A rant a week

It’s a long time I don’t post on this blog. I regularly go through periods of hypo and hyper working activity, in time-spans of broadly two months. November/December 2011 has been one of those hyper periods.
I took some refreshing days and tomorrow I’ll be back to my everyday life again.

Before even this last vacation day comes to an end, I’d like to sum up something I learned in 2011. It won’t be all, but I’ll try to list what’s more important IMO.

If you want children, don’t wait too long.

They suck a lot of time! They can be as cute and tender as a teddy bear, but odds are good you’ll be drained by their need of attention. Mother Nature rendered women able to easily get pregnant between late teenage and early 40s. There is a reason for this.
I know there are also a lot of reasons not to have children before given checkpoints (I want a home, then I want a work, then I want to travel the world, then I have to relax a bit, then…). Some of them come from fear (Will I have enough money? Will I be responsible enough? etc), but babies just need you. The older you will grow, the less “you” you’ll be able to provide.

So, given for grant you’re sure you love your partner and you really want to spawn offspring, go for it without fear! ;)

Less money == Less troubles

I live in Italy. In 2011 we had to face a truth everybody knew, but nobody was able to speak: our country was running at breakneck pace towards financial default. Our politicians has all been inept and incapable in their mission for so long that we’re now driven by a temporary non-politic government. I’m pretty happy with their results, even if they’re asking people for sacrifices. But Italian national sport is “Complaint” (you would have said “football”, I know, but bear with me! I drive “a rant a week”, I know what I’m talking about! :D), so the most of people isn’t happy with change.

Last year hasn’t been easy for my family on the economical side. I worked a lot, but we still had to face a chronic lack of money. We had enough to pay our bills, eat and pay taxes and our life-insurance, but at the end of the month we remained with a few odd coins in our pockets.

Despite this could sound sad (it has been sometimes), I have to say that we learned to face the situation enough to appreciate it somehow. We always drove a moderate lifestyle, dedicated to our family, our work, music and children. What we have is enough to be happy.

Looking around I see a lot of people complaining. Some complain with good reasons, since they can’t even afford our moderate lifestyle; but most of them aren’t doing that bad: they just shed tears over their lack of privileges.
Claiming personal financial disaster on facebook from your brand new iPad2 is not what I call coherence.

So, at the end of the day, I’m happy with my drained bank account, as long as my family and loved ones are too. I think if I had more money I would have been scared to lose it in the rising crisis. It’s not the case, and, as stupid as it can seem, I’m thankful. :)

Each head is one world.

Not that I didn’t know this before, but in 2011 I understood this even more deeply. There are tons of different visions, reasons and ways to be. None is totally right, and some seems to be definitively wrong.
What I learned is that reasons behind ideas are the real value of ideas themselves. You can’t decide if a vision is good or bad without putting yourself in the mindset of the vision owner.

Sadly this is too much overhead, not to mention you risk to lose your own visions and ideas with frequent transferts (not joking). That’s why I decided to adopt a macro-evaluation process based on some simple rules of thumb:

• Does your vision somehow hinder my freedom?
• Does your vision violates some of my personal, deeper or moral value?
• Will I take (or risk to take) damage or (intentionally or unintentionally) damage someone else following your vision?

If all answers are “Nope!”, then, let’s do it your way and stop arguing. I’ll have more time for myself.If there is one “Yep!”, I prefer to split and go alone on my own way. The reason is that, simply put, it won’t work.
After all, minding one’s own business is the sole, true road to success.

If you need to explain it for the third time, it doesn’t worth the pain.

Stupid people (I mean, really stupid ones) are not that much. The vast majority of stupids around are just fat-heads with different ideas; actually they think the stupid is you! :)

I’m always eager to explain my ideas twice, but the third one is wasted time.
Try with me: I’m more fat-headed than you can tell and you won’t get to change my mind so easily. I want evidences, and I won’t take them nicely if they show I’m wrong.
Sometimes I just don’t understand, so a second explanation will fix things. If not, reality is I don’t want to understand. So let me see you’re in the right without further ado.

Things get done! It’s just a matter of time.

I’m not scared about not getting my (personal) things done on a daily schedule. I’ve got a lot of passions and I’d like to do just everything, but work and kids steal the very most of my daily hours.
Being an 8PM Warrior is hard, and sometime it’s not enough, but step after step, things get done.

So, don’t trash your ideas just because you feel you won’t have enough time. And if this feeling discourages you too much, face the truth and tell yourself that you won’t have enough willpower.
Personal projects take time and devotion. If time is short, you have to invest on devotion, avoiding deadlines and putting brick over brick when you can, slowly but steady, ignoring fast results. This requires patience and will.

There are a lot of things I could put in this list, but I think they’re just corollaries. All in all, 2011 brought me some more wisdom. I hope I’ll be able to put it at work. :P

Happy new year everybody.