life epiphany #29573

happiness comes from within.

don't look upon others for it.

is there a space

where i expect nothing from anyone and everyone expects nothing from me?

is it that exact moment when we sit down for a beer together, shoot the breeze, and don't give a shit about anything?

or does it only exist in solace in the wilderness?

if you want to know

what kind of person you are, just look at the wake you leave behind

a note on crises

i won't lie, i'm a big fan of crisis management.  i have a high threshold to be fully engaged and excited.  variables, logistics, the works.  it's a better alternative to daytrading, sometimes.  it requires creative solutions usually in an extremely limited time frame.  i put on my stoic face and it's game time.

it's also something i look for in most people i want to work with because life is full of crises, and few the same.

but what is a crisis?  how do they happen?  imho, they shouldn't happen, but life's full of surprises.  sometimes there's no way of forecasting them, but rarely so.  it takes a convergence of errors - which amounts to a very specific permutation - for a crisis to happen: a shortage of resources, unintended outcomes, poor risk management, and so on.  and from the risk management side, disregard.

so while i have no issue dealing with crises, it annoys me when they are foreseeable and are a result of lackadaisical morons.  and there's a fairly high threshold for an incident to be a crisis.  of course, you're welcome to drop the bar as low as you want, but you're making a mountain of a molehill.

adversity: in for the long haul

when things get shitty, i never leave; i take the lead.  i view any form of challenge/adversity as character-building.

so it's usually essential that teams i work with have faced adversity and came out on top over and over again.  this makes it far more likely that people won't bail when the going gets tough.

on being: selfish

i probably already have a rant about this, but at some point, i considered cutting all the selfish folk out of my life.

it's irritating and frustrating to be around people who only look out for themselves, to be among a constantly bickering and competing cohort.  but truth be told, it's a necessity.  we all need to be a little bit selfish, because nobody else has our best interests in mind - maybe with the rare exception of where our best interest may coincide with their best interest.  selfishness and competition - not at the dire cost of others - are healthy.  it makes us stronger, fitter - better suited for darwinian survival.

but something always trumps selfishness: collaboration.

the purpose of life

is simply to exist.  anything beyond that is simply a bonus.

to laugh, to love, to breathe, to see, to think, to cry, to hurt, to learn, to fail, to teach, to create, to taste, to fear, to enjoy, to hear, to win, to lose.

the difference

between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs:

one of them will figure it out

What if...

- yes, another one - we think of people as atoms and we chart them on a periodic table stratified according to organizational behavioral traits?

these so called atoms have so called electronegativities (i.e. personalities) and other traits that we could analytically forecast reactivity with other atoms.

suddenly, team optimization and lower divorce rates.

more lessons from catan

i just lost a game because the other player was horrible at risk assessment.

i thought it was just a fluke so i went to check out his stats.  11% win rate.

not a fluke.  the guy is consistent in his poor risk management.

i immediately added him to my block list.

the lesson is that you never want a weak link on your team or even as an opponent.  why add liabilities to your team?