Have you ever wondered why some people choose to push themselves to the very limit to climb a mountain, to risk everything to conquer a vertical rock face, to force their bodies to the very limit of human endurance in Iron Man competitions? If yes, you probably asked some of those persons – “But why”? And they told you something along the lines of  “For the feeling you get when you reach the summit, when you finish the race and because I can”? Well, I did, I also got the same answer and didn’t get it. “Because I can”, what kind of answer is that? And what feeling? I’ve tried, thanks to my brother, rock climbing and mounteneering but didn’t quite get the trhill. Rock climbing is not for me. However, thanks to the same crazy brother I got to take part in a mountain bike competition last week and I tell you, when I’ve crossed that finish line I got it! I finally did. Dead tired but I felt the rush of adrenaline or whatever that was. I felt that I did it because I could, I felt strong and I wanted more. And I challenge everybody to keep trying and do things that are interesting and a little crazy until, at least once in their lifetime, will get the rush and will get it, will understand why Everest was conquered and why people choose to run Iron Man triathlons. Go and search and do it!
My first thought when I heard about Google TV yesterday was – are they for real? But then I kept watching and I saw, together with the rest of thousands of people watching the Google I/O conference that these guys were serious about it. When Eric Schmidt lined up 6-7 CEO’s from big companies on stage it became very apparent how much they are pushing this.
So we know Google is serious and it seems like a cool product and everything and you might ask why was I so surprised when I heard about it. It’s simple, the thing ain’t new and it’s not solving anything unsolvable.
For some time now I’ve been planning to buy me a NAS with a media server on it, hook it up to the TV, hook my PS3 to the TV and take a cable from the router and put it in my PS3 so I can stream movies directly from the laptop without any problems. Oh, yeah, and figure out and easy way to output my laptop screen to the TV (not that hard at all, as most laptops come with and HDMI output, these days).
What that would give is not very far from what Google wants with the G TV thingy. I already have tons of hardware lying around, do I really need a TV that is essentially a specialized computer?
But while walking home, after watching the Google I/O conference at Bucharest Hubb (than’s Petrica for setting things up), I thought to listen to an audiobook, so out comes my iPod and with it a revelation. It’s not about me! It’s not about the geeks who know what a NAS is and how to set up a media server and who have a box of wires under their bed (I do) to connect everything up. It’s about the rest of the world, consisting of people who barely know how to use their remote. TV is a 4 Billion users industry! There are a lot of people who want to do it easier.
And the Google approach makes it easy to have web + apps + video + tv all in one, like the iPod made possible to have ‘1000 songs in your pocket’ hassle free. Same goes here. Watch out Apple, Google is after your ass. But they don’t need me to tell them that. Plus Apple already made an attempt with Apple TV.
After this revelation everything seems to have more chances of success, but I’m still skeptical. In 1.5 years we’ll know if the G TV thing will fly or fall. What’s your take on it?
What’s it about? The authors Craig Stull, Phil Myers, David Meerman Scott talk about how to make products that are succesful. Or ‘resonate’, as they call it. I can’t help but find similarities with Seth’sPurple Cow book, or Free Prize Inside book.
Is it any good? Yes, it makes you think, it tells things that you probably already heard or read in other places but it does it in an entertaining way and it’s always good to hear interesting ideas from a different point of view. The three authors seem to know what they are talking about.
What are the main takeaways?
1. Your opinion, although interesting, is not important. This is a phrase you will hear a lot in the book and it’s something you need to understand, no matter what you do. If you don’t have valid data to support your claims, you are just stating an opinion, no matter what you are talking about: the background of your new website, the packaging, the color. Same idea, from a different point of view I’ve read in a web-design book (can’t recall the name). The guy was saying that changing endlessly the color from green to red to blue to whatever is just a matter of opinion and taste, the whole package counts, not your opinion, so you should stop thinking about the color and start thinking about the whole thing. Simple and powerful. Try it, it works!
2. Your slogans and missions statements should show your distinct competencies, the things you do that solve a users problem. The already famous iPod tag line ‘1000 songs in your pocket’ is a perfect example. Don’t make missions statements that talk about what you want to do, talk about what your customers need to solve.
3. When you build a product don’t talk to your existing customers who will just want a better / more colorful / bigger  mouse trap, talk to your potential customers to figure out what they’re problems are (getting rid of rodents) and how to do it. Incremental changes don’t make resonators / purple cows / remarkable products (depending on the author).
Overall? Read it, it’s worth your time. Read also Seth’s books, they are very good, if not better, in some ways. These kind of books make you think and that’s an excellent reason to pick them up.
In the movie Patton, from 1970, there is a scene where the convoy of the whole 3rd Army is held up by a couple of donkeys stuck on a bridge, not wanting to move. Patton gets out of his jeep, takes out his ivory-plated gun and shoots the animals, pushing them in the river. Problem solved. This animal-cruelty story is based on real events.
Later on Patton said that he didn’t like killing the poor beasts but compared to the alternative of his army getting massacred by an air raid, while crossing the bridge, he preferred to do that. Sensible choice, if you think about it. Tough choice, something he didn’t like to do, but he did it, he had to.
We have to shoot our own donkeys every day, we have to take choices we are not necessarily found of but which can save our army. It takes guts and it takes brains to do it.
This story is so powerful because it’s simple – killing a poor creature to save a great number of people. In real life it’s not that simple, is it? Work a couple of hours on a weekend or spend them with your family. Quit your job or linger on. Buy a new car or invest the money. What is the donkey? In every case you have to decide for yourself, but once you find it, shoot the long-eared thing.
This story is also inspired by the book Tuned In, where they speak of the “Shoot the Donkey” series by Expert Access
Have you noticed how close the words start-up and up-start are? Is there a link between them? If not, it should.
Some of the greatest start-up of the past decades have been up-starts. Think Starbucks, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and so on. What do you think? Is there a link between them?
I got the idea by listening to Tuned In, a good book with some interesting ideas. They were taking about the up-start Starbucks.
So making choices is difficult, letting other people tell you who you should be is bad, knowing what you want to do with you life is hard. It seems that we need all the help we can get with decision making. And what better way to do it than to listen to advices?
When you read books by people who think they’re smart and talk to people that believe they poses wisdom which is beyond your current state of development (a fancy way of saying they think they are better than you) and here I think mostly of teachers, who are responsible for so much of the brain washing that goes on in the early years of our life, you’ll get a lot of advices. Tons. Which ones are good, which are bad? Which are status-quo defending things that only beat you into submission and which are pieces of common wisdom or genuinely insightful thoughts we should pay attention to?
The sad part is that you have no way of telling, the good think is that there is a trick to dealing with this. The trick is to listen. Listen before you do, watch and learn, just long enough to make your own decisions. Maybe these are influenced by others, most of the time they are, but they are your own, you’ve thought about them.
Suddenly a piece of advice somebody gave you will become your decision, not his advice. Even if you choose to do exactly what that someone recommended you, it’s still your decision, your making. This has a downside and an upside. The downside is that, if it goes wrong, the advice doesn’t work and everything goes crushing down and you can’t blame it on the one who gave you the advice. The upside is that you can’t blame it on anybody else but you.
“What? Did he just said the same thing twice?”, you might ask. Yes I did. The easiest way is to blame bad decisions on somebody else. Sometimes people who give advice are plain incompetent, and have no interest to put too much thought in what they say. Sometimes they are well intentioned and wise and put in the thinking time into it but they can’t see it from your point of view or have different values (think of your parents) and all of the times, they are not you. Advices have to be filtered through your brain, your values,.untill they become your decision, not commands from somebody else. You can’t blame it on others.
Another thing you must learn is to take the risk. It sucks, it’s uncomfortable, failing sucks big time, there is no one but you to blame, but it’s the only way to take a decision. In the long run in pays of in confidence and experience. Learning to filter what everybody else is telling you that you should do and making you own decisions is the first step in doing. Doing is the first step in succeeding or failing.
So if you want my advice: “First listen, than do”.
I leave you with a song mildly related to this post.
Another question that has terrorized my childhood. Right up there with “What do you want to be when you grow up”. You see, I didn’t have a role model, I still don’t and at some point I worried there was something wrong with me for not having one. I don’t know about you, my dear reader, but I can distinctly remember one of my teacher telling the class that we should have a role model.
Thinking back it’s stupid, of course. The whole idea of having a role model is stupid. What the heck is a role model anyway? According to the source of all digital knowledge – Wikipedia, role model is a "person who serves as an example, whose behavior is emulated by others".
Emulated? Like in trying to be somebody else? Like in being somebody you are not? Like in not feeling ok in your own skin? Well that just sounds wrong. That also is against everything I’ve learned so far in life, that it’s good to be yourself, to follow your dreams, to stand for what you believe.
Main words here: yourself, your, and you.
What my teacher (I believe that was in 8th grade) horribly missed is that there is nothing wrong in aspiring to be great, as some people are, and to be inspired by great people but it’s completely wrong to try to be like that person.
If you like Einstein, don’t try to prove that E=mc^2 is wrong and that it should be E=mc^3, try to do what he has done, and do it your way, revolutionize the way people see the universe. And you don’t have to grow the crazy hair either.
And if Superman is your role model, good luck with stopping bullets with your bare chest, If you want to be like Superman, just look at what the whole idea of Superman is- doing good, stopping bad guys. Who’s stopping you to do good, your way? Nobody! And you don’t even have to have x-ray vision to do that.
The whole role model philosophy is flawed in many ways and it’s one of the teachings of school and society that manages to put a big nail in the coffin of feeling good about who you are and, ultimately, of being happy. If I learned something over the years is that there is one way of doing things right and that way is your way.
I will end with an note of caution – if you feel like hitting somebody on the head with a lead pipe, please don’t do it, even if that is your way of showing sympathy. Working in the boundaries oh right and wrong is a must. Knowing when and where to push and shift those boundaries is an art that makes the artist who wields it one those people that are labeled as role models.
P.S. The previous two post had some clips that were supporting, in one way or the other, my arguments. This post, however, has none, because the ideas in this one are based on believes formed over the years. However, if what I said makes some sense to you, I do recommend reading two books by a person who I greatly admire and who has been an inspiration more than ones, Seth Godin. The first one is called Tribes, and it’s about learning how to become a leader and how communities grow, and the second one is Linchpin and it’s about being yourself in what you do, or so I see it.
Alright, so making decisions is hard, ignorance is bliss and thinking too much and having too much choices makes it even harder to decide.
The question, and real art is how to decide. To take a decision you must know what you want, what is your goal. Without a goal whatever you choose is pointless. A decision in itself must bring you closer to a goal.
Above: Unrelated photo of sunset taken out of my window in Arnhem
Therefore the art is to find out what you truly want or convince yourself that you want something, to set your goals. This is, probably, the most difficult thing you will ever do in you life. For me it still is. And I haven’t gotten there and I will probably never find an answer.
But it all gravitates around the question – why are we here, what is the purpose of life and what makes us happy.
Humans are mammals, animals, therefore the need to reproduce and find a partner cannot be taken out the picture but we have to go beyond that and figure out what else is there to life? What can we do to be happy?
Well, it turns out that happiness has two sides:
being happy in you life (the present)
being happy with you life (the past)
We might be happy now but we might be unhappy with how we lived our life.
I’m not smart enough to figure this out all by myself so watch this talk by Daniel Kahneman. Make sure to watch the very end too (around minute 18), when he talks about money and happiness.
So we need to figure out a way to be happy with our present and to fill in our brains with enough pleasant memories to feel good about our life. Family and friends are both present and past, they bring both strong experiences and enjoyable moments. Work, on the other hand, is what our present is mostly filled with. And new things we try and do might not be the most interesting or enjoyable thing in the present but these make a big part of our memories.
working with these three things will fix the following:
We are social animals and we need to love and to be loved, so learning to enjoy spending time with you parents, brothers, friends, parents is very important. Even if you don’t see eye to eye you must find a way to enjoy being around people you care about and who care about you
Work takes up most of our time. If we hate what we are doing, something is wrong. We either are not doing what we are supposed to do or we fail to set our expectations and experiences to such a level that we will actually enjoy ourselves at what we are doing. Seth Godin make some very good points of how important is to emotionally invest in your work, but not in the way of going mad and yelling at your boss or coworkers, but in the way of relating to your coworkers and learning how to enjoy being around them. I recommend Seth’s book Linchpin, Read it, it’s worth doing it.
When I’m in doubt about doing something or not I guide myself by the principle “better sorry about doing something than being sorry you never did it”. It is very difficult to get yourself moving, you are tired, it’s never the right time, it might be raining, but if you have to choose between sitting on the couch and experiencing something new never, ever choose the sitting on the couch.
In short these are the 3 things I believe that mix together into the magic thing that is the purpose of life. We have to reproduce, because we are mammals and our instincts tell us that we have to do with and we are rewarded with having to grow those extraordinary little things called babies. We must love our loved ones. We must learn to know how to make out of work an enjoyable challenge, not a job and we must learn how to never say no to new challenges.
In my next posts I will focus on the last two points, on how we can figure out what to do and how I approach new challenges and opportunities that come along the way.
I challenge you to tell me where you think I’m wrong, to tell me what is your secret mix that gives you the purpose of life, to rant, to cheer and to read on!
Before I end this post here are a few TED talks about happiness which are more than interesting and a real food for thought. They will make you think about what experiences make you happy and not and how too many options can make you unhappy.
Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?
A question that has tortured my childhood. Still have nightmares about it and is up there, in my top 5 of “stupidest question you can ask a human being”.
Why, you might ask. Simple, because the answer implies one of the following:
the kid being interrogated has no idea what to say and therefore answers with what she notices that amuses the grown-ups;
the kid has been brainwashed into thinking she wants to be something the grown-ups have told her she should be;
the kid clangs to some fantasy in which her heroes take part aka “I want to be an astronaut”.
Only the last one is, in my humble opinion, a valid answer, but really, how can you expect a 5 year old to be able to tell you what the heck she will be doing in 15 or so years when even the task of tying the shoe laces seems insurmountable? And why should kids even bother with such thoughts?
But this is not about kids and this is not about what you want to do when you grow up, this, my friends, this is about the art of making up your mind, taking a decision, pursuing it and, at the very end, being happy.
My modest brain came to the conclusion, by ways of analysis of empirical data, that there is a direct link between knowing what you want and happiness.
The trick is the knowing what you want part. Some of the most interesting people I have had the honor of meeting in my short and so far not very useful existence are plagued by thoughts in the lines of ‘what is life’, ‘what is the purpose of life’ and so on. A polite way of saying they have no damn clue what they want from life, most of the times. I say most of the times because it’s clear you want your children to be happy, your family to be healthy. But when it comes to their own selves and their own decisions, this incredible people have no clue.
Many times it pays to look at what others think about a subject, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, and therefore, my dear reader, let’s look at what the wise people from our past have said about the matter and at what’s been distilled down into bits of wisdom known as sayings. So, time for some cheesy quotes.
You got Socrates saying “I know that I know nothing”, There is the saying “The more you learn the more you realize how little you know”. And there is the “The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why bother to learn” by George Bernard Shaw. And my two favorites “Ignorance is bliss” and the Romanian version “Fericit cel s?rac cu duhul”.
Alright, cheesy quotes aside you can’t dismiss the fact that some of the happiest people I’ve seen live in complete brain-washed dumbness, complaisant of their own stupid condition. Ignorance is truly bliss.
However, considering that banging your head against the wall to shave off some vital IQ points is not an option for you, than what is there to do when in doubt and when you have to decide taking option A or B?
Well, I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you what are my thoughts about the subject. This post is an introduction in a series of 7 posts about decision making and the related happiness that will do just that. It’s a subject that fascinates me, I believe it is very important, as knowing how to make decisions should help you be more satisfied with yourself and it’s such a interesting subject that I can’t help but be fascinated by it.
Before finishing this first post let me give you some food for thought. Watch this fascinating TED talk by Barry Schwartz called “The paradox of choice”.
This is basically a scientific proof of “ignorance is bliss”. Enjoy and read on!
P.S. This series of posts is dedicated to a very special friend
So, a week has come and passed and every day I’ve written about a small part of what I’ve seen during my months in Holland, the land of the crazy Dutch, but what I’ve written is just a spec of dust in a sand storm of impressions gained in this strange and yet wonderful country with depressing weather and crazy inhabitants.
I feel that it is fitting to end the week of crazy Dutch stories with a few of the stories I’ve considered writing but which didn’t made it in this weeks stories. In no particular order I’ll just mention facts, impressions and thoughts.
The crazy Dutch have something against wearing hats… Only when the weather is so cold that you get frost bites on your brain they would think about covering their heads with something. It’s true, it’s strange, it’s Dutch.
The girls wear boots a lot. Yup, don’t know if it’s just a passing fashion thing or it has always been so, but if you walk around you will see a lot of girls wearing boots. It’s true, it’s not that strange but it’s still Dutch.
There are a lot of people that do sports on regular basis, all kind of sports. Being a person that likes sports and considering that in Romania the biggest sport is football and it’s practiced by sitting on the couch and drinking beer this seems as a breath of fresh air. It’s true, it’s the way it should be and it’s Dutch.
Above – Crazy Dutch goat at the Open Air Museum in Arnhem.
There are a lot of petting farms for kids, so the kids can see that milk does not come from a factory, produced, like soda, but from a cow. It’s true, it’s good and it’s Dutch.
Above – Windmill at the Open Air Museum in Arnhem used by the crazy Dutch for pumping water
There seems to be an obsession with how to build dams and use pumps to control the flow of water. Well, for a country with so much land below the sea level it’s not that unexpected, but it’s still strange when you see how this obsession manifests itself. I’ve see in at lest two museums (The Water Museum in Arnhem and NEMO in Amsterdam) a sort of a water slide you could build dams on. I also saw at the Open air Museum in Arnhem a sort of a crane toy in the middle of a puddle with which children could build dams. It’s true, it’s strange and it’s Dutch.
There also seems to be some obsession with swimming. Kids have to pass some swimming tests where they show they know they can swim and that they can also swim with their clothes on and in difficult conditions. It also has to do with the country being under the sea level. It’s true, it’s cute, it’s useful and it’s Dutch.
When you go to a cinema you might be amazed that instead of pop corn and soda people drink beer and eat… beer. I was taken by surprise. As far as I understood going to the cinema is considered the same as meeting your friends in the city, which seems right, therefore it’s like going to the pub, so having a beer is normal. Also, some cinemas have a pause right in the middle of the movie, like at the theater. It probably has something to do with unloading all that beer . It’s true, it’s weird, it has some logic to it, it’s Dutch.
The beer doesn’t come in the half a litter bottles but in 0.33ml bottles, which, sometimes, makes more sense, if you drink all night. It’s true, it’s different and it’s Dutch.
And I probably can go on like this for a few more pages (actually I ran out of good ideas but there are some other things which I might remember).
Now is the time to write a conclusion… And what comes to mind, my dear reader, is that I’ve been surprised by how friendly the Dutch are, I’ve been amazed by how things seem to just work in Holland, and I’ve been amazed by how many interesting things such a small country manages to hide. I feel that the whole Dutch experience was, is and will be a privilege and I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to meet and get to know a little bit how the crazy Dutch are and I’m very happy to be able to call some of the craziest Dutch I’ve met, my friends.
And thus, my dear reader, I choose to end the week of crazy Dutch stories, hope you enjoyed it, hope to hear from you and hope you will read on!
