Hello,
Yes, it’s been a while. Too long. Or it was the time that was needed. It was meant to be.
You probably no longer remember this even existed. Go lose yourself in the archives and rediscover why you subscribed. I’ll wait…
2022 was weird. I won’t bother you with that. It’s over, I know.
It’s probably no coincidence that today is the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I didn’t want to write about it. But I can’t help it.
I live in cousy-nothing-happens-cute-little-portugal. So I was never that personally close to a world event. Everything was in the news, before it was in the paper, now on the screen: Berlin wall, USSR collapse, 9/11, Arab spring, Black-lives-matter,…
This time it was different. I have colleagues, part of my team, that were there; some still are, others ran away, some ended up here in Portugal, and a few even stayed at my place for a while. During all this time, I couldn’t feel anything. Who was I to have the luxury to feel anything? Anxiety, depression, rage, frustration. How can I relate and empathize with people that live through this?
I feel bad, I can’t feel bad, feeling bad makes me feel bad about feeling bad without deserving to feel bad. I feel bad.
Do we even have the right to feel bad? Can we allow ourselves to feel bad, even if it's only slightly?
Insane. Real. Let it go. Let it go… breath out…
2022 was weird. I won’t bother you with that.
It’s over!
The year, I mean.
I know.
Moving on
I did procrastinate this comeback, and as a professional procrastinator, I had many reasons to.
One of them is that I’m moving to have my own web property (aka website)! So I wanted that the comeback to be a “housewarming” event for the new site.
Until I realized I had two procrastinations feeding of each other: I wouldn’t release the post before the website was ready, and I wouldn’t publish the website before it was ready. Maybe we can call it compounded-procrastination!
So, soon I’ll be moving these posts to the new website. It’s fine. It’s an experiment. No one dies or gets hurt. If it doesn’t work, I can always come back here.
Too many times, we (I) get bogged down with these stupid little decisions. I don’t know if it’s pure indecision or just plain procrastination.
Then time passes by, and you didn't publish for one week, one month, and soon for a whole year. As time goes by, the pressure just increases. Oh, now I need to justify to them why I didn’t publish. What will they think? It needs to be awesome to be worth it. Now that 3 months passed, if I take another day or week to finish is fine. It is worth it.
Not today.
Day 1
It's day 1. It's always day 1. This comes from a famous quote from Jeff Bezos, and it captures the idea that Day 1 has a special energy, the beginning, the launch, the all-in attitude, the focus, the obsession, and the single-mindedness. It is always Day 1, so we don’t lose that spirit and become complacent, distracted, or careless,... we need to remind and recenter ourselves about being on Day 1, with Day 1 spirit.
Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
Jeff Bezos 2016
Why do we need that? Why do we need to be re-centered into the idea of Day 1? Why do we lose ourselves after Day 1?
It seems that there’s an entropy that kicks in that leads us to accumulate complexity - we get more people, more products, more dimensions, more teams, more departments, more meetings, more… it becomes a multidimensional complex problem.
The energy is finite, and we split it in all these different ways, so we get less energy for each. It is like pressure = force/area. The same force in a bigger area gets us less pressure. Want to increase the pressure? Reduce the attack area, focus!
On Day 1, the energy is the same in quantity, but it just looks different. There's no wasted energy and no friction. Things happen, there’s no hesitation, no negotiation, no waiting, and no need to influence others to move. Things just happen!
It’s Day 1, always Day 1!
Missed you! Welcome back