04/26 - I found my WHY

Who am I?
 
I am someone who has a desire to serve, a strong natural curiosity, an ability to ask probing questions and the determination to face the uncertain, the unknown. I am someone who believes in a better society, where everybody has the right to feel included, educated and live in harmony in one unique global community.

Why do I get out of bed every morning?

To learn, teach and interact as much as I can so that I can enrich my service to society.
 
My mission

Persevere in a relentless pursuit to serve the people around me, while leading them to feel empowered in their lives.

My Values

• Interact with people in meaningful ways – make personal interactions and let people know you care and support them.

• Learn something from everyone – always enjoy the opportunity to learn something from someone. It’s a unique experience.

• Teach something to someone – be a connection. Try to spread as more information as you can to whom wish and need it.

• Include and support anyone – celebrate the differences and give the proper value to all ideas and intelligence around you.

• Practice leadership – go first, take the risk before anyone else does and help them achieve more than they could have imagined.

I am really, really happy because of this.

Independence

3:12 am. I am seated on the couch in the leaving room wondering about life.

Suddenly, something comes to my mind, an insight or some kind of slogan. My subconscious mind is burning now.

INDEPENDENCE SETS YOU FREE

So simple but so complex. 

Some definitions from Cambridge dictionary to Independence:

• the state of wanting or being able to do things FOR YOURSELF an make your own decisions, without help or influence from other people; 

•  the ability to LIVE YOUR LIFE without being helped or influenced by other people;

• FREEDOM from being governed or ruled... 

The complexity of the thing is that when you find your independence, you find your freedom and this process releases you from a lot of things and people that used to rule your life through your dependence on them.

More than ask yourself if you are ready for this freedom is to ask if all those dependent relationships are worthy right now.

Was this dependence relation what was keeping them alive?

Wow! Again, so simple but so complex. Maybe you are going to find answers to questions that shouldn't have been done!

Not anymore

You have been playing an infinite game with a finite game mindset. Then, when you discover your mistake and think about that, the worst happens. You realise that you don't want to play that game anymore. Not anymore. 

Graham Core Principles

* A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.

* The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

* The future value of every investment is a function of its present price. The higher the price you pay, the lower your return will be.

* No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.
 
* The secret of your financial success is inside of yourself. If you become a critical thinker who takes no Wall Street "fact" on faith, and you invest with patient confidence, you can take steady advantage of even the worst bear markets. By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people's mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.

# thoughts

One of the worst feelings that exist is - feeling guilty. It represents the acknowledgment of the mistake.

You blame everything and everyone when in fact the problem is you

How can you live like this? Always wondering! Flirting with discontentment. Should you really have been thinking about this? I am talking about your job. I am going to say something. You have a good paycheck, some perks, flexible timesheet (but you have to work on Saturdays), you have set your boundaries, you have found professional stability (regardless of the fact that you are always trying to forecast something), you know everybody and they nourish some sort of respect to you, you have full access to managers, directors, and even the presidency. All these details could be enough to make you fulfilled at work. Instead, you don't feel part of the family. You are not on the same page. Why?

The truth lies deep inside you. You have been pretending, building an image of importance to the system but actually, you know that you are not doing anything that people imagine that you were supposed to be doing. It's another dimension, a distortion of reality created by you. Congratulations! You made it. You are the impostor's syndrome personification.

 The truth lies deep inside you.

There is a resistance rooted in your mind like a rat race. That's the cheese, keep running, but not only running, you have to pose that you are not like all other rats. You are a champion! The best part of this history is that the cage's door is opened. Actually, there is not even a physical cage, you can come and go whenever you want. It's a virtual cage imagined by you. However, you insist on staying there, waiting for that easy piece of cheese.

You blame everything and everyone when in fact the problem is you. You are not bold enough to take action. Where does all this laziness come from? Or is it all about fear? I think that I have more questions than answers. Working has always been part of our history as well as how much space this subject is allowed to remain in our minds. Which means that if you don't give much space for working in your mind, you might be working just by the paycheck. It's what really matters. You don't expect much personal fulfillment. The only thing that you want is to be capable of paying your bills and providing a good life quality for your family.

You blame everything and everyone when in fact the problem is you. 

On the other hand, if you expect more than paying bills you must find a way to change your life's narrative. Start writing your goals, defining your expectations, revising your actions (what is working, what is not working, what have never worked). Visualize everything and yep, guess what? Keep working to providing the means to support this changing. My final words are not so encouraging. I don't know whether it will work or not! At least you will find a purpose to wake up every single morning and commuting to work. You will find why you do what you do.

"So line on up, and take your place, and show your face to the morning..." John Mayer

See you all!!

The Antimatter

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” 

Albert Einstein

There are first-level thinkers and second-level thinkers.The latter is used to looking what’s behind common sense, they tend to be misunderstood by people in general. They are, sometimes, considered strange people by most of society. They are considered the antimatter.

There is an inner feeling of refusing the conventional. Maybe because it’s not enough for them. That first dimension where everybody lives is not completely satisfactory for second-level thinkers. They need more, to go deeper, to find what lays underneath the basic truth.

This physiological necessity to understand the not understandable is sometimes a blessing but most of the times a curse. A second-level thinker walks alone in his thoughts while his body is stuck inside of a casket.

You can not do the same things others do and expect to outperform whatever you might be thinking in outperforming. Be the antimatter if you want to "beat the market". Do what no one else is doing. Dig deeper where nobody wants to dig and you will find the second-level thinker dimension.

It's almost sure that you will never be the same again.

I Guess I Just Feel Like - John Mayer

John Mayer - iHheart Radio 10/24/18

I guess I just feel like
I guess I just fell like
Nobody's honest
Nobody's true
Everyone's lying
To make it on through
I guess I just fell like
I'm the same way too

I guess I just feel like
Good things are gone
And the weight of my worries
It's too much to take on
I think I remember
This dream that I had
That love's gonna save us
From a world that's going mad
I guess I just fell like
What happened to that

I guess I just feel like
The joke's getting old
And the future is fading
And the past is on hold
But I know I am open
And I know that I'm free
And I'll always let hope in
Wherever I'll be
And if I go blind
I will still find my way

I guess I just felt like
Giving up today

*This is my transcription, not the final version.

Paradise Valley - Montana

Pieces of Advice

I have been working with some ideas and I wish to share them with you.

The way I found to improve my life (personal and professional) is following these steps every day.

1) Wake up as early as you can. I wake up at 5 am most of the days. It's the best way to balance family and work.

2) Don't leave much room for insignificant people/things in your life. Avoid toxic people and toxic things. Work with green, yellow and sometimes red people/things, but never with toxic.

3) Work with your things. Be quiet. Be the last to speak, mainly about your plans, goals and objectives. Keep them with you.

4) Avoid foolish interactions. Don't waste your time walking out of your path. 

5) Study! Study as hard as you can. Study whenever is possible.

6) Find your way to go. There are those how can only see the things that prevent them to get their goals, and there are those who can see beyond. They see what they want. Be one of them!

Luck and peace to you all!

Crime and Punishment

The criminal law establishes crimes and the proper type of punishment for each of them. But what is the correlation between crime and punishment? And how those measures and penalties are seeing through the eyes of society?

When someone breaks a rule, so he/she got punished. That is the way things work, or at least how they should work. You can see this from a macro perspective (society), or from a micro-perspective (your own reality).

A few days ago, my wife grounded my 2 years old son because he wasn't having a good behavior. In other words, he broke the house rules. They had a conversation about what had happened and his punishment was to stay in his bedroom for 10 minutes alone. After that, it was the time for my wife and I have a talk. In my opinion, her measure was too harsh. So, in this case, we were talking about the same "crime" with different opinions about what would be the correct punishment to the "infractor".

The grounding was unpleasant, and she issued it purposefully to serve as his punishment.  However, it is not a law. It is not written in any place that the correct measure, in this case, is to ground him, but she decided based on what she believed that would be the best punishment for him.

In order to correct those discrepancies and to avoid that anyone would take their own measures based on their own beliefs, the laws were written as wells as the punishments for the violation of them. But it seems that are some different views about the application of the law. There are those who believe that, choosing to behave badly, you must, therefore, be blamed and held responsible for your bad behavior. In other words, it is the called "an eye for an eye" which means that the punishment should fit a crime.

On the other hand, there are those who believe in punishment as an example to the society. From a micro-perspective it was exactly what my wife did with my son. When she grounded him she was trying to give him an example and show the consequences if he would choose to break the house rules again. Analyzing from a macro perspective if we had siblings, we would be giving an example to the other son. He will notice the consequences and think twice before breaking the rules as his brother did.

The law is not perfect. It is opened for interpretations as well as the punishments are opened for controversies. Although we may not agree sometimes with the balances and counterbalances ruled by the system, they are the foundation of a well-structured society.