A Crash Course In The Long-Lost Art Of Adaptation

One of the biggest lies of my life was this one: if you do your job constantly, if you listen to your folks obediently, nothing bad will happen to you. All you have to do in order to live a happy life is to play by the rules and everyone around you will do the same. If you listen to life, life will listen to you and will reward you back big time.

Well, guess what, it didn’t actually happen like this. I mean, I did my best to be obedient, to follow the rules, to do my job and not to harm anyone else, and yet, out of the blue, I got kicked straight in my ass. And not only once.

I’m sure you’ve been there too. And not only once. You did your job too, minding your own business, fulfilling your roles as a friend, employee or husband and then, kaboom, life hits you right in the groin, not only filling your entire being with unbearable pain, but also leaving you breathless, confused and defeated. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about business, about relationships or friendships or you name it. Sometimes you just get hit. At some point, if you’re a business man, competition will play dirty. Or employees will let you down. In your personal life, the persons you trust (or care for) the most will lie to you or dump you. In your casual circle, a friend will suddenly betray you. It will happen.

For a long time, I thought I didn’t do the right thing… you know, righteously enough. I thought I didn’t follow all the rules, or that I somehow misunderstood something. I thought it was my fault. This is what they teach you, anyways. If what you do doesn’t solve the problem, just use a bigger hammer. So I strived even harder. But surprise. Nothing changed.

As life unfolded, the tiny little crack I was just glimpsed at, became larger and larger. It looked like no matter what I did, the gap between what I expected and what I actually got grew bigger and bigger. It became obvious there wasn’t a direct link, or any causality whatsoever, between my obedience to the rules and the bad things that were happening to me.

To make a long story short, it took me a ginormous amount of time to realize that life really is random. That you can’t control it. That you can’t influence events. They will always happen somewhere outside you.

Oh, my god, stop it right here! Blasphemy!

How can someone who writes about goals, living a better life and improving your skills can come up with such an enormity? You can’t do anything about events? You just have to sit there and endure whatever comes in your face?

Well, not so fast, Jose, not so fast.

I didn’t say anything about what YOU have to do. I said something about events. About things that are happening to you. Those things, believe it or not, you aren’t able to control.

You can’t control the stock market. But you can see how she moves and take advantage of some opportunities.

You can’t control the weather (not unless you can detonate a huge atomic bomb, or generate a volcano eruption, that is). But you can assess the changes, evaluate them and then act on them. Put on lighter clothes if it’s getting warmer or take an umbrella if it’s going to rain.

You can’t control the behavior of your clients, if you run a business, not to mention competition. But you can observe the competition moves, read your customer feedbacks and then do whatever you have to do advance.

Are you with me now?

Truth is we have a very limited sphere of direct influence in this world. If you really look at it, it’s just a tiny bubble around us. You can control your body, your clothes, your moves. You can control your balance and your visual sensors as you walk outside of a building, for instance, but you can’t control a potential brick that may fall right into your head from the top of that building. You can observe it, of course, and avoid it. But the brick will be outside of your control zone.

The Randomness Of Life

We get a lot of “bricks form the top of the building” in our lives. We can spot some of them and timely avoid the impact. But some of them are invisible and we just get hit.

In the beginning, I was shocked by this discovery. The randomness of life seemed frightening. I thought I was helpless. I suddenly went to the other side and started to believe that no matter what I do, a brick will always fall down from the sky and ruin it. Of course it didn’t. So it took me a while to understand the meaning of the term “randomness” and also to adjust my position towards it.

And that’s how I started to study the “long lost art of adaptation”. Of course I don’t know if there is such an art, I just made it up. It made you click on the title, didn’t it?

Anyway, back to our story: art or science, adaptation is not only key to survival (as any serious biologist will confirm it for you) but it’s also important if you want to make the best of what you get. It’s at least a key skill and, as such, I firmly believe that it can be taught.

Without further ado, here’s a (crash) course on how to enhance your adaptability skills:

1. If Something Feels Like (Or Really Is) Wrong, Accept It First

Don’t fight evidence. If you get hit by a crisis, please admit that you are hit by a crisis and this is exactly what is happening to you. Don’t treat like an injustice. Don’t even think in terms of luck or bad luck. From a tiny point of view, at the exact moment of that event, it may feel like an injustice, but on a larger scale, it’s just another event in your life. So, instead of whining, crying and complaining about how bad life is treating you, just accept it. It’s another part of your life. It may be painful now, but it’s still your life.

2. Always Assess

After accepting it, start looking around and see what can really happen. Evaluate the harm done (or potential). Try to predict. Try to see what might go wrong. Or good. I can’t really remember any event in my life which was entirely good. Or bad. A wedding can be a good event, but if there’s a divorce 5 years later, well, I don’t know… Losing all your money may seem like a terrible thing to happen, but if you look at how this forced you to change your way of life, it may be something to ponder there…

3. Unfold Plausible Scenarios

After assessing, try to understand what you can do in the newly unfolded circumstances. But don’t limit yourself to just one thing. Don’t try to find the perfect solution. Make a few scenarios. Even better, try to develop a way of thinking in scenarios, whether you’re in a crisis or not. It will make miracles for your morale, believe me. Just try to project as many variables as you can. Don’t let anything out. Don’t believe in “this will never happen to me”. Everything you can imagine, can actually become an event.

4. Act, Don’t React

Accepting the catastrophe, assessing the damage, creating a few plausible scenarios, well, it’s not enough. You gotta act. Acceptance in itself will do nothing. Assessing in itself will do nothing as well. Those possible scenarios, as detailed and complete as they may be, won’t mean nothing. It’s action that changes things. So, just go ahead and make your best pick out of those scenarios. Just play your hand.

5. Rinse And Repeat

Once you acted, you’re already in a new context. Enjoy it. Be there, watch the surroundings and be ready for anything. It may be that the scenario wasn’t as good as you thought it may be. Ok, back to square number one. Try plan B. Or it may be that the plan really worked and now you’re out of the dangerous zone. Just be there and be alert. Enjoy what you have and live the best life you can live.

For it may fall apart again in a split of a second.

7 Things I Learned From My 5 Year Old Girl

A few weeks ago it was Bianca’s 5th birthday. As always, each year I write a post about what I learned from her during the last year. If you want to read the previous posts, here they are, in order for one, two, three and four year anniversaries.

1. Diplomacy Is Easy

Last year Bianca’s mother and I parted ways. For me it was an incredibly relieving and lightening event and I’m increasingly happy with this new context of my life. But for Bianca there were a few difficult situations. Although I do my best to keep a normal communication flow with her mother, glitches are occurring every now and then. I can’t control those glitches (being only one part of the discussion). The only thing I can do is to manage them. But at some point I realized something absolutely incredible: Bianca was actually helping me around. In a “childish” and selfless way, of course. Every time I had one of those glitches, she was doing her best to smooth things out. Again, I don’t think it was a conscious plan. I think she is just learning how to handle both me and her mother in this new context. And she’s doing this with a fantastic sense of diplomacy. I literally learned from her when and how to talk and when and why to shut up in a variety of situations. And I’m still learning this.

2. If You Don’t Know, Ask Around

Last year was the year of “why?” questions. I already told you that she is a diplomate. But that only means she is picking the right time to ask his gazillion questions she had to ask, not that she is not asking at all. I had to answer, as usual, the weirdest questions you can imagine, but that only made me realize how powerful this option is. When you don’t know something, just go around and ask. Don’t guess. Don’t imagine. Say out loud what you don’t know or what you don’t understand, or what you think is wrong. Chances are that your questions will be answered sooner than you think.

3. Being Happy Doesn’t Need A Reason

Bianca is happy about everything. Of course, there are contexts which are not pleasant for her, as for anybody else. For instance, every time we split after the time we spend together, she is sad. But after she finished with this separation sadness, she’s happy again. She expressed what she had to express (and I never try to refrain her from doing that) and then she returns to her natural state. Which is being happy just about everything. Too often we forget that. Too often we prefer to cling on our own sadness, or anger or frustration long after the cause of whatever bad feelings we had disappeared. And in this process we create tons and tons of reasons for hating our life. And we forget that we don’t need reasons for being happy. Happiness is an unreasonable state of our being. It’s also the fundamental state of our being.

4. Adaptation Is Evolution

In the separation process Bianca had to deal with a lot of changes. She moved away from her house, she changed school and she had to cope with a lot of new persons from her mother new or old circle of friends. But she coped with this incredibly well. Sometimes I think she has some magic powers that she summons every time she needs to overcome something in front of her. But then I realize we all have these powers, we all have this incredible ability to adjust and adapt, we just have to find it and let it manifest. After I identified this ability in Bianca I soon realized that I had this too. And so the processes of reverting back to parts of my old life I lost in the last 5 years or reinventing parts of my new life started to unfold much faster than before. I hardly remember how I lived just a few months ago. And when I do, I hardly recognize the reasons for living the way I used to.

5. Thirst For Learning

During last year she started to learn how to write and read. And she’s doing it like all the time. This isn’t like she has some time for doing her homework and then going back to “play”. She is learning every single second and her curiosity never stops. Somehow, she finds a way to enjoy and mentally devour every single piece of new information that enters her horizon. She learns lyrics from radio tunes. She plays small dialogues. She tells stories about her friends at school. Every single second she learns. And whenever I’m with her I refill my curiosity too. As adults, we lost this. We think we know everything. We weakened our curiosity muscle and let boredom conquer everything we have inside.

6. Test Newcomers

Bianca is never engaging into direct interactions. The first few seconds are for testing. Yes, this is against social norms. When somebody is saying “hello” to you, the norm is stating that you should instantly reply with a “hello” too. Well, Bianca doesn’t really give a damn about this norm. And I’m so happy that she doesn’t. She only engages in new interactions (if she engages at all) after at least 20-30 seconds of attentive research. This initial period of testing is so important for any new encounter we have. We give in to social games and we move forward based on dry convention and not on our own feelings about the other person. Sometimes I think my life would have been completely different if only I would take the time to test all the newcomers in my life, just as Bianca does.

7. The Will To Win

Lately, we started to play games together more and more. She really wants to win. As I am more of a “just playing the game is good enough” type of guy, her attitude is a very good reminder to pursue the winning game. Yes, the journey is the destination, but winning every once in a while, focusing on the victory, well, that’s something that pushes us forward. And Bianca really a has a lot of this. Every time after I finish a game in which she won, I carefully study her joy. And, little by little, I start to incorporate this desire to win too. Yes, being in the game is what counts.

But boy, that victory feels so good, isn’t it?

You Steal My Jacket? Blood In Your Face!

When I was younger, I had a little bit of a restless life. I had what the vast majority of people knows as “a lot of fun”. Which translated in drinking 5 days out of 7 each week, the rest of 2 being reserved to women. Sometimes the ratio being drastically reversed in favor of women. Fact is that, until my late twenties, I didn’t do almost anything else except “having fun”. Oh, I had a job and all, but it was a very easy one. Being a radio anchor I was basically making a living by talking out loud.

The Setup

One of these long (and, I have to admit, quite boring) weeks, I was as usual in the student campus. Just after the fall of the communist regime the student campuses in Romania were a wild mix of cheap student hostels and drinking holes, poorly disguised as “terraces”. I remember it was a very cold winter night. I had a thick jacket, a blue furred short jacket, which came in very handy at those minus ten Celsius degrees. That jacket was also a distinctive sign of my presence in that campus. I guess we would call this today “a personal branding item”. But at that time it was just my special blue furred jacket.

And since I was going to enter my regular routine, which involved a dozen of beers and mindless gambling at the poker machines in one of those “terraces”, I left my jacket on one of the chairs outside the pub. My drinking buddies were already in and we took our comfortable places at the poker machines. Luckily, that terrace allowed me to play, because there were other places were the owners didn’t. Basically because playing for so long I somehow started to guess the algorithm and started to win more than I was “allowed”.

The night went fast forward before my eyes, beer by beer and friend by friend. I remember I played everything I had on me and didn’t win. That night wasn’t good for algorithms, it seemed. It was around 3 and a half in the morning when I decided it would be a good idea to take my jacket and find a room in the hostel to sleep for one and a half hour until 5 AM. From 5 AM I could take the subway, 5 stations to my rented studio (I wasn’t living in the campus anymore, just having fun there). So I did one last hand at the machines, lost it in style and went out to take my jacket.

The Revelation

But outside: surprise! What am I saying, surprise, it was plain horror: my jacket disappeared! First, I thought it was a joke my drinking buddies were playing on me. I looked deep into their eyes and realized they were much too drunk to answer logically to any question I may have had. Planning and executing a joke in that state was clearly out of the question. With a little bit of surprise, I realized I was also much drunker than I initially thought.

After a few minutes in which I was walking in circles on the terrace, hoping to find my jacket under some table, and trying to avoid slipping on the thick ice, I experienced a strong sensation of cold. It was freezing. Minus ten degrees Celsius. The alcohol was burning really fast inside me and I suddenly had a revelation: I had to find my jacket or otherwise I would die frozen. Of course I could find a room and sleep, or borrow a jacket from somebody else, but, as I told you, I was much drunker than I thought. Didn’t think clear.

I don’t know if it was the cold, the sudden realization that one of the members of our gang (we were quite popular at that time) was robbed, but my drinking buddies had a burst of lucidity and, in a clear voice, they had an incredible proposition. “Let’s find the jacket” they said, and, as this sounded like a voice from the heaven, I followed instantly. At some point, one of us may also have mumbled a quote from “Tortilla Flat” which happened to be the book I was having under my pillow at that time, but that, I cannot remember clearly.

The Search

Our long term party animals memory activated instantly. In a few seconds we identified all the parties, open terraces and, generally speaking, all hot places still populated at that time, including discotheques and other venues, and took them one by one. We may have been quite an impressive show, a few lads all frown ups with a guy only in his shirt (yes, I only had one shirt on me, and it was minus ten degrees outside) entering each of these parties, silent but decided. We were mingling instantly and started to subtly hunt for clues. The most subtle way of doing it, as I remember, was: “Who the fuck stole Dragon’s jacket?”

We visited a few hostels, all the terraces and open discotheques, but my jacket wasn’t in any of these places. To ease a little bit the frustration we did have a few drinks everywhere we went. Also, because it was really cold outside, you know. At some point, I remember we met with a young Albanese guy who was at the medical school in Romania. Usually, we were drinking buddies, but in that specific context, something happened. In a burst of lucidity, I throw at him the only English phrase I could articulate at that time: “You steal my jacket? Blood in your face!”. After a few minutes of talking it was deadly apparent that he didn’t steal my jacket. We had a few drinks to celebrate this fact. He promised he will do some research and get back to us. We parted ways as close friends. Almost walking on our own feet.

It was getting late. My drinking buddies were fewer and fewer. We lost some of them in each of the places we were into. In the end, there were only two left. They walked me to the subway station. They insisted to give me one of their jackets. I refused. I was a man, right? They gave me strong pats on the back and declared they didn’t see anyone manlier than me. They had tears in their eyes. Probably because of the cold, but I thought otherwise.

The Wake Up Ride

As I entered the subway, I had a mix of strange sensations. First of all, it was warm inside. Second, I realized I smelled like a distillery. Scratch that. Like a consortium of distilleries. I was still able to identify distinct faces of workers and secretaries rushing to their jobs. They were looking at me a little bit too long, I thought.

And then I realized the awkwardness of the situation: it was minus ten degrees, 5 AM in the morning and I was in my shirt, smelling like a consortium of distilleries. This young and good looking pal, what a waste. At that point, I clearly remember that all my alcohol was simply washed away. In just a few seconds I was widely awake. I also had a sudden change in my spatiality perceptions. It was like all the space around me was curbing, giving me a strange position. Looked like every gesture I made was amplified by this strange space deformation.

I still had 4 more stations until my rented flat. And I decided to change those looks. I don’t know if it was the shame, the guilt, or anything else, but I strongly intended to send a different message to those people. So, I focused as much as I could on this attitude: “hi folks, I’m just taking the garbage out. Yeah, I know, I could put it just near my block, but what can I say, I like to ride the subway in the morning. I’m cool. I’m ok.”

The deformed space around me started to change. Seemed like any intention I had was amplified and sent away in waves. I could almost see it as you see the ripples made by a stone thrown on a lake. I was actually modifying the image I sent to other people. First, the number of looks started to decrease. There were fewer and fewer people looking at me. Second, the ones that they were still on me had a lower intensity. Just a few seconds on me, and then they moved onto somebody else. It worked. By the time I was home, absolutely everyone in that wagon thought that I was a perfectly normal guy, just going back to his home. And I mean it. Nobody had any fancy looks anymore. I was just blending in. It may sound completely strange, but this is how it happened.

Oh, and I wasn’t cold anymore.

Forced Adaptation

Without knowing, that morning I learned one of the most important lessons in my life. The lesson of forced adaptation. Without my jacket on, I was deprived of something very important for me. But at the same time, I had to adjust. Not only to my personal context (which translates into having very powerful sensations of cold) but to the other people contexts. I had to find a way to blend in again.

This is happening in our lives more often than we think. We’re suddenly deprived of something important but we can’t adapt. Our first reaction is to blame somebody else. “You steal my jacket? Blood in your face!” It’s nobody’s fault, of course. Sometimes, deprivation just happens. We may lose our job. We may lose our money. We may lose our partners or beloved ones. We may lose our furred blue jacket.

We have only two alternatives: to blame others for that, or to adjust. Blaming never works. As drunken as I was, while negotiating with my Albanese friend, who was even drunker than me, I realized this was a dead end. And it’s the same in real life. We believe so hard that other people are responsible for our misfortunes and we just can’t stop. In fact, they may be even unhappier than we are. They may have even bigger problems than we have.

On the other hand, while I was on the subway, something magical happened. That strange space deformation thing, that was something extremely powerful. Somehow, from that morning on, I did incorporated it into my daily behavior. I do this instinctively now. For example, when I was for the first time in Geneva, 10 years after the jacket incident, I was approached 3 times by locals who were asking for directions. They thought I was a local. On my first flight back from New Zealand, I was asked by my seat neighbor if I’m Irish or Scottish. I’m Romanian, I told him.

Even now, when I’m writing this post, I noticed this. I am having my car checked up and a few moments ago a clerk asked me to give him some papers. I left my computer here in the lounge but instead of getting out of the building and take the long way from the outside to the reception, I crossed through the actual repairing hall. It’s too cold outside. Needles to say that you don’t have access to the repairing hall. While I was passing by all those cars partially dismantled, a mechanic asked me to hand him a hammer. “Here you go, buddy”, I said. Yeah, I’m one of you, guys…

The ability to adapt ourselves to unexpected contexts is fundamental. If we don’t train our abilities to blend in, to fine tune for the same vibration as our environment, we will always be considered aliens. And people will always be afraid of aliens. Like those guys in the subway, watching me with disgust: “look at this guy, he’s so out of this context”.

I don’t think you can find a more ridiculous context than the one I was in that morning. Later on, I faced many challenges and I was deprived by many things. But the power I experienced that morning in the subway always helped me to get over them. Yes, in just 4 subway stations, I somehow managed to make other people think not only that this guy in a shirt on a freezing winter is a normal person, but also that they have no right to judge me whatsoever.

Lost And Found

A few days later I got a phone call from one of my drinking buddies. Apparently, they found my jacket. Apparently, under one of the tables of the same terrace. It seemed that the ones that stole it had no idea from who they stole it. They were quite new in the campus and didn’t have the time to identify the jacket with its owner (we were quite popular at that time, did I tell you that?). Which basically means they couldn’t sell it in the campus, everybody knew that jacket. That, and the fact that all they found in its pockets was a half empty tube of mini-super Glue (I have no idea why did I carried that with me) made them throw the jacket under the table, when nobody looked. I also vaguely remember about some very serious threats for the “idiots” who stole my jacket, threats that may have played quite a role in their decision.

Fact is that 30 minutes after that phone call I came back to the same terrace, with only one sweater on me (it was the same freezing weather) ready to celebrate this very, very happy event. I only had a sweater because I knew I would return home with my jacket. When I left the campus, at 6 AM next morning, with my flurry blue jacket on me, I mingled into the morning subway population, made by the same workers and secretaries rushing to their jobs.

While I was looking at them, I intended to send out the the appearance of a suit who’s coming home after a very long night at the office, crunching numbers, strategies and marketing plans.

I think they bought it.

System Overload

How many times you’ve started something “without thinking”? How many times you just dived in, thinking that “things will arrange somehow”? How often you embarked on new projects just by passion or enthusiasm, without any type of assessment? I know I did it a lot of times. So often that I was on the verge of completely ditching my assessing and deciding capabilities. I was just doing stuff, imagining that I was carried by “the flow”.

Truth is I was not on the flow. I was completely out of sync. Trying to do so much, but with so little care for my real needs. Just going forward without assessing any of my moves. I remember that every time after a “full” period in my life, something extremely violent happened, usually to my detriment. Every time I was doing “so much” a restraining event came, quite often violently, and drastically restrained my options.

Took me a while to understand this dance of doing too much and then doing too little. But it finally came true: it was just a system overloading situation. The limiting events were in fact there to balance my exaggerated implication in too many projects at once. Some inner positive guardian was activating some switches, telling me: “I’m going to cut the power, Dragos, otherwise, you’re going to blow”.

Overloading Your Life

Whenever you engage in something new you’re overloading your system. Before you’re actually doing something you’ve already put to stress your system: you’re first assessing, and then decide what’s to be done and only after that you really start doing it. That’s the normal sequence. In practice, you’re mainly “doing”, or at least this is what you’re perceiving. Because you put your Assess and Decide stages on auto pilot. And that’s bad.

Even worse, if you’re doing more than it’s useful for you, if you’re taking on your plate more than you can realistically do, you’re going to get some crashes every now and then. It’s like a computer giving you the blue screen of death. Only it will be in the form of a psychological depression, physical illness, or some sort of addiction. Anything that will balance a little the stress you’re putting on your system.

Spontaneity

Just diving in, without too much “thinking”, it’s fantastic from a “spontaneity” perspective. It’s easier to get tricked by this viewpoint and find an excuse for not thinking your moves just for the sake of spontaneity. Although both words are starting with the letter “S” there is a big difference between spontaneity and stupidity. For me, spontaneity means “going with the flow”, stupidity means “going with their flow”.

In other words, spontaneity is a way of reacting to events by following your intuition (which is part of your assessment tools) and engaging in an action which resonates with your values, without giving it the benefit of rational doubt. Sometimes it’s great to go based on a hunch, on an intuition, without thinking too much.

But there’s a little bit of a subtle difference between not thinking and not assessing. You can assess without thinking, by using just your intuition. In this case, intuition is just another tool you use. Sometimes thinking will bring you the best results, sometimes intuition or other types of assessment. But the bottom line is if you’re really spontaneous you’re still assessing your actions, by using your intuition. If you’re just “going with the flow”,  without any type of assessment, mimicking intuition for the sake of being in somebody else’s flow, with all due respect, but you’re stupid.

Adaptation

So much for the spontaneity and stupidity, let’s get back to our overflow paradigm. Every time you’re putting something new on your plate, you’re overloading your system. That something could be anything: learning something new, changing career, entering a new relationship, whatever. Every new activity is a system overloader, it adds something to your current state. Usually, it adds something stressful.

Even if the change is beneficial to you, the stress will be there. In fact, every change is stressful, in the sense that it requires an adaptation period. You can’t really skip this. You may try to avoid it, you may try different escaping techniques, but it can’t be tricked.

Adaptation is a way of adjusting your internal vibration to match the vibrations of your external context. Unless you’re having a similar frequency, you’re not in sync. You can’t pretend you’re playing a sonata, while the Universe is playing a fugue. It just won’t match.

Adaptation is usually the biggest energy consumer in every change you’re involved. And if you’re constantly putting to much on your schedule, if you’re constantly trying to change your environment , your adaptation period will eventually run out of energy.  And a violent event will enter the scene in order to re-balance everything. You’re going to experiment another “system ”overloaded“ message.

Reboot Every Now And Then

Back when I had my online publishing business I was using Linux powered servers to host my sites. I was so proud when I looked at the log and see something like: “this system up and running for 234 days, 18 hours and 3 minutes”. To keep a server without a restart or reboot so long is usually a good sign. Uninterrupted functionality is critical for an online business.

Somehow, I started to mimic this behavior. Keeping an uninterrupted functionality flow for months, or even years was perceived like something good, the same way a server was doing. I was taking pride in it. I haven’t had a single holiday during my first 3 years of entrepreneurship and I even bragged about it. Unless I was not a computer. And every now and then I had to face some crash.

We’re an incredibly delicate and powerful energy manipulation machine. We’re so much better and infinitely complicated than a computer, which does a single job tremendously well: it stays up and serve sites. We’re doing so much more. We’re not supposed to stay up and serve clients uninterruptedly. This is why we invented computers in the first way, to do that for us.

We’re supposed to enjoy, to give, to receive, to love, to experience, to invent.

And we really can’t do that if we don’t reinvent ourselves every once in a while.

Make yourself a service and reboot your system every now and then.

Staying GTD Over The Hype

Two or three years ago, a strange topic about organization skills, de-cluttering and mind like water exploded on the Internet. It was about GTD, or Getting Things Done, a methodology for boosting productivity invented and shared by David Alled in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity [aff link]. This phenomenon lead to a sudden surge of new blogs, with 43folders.com of Merlin Mann becoming the icon blog for this trend. Soon, other useful and very popular blogs appeared. At that time even yours truly was a GTD wannabee and one of my very first posts in this blog – and one of the most popular, I must say – was about GTD for people in transition countries. GTD posts and blogs where spreading over the internet at light speed. It was the Golden Era.

But now the hype is over. Merlin Mann has switched his 43folder.com and we must re-learn how to use what was once the Internet Bible of the common GTD’er. Icon GTD blogger Brett Kelly handed over his popular GTD property Cranking Widgets Blog to a new voice, Andy Parkinson and in recent posts claim he cured his addiction for this technique.

GTD hype is over for good. But the benefits are here to stay. In this post I’ll outline what was left from GTD in my productivity rituals after the drop of the hype.

GTD Leftovers

There are at least 4 different things that somehow survived the golden era of GTD in my organizational behavior. Let’s take them one at  time:

Emptying your RAM

And getting rid of  “open loops”. In GTD terminology an “open loop” is a thought that is not solved, hence keep popping up in your head all the time. Solving this “open loop” is a matter of taking it out of your head and storing it in a trusted system, for further processing. This is something I kept and found extremely useful.

I don’t know about your brain, but my brain is not a rolodex for sure. I prefer to use my brain for doing creative stuff like writing, coding or something like that. I also use it for learning, either by absorbing information, either by experiencing. I don’t want to be bothered in these processes by unsolved “open loops”.

Next actions

I kept the habit of breaking projects into “next actions”. In GTD jargon, a “next action” is the next physical action required to move forward a project and it doesn’t have nothing to do with the logical structure of the project, most of the time. For instance, if your project is to change your plumbing, the next action will be “look up phone number of the plumber in the agenda @phone” and not “call the plumber”.  “Call the plumber” comes next to “look up the phone number”. Pretty logical, of course.

Next actions are a fantastic glue to my flow. After I created and constantly sustained the habit of breaking my projects into next actions, something nice happened: I started doing stuff instead of organize my day all day long.  It’s not rocket science, but it’s effective. (more…)

Depression – How To Un-Handle It

That’s a delicate topic, I admit. Depression is one of the most delicate topics in the world, because it involves sharing the deepest parts of your being. And because it brings to the light feelings of shame, guilt and sadness. I never met any human being who was comfortable to those feelings…

For me, depression, despite its medical definition, is more of a state of rejection, of meaningless time and a lack of value. A state of withdrawal and surrender, a state of worthless actions and a wish to put an end to everything. Depression is just an enormous hole filled with lack of self-esteem and respect, lack of trust in you and anything. I’m not a doctor, and even if I do like to manage multiple skills I don’t intend to become a regular one, so take these definitions as my own personal view of depression and not as a medical approach.

Because I don’t put depression on the doctor’s plate, by the way. I take depression as a sign of imbalance in your whole being. It is not an illness, it is just the fact that some parts of yourslef are in need to take a break. To let go of the pressure. Maybe you asked to much. Maybe somebody else asked too much of you. Maybe you feel anger because you can’t get what you want, or because you had it once and now you lost it. Maybe you just need to rest for a while and your environment can’t let you do that. Whatever the form, the substance is the same: repressed, fermented emotions that are exploding inside and are looking for a way out.

Avoiding The Inevitable

Letting it out is the best thing you can do. Just be aware of the danger that this flow of emotions could take with it, though: it’s like a river that can take your house if you’re not paying attention. But you can’t stop it. That’s the biggest and most hurting mistake I’ve made. You can’t resist it and you can’t escape it. You must let it go, otherwise it will eventually overflow you by accumulation. (more…)