Keep Walking in 2010

First : I wish all of you readers, and your relatives & friends, a very happy new year 2010.

Now. Digging up what I had or hadn't posted for last year's season greetings, I ended up cross-checking the objective(s) of tyhis blog, detailed in my very first post : The ambition of leadership.
Quoting myself (I know, very unpolite!): "Let's try to find out more about [...] what it means to be human. Here as in many other situations, the final destination - ultimate knowledge - is not as interesting as the path towards it."

What do I mean by "keep walking"? Mostly 3 things:
1. keep going towards what you like and enjoy most
2. keep paying attention to how you are maturing, what you are learning
3. adjust your direction accordingly (back to 1)

What is there in 2010 for me?
1. I keep looking towards the renewable energy sector, learning more facts, techniques, business stakes
2. I have my personal plan for the " coming years, with deadlines & checks regularly spread out
3. I still read a lot and enjoy it, which helps me to look at my choices critically as I go.


There are tons and tons of things I would like to do, but at the moment I am rather trying to simplify my life around priorities, therefore I am doing less things, and more of them.

As usual, I will try to post some of my initiatives or business ideas around these pages.

In the meantime, why don't you try the exercise for yourself:
What is there in 2010 for you?

Keep walking, I hope your footsteps bring you back here from time to time.

Once again: i wish you a VERY HAPPY 2010.

Simply simplify

Three months or so ago, I sat with a friend for six hours, writing down my personal goals for the next 3 to 5 years.

Two weeks after that, I sat down again, on my onw, to finalize what we had started and detail my goals into specific, timely actions. (yup, that's also something I learned from Aiesec)

One month after I had completed my action plan, I realized that I was not tracking my actions. I could not know if I was living my life according to my own priorities or not. So I started tracking.

Two weeks of tracking later, I realized that I needed to update my action plan, in order to incorporate a gross estimate of the time I was spending on my priorities: was I getting enough time to sleep, to read books or watch a movie, to spend time with friends; was I getting enough time to work?


Now, after one month of detailed tracking, I realize that it is very hard to keep within the limits I set to myself. To grant each of my personal priorities (including work) the right amount of time in order to achieve my goals. Because there is always a temptation, either a project that I want to study more in detail at work or some procrastination opportunity at home.
My daily life is getting in the way of my personal goal.

Recently, through a couple of well-meant links and thought-sharing from a great friend, I came accross an interesting idea: simplify.

The first link I surfed was http://zenhabits.net/. It is a perfect starting place for pragmatic, long-term thinking about how to implement your long-term plans, your life dreams, your great-idea-that-you-just-never-get-to-start. It has a lot of content revolving around personal organization, without being pushy or arbitrary.
From then, I discovered http://mnmlist.com/ . It is about minimalism. You had guess, had you not? ;)
There is a lot of truth and evidence in the posts on that blog, but it takes a lot of change to go from mass-consumption to life-streamlining to minimalist-living. That guy has gone very far, and he is keeping his own possessions under 100 items (or keeping blog posts under a certain number of words ;) ...), and having a lot of upper-limit numbers to a lot of things. I have not been that far, but I took some ideas already, that I mention further in this post. If you want to know where your life stands today, as regards simplicity, try any post from the top #20 posts. I would be surprised if there is not a single idea that you can start using today already.

In the past 2 weeks, I have undertaken three significant actions:
1. I have tidy-ed and cleaned up my bedroom. That involved a lot of thinigs going OUT of it; some to the trash, some to other places in the house. Not necessarily the best way, but at least it is out of my room. I have simplified my library, not the only books featured on my shelves actually reflect pretty well py personality! (there is philosophy, economics, Aiesec, comics & mangas, EU policy drafts and the UN charter...)
Consequence: The moment I was done, I could feel my mental space expanding, all the mind clutter stress flying away. It feels good, and healthy, to be in an environment that has nothing un-necessary on the floor, or getting in the way of your movement. Also, I felt more "at home": the room felt more like my place than it had ever before.
2. I have reduced my use of mobile phone: in transportations, considering that the mobile signal is poor in the subway, I got to reduce my exposure to electromagnetism (I am not debating whether it is dangerous or not). I think that I should be able to have my mobile 'off' at some point of the day. So it is that time: commuting to and from the office.
Consequence: I use that time to read a book, or close my eyes and think about a situation, a time of the day that I want to understand better. During my 8-day experiment, I did not read or think about anything, I was just looking at people, all the other passengers, and I found it can be quite boring ! So I figured reading is a good way to use that commute time.
3. I applied to myself the minimalist desktop; one from mnmlist that can be found here. I did that on both my office laptop, and my personal netbook. My pro laptop actually has exactly the same image as the minimalist guy, with the same quote, and I used a more personal photo for my netook.
Consequence: Here, only positive aspects. I never use desktop icons anyways, so not having them displayes suits me fine. I managed to remove even the "trash can" from windows desktop, ask me in a comment if you wanna know how ;) and I have all the essential shortcuts in the "quick launch" area of my auto-hide taskbar.


Closing words for today : Simplifying your life is not easy. One quote goes: "I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead".
But simplify is simple, in the sense that you have it in you. It starts with your will to simplify and get rid of things. And it is not absolute, it is mostly iterative: you go over those things, thinking you need them, at some point you will realize that you never read that book or never wear those socks.

As always, ideas and comments welcome.

Get Control

I used to feel that I did not have time for anything.
Between high-school and business school, I think I was late for almost every appointment I ever had. I'm not the most punctual person on earth, but I think I can safely say that I got better.
I was delayed a bit today as I left my office, and therefore got slightly late at the presentation I went to attend.
5 years ago, or maybe just 3 years ago, I probably would have ran like a madman to catch up with time, and win a couple of minutes. What I have understood is that time does not control me. I am in control of my life, of my actions, of my priorities.
Reaching that comprehension has taken me a lot of time, and quite many years of running, getting shorter of breath, and yet another day closer to death. I see today that it's okay to be one day closer to death without running. Be it to gain a few seconds on a travel, or to fit more things in one day.
Even though I cannot do everything that there is to do on this earth, even though I cannot possibly go through the complete span of life experiences, I can take my time. In fact, I feel it's because I know that I cannot do everything, I can allow myself to take control of my time.


Currently, I am reading The 7 Habits of Highly effective people.
Random trivia: in French the title reads something like "The 7 habits of people who successfully realize everything that they set themselves to endeavour" (don't worry, it's actually shorter when you write it in French. otherwise it simply would not even fit in the front cover :p ).
It is a highly useful book, as it provides guidance in leading a life more centered around principles and values, rather than appearance and personality, as is often the case in our current times.

After setting out to explain that:
- if you want to change, you need to want to change: the "what if", "I wish" won't ever do you no good
habit 1, "be proactive"
- all things are created twice: before you act, you must first produce an image of the expected result in your mind
habit 2: "begin with the end in mind",
so after those two habits he gives an opinion on the difference between leadership and management. If leadership is about going in the right direction (habit 2), habit 3 is about management: "Put first things first".
By consistently prioritizing on what is important for us, and not only on what is urgent, we can get more results on those important things.
And what is important? well, there can be quite a few things. I had some trouble understanding the whole point of this habit until I found out about the "roles" perspective. In our lives, we all hold several roles: child (of our parents), sibling (of our siblings), friend, colleague, student, etc.
And the first thing to do is, regularly, to assess which of our roles are most important to us. Then we can start prioritizing on the things we have to do. Well that is how I do it, in fact, and it is doing it that way that has helped me significantly in better managing myself (rather than better managing my time).
I undertook a"paradigm change", as Aiesecers would have it: I changed my perspective and understanding on a topic, on a given part of the world, therefore allowing myself to interact differently with that part of the world that I now see differently.

So that was it! First post since the last one, where I stated my new ambition: more personal, shorter and more to the point, and hopefully more practical, less philosophical than usual.
Cheerioos,

Jonhjonh soon at large in Cyproos