3 proofs your mind is your #1 Enemy

1: You just had a heated discussion with someone. Disagreement, lies, bad habits, pick your poison. You keep thinking "Why is (s)he acting like this? If I had reacted in X way instead of Y. How is (s)he going to behave when we meet again? How am I?". Independently of whether what cause the argument was justified or not, your mind keeps spending an increidble amount of time and energy reliving it, playing different scenarios, imagining reasons on your and his(her) behavior. It consumes you. It keeps playing in your head.

2: You have a headache. You take a pill, it doesn't go away. You go to the Internets, and find a myriad of potential reasons for your headache. You take an appointment with a doctor, it's friday next week. Your headache comes and goes, and you start (again) creating scenarios: did I hit my head? Might this be hereditary? Am I feeling pain elsewhere? When did it actually start? And thanks to everything you read off the Internet, you start drawing pretty scary conclusions: Might be migraine. Brain injury. Or something more serious.

3. You're feeling overweight. You've been eating bad lately, you reckon. It starts showing around the waist. You stop wearing tight stuff so it doesn't show, while you work it out. You become more sensitive of fat jokes. You stop yourself from ordering the large french fries, as it will go straight to your hips. Off your mind goes: You start losing a little bit of confidence, as you don't feel sexy. Every time someone mentions anything related to weight, you think they're talking about you. You look outside at all the skinny people, you feel envy, you feel frustrated.

Pain is real and unavoidable. Suffering, on the other hand, is completely made up.

Your and your loved ones will always disagree and fight. That brings pain. All the stories and recreations in your head afterwards? That's suffering. A pure product of your imagination, useless and negative.

That pain in your head is coming from somewhere in there, a palpable root. All the paranoia and hypochondria? Suffering, sponsored by your imagination.

The added fat on your body is there. You can (sadly) feel it. All the extra sensitiveness and and frustration? Suffering, straight out of nowhere and ready to bring you down.

Your mind is capable of the most awesome things. And also, some of the worst. Again, pain is inevitable and unavoidable, is part of life. Suffering, on the other hand, is product of our imagination. Our mind. Our number one enemy.

Why being politically correct is stupid.

There are two kinds of people who make racist, sexist, etc. jokes.

The first kind believe the content of the joke. They really think niggers/Jews/women/etc. are inferior, stupid, etc. Society has told them they're wrong, but they disagree. And hence they express it in form of a joke to defend their position. What? It was just a joke dude, relax!

Then there's the second kind: those who are above the racism/sexism/antisemitism issue. To them, it really is a joke, poking fun at a) stupid people who still believe the joke, b) our society, since at a given moment people who believe this were actually the majority, and finally c) politically correct people, who really are not sure if they're on the "don't care" side or "still believe" side.

Now, in a world without racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc. everyone would be able to joke about it. It would actually be a joke for everyone. This way sites like www.tshirthell.com/ and www.reddit.com/r/imgoingtohellforthis would make everybody laugh. We could all sing along making fun of every possible stereotype and have a good time. But stupid politically correct people get in the way.

If you're like me, you want to get there. You want this world to be free of racism and the like. You want to eat cotton candy and thank your black friend for picking it out! But there is an awful big amount of us who still believes your black friend should not be sitting with you in the living room, but in an actual cotton field.

So how do we fix this? Getting rid of political correctness. PC is inhibiting racist, sexist people to express themselves the way they want to. If we do not know who they are, how can we argue with them to understand their positions and debunk them?
 
Don't you love freedom of expression? It's awesome. It allows you to say whatever the hell you want, regardless of whether you have any base, proof, or evidence: It's perfect to detect stupid people. Political correctness is nothing but a way to curtail freedom of expression, thus delaying and making harder our task to make this world a better place.

Down with political correctness: Let them speak their minds! Let the stupid be stupid. We're here and ready to make them see how wrong they are.

Boomeranked

I always told myself I would come up with a great idea, find some coders to make it happen, and retire by the time I'm 35. Until I realized that the only true engine of making things happen is passion. And if I have the passion, I would have to do the coding.

Hence Boomeranked.

I was told on more than one occasion that I looked like a drug addict, because of the way I dressed and acted. Other than biting a brownie in Amsterdam once ( that I think had nothing on it as there were no effects), I've never been anywhere near drugs. I'm not here to discuss whether drugs are good or bad, but I think we can agree on the fact that being called a "drug addict" is not exactly a compliment.

I have never taken care of the way I dressed. I used to go in pajamas to college, never shave, and used clothing from my dad. I wear chains and have bracelets, and I have been know to be the nof*cksgiven kind of guy. I have been called "unembarassable" on more than one occasion.

But to be called a drug addict? Damn. How many friends I did not make because of this misconception? How many people turned away and chose not to try me? I will never know. But this went on for years and years, and I was totally unaware.

Then I started looking around. I have friends who smell (being in France, not that uncommon). If they knew they smelled, would they do something about it? I tried telling them, and most of them changed ways. How many people were turned away by their BO? They will never know.

We all have a friend we make fun of secretly about a quirk, a feature or a trait. It turns out, everyone has one of those, and they have a name: personality blind spots.

It all comes from the Johari window, a psychological theory that divides the personality in 4 spaces:

• Bright spots are the things about you that you know, and everyone knows: You think you're funny, everyone else agree, that's a bright spot.
• Dark spots are the things about you that nobody else knows: your porn watching habits likely are not of general knowledge, that's a dark spot.
• And the blind spots are the ones everybody knows about you, but yourself.
• The other ones I don't remember.

How is it possible that there are things about you that everybody sees, but yourself? It made no sense to me. It shouldn't make any sense to you.

Hence Boomeranked.

I now value immensely personal feedback. I tell people what I think, in a constructive manner. I think everybody should do that as well. Imagine how great our lives would be if we knew these traits that everyone sees in us, but ourselves. We could be so much better people.

The thing is, it's not easy to share this things. Hence Boomeranked.

Boomeranked is a social feedback website. I agree, a website is not the best way to deliver feedback. But we're not doing it enough today. So I set up a platform that makes it easy and simple, anonymous and private, constructive and spontaneous.

If this was an ideal world, we wouldn't need Boomeranked, we would share this. But it's far from perfect, and many society rules prevent us from sharing. I dream of the day Boomeranked won't be needed anymore. Until then, use it. It's there to help you better understand how you are seen, how important personal feedback is, and why you should just share these things and not keep them to yourself.

--
Personal feedback: Spontaneous, Anonymous, Constructive, Contextual.
wwww.boomeranked.com

4 reasons why we’re living the best time Earth has ever known and have no idea about it: It’s getting better (man!)

According to Wikipedia, there are 31 ongoing military conflicts, just one down after the Lybian situation got “solved” by the death of Gaddafi.

Add the common violence unrelated to military conflicts: my native city, Caracas, is one of the most dangerous cities in the planet, and we have no war going on there.

Add the people we kill even before they’re born: feminicides in India and China were having baby girls is synonym of debt and sorrow; or Greenland where, as far as 2007, more than 50% of pregnancies ended in abortions.

Add the “legal” deaths of capital punishment, still allowed in a staggering 101 countries.

And yet we have the most peaceful world in our history! It is a point I have been trying to get through, to no avail, and now scientific figures are available to back up this claim.

How is it possible that we are living on such a happy planet and pessimism is at amazing levels, with so many people claiming we live in a world with no values, no virtues, we’re all going to hell, this lifestyle is taking us down, etc? Here’s my breakdown

• Information.

As little as 30 years ago, the only way you could know what was happening was via a limited set of TV channels, the newspapers you had access to and information conveyed by friends and relatives. A friend recently talked to me about how this world is rotting down: she saw a documentary on feminicides in India, and how women are killed to avoid debts and they largely explain the gender disparity due to ancient traditions on some cultures there. 

This phenomena isn’t new. Indians that abide to these traditions have been probably killing women for ages. We just did not know about it. Like we didn’t know about Somalia, Ukraine killing stray dogs or Sweden using bunnies for fuel (look it up!). Now we can have access to any kind of information we want within seconds thanks to the Internet.

• Perspective

Pogroms were quite common a couple of hundred years ago. And then, merely 70 years ago, we killed six millions Jews because, among other things, “they were impure”. Black people were “imported” and used as slaves up until very late in the 19th century, and after they were “freed”, we kept lynching until recently.

These terrible types of thinking are very likely not to come back again. And the people on the world who still holds a candle to these principles is dwindling. While we still have Gaddafis and Al-assads, and ethnic cleansing is sadly still happening, but I think it’s safe to say we will never have these events in the scale we’ve had it before.

• Standards

We like to believe we are a civilized people. And since our values are constantly under attack, something that years ago would not have been that upsetting, it is now.

Roll back 400 years: Paris, the city I live in, was filled with dead corpses all over the place, and people would remove them only to be able to get their carriages through.

A few days ago, the little Chinese girl, Yue Yue, who got ran over and bled to a near-death state as more than a dozen people passed by without doing anything about it, was a shock to the 1.3 billion Chinese people and to the world. And it is likely to have important consequences on the minds of them which will hopefully translate into governmental action to implement measures in place that will avoid these events. Our standards of what we believe is acceptable and what is not are getting better!

• The Regular Media

Yep, it’s a punching box, and we can’t do without, but the Media cannot be really spared of the reality distortion. You are 30 times more likely to be killed by lightning and three times more likely to drown at the beach than to get bit by a shark. But what do you fear the most? Thank you, shark week.

I’m not saying let’s all bring out our hoola-hoops and go dance with rabbits as we pick mushrooms in the nearby forest. The world has more problems that I can think of . But now we are more aware, we are more intelligent, we are more propensive to care and we have better means to address it. So cheer up and keep fighting, but do so with a (at least light) smile on your face.

To cite my favorite song by my favorite artist: It’s Getting’ Better (Man!)

6 reasons your personal blog should be on your Linkedin account

Recently, I got an email from a person who might join me as a colleague. She found this blog through my Linkedin account. She told me (among other things) that, while she found the content of the blog interesting (thanks!), it may not be the best choice to have it on a professional profile, as it talks about topics out of personal experience. Here’s me challenging that statement.

Having your personal blog on your profile helps you make the case that:

1. You’re connected. It might be superfluous if you’re in the IT field, but elsewhere, it lets your employer know you have at least a decent knowlegde on working with online tools, which are absolutely necessary for pretty much every possible job nowadays.
2. You’re not all about working. A blog (at least a well conceived one) takes time. Takes effort. Takes interest. Having a blog on your profile means you have (at least) one activity other than working. And workaholism may be a good thing for the company on the strictest pragmatic approach, but I believe the negative effects on every other aspect of that person’s life have been proven.
3. You let potential recruiters know what you’re up to. If you blog vehemently advocating global warming, BP might be better off offering the job to another Project Manager.
4. You have ideas. If it’s not one of those blogs were people talk about the colour of their dog’s poop or how much they got hammered last nite, then it shows you use your brain even after you’ve turned off your work PC. Your ideas may be wrong or right: you may be advocating the end of the world, the feminicides in India or the unfairness of Occupy Wall Street, but you have an opinion.
5. You trust your judgment. Putting your personal blog on your professional profile lets recruiters know you are ok with public scrutiny of your thoughts, which takes a strong character and a lot of trust in yourself. That sounds like a pretty damn good virtue in my book.
6. You think it’s important to influence people. The simple concept of blog publishing means you have something to share, and you want people to rally to your cause. You have a motivation, a passion, a topic that makes you move, and you are looking for someone else that might be willing to listen. As a recruiter, you look for someone that can get behind an idea and sell it. A blog is the perfect self-training arena for that purpose.

In a time where there are more professionals that vacancies almost across the board, sending a clear message from the start that you are connected, passionate, motivated, argumented and influential might give you the edge that makes a difference between making them hit either the “next” or the “send a message” button. Your move.

Why being insulted is better than being complimented

Whenever you hear something that affects you, bothers you or puts you down, take two seconds to think:

1. Is this person someone who cares about me?
2. Does this person have a reason to be rude to me?
3. Am I offended because I see some truth in what he/she said?
4. Is he/she backing up his words with arguments?

Not everything that makes us feel bad is an insult: it can be an observation, a critique. And of that, we do need a lot if we want to become better people.

We all have our own little idea of who we are; of how people perceive us and of how the world does see what we do. Ever cared to ask if your perception matches reality? It’s hard, isn’t it? So every time somebody tells you something that affects you, think whether it might actually be a critique or observation on your behavior, and then talk to your loved ones about it. We have this huge problem of not wanting to hurt people telling them uncool truths, when we are actually hurting them by letting them believe something false about them.

If somebody tells you “you’re a stupid moron who doesn’t give a sh*t about anybody else”, which is an insult, they might actually be trying to say “you’re a patronizing, arrogant, selfish person who has no concern whatsoever from what happens around you”. He/she might be doing you a favor.

There is one little caveat though: you gotta know who you are and what you want to be. If you're having doubts about yourself and your purpose, goals, etc. you might want to spend some time clarifying this issues, as being able to take critiques is not an easy task if you are not happy with who you are

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Your last failed relationship was your fault. And you should be happy about it

We all want to find love and live happily ever after.

To find love and live happily ever after, we must find a person that corresponds to what we want.

But then again, we must take into account that this person wants different stuff, so we must learn to find the balance.

         

Finding the balance is quite hard. We can read about it or learn through experience.

Being humans, failures are the most efficient way to learn stuff that will help us find that balance.

So we must fail, understand why we fail, and learn from that.

So why is it that almost every time a true relationship ends, people try to find every possible excuse not to put the blame on them?

The relationship is over. You are not going to share the rest of your life with this person. Why worry so much about making them know what they did wrong?

Find out what you did wrong. Work on it. Correct it.

It will give you experience.

This will help you find the balance.

This will enable you to take into account the other person.

And then, when you find the person that corresponds to what you want, you will find love and live happily ever after.

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