what it’s like). After the graduation exam, I stay with them for two more months and I convince myself that whatever my preparation in Economics was, I will avoid numbers and especially accounting or finance.

During the last months of the Faculty I have to take a decision: which should my career path be? A small parenthesis. After reading things on psychology, I liked what I’ve read on ADHD. According to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder page on NINDS web site, these are some simptoms of ADHD that felt really close to my behaviour:
1. “Impulsive children seem unable to curb their immediate reactions or think before they act. They will often blurt out inappropriate comments, display their emotions without restraint, and act without regard for the later consequences of their conduct.” [ You will really not believe the things I can say out loud ]
2. “Children who are inattentive have a hard time keeping their minds on any one thing and may get bored with a task after only a few minutes. If they are doing something they really enjoy, they have no trouble paying attention. But focusing deliberate, conscious attention to organizing and completing a task or learning something new is difficult.” [ Felling asleep at theatrical plays, unable to remember anything from most faculty class where I was just present, unable to follow up with someone's speech, unable to read a book, any book - these were all common to me ]
3. “Homework is particularly hard for these children. They will forget to write down an assignment, or leave it at school. They will forget to bring a book home, or bring the wrong one. The homework, if finally finished, is full of errors and erasures. Homework is often accompanied by frustration for both parent and child.” [ This has accompanied me all of my life, I have even seen all of these errors in a winter school in February 2008; but most of them were drastically reduced; I mean, having an email address just to help me be aware that I forget things - deneuitat - clearly helped me avoid this problem ]

What I liked most on ADHD was reading something like this:
“There is no “cure” for ADHD. Children with the disorder seldom outgrow it; however, some may find adaptive ways to accommodate the ADHD as they mature.” (from the NINDS Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder Information Page). Adaptive behavior. Things can change with behavior. So beautiful put. (I didn’t like the solution of going into medication at all)

Please note that I may have been wrong with my analysis on whether I have ADHD or not. I could also have the “Medical students’ disease” (see the Wikipedia entry on Medical students’ disease). So everything could just be in my imagination. I found out about ADHD sometime in 2002/2003. Back then it was the WOW factor. “It must be true! Everything fits so nicely.” When I look now at the symptoms, most of them don’t fit the description. I can now read a book, I can follow almost anybody’s speech if I really want to, I don’t move all the time when sitting down, and all-in-all I have much lower resemblance to the patterns in there. But the ADHD helped me a lot in identifying some weak points in my behavior and working on them.

So, what would a perfect job and career be then for me (a thought-to-be ADHD)? Something that I wouldn’t get bored doing, something that would really get me involved (due to ADHD symptoms). I looked at all the skills I’ve had, and I reasoned like this: I love doing IT, I have some knowledge on Economics-related field, and I’m very low on human skills. I took the non-boring, totally paradoxical, and WOW-factor solution of going into a job on human skills: communication and public relations. Exactly what my weakest point was. More than this, I’ve chosen a career path that would definitely provoke me: I thought back then that I could learn how to control what I say and be a good diplomat. Alternatively put, doing public relations was my way of doing an almost impossible thing like climbing mountains: my poorest skills were in communication (although I have already tried working on that), and my life philosophy was nothing on saying good things in the good way (and I tought I could change this: I will still say bad things, but in a good way; back then I thought that PR was on the way you say something, not on what you say; and I would later found out that method of saying something very nicely was mostly advertising).

4. 2005-2008 period. So, for the next two and a half years I did a Masters’ in Communication and Public Relations, I had two jobs in Customer Service (three months each), and one in both Internet Marketing and Public Relations (for one year). Time flew slower when having to work repetitive tasks, but two and a half years passed. In February 2008 I graduate my Masters’. Now it’s time for a new evaluation.

1. First, the graduation itself: I had to create a 60 pages (I did 90) graduation thesis and then present it to a commission. My supervising teacher told me that she insisted to the commission that I should get a maximum grade for the quality of writing (so not the page numbers). Now an interesting aspect: the commission also insisted that my presentation skills were not-as-good as my thesis itself. Then I think: hey, you enter a Masters’ in Communication and at the end you can’t communicate. Sure, you speak nicely about it, you can give reasons in a talk, you like the philosophy of speaking but still: after studying communication two years, exactly your real-life communications skills drag you down. What’s the use of a Masters’ to you?
2. I organize (and that’s a good PR skill) a meeting like this: an event organizer and a head hunter gave me a virtual interview. In the room there are students interested in HR field. Also present is a HR specialist (with experience in multinational companies). I present my CV, I go to the fake interview, everybody gives me feedback on my behavior and way of reacting to the questions. The positive opinions on my performance were: whenever questioned, I presented the situation in such a way that although I spoke a lot, I don’t answer the question directly (it was mentioned as a negative performance, but this is actually a PR skill, or so I think) and also a positive opinion was the fact that I’ve organized the very interview (although this was not mentioned). But most of the other feed-back was negative, and it focused on: soft skills, and technical skills (understanding the way I should organize an event). I didn’t care about the technical skills (it’s easy to learn how to organize an event), but the soft skills worried me (learn how to move your hands according to what I say; I went like: HUH?). Now if this feed-back came back in the summer of 2005, I would have said: OK, I can improve this, I know there are many things to work on. But now we’re in February 2008, and in the meantime I’ve played a lot of theatre, I’ve done sports, and I’ve had a lot of trouble thinking on ways to improve my communication skills and acting on those ways. Surely, these skills can still be improved, but it’s a question mark the fact that in two and a half years of self-improvement for soft skills I basically suck at communication. Coming back to the fake interviewed, I focused on the HR specialist’s opinion, and since he wouldn’t tell me if PR is right for me or not after just a small interview, I asked for things to improve upon, and he gives a reply via email with things that I was already doing (so for years I’ve been doing it right, but the results were still small);
3. A winter school in February 2008 puts me in a team of 5 and we work on projects. With time for me to think and analyze things, I see a conflict between this thinking: “One should focus on the positive things, and although it should say all truth, it should not say everything, but just some good stuff” (basic rule of PR, or so I think), and my life principles, which, adapted to PR, would sound something like: “Don’t focus on your own (or company’s) interests, focus on the customer’s interests. If these interests make you recommend to your clients the product of the competition, then you should do that. If these interests say in public that your company’s core business is not as good or efficient for the client as an alternative business, then you should also say it”. This was much more than learning how to control the way to say things (which I thought in the summer of 2005 was one weak point of mine). PR is saying just some things, in a good way. And mostly focus on what’s cool and nice and OK. I found out in the winter school that this is just not like me. The problem was with personal values, not with the way one makes a thing look better or worse. Getting back to the winter school. After a conflict in the final days of the camp, which didn’t have an obvious cause to me, I decide to ask for feed-back on my behavior from some colleague participants. I received mostly negative feed-back. Some focused on soft skills, some on ethics, but I already knew most of that (the feed-back itself was, nevertheless, valuable). What I found most striking on the winter camp was a personal negative feeling to a general harmony in the social communication. A peaceful, happy, joyful atmosphere is just not for me. This discovery took into account a lot of past examples, not only on the camp itself. What’s PR? It’s exactly on creating a peaceful atmosphere between humans. Most of the time PR is just that: there’s a conflict, make it go peacefully. My way of acting is exactly the opposite: create a conflict to solve a problem. Surely, there are arguments and conflicts in PR, but most of the time you just have to keep a peaceful relation. As said, that’s in conflict with my conviction that conflict leads to improvement. So two discoveries in the winter camp: I do not view public relations’ way of saying mostly positive things in a totally positive way as a good thing for my self-expression and peaceful talks and me don’t mix;
4. In March 2008 I talk to quite a few persons in PR and I confront them them about these two premises: “PR is all about peace” (it’s mostly true, in their opinion), “PR is on saying true things, but mostly positive” (I think they would say true, but no clear answer was given). And one person gives me a reasoning for the “say only positive things”: you don’t say positive things, you are just so much impersonating with the company, that the true things are mostly positive (OK, and probably you control a few others). Anyhow, it was an argument that if I have the urge to say mostly negative things about a company, then (again) there is a problem between the values of the company and mine: it’s not normal to work for a company for which you see mostly bad things. Then I think: what company and institutions I would recommend as great? Google, GMP (Romanian advertising & PR company; I mostly like them for their works, this generally does not extend to their clients, except, say, Itsy Bitsy radio) are fine, but most of the people from Obor marketplace (in Bucharest, Romania) are great. These are the companies or institutions I would present nicely in perfect accordance to my values. Not a very long list to work for in PR. Again, a problem on personal values: I can’t fit with any organization’s values. Creating financial reports for a company you don’t value 100% may be fine, but being the voice of that company with the external world can lead to problems.

So, my third switch comes around February 24, 2008, and I’m back to the one field I love: IT. What happened to the
eye-problem issue? Well, according to a study focusing on things is actually good for some eye conditions. More than this, TFT displays are now common-place. I could have chosen IT back in the 2005, but it was just not challenging enough.

You should expect that after doing an Informatics high-school, worked in an IT company for more than a year, and basically be very good Internet, I would clearly know what I want to do in IT. Unfortunately, since 2001 I’ve constantly blocked any thought of “How would it be if I worked in this field of IT?” I just didn’t let it in: “This is a no-no”. So right now I have to short-circuit all these thoughts and make a decision. But I’m in no hurry. I can identify what I like most (and Internet obviously pops-up), and I can work on that. Right now there’s no urgent reason to make a decisive decision. I also have to think on way to get a more formal education than a high-school in IT. Time for that too. Romain Gary (with pseudonim of Émile Ajar)’s novel “La vie devant soi” was translated into Romanian something like “You have all your life ahead of you”. That’s my feeling in March 2008. Plenty of time for IT.

5. Conclusions:
1. Put your values above everything. My 2001 conflict was due to a change on priorities via health issues. My 2008 conflict was a conflict with PR on values again. I couldn’t do anything when faced with values problems;
2. Doing something you are not good at may be challenging, but it may also be unwise. Almost everything can be improved, but you may find it something just not worth the time and effort;
3. Investing in deciding a career path may be a good target by itself (there are counselors who will advise you on picking a right career);
4. Put a lot of questions to authoritative persons. An authority may be working in HR, may be a specialist in your field, or may just know the situation well (to know whether to study in Bucharest or not, for example);
5. (I don’t follow this) Create a written plan for improvement;
6. Anything you do, love it.

Any comment on my personal case study? Post it below, please.