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.

Life Device Drivers: What Are They and When You Need To Upgrade

Life device drivers are fundamental for a smooth social interaction. They’re the invisible layer which allows us to have a proper interaction with various social interfaces, like a job or a family. Oh, you don’t know what a life device drivers is? No problem, this is exactly what you’re going to find out in this article. But before we dive in, let me tell you that this is the second follow-up to my first article using a computer metaphor to describe self-improvement. You may want to have a look at it first: Are You The Best Version Of Yourself?. And you could also check out the first follow up in this series: How To Defrag Your Mind In 5 Eay Steps.

What Is A Life Device Driver?

Well, it’s just like a software driver, only it’s for your day to day life. I bet you wouldn’t think at that, right? Now, seriously, continuing our computer-human parallel, a life device driver would be described as a set of procedures one uses to manage a certain context at a very low level. The driver should also be used to enforce a certain result upon using that context. Sounds much more complicated than it is.

For example, if we’re talking about computers, a printer driver would let your computer communicate with your printer in order to print documents. The expected result would be the transfer of an image from your computer screen to a piece of paper. Subsequently, a marriage life driver would let you function in an almost automated way as husband and wife. The expected result would be an ongoing partnership which will allegedly make your life easier.

Of course, neither printing or marriage are always creating the expected result. Hence, the constant need to improve their drivers.

Habits, Skills and Life Device Drivers

Drivers are using very low-level programming interfaces. They’re built to access directly the most intimate parts of your computer: interruptions, memory buses and so on. In some respects, they’re like habits: once implemented, you’re using them transparently. Subsequently, once you installed a life device driver you’re just using it and don’t bother about how to talk with the part  you want to manage. But in fact life device drivers are much more complex than a simple habit.

The difference between a mere habit and a life device driver is quite simple: besides the fact that the life device driver should be very low-level, close to the core of your behavior, it should always end with a predictable result. For instance, if you have the habit of taking a nap every afternoon, that wouldn’t be a life device driver, because the expected result will vary drastically. Some afternoons you’ll be fine while others will make you feel like crap. If any of you ever wanted to implement the habit of taking a nap during afternoons, then you know what I mean.

Skills, on the other hand, are essential to life drivers. If you learn a new language, for instance, every time you communicate in that language you will generate an expected result: the other guy will understand what you’re saying. Provided that there aren’t significant bugs in your foreign language driver.  Other examples are: managing your job with a solid set of skills (both technical and social), managing a personal relationship or creating and maintaining a hobby (like travel, for instance).

Life device drivers are just very specific skills, implemented as habits.

Managing Your Real Life Peripherals

If life drivers are skills implemented a habits, what are they actually driving? What is the equivalent of peripherals in our human-computer parallel? We know what a peripheral is for a computer: a printer, a monitor or a keyboard. But in real life?

A life peripheral is an external context in which you want to express yourself. Being married, that’s something that could be called a life peripheral: you do want to express yourself within this context, but it’s not part of your core. You are a complete individual without being forced to be part of a marriage and many of us are functioning like this. Not every computer does have a printer and not every human being wants to be married.

Another peripheral would be a job. For many of us, a job is just an external interface. A context in which we are performing a certain number of tasks and at the end of the week we enjoy the expected result: money. A personal hobby, like traveling, would be another example. You acquire a set of skills (like foreign languages, for instance) and then implement them as habits (doing that constantly).

So, managing your life drivers means acquiring new skills and then maintaining them in the form of habits. Every once in a while, you will need to upgrade your life device drivers, of course.

Still with me? Good.

Why Do You Need To Upgrade Your Life Drivers

Every time you reach a new level in your life you need to upgrade your drivers. You need to be sure you have the right skills and put them to work on auto-pilot in order to perform well on the new interface. Otherwise there will be hick-ups. The expected results will be delayed or even null. You will spend a lot of time debugging your specific life drivers instead of just doing what you have to do.

Every time you enter a new relationship or get a new job, you need to upgrade your drivers. You need to reassess your role in the new relation or acquire new skills for the new job. Failing to do this will put you in the very frustrating state of having a beautiful printer, or camera, or other gizmo and not being able to use it, by lack of the appropriate drivers. And we all know how frustrating that can be.

Entering a new stage in your life without a proper life driver could even result in a frozen computer, or a need for a reboot. Your new job may look and feel great and even give you an underlying feeling of personal progress, but the lack of a proper driver for your new context could lead to a serious life crisis. And if in the geek’s world we know it’s always segmentation’s fault, in this case there’s nobody else to blame for forcing a cold reset, than yourself.

How To Upgrade Your Life Drivers

If you ever had to attach a new peripheral to your computer (a printer, or a camera, or something like this), you’ll find the next steps surprisingly familiar. If not, well, you’ll be in a better position to do this when you’ll have to. Here are 5 steps in which you can upgrade your life drivers whenever your life peripherals are changing.

1. Identify The New Peripheral

Most of the time, this step is obvious: you’ll know when you’ll get married (or at least I hope so, for your own good) or when you get a new job. But there will be times when you won’t exactly know what are the peripherals you want to manage.

For instance, you may want to enrich your social life. But, as real as the inner need may be, this s a very vague definition for a peripheral. Hard to identify it in the form of a manageable device. You can have a better and more fulfilling social life in a million ways. This is why is important to know very well what exactly are you looking for. In some situations the new peripheral could be identified as: a new group of friends. Or: a new group of like-minded people for exchanging ideas. Or: a support group for my public speaking skills.

Once identified, go to the next step.

2. Identify The Expected Result

Now, if you know what you are attaching to your life, it’s time to decide how exactly you want it to work for you. For computers peripherals, this is generally easier, because they come with some specs. A camera should capture frames at a certain frame per second rate, a printer should print at a certain resolution and so on. For life peripherals, things are a little bit fuzzier.

If you’re attaching a new job into your life, you do have a little bit more freedom to decide how exactly it could work. You may negotiate the number of hours you spend, the number and quality of skills involved and then make a specific request. The other part should offer you money, a decent work place, and so on. Now you made your own specs. The same goes for a marriage (more or less, to be honest) and for a personal habit.

It’s important to remember that on this step, a little bit in contrast with a computer setup, you have enough freedom to create your life device specs on demand. You decide what the expected result of using the new interface will be. But it’s also important to understand that you can also change the specs on the go. For a computer, usually this is happening only with a hardware upgrade.

3. Identify The Low-level Access Routines

Now you know exactly what you’re attaching to your life, you know the expected result, all you have to do is to start putting together the pieces. You will start to actually create your new driver. The equivalent for the geeks world will be the analysis stage. You start looking around for technology and choose a programming language. You make all sort of diagrams and workflows, which in a non-geeky, normal language should translate as: you’re imagining your new life in that new context.

In this stage of upgrading your life device drivers you’re creating and incorporating new skills. If the new job requires some training, you’re attending classes. If the new relationship requires some new adjustments (ok, you’re moving together, who’s going to do the dishes?) you’ll start identifying them. This stage is, like I said, analysis-driven, rather than actionable. You’re contemplating your next life device driver.

4. Program And Implement The New Driver

This is the step where you start “writing code”. You have the main architecture of your life device driver, hopefully you already acquired (or upgraded) the necessary skills, all you have to do is to freeze them in new habits. This is also the most difficult to implement, because creating new habits is usually a tedious task.

For instance, if you lived alone for 20 years, and your new relationship is upgrading to a “”living together stage“ you will find it very difficult to change some of your habits. Maybe you have a morning routine in which you’ll have to incorporate a new person (ok, who’s going to use the bathroom first? And for how long?) or maybe you’re having a poker night with the guys every Thursday (and you’re really going to miss that, believe me ).

Most of the life device drivers bugs are created in this stage. We all seem to know what we have to do to improve our lives, but it seems we have a very hard time actually doing it right.

5. Test And Debug

This is the stage when you’re actually using the life driver. You’re already at the new job, or you’re already moving in together, upgrading to your next level of your relationship. Most of the time, you get a trial period at any new job, usually a month. This is the period in which you have to put your new life driver to test. If you already have a life driver, of course.

This is also the last stage in which you can modify your driver. You can make adjustments, replace routines, integrate new skills and create new habits. After this stage is over, you will remain stuck with your life driver in its current state. Not much to be done to it after you finish this testing stage.

In every relationship, the first few months are usually shaping the next years and modifying what you’re creating now is really, really difficult later. Your marriage life drivers will be already in place.

Personal Example

Now, let’s talk about a real life example. Two years ago I decided to sell my online publishing company. After that, one of the bigger social interfaces changed dramatically: I didn’t have an online publisihing company anymore. But I did want to do something with my life. Hence, the need for a new peripheral in my life. Hence, this blog.

That was step number one, if you didn’t realize it by now: I identified exactly the new peripheral in the class of “work”. What exactly I want to do as “work”? Create a personal development blog, of course.

The second step was also pretty clear: I want this blog to become profitable in 2 years. I want to work anywhere between 2 and 8 hours per day and have a very flexible routine. Oh, and I also wanted to generate even a bigger revenue than in my previous business.

The third step was relatively difficult. I had to choose between the Romanian market, where I was obviously comfortable with the language, but the overall market audience was completely out of my target. It was both really small compared with the English speaking blogosphere and not at all interested in anything more than tabloid blogs. I also had to assess my biggest liability, writing and reading in English, and take some steps towards drastically improving these skills. Fortunately, the rest of the diagram was filled in with the necessary requirements: had a lot of business experience, management skills and so on.

The fourth step took me like 2 months. I sold my company in July 2008 and started the blog in October 2008. Not too much to be told about this stage, I just started to write and follow my 2 years long strategy.

The interesting stuff happened (and still continue to happen as we speak) in the fifth step: since October 2008, my life blog driver suffered a few major upgrades. Some of them were related to the time spent writing, some of them were related to the time spent promoting and some of them were about simple things like changing the blog domain from a .ro domain name to a .com domain name. At the moment, I’m pretty satisfied with this life device driver as it is, but I’m sure there are a lot of other small features which can be added.

Well, feel free to suggest some, if you see a flaw in my workflow. And, by all means, do share your impressions. Do you think this is a sustainable approach? Do you see parts where it can be improved? Would you use such an approach to adjust to some big changes (both wanted and unwanted) in your life?. Let the comments begin.

Entrepreneurship As A Personal Development Tool

10 years ago I started my own business. I didn’t exactly know what I was going to do, it was something mainly related to the online thingie that was starting to rise at that time. Nothing clear in terms of business plans, financing, strategy or management but with a tremendous drive to succeed. I guess the main reason behind starting my own business was my unconscious drive to publicly show that I was good at something. For those of you into astrology this might also be related to my North Node in the 2nd house in Aquarius, but let’s not get too technical… Some of my initial motivations had faded during years, some had grown stronger and during this 10 years slice of my life some new motivations appeared. The official ending of my first business was several months ago, when I succesfuly sold it to one of the most important players in the Romanian online publishing. Quite a success, wherever you may look at it from.

That was the end of the business though, not of my entrepreneurship. Ater selling, I turned all of my energies towards this blog which I am building almost from scratch, but with different motivations and metrics. In this post I’ll share some of my thoughts regarding entrepreneurship, business and personal development.

The Definition Of An Entrepreneur

99% of the definitions of a business will have something to do with generating profit. Or with generating steady income sources. Or with creating a more indulgent lifestyle. The entrepreneur is then defined as the guy who’s going to do all of these. And entrepreneurship would subsequently be the action of starting a business. This type of business. Every decent dictionary will tell you that doing business will ultimately have something to do with profit, somehow. Put in some money and at the other end of the business take out some more.

Every guy who has the idea, the resources and the energy to create such a process stream will then be an entrepreneur. I have nothing against this definition, except the fact that it doesn’t really deal with the failure part of this activity. As an entrepreneur you can succeed, but you can also fail. There is nothing wrong with failure. This doesn’t make you less of an entrepreneur. Not to speak about the fact that it doesn’t make you less of a respectable person, one thing that is most of the times forgotten in the modern society.

An entrepreneur is a person who is pushing his own limits toward a new level of personal evolution. Being an entrepreneur is about committing to your creative drive and starting to make reality obey your wish. Being an entrepreneur is all about courage and trust, hope and discipline, inspiration and endurance. It really doesn’t have to do with a successful business, although most of the times the successful entrepreneur will end up with a successful business, too. But one can also fail in terms of business, but still succeed as an entrepreneur. (more…)

Building Different Skills

People are often confused by the abundance of skills I developed over the years. And I guess what confuses them is the apparent spread of those skills over areas which are apparently incompatible or difficult to match together. For instance, if I bring into the conversation with a programmer an astrological opinion on some fact, chances are that I will get a “blue screen of dead” conversation. And if I bring into a fine arts conversation something about programming, I’ll be most likely left alone with that “mambo jumbo” sentence and labeled as an “unsolvable case of geekery”.

The examples above use extremely distant knowledge areas, but the confusion remains even on more closely related activities like business, marketing and sales. A marketing person will expect that I know nothing on entrepreneurship, since marketing guys are usually employed by somebody else in an established structure. And a sales person will expect that I know noting about marketing, since this should be a complete separate activity inside the company.

I can talk for hours with an astrologer only about astrology and have a fulfilling and entertaining conversation. I can do the same with a programmer and share a lot of the newest web 2.0 technologies and feel at ease with that. I can also talk about entrepreneurship and starting a company from scratch and never feel on moving sands with the person in front of me. But the moment I start to bring new perspectives on some topic and use other skills I have for that insight, my conversation partner becomes reluctant.

I acknowledge that I’ve been pretty affected by that. The moment I opened to somebody and let him know that I know more than what he expected, I was rejected. I came to the point that I felt ashamed of what I knew or learned so far. It’s better to stick on one topic of your life and seek only people who can understand you, I’ve said to myself. I do have the need for social acceptance, so if that’s the price to be paid, let’s pay it. Let’s stick with a limited set of skills, which at least will provide me with a comfortable environment and put me in touch with similar people, and bash all those new and interesting things I could learn.

But I confess I wasn’t able to do this. Although I did my best to succeed in limiting myself, I failed miserably. The dryness of such a life was simply unbearable. Limiting myself to only one major skill was just unconceivable for me and unfulfilling, at least. (more…)