Anger or Passion

We usually state the term "success" quite often and in so many different contexts, as we say that a certain person is successful or that we need to reach success in some life area. I've been one of those so many people trying to follow that light thread tagged as "success". For example, in the area of work I save no effort trying to achieve the "success" in work. I got so sucked up at work that I lost most of the other life aspects such as hobbies, nutrition, and the relative peace of mind I used to have. It doesn't just happen out of the blue, it happens gradually and by time until you realize that painful fact that you kept consuming all the life aspects until they ran out in order to just achieve a solitary success at work, in case it's success at all. I've never asked if that is really the success that I want, all what I just knew is that I loved both work and people at work defining the "success" at their organization level and I simply follow them.

I'd been into this for three strange years until recently when I went into a depression state where I lost interest in everything and I wouldn't even care to achieve success in whatever area of life. As bad as the last statement sounds, it might be beneficial to suddenly loose interest in everything. For me, loosing interest gave me a space of thinking that I've never been into ever since the graduation. It got me to a point that I could step up and start looking at myself in the life big picture, start wondering about what I'd been doing and where that led me. I started wondering, is it really a success? is it the "success" that I want? is it worthy to consume a life-time for it? Why had I been eager to achieve it? Was it out of passion for work? Was it out of anger at failure?

So many questions had poped into my head and I couldn't find an answer for any of them. By time, It started to be crystal clear to me the answer for all the questions above is a simple and a pointing NO. That is, It's not the success that I want; it's the success that society defines. Being so, it's not worthy to waste time, not even a life-time, to achieve it. It wasn't out of passion, it was out of lack of self-believing that let others define roadmap for me. It wasn't out of anger at failure, since there's not failure to a non-defined success.

I realized that the first success is to be able to define success. Just like Albert Einstein once said that If you didn't succeed at the first time, define success. Accordingly a successful person, is a person who lives by his own definition not by others definition. Collectively, successful persons together can achieve more to the society than if they're lived by society definition of success.

At the end, success is achieved out of insight into the self, capabilities and the environment. It's neither out of passion, nor anger.

Cut Once, Measure Twice

"Gut feeling!", a common word that we use when we do something and we can't figure out why. The term implies something that is either very intuitive to do, or very vague to determine. However, most of us tend to use it by the later implication. That is, when we give up on thinking about the matter we're up against, we follow whatever impulsive idea we feel really relieved about and we call it a gut feeling. 

Measuring how hard the decision is depending on how critical the branching point on your road of life. That is, a decision that might change your career is much harder than a decision about your car color. Another factor that might affect the hardness of your decision is the number of the available choices or alternatives. The more alternative you have to choose from, the more hard to settle down on an alternative and be quite confident that it's the best alternative you want. No matter how hard your decision is, what really distinguishes it from a natural reaction is it's mutual execlusiveness. You need to choose one and one way only which is why it's difficult to add a gray range to your choices where you can mix choices up. 

Some people tend to hassle up the thinking phase prior to making the decision; they need to quickly wash their hands off the decision and make a choice. Thus, they tend to follow what they like more and call it as gut feeling; later on they might regret making that decision. In most of the situation, the right decision might not seem the best at the beginning and thus people who hassled up the thinking regret at the end of the day.

Other people just find it overwhelming to think about the decisions they are about to make, that's because they just keep thinking about all the factors at once and accordingly they see it very difficult to choose and the boundaries between the road branching points tend to be more vague. Accordingly, they also tend to make the decisions quite quickly and without much of thinking.

Everything in life has its own start and it's corresponding end; for everything we start we have to be aware of where it is or might be ending and whether we are able to end it or not. Starting things without thinking of its end or our ability to end it is a cause of depression since we keep increasing the number of the dangling threads about issues that we have. After a while, the impact on our lives increases dramatically since we may have to make impulsive decision hoping to finish off any of the open threads of the issues that we have. Like a chain reaction, it keeps on generating even more open issues threads and consequences that we can not handle nor end. All those opened threads and consequences were originally started as a single deicision to make. So we started with a point representing a decision, and we ended up in a full-fledged tree of endless open issues that we can not handle.

One of the key points to making a good decision is to always think while the end in mind. It pretty much helps pruning some of the decision alternatives and lets you focus on the remaining set of options. This cuts the hardness of the difficulty level to a fraction of the original level.  Once you prune out the least fitting alternatives, you can systematically try to making a fitting criterion for all of the remaining alternatives and it will be a matter of mathematical weights in order to make your decision. 

 The systematic way about choosing the best fitting alternative is to put down all the aspects regarding the set of the alternatives you have. For example, If you're choosing among four alternative companies to work for; the aspects that you might consider would be: career progress, environment, and finanical oppertunities. Every one of us weighs those aspects differently depending on his/her discretion. Accordingly, you can add weights to your rolled out aspects, say on a scale from 1 to 5. Those weights implie your preferences to the aspects you just put down; putting weights might not be an easy task on its own, let alone the discrepancies between your opinions about the weight value. Simple analogy between the aspects would be of a great help to let you settle down on the correct weight value. In the example above, if you are not so sure about the weight of environment; you can make it to a common sense value like 3 out of 5 and then make the analogy between the environment and the career progress. Analogy would be by stating the question: "Is environment as much important as career progress?". For me, I would say no and accordingly I would decrease the environment weight to 2. You can repeat the same process by making analogy among the aspects in pairs until you reach the settle point. For the example above, I may assign to career progress the weight 5, to the environment the weight 3, and to the financial appertunities the weight 4. The next step is to apply all the weighted aspects you rolled out to all the alternatives you have, which will result in a set of values, say on a scale from 1 to 10, for all the aspects for each alternative. In the example above, if we have to companies (A, and B) then you can say that when you apply the aspects on company (A) you get to see that the career progress has value 8, environment has value 5, and financial oppertunities has value 6. You can apply the aspects again to company (B) to have another values.

Once you're there and you've settled down all the weights and the aspects values for all of your alternatives, making the right decision is a no-brainer task. It's the maximum value of the weighted summation. Don't get afraid of the mathematical terms, it is merely the summation of the values you've collected for each aspect multiplied by its weight. In the example above, the company (A) measure would evaluate to: (5)*8 + (3)*5 + (4)*6. Accordingly, the maximum valued measure would be just the best alternative to choose.

In the decision making process above, you virtually "see" yourself in each of those alternative thinking about how it will end and how you'll act. It's your second measure that you take before making your cut in the piece of wood. As for the cut will be more accurate, your decision making will be more effective and accurate too. 

Planning

I've read a quote for Lewis Carroll that says: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there". Which means that if people just don't know the next step to make in their lives, then it's up to the life conditions to determine their next step.

I've experienced some period of time when I gave up planning, it's true that once you gave up on planning you get to see that everyday is just like another yesterday without any sense of time or progress. And to make the matters even worse, you get to make impulsive decisions without ever calculating their consequences. It's very natural degradation since you're loosing the big picture of your life and its main road and thus, decisions are not validated against that big picture. Consequently, you make those decisions based on momentary feelings or others attitude. For at least three quraters of those decisions, regret is the natural result. Accordingly, in effect, I became just like a piece of paper flowing away without a specific direction where wind can move it anywhere it likes. Wind is life conditions and other people attitudes about you and your behaviors.

Planning is what transforms you from that piece of paper into a solid tree with roots in the ground that can not be easily affected by winds and condition. For me, life planning is the first step toward self confidence and worth sense because once you start on planning, it means that you're convienced with your vision about life and you're confident that you'll set targets and you will achieve it by doing the best you could.

How to maintain your plan is a matter of your discretion. There are several software tools for maintaing your targets and plans and all of them just do the job. It's not important either it's a piece of software or even a piece of paper for as long as you do follow and revisit it. However, it's quite important that you try to stick to the plan and try to achieve its targets on timely basis. The more you stick to your plan, the more self confidence you get and the bigger targets that you achieve. To be more practical, your plan need to be realistic. To be realistic you have to bear in your mind the other obligations you have (e.g. your work, marriage life,..etc) and your capability to perform. Making unrealistic plan will make you even more disappointed about yourself and you'll loose your self confidence. On the other hands when you make your plan realistic, you have to be ready for its change. Life isn't that rigid and regular as we imagine. Things might change; other conditions that are out of your hands might affect your plan. You have to absorbe and adapt those changes by continously updating your plan and revisiting it. 

My favorite technique to roll out my plan is to first name all the targets that I need to achieve in the next year quarter. The main artifact out of that phase is a piece of paper that has a numbered list each item is a target. The list is numbered to indicate target priority. The next step is calculate a rough duration (in terms of hours) that will take you to achieve each target individually in isolation of other targets. After putting the duration for each target, you need to put a contingency factor to each of those duration (I put usually 30% contingency). You might not know the exact contingency factor; you can start by a large factor then while revisiting and comparing the planned duration versus the achieved duration, you can adjust the factor variance. The final step is to view your calendar that indicates your available time to proceed with your plan and start breaking down each target duration into a number of smaller regular sessions on your calendar. For example, if you have a target that require 90 hours to achieve; you might break that down as one calendar session every two days and for three months. Calendar session is a reserved time slot in your day so you continue working on your target. Repeatedly, you'll break down the rest of the targets duration in your calendar available time slots. Of course you might have a plan that can't fit in your calendar for the next year quarater, by then, you might have to de-scope one of your targets to the next year quarter and you re-adjust the plan. After finishing your plan and setting up your calendar, you can put it on your cell phone calendar for example to regularly check it.

The key to master this technique is the continous monitoring and maintenance for your plan. It's just like a cycle that starts with planning, achieving, taking measures, and feeding them back into your plan. The more you iterate on that cycle, the more accurate you'll plan your subsequent plans and the more clear insight about your achieve capbailities you'll get.

Naming

We are humans tend to make things according to aspects that we already know; it requires a huge amount of training and mind scripting just to think unnaturally or out of the box. For example, when computers were first built they were pre-conceived as per our biological processing model. That is, in short, we know that human brain has memory and has this ability to process things incoming from different external stimuli in the form of a touch or a look. Computers are just made the same very way, they have memory, processing power, and a set of input devices representing the external stimuli.

Accordingly we are always trying to behave or create according to our life model which is merely a collection of assumptions, concepts, and practices about the life that we're in. Collectively, those concepts constitue our way of seeing, thinking, and accordingly behaving. That way, is called "Paradigm". 

I named this blog "Paradigms" to document and share the way I see the different aspects of life and how I would behave accordingly. I'm sharing this because I believe in cooperation to make things better and we'll never know that we're right or wrong unless we're validated against other references. Publishing this blog is away of validating paradigms.