Ego Libre

During my afternoon coffee break I have stumbled upon a funny little cartoon. For Apple fan-boys Joy of Tech is no news, rather it is a daily sermon of the great Apple religion. Well, I am one of them, so I like to get my daily shot there.
But today it touch deeper than just a dose of Anti-MS humor. It once again reminded me of design. Maybe because the previous discussion and post was so narrowly viewed as a web-design rant, I would like to expand it. The principles of design are universal and are deeply entwined in every single product we consume.

It is so simple, but some companies still get it wrong. What is wrong with Windows Vista? I still don’t have first-hand experience (although very soon I will have to due to my work), but I can say one thing. It is not designed well.
I can almost here the sniggering from the MS geek crowd, but it is simply put a badly designed product. It is unfinished. Why can I say that before I even had a chance to try it?

Because the best design is the one that no-one notices.
The best design just works.

And Vista doesn’t work. You have to spend substantial effort upgrading your computer to be even able to run Vista. Heck, even buying Vista requires manual by itself, because it will be impossible to decide which version to buy in this pricing charade Microsoft is trying to pull off. And when you install it, you will have to re-learn all your workflows due to GUI changes. That is fine, it is a cost that we have to pay for revolutionizing our interaction with computer, because that is what software evolution is all about, right? But wait, if your configuration will not be able to run the eye-candy Aero layer, you will be stuck with old looking OS. So that means that if you have one computer at work which is good enough and one at home, which can’t run Aero you are using same OS with two different GUI. Hmmm, great!
If you are a real geek and a programmer, you are already disappointed with Vista because it failed to introduce all those nifty geek-oriented features. Simply, its code was a mess and they couldn’t pull it off. If you are a company producing software you have to basically rewrite most of your code. And that goes even for websites and web-apps due to IE7 and new Active X.
Every step of the way, you are running into problems. You will have to pay constant attention and create effort to MAKE THINGS WORK. That is not good design. That is a product that fails in almost every category. But I will give you that, when it works correctly, it is shiny.

That is the reason why iPod is such a success and why Apple has a fanatical followers who connect with their products emotionally. Did anyone fall in love with their Dell yet?
Don’t get me wrong, Apple does not always get it right. But that would be for a whole another post. The point here is not to accuse Vista of being the new antichrist, the point is to take it as an example of what I mean by good and bad design.
If your product is designed well, I will buy it. I go so far in this little fetish of mine, that I have even purchased applications just because they are beautifully designed even though I didn’t really need them. Delicious Library anyone?

Update: And just as I finished writing, Lifehacker posted an article how to disable new revolutionarily annoying feature in Vista. I mean, c’mon; a program that manually asks for almost every user action to be confirmed? A feature that is auto on, but can be switched off and thus will only bother people who don’t know how to turn it off? And what about all the spyware that it is supposed to stop, how long before they find a workaround while majority of world’s population productivity decreases because they have to stop typing and press OK? So… good design? Hardly.
At least you don’t have to press start to switch it off anymore. (If you thought I could write an article about Windows without pulling this one you were wrong )

Some scientist say you can. But don’t bring up this topic with your girlfriend
This is the topic, I have been thinking about for some time. I also know that this is a theme that many of you will be interested in, as it comes up in almost every drunken conversation I have with other guys in one form or the other.

What is love anyway? Can you live for the rest of your life while having sex with the one and only?

It is probably due to my age, or my situation that this topic comes up so often between my peers. When you are experimenting with sex in your teens, you don’t usually care about this. I mean, it feels like the whole world is in front of you and it is ripe for picking. After a few years, you might run into a realization that might feel terrifying at first. It’s the fact that sooner or later, you will be expected to pick one partner and spend the rest of your life with him or her. This is not the scary part. Most people are all up for that, especially when they are in love. The scary part is sex. Can we be happy fucking the same person over and over again? Is sex representation of love and does waning sex interest mean waning love? These are the problematic areas.

Do I have an answer? No. But I have a theory. And funny as it is, this theory is backed by some science. It all came together while watching Helen Fisher’s TED speech. Yes, the famous TED helped me once again. She is an anthropologist who spent years researching what happens to our brains when we are in love. The findings are spectacular.
Basically, she claims that we have three somewhat independent brain systems: one responsible for romantic love, the other for sex drive and third for attachment. This is so significant, that I will list it again:

• Romantic love
• Sex-drive
• Long-term attachment

And these three are comepletely independent. I hope you see where I am getting at. It is theoretically possible, that each of them will get triggered at different times by different people. Therefore it is physically possible to be in love with someone, feel aroused by someone else and at the same time have a relationship with a completely different person and it will not cause a problem to your brain.
Of course the problems to your lifestyle are much worse, but let’s say you can pull it off. I know people like that. Some go as far as to claim that they are incapable of connecting these three and focus on the same person. And these people are partly the ones that I am writing this for.
The underlying theme here is that we are perfectly capable of these acts, but that does not mean that we are not perfectly capable of directing these three independent system at one person. Surely, this is not an easy task, but it does not mean that it is impossible.

I think, it puts the whole “problem” into completely new perspective, so let’s look at what practical implications it has.

1. No matter how madly in love we are, there will always be a danger of misaligning these three systems.
2. If that happens, it does not mean that you do not love that person anymore, it just means you have to use your mind to bring the focus of that one lose part back to THE person.
3. Love (hereby thought as a complete alignment of the three and thus love as we commonly understand it) can be triggered by either one of them.

As Helen sums it up in her speech:

“I don’t think honestly that we are animal that was built to be happy, I think we were built to reproduce. I think that the happiness we find, we make.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. This is a tricky issue, because many people will read and think of it purely as a prerogative to cheating. I can just imagine the excuses bringing this study up and saying: “Honey, but it did not mean anything, it was just a sex-drive, I LOVE you.” or as Eddie Murphy puts it in his RAW show when replaying a speech of a man who got caught cheating by his wife in their own bedroom:

“Wait a second. Yes, I fucked her. I FUCKED her. But I make LOVE to you.”

You see, these ideas have been around for quite some time. There is nothing revolutionary about what I am saying here. But there are two problems with the usual explanation that this research undermines.

1. This system works same for both men and women
2. This system is independent, but that does not mean we have no control over it.

The usual argument about men’s cheating is that it is in our nature. Personally, I think this is total bullshit. The only thing that makes it seem so is our culture and how indoctrinated we are with the common perception of men and women and their roles. I swear, if one more person tries to pull this argument on me, I will lose my temper. Women are prone to cheating as much as man. Women love sex and women are as promiscuous as men are. The only difference is that this culture does not perceive them that way, so hypothetically speaking if a man and woman will be put in the same situation of possibility (or desire) to cheat, women will be held back by their socially implemented restriction rather than by physical nature.
Men do not want to see it that way. We see it as our right and unspoken supremacy over women and this is just wrong. These principles are not only about men, they are about people.

Recently I had a discussion with my friend who actually planned to cheat on his girlfriend. When confronted with it, of course he said he would not like her girlfriend to do the same and that he would probably break up with her. But ego brought into game a nice twist. It is ok for him because he is a man and it is in his nature. What a sweet logic our balls dictate to our minds!

Second implication that it has is that when this unfortunate misalignment happens, you should do your best and realign it. This is the scary part because it breaks a lot of ordinary concepts of love as something magical and uncontrollable. If this happens to you, you shouldn’t freak out, but just to ask yourself: Do I have the will and desire to redirect my sexual-drive back on my present partner? And if the answer is yes, just use your mind to do so. How? I think that giving yourself no choice might help I guess this is where marriage becomes indispensable. So there you go, another blasphemy thrown at you: The purpose of marriage is to give you no choice and thus make you happy.

Personally, I am not scared anymore. (Not so scared anyway) The reality is, that no matter what happens in future, if I stay with my girlfriend, if I marry her one day and thus will not have any other sexual partner in my life, I will be happy. I will be because right now I am working on it and giving myself no other choice. I was afraid of the possible shifts of desires in future, but as it seems they are completely natural. This should not be regarded as a prerogative to cheat, but rather as an explanation not to freak out when it happens.

Can you love one person, have sex with another and live with a third one? Science says yes. But in the end, it is your choice. You just have to remember, if you walk that path, the availability of abundant choice means that you might never truly be happy. So think again

…especially stress.
Stressful people are busy people and busy people are succesful people, right?
So more stress must be a good thing. In that case, please check out 5 Ideas for Stressful Living on Everyday Wonderland.
As I have stated in my first post, I am definitely not the only one and this article resonates so well in my head. Just read it and see the parallels. I love especially this part:

Most people look almost exclusively to external things and circumstances for their satisfaction, instead of looking within. … It’s the reason why people spend most of their time working for the purpose of accumulating more things, and then their free time on trying hard to extract as much satisfaction as possible from these things in order to justify the means of attaining them.

5$ for those of you who can guess which of my own articles did it remind me off? It’s not like there is that many to chose from
By the way, it was my first time on that blog and it surely does look interesting. Check it out.

At least that is what this research suggests
It seems like scinetificaly proven common sense, but the reason why I post this link here, is because it is somewhat related to a topic that I am preparing to talk about as soon as I manage to gather some people here, so I can see what reactions is it going to trigger.
Anyways, a bit of science for those of you desperately hunting mates. Includes advice for both sexes. Except that I don’t think the girls will except it so easily.
I also think they should expand the research to include type of jokes and categories. I wonder if appearing to be a racist, homophobe or a bigot in general will get you more mating possibilities? I know most of my jokes should not be used on first dates

Thanks to Pat for the link.

It is impossible to please everyone. It is equally hard to please the majority. Heck, even pleasing one person can be hell-of-a-lot-of (albeit pleasurable) work

But this is not the lesson and this ain’t a post about sex. No, this is supposed to be about design. But these things have a lot in common. The reason why I decided to write this post was a reaction of my friend when seeing my redesigned personal website. It made me think and state why have I done so. I want to hereby provide you what I have learned from years of trying to make money as a web-designer.

1. If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t waste your time and resources.
2. Do not make sales until your production framework is up and running.
3. Beautiful graphic layout cannot replace good design.

Number three is what I would like to talk about today. Maybe the main reason why I learned the last lesson was that I was always a crappy graphic-designer. I mean I could play around in Photoshop, I could imagine beautiful layouts in my head, but I lacked the skills to make them reality. For years we have tried to hire a professional designers, but alas they either wanted ridiculous amounts of money leaving us no margin, or they were no better than I was. The rest is history. Me and my friend have made some money over the years, but nothing worth talking about. Well, it got us through high-school and paid enough beer and shots to keep us involved for some time.

But enough with confessions and back to lessons. So I was a sub-par designer. The only thing left was to look at what others were doing. And boy, did I learn a lot there. Unfortunately mostly about what good design is not. It might have been that era of late 90’s early 21st century when people were fascinated with the possibilities of Flash animations and when seeing a full-res photo on a website was something of a miracle (that you usually had to wait for 1 or 2 minutes to load). And all this time, I just couldn’t help but think that this whole direction that mainstream design is flawed. Finally, Google proved me right with its minimalist graphics and maximum functionality. Now that was good design. Since then, unfortunately, we are stuck in so-called Web 2.0 and its own fallacies, but more on that some other time.

The problem lies in the perceived meaning of the word ‘design’. It is often used for only a small part of design. People look at website visual lay-out, at new BMW or an iMac and say: “Wow, cool design.” Yet they do not refer to the way the buttons are placed for easy accessibility, to how the code is written to be multi-platform, how is the engine placed or how easy is to replace RAM in your machine. No, they mean they like the way it looks. And every time I hear this I become more and more desperate.

What has happened to design? Why do people care about all the flash and bling and not the real thing? How come my internet banking works only with Internet Explorer running on Windows and people will stay it’s cool design. Do you think YouTube has millions of users because of its graphic layout?

So people will see my website and think: that’s a crappy design. Yes, I did not spend too much time tuning it, I have instead decided to provide a content to it. Now I have a single html page with a single image that I can edit on the fly directly from ftp when I need to change something. If you forget my email or phone, you can always access it from anywhere including your mobile devices. Do I need anything more? No and that’s why you didn’t give you anything more. Simple as that. I wanted to provide value (contact information) in a functional way (single html page) and so the actual design or form did not matter to me and thus had the lowest priority. Is it possible that I will redesign it one day to replace the current childish simplicity with more compelling design? Yes, but only if I can perceive an added-value in it.
And to add even some more fuel to the fire, this blog is running on WordPress’ own layout. I mean pre-designed layout! How come an ex-graphic designer uses pre-defined templates? Because I believe in value and content. If I spend my precious time fiddling with design for this page, I would never write anything in it. In fact, today I caught myself thinking that I don’t like the photo that I carefully selected for the header, so I have changed to template without the possibility to customize headers. And you know, now that I have no option to change it, I am much happier about the whole layout. This goes back to my previous post on choice and happiness.

So what is the main lesson that I have learned from my unsuccessful career path? What should resonate in your head next time you spend half a day designing your business card or printing full-color brochures for products you don’t even have yet?

Read the rest of this entry »

And to make it even more far-fetched; what does me losing a glove have in common with my view on customer service?
I have lost a glove today. One glove. One stupid glove and I felt silly and angry. Interestingly enough, it brought to my mind a quote by Machiavelli that I have not thought about for a long time:

“Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.”

It amused me enough that losing a glove makes me think of Machiavelli, but maybe it is not a coincidence. If I would lose for example my computer I would feel sad, stupid and hopeless. But I don’t think I would feel anger. Losing a computer would be such a severe situation for me that despite all the emotions entering my mind then, I think anger wouldn’t be one of them. The situation would be too big for me to be angry about.
A glove on the other is different thing. It is small enough that I can bitch about it.

And what does this irrelevant rant has to do with business? In fact quite a lot (if you allow a bit of abstraction). Never ever assume that your customers will forgive you small mistakes. For example, if you are a software developer, your customers are more likely to forgive you a missing feature then badly implemented one.
I work as customer supporter and that means that from time to time I have to deal with users who are furious and even rude because one miniscule feature of our software was not working the way they thought it should. I tried to do my best to please them, but what can I do to prevent them from posting angry messages on forums all over internet? What can I do to explain to other people that all the anger of those users comes from one single feature and other than that they are happy with our product? It seems hopeless. I do believe in truthfulness of Machiavelli’s words. Do you? Or should I say: do you dare not to?

Update: I found the glove today in front of our office. The anger is gone and replaced by feeling of intense stupidity. And the only quote that can underline that properly is in fact by Einstein:
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”

Ever pondered about the meaning of life and its purpose. Of course you have! What is the most common answer? The one that people give, when you ask them what is the meaning of life? The one they come up with, so it would encompass everything including their egoistic desires they don’t want to talk about? The one they think is universal and can easily possible includes world peace? Surely, they will say that purpose of life is to be happy.
I agree. It is my answer as well. Yet what blows my mind is how many people fail to do so. If it is everyone’s goal, so why is the world full of miserable people that I seem to meet all the time? No, this is not going to be a useless advice such as the annoying: “focus on the full half of the cup.” That’s crap anyway and it is bound to fail.
The one single step to acquire ever lasting happiness is as simple as this: “stop trying…”
Well, that sounds like another boatload of crap, not to mention it could lead to a nihilistic meaningless existence, so I should add “…and let your mind do the trick.”
Yes, that is the one single, but maybe not so easy, step to fulfill acquire everlasting happiness. Stop trying and let your mind do the trick.
Of course it is not as simple as that. I am not proposing a fatalistic attitude towards your life, your career or the people you care about. Not at all. I am just saying that no matter what you do in your life, no matter what you achieve or what happens to you, if you let your mind do the work, you will be happy.
This is something that I have observed on myself for years now. It started with me writing a diary. It may come as a shock to those of you that know me because it seems like a thing that I would never do. But I did. It wasn’t a diary to record what I have been doing lately and write stuff like: “today my friend Jonas gave me a beautiful puppy with a pink bow. It was so cute, I will name him ‘Puffy’.” No, none of that crap. I just write my thoughts in there. What I think of my life, where is it heading, what I think I will be able to achieve and what mistakes did I do. Now this blog is in some way just an extension of this diary. I have started writing it because I wanted to know how these thoughts and desires change over time and with different experience. And boy, do they change! It is fascinating to see what you wanted in life, just mere three years ago! It is also fascinating to see that you were happy in situations that you now find less then satisfactory with hindsight, it is a healthy process indeed.
There are many lessons to be learned from there, but this pattern that humans are able to create happiness in every situation started to emerge to me. It has been supported with my recent visit to India. I did not traverse the peaks of Himalayas looking for long-forgotten temples to find enlightenment. I went to friend’s wedding.
Indian weddings are a fascinating ordeal, but I have written elsewhere on that topic (I should mention that my trip to India for various reasons fianlly pushed me to start this blog). I want to focus on one element of them. Most of the time they are arranged. In this case, my friend and his wife-to-be have met each other exactly four times and only for several hours each time before the day they got married. Four times and after the wedding they will spend the rest of their lives together! I mean common, this is so medieval, right? Turns out it is perfectly in sync with human nature, but more on that later. When I asked my friend what does he think of this arrangement, he simply answered that it is good. It is just another system. He told me:”You have no choice. You accept the fact, the person and the situation and you learn to be happy. And eventually, you learn to love the person you are with and might be happier then most of the ‘love’ marriages.”
Now this is quite striking. Especially to those of us who grew up in ‘western’ societies and believe in the inherit right of choice. Well as Barry Schwartz will explain you in his TED speech here, choice might not be such a good thing. It turns out that the more choices we have the UNHAPPIER we are. Now that is some finding!
Let’s look at the purpose of life again: to be happy. How can we achieve that? What is this mind trick that I was talking about? The trick is to give yourself no choice and your brain will follow. The next video by Dan Gilbert was a real eye-opener for me. It has summed up and solidified the feelings and ideas that were being constructed in my mind over the years. We are perfectly capable of being happy in any situation at any point of our lives. This is a far-reaching revelation that effects the very underlying patterns and beliefs in our lives. Watch the video, think about it and let the ripples in the materia of your brain affect any or all parts of your life. Your brain is designed to make you happy if you let it do so! Don’t put unnecessary obstacles, like too much choice in its way. So the buddhist might be right after all: simple life is a happy life.
I do not want to end up with such a high-flying mystical phrase. You might accuse me of sounding like all those new-age rants that I usually dismiss, but you know there is a grain of truth in everything. I am not telling you to throw away your possessions and live in a cave. Not at all. I am just trying to be pragmatic and make another steps towards lasting happiness. I am proposing a new framweork for your decision making, so next time you catch yourself thinking if you made the right choice or whether your career and life is going to way you want it to or even when you think if buying a new iPod will make you happier, just think of this: it does not matter. Don’t break your neck to get something you think you need just because you feel it is so much more worth it then what you already have. It’s not. And you brain knows it.

Note: I love TED videos. They are fascinating collection of some of the brightest minds on the planet giving you “trailers” for their points of view, ideas and discoveries. I will definitely buy the books of these authors to go into more in-depth research on the topics, but please if you have time, check out all the TEDs, you will not regret it. They are available as a podcast too.

Now this might look like I am starting way too slow, you might think:”who cares about that?” But I am at the moment in middle of writing of my Nissan case project and just found a very useful feature of Amazon that you might not know about.
You can use Amazon to search in books. Yeah, well now I know that Google has same feature, but it is still neat as Amazon and Google-searchable books are not the same. That is, if you are unable to search within a book on Amazon, you might be on Google and vice-versa. Anyways, this is just a little productivity tip for those of you who are in same position as me - you read hundreds of books and when you need to refer to them, you cannot remember what page was that particular information or quote one. Well now you have a faster way how to find it then try to guess using index
I will get to some more interesting stuff, bringing in what I have promised in the initial post, but as I have just switched to wordpress, I am still learning how to use it effectively, so consider these posts just my try-out period

I am not unique, I am replaceable. My mind is not unique, it is influenced. This blog is not unique, it is aggregated. So why would you read it? Why would you be interested in what I have to say?
Because I am like you! Because I share common wants and needs, I share common mistakes and yet I have undying desire to get better. To be a better student, businessman, partner, person. Yes, I share this common desire to improve. So what do I have to offer beside commonness?. I have a power and a drive to change things. I believe in these goals and I believe that there is a way how to reach them. It might because I am young and naive, but it might be also because I am right. Who knows?
This blog is my quest. It is my quest to reach these goals. It should be an interesting and rewarding journey. If I fail, you may laugh at my expense and maybe it’s going to make me work harder next time. If I succeed, well maybe some of the things, ideas and concepts that I intend to talk about will have a positive influence on your life too. Maybe it will just make you aware of issues you never really thought of and you will develop your own ways how to tackle them, from which I will be able to learn. Life is beautiful that way - unpredictable and grand.
In order to do that, I have identified 4 primary concerns in my life that would add up to general improvement of my perception of myself. My wants are:

• Taming my ego
• Improving my finance
• Becoming productive
• Starting a career

But what about all the other personal development blogs? What is my selling point? I believe there are few. First, I am not an American. When it comes to personal finance blogs and investment advice, it all boils down to retirement plans, stocks and credit card debt. I am not saying that these are worthless topics, I am just saying that to a Czech student living in Japan preparing for his career in Denmark, they might be inspirational, but not really down-right relevant. When it comes to philosophy of life, blogs of this sort are victims to a lot of new-age blurbs that are interesting but somehow undermine the complete believablity of the advice. I am a pragmatic guy, I want results. And when it comes to business and career, usually all the blogs are (again) written by americans who quite often write about their past successes and failures, which is great from learning perspective, but I am trying to go forward here, to grow. I am trying to build new values in life and you may observe this development, if you are interested. A bit of a personnal development reality show
So that’s it. Generally I am using this blog as a public commitment. It is easy to fail when you try by yourself, but group responsibility can push you out of your comfort zone. This is not an Alcoholic Anonymous group, but I would greatly appreciate your cooperation. Especially from people who know me and can catch me trying to pull some bullshit without me even realizing it. I really hope I will get responses from people about what is a sound advice and what is just me treading down some blind alley.
Thank you and welcome to an exciting journey. I really hope, you just haven’t boarded the Titanic