Octav Druta

Unboxing the self

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:28:00 +0300

Even though society has evolved a lot, most of its institutions follow a culture that confines the freedom of self-expression. That is sad, because not being self-expressed means not being happy.

Image copyright James Yang

The rise of agriculture and industry, shaped work and education as contexts that required individuals to be punctual, follow directions and tolerate long hours of tedius work. Your own sense of progress, higher purpose and autonomy were concepts that didn’t resonate quite well with the thinking of the leaders of that time: “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” - Henry Ford. In many places around the world, educational and professional environments stil follow the same philosophy.

My belief is that self-expression is fundamentally connected to happiness. Unfortunately, even if the educational and professional environment allowed for more self-expression, it would still be challenging to trully be yourself. We live in a complex environment and there are many contexts that influence natural self-expression - most of the times in some of the most ugliest ways.

Discovery is an approach that fosters self-expression. Being in a discovery mindset allows you to expose yourself and the surrounding context to the light of awareness. Even though awareness is a huge shift that most of the time allows you to carefully craft a response rather than mindlessly react to a certain situation, it is not enough. Sometimes the response that you have to give requires courage, authenticity and integrity. Being a discoverer is about finding the path but also about walking the path.

You can quickly recognize people that express themselves naturally by simply asking “What do you do?”. They’ll answer your question enthusiastically, pasionately and authentically. They’ll tell you a story about their work or about their life and they’ll even share the lessons that they’ve learned along the way. They’re good “friends” with the status quo but they always take one step further, discovering, inventing - not for the purpose of fame and fortune but rather for offering better, more effective alternatives to what already is available. Healthy profits (or benefits - call them however you want) come along as a natural consequence of helping people to solve a problem more effectively.

I love these people. To me, their dynamism, their strong integrity and their authentic curiosity, is empowering and inspiring in the same time. They are people that are truly self-expressed.

Reality show

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:00:00 +0300

“Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one”. - Einstein

Image Credits: Octav Druta

Shortcut to unhappiness

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:52:00 +0300

“I used to be on Facebok a lot, but found that it left me feeling bad about my life” - confessed a friend of Stan James. Spend time on Facebook “watching” the glamorous lives of your “not-so-close” Facebook friends. It will make you feel bad about your life.

Your “not-so-close” Facebook friends are the new TV Stars writes Stan James in a thought provoking post. These people “are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do interesting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet.” […]

Stan is hinting at a succulent question: Why our lives seem not-so-amazing in comparison with the lives of our “not-so-close” Facebook friends or the lives of the TV stars? Part of the answer can be found within the question: it is because we’re making comparisons. The other part of the answer has to do with desire. Let’s take a look at why comparison and desire can lead to unhappiness.

“Things are not always what they seem”. The way we make comparisons is inherently flawed. Look at the image above. Which one of the two light blue circles is bigger? Most people answer that the left one. The truth is that both circles are equal in size but they occur to us as they had different sizes. The different contexts (i.e: the dark blue circles) around each of the circles distort the reality. This means that the way people occur to us can be highly distorted simply because we’re making our evaluations within the wrong context (i.e: we don’t know them and their lives enough to create the right context to make accurate evaluations)

This type of comparison triggers questions like “What do they have and I don’t?” And so, our mind leaves on a trip to discover our insufficiencies. We wish we had all those things that are missing. We start desiring, wanting things that should exist in our lives so that we can too, be in a state of happiness, similar to those no-so-close Facebook friends of ours.

The sad reality is that no matter how fast we would cover those insufficiencies, we would always return to the same state of “i’m not happy, there’s something missing”. James Hong who cofounded hotornot.com paints this “vicious circle” very well: “When you get a Boxter you wish you had a 911, and you know what people who have 911s wish they had? They wish they had a Ferrari.”
Even though I’m not a religious person, I know for sure why you shall not “desire your neighbor’s house nor field or male or female slave or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor”: it’s useless.

Most of the time, what leads us to unhappiness has a lot to do with the way we evaluate the world. Survival across millions of years trained our brain to evaluate and decide quickly. Speedy evaluations are also efortless. That’s because they’re based on what our brain “already knows” so we don’t have to think to much.

Evaluating and deciding quickly may be useful when you’re about to be hit by a car but not when creating your relationship with the world. Shortcuts are not always useful. Allow yourself more time before making evaluations, get to know the nature of the context around you. It might be very useful.

Unplug yourself, let go and refresh

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:58:00 +0300

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.” - Lao Tzu

Image credits: noimpactman

Imagine living unplugged from the electrical grid, producing no trash, travelling exclusively by foot or bike and buying nothing except food (all of it locally grown).

This would mean:

no trash
no paper
no carbon-fueled transportation
no shopping
no dishwasher
no microwave oven
no coffee machine
no food processor
no TV
no toilet paper
no plastic
no air conditioning
etc.

For one year, the author Colin Beavan together with his wife, their 2-year-old daughter and their dog attempted to live without making any net impact on the environment. And while at it, they’ve shot a documentary called “No Impact Man” to share their experience with the whole world. I watched and it’s at least thought-provoking.

What drew me in, was the nature of their experiment: their choice to let go of their current lifestyle and reconsider absolutely every consumption habbit they had.

You know, there are parts of our lives that we live like we had no other option. Think about the people that eat meat like meat was the only option to have a consistent meal or simply the people that are violent when they get angry, again, like there was no other option. Letting go creates the possibility to put into perspective the options that we have or simply to generate options that we never thought of. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What’s the impact of doing this or that?

The act of letting go can be applied to any area of our lives: relationships, career, health, finances, family, character, emotions, daily habits, life purpose, spiritual, you name it. There are areas where the attachment towards certain habits is so powerful that we can’t even “see” what we do, why we do it and the associated impact in a clear way - which can lead to a mindless, dangerous, unfulfilling way of life.

Can you identify some areas of life where you or the people around you could benefit from having, generating or seeing more options?

Why generosity is the new selfishness

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:29:00 +0300

We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for selfishness. When I say we, I’m talking about any kind of living organism. From an evolutionary standpoint, selfishness is fundamental for survival.

Image credits: Anonymous

So then, why is generosity the new selfishness? Or, why it isn’t but it should be? Explore the words of Stephen Hawking a bit: ”Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth, are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.

Our only chance of long term survival, is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.”

Moving into space shouldn’t be just a way to increase the probability that we are going to survive in case of a disaster provoked by man. After all, it’s not the selfishness of our genes that drives us to be destructive but the selfishness of our “selves”. That’s why it would probably be useful for us to look beyond the possibility to run from disasters. I am talking about working with our “selves” to transform selfishness into something better. Perhaps generosity? Starting now?

To climb or to flow? That's a good question

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:12:00 +0300

I’ve been thinking a lot about mountains and rivers. No, I’m not planning to go camping any soon, but it would still be a great idea. What I was really thinking about is the fundamental difference between two approaches to life.

Photo credits: Stuck In Customs

The first approach has to do with investing hard, constant, willful effort in order to succeed. Think about climbing a tall mountain. The trek is hard and not everyone can make it. Also, the mountain’s peak is quite narrow, which means that it can only hold only a few people at a time. You can recognize “climbers” when they say that “You can be anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough”.

The second approach has to do with flow. Michaly Csikszentmihalyi defines flow in a pretty formal way but I’d like to invite you think about flow as in “flowing in a river”. Flowing requires a lot of attention. The stream can be pretty fast and you need to pay attention to unexpected obstacles such as rocks and eddies. Rivers flow into oceans which are quite different than mountain peaks because they can hold a lot of people in the same time. You can recognize people that practice flow when they say that “You cannot be anything you want to be - but you can be a lot more of who you already are”.

But really, these are just two metaphors and there are no rules. Living our lives the way we want is a must . The point that I’m trying to make here has to do with leverage. Think of Archimedes words: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth”. Think of your “navigation” skills, your “climbing” skills, your ability to pay attention, your capability to make a lot of effort, etc. What’s the best trait that you can leverage on?

If you don't use it you'll lose it

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:44:00 +0300

We are what we repeatedly do. You know what I mean, right? If you do, you also know that the “picture” below is not the full one. So, if you want to add something to it, please do it in the comments section.

Enjoying your own actions

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:08:00 +0300

What am I doing now? It’s a simple question. I ask it myself constantly. Even though the answer is valuable, I find the “asking” in itself to be even more valuable. It’s a way to be aware of what I do and how I feel about what I do.

I thought of creating a visual of my most frequent actions. Being able to “see them” allows me to have a better connection myself and the world around me. You can see the result blow.

You might also find the “asking” useful. Try asking yourself “What am I doing now?” for a month and write down the verbs related to the activity in which you’re currently involved. See which are the actions that are repeating and the ones in which you invest most of your time. How does the big picture of your activity look like? How do you feel about it? These are questions that you might want to ask at the end of this little experiment.

Facebook friends visualized

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:10:00 +0300

I have quite a few friends on Facebook: 690 to be more exact. I use Facebook since 2005 when I was in college so, I was really curious to “see” how my network developed since then.

What you see in the left side of the image above is a visual representation of my friends (points) and the connections (lines) between them.

The core of my network (the red, circle-like shape) is made up of people that I met while doing my university studies. Most of them know each other, that’s why the points are so tightly connected. At the outskirts of the network there are people that I met after graduation. Because I met them in many different contexts (while working, travelling, having fun, etc), these people are not as tightly connected as my college friends.

The shape of the network reminded me about solar flares (large explosions in the Sun’s atmosphere) so I decided to do a little collage to visualize the similarity.

Well, I love my Facebook friends! I say “Thank you!” to all of you for sharing informative, inspiring and sometimes funny posts.

What does "spiritual" mean to you?

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:01:30 +0300

I think it’s a very good question and I had the chance to debate it many times with my friends and family. Recently, Vladimir, a good friend of mine posted the following on his Facebook wall: “do you consider yourself a spiritual person? and if so … what do you think makes someone spiritual?”

Here’s a visual summary of the topics that people used to reply to his question. As you can see, the conversation is associated with topics such as “God, Bible, Believe”.

I decided to join the conversation and write my answer in the form of a blogpost.

Why associations are important

Associations are important because they can define a certain range of behaviors and results. Let me share an example. If you place a simple carton box near a beggar, people will put money in it. It won’t be a simple carton box, but a charity box. People will have a certain behavior towards the box because it has been associated with a beggar.

It’s the same with spirituality. Think: what kind of behaviors and results does the Spirituality-God association create? Are they useful for your inner peace? Are they not? You should know better and if you don’t, think again. The most important thing is to be happy with the kind of associations that you make.

My perspective on spirituality

For me, spirituality has to do with awareness, inner exploration and freedom. These associations allow me to cultivate my behavior, my feelings and my relationships in a way that I consider to be authentic rather than in alignment with an external point of reference.

External points of reference can sometimes be useful and sometimes not. To better paint this argument, I’ll share with you a story that I’ve heard recently:

The Golden Eagle, a story about instilled beliefs:

A man found an eagle’s egg and placed it under a brooding hen. The eaglet hatched with the chickens and grew to be like them. He clucked and cackled; scratched the earth for worms; flapped his wings and managed to fly a few feet in the air.

Years passed. One day, the eagle, now grown old, saw a magnificent bird above high in the sky. It glided in graceful majesty against the powerful wind, with scarcely a movement of its golden wings.

Spellbound, the eagle asked, “Who’s that?”

“Thai’s the king of the birds, the eagle,” said his neighbour. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to earth—we’re chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken for that’s what he thought he was.

On the power of violence

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:24:00 +0300

I am fascinated by violence. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a violent person but I find it fascinating to see how easily can violence corrupt my mind. This makes me ponder on the power of violence.

Photo credits: Emmy Vesta Fotegrafe

I find that witnessing “unfairness” triggers the feeling of violence in my mind very often. It is enough for me to watch a movie that tells a story about innocent people dying and I already feel violence lurking in my mind. During those moments, my most basic instincts tell me to defend those people, to fight against their atackers. In the same time, I feel that reacting to those instincts will make me unhappy. It is amazing to observe this crazy show in my mind.

I am curious about movies that tell real, tragic stories. They trigger powerful feelings and interesting questions in the same time. Not to mention the fact that through these kind of movies I can acquire a better understanding of the world.

Check out the movies below. I’ve seen them all, they’re all amazing. They tell true (most of them), tragic stories about events happening in various cultures across the world:

Balibo - East Timor
Hotel Rwanda - Rwanda
Blood Diamond - Sierra Leone
Schindler’s List - Poland
The Pianist - Poland
Life is beautiful - Italy
Persepolis - Iran
The Kite Runner - Afghanistan
Downfall - Germany
Goodbye Lenin - Germany
Au revoir les enfants - France
Letters from Iwo Jima - Japan
The lives of others - Germany

Why do you think that violence is so powerful and how should we respond to it? I’d love you to join this conversation. I am looking to explore as many points of view as possible.

Flying high

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:30:00 +0300

Today it’s the 1st of July, 2010. I made my blog public exactly one year ago. I believe that’s a pretty nice milestone so I decided to share something that I love with you.

Freedom, high mountains and flying are all sources of inspiration for me so in the video below you’ll have the chance to see a glider flying above the Swiss Alps. I find it amazing, I hope that you’ll like it!

Exploring freedom from attachment

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:22:44 +0300

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

- William Blake: Eternity

Image credits: zik “Tây”

I see William Blake’s poem as a simple story about attachment: as long as you’re attached to something there is a high chance that you’ll become unhappy.

Everything around us is dynamic: love, desire, pleasure, joy, sadness, technology, nature, they’re all dynamic. When we attach to them we create expectations. We expect that the element that we’re attached to, should not change with the passage of time. When it changes, the sense of attachment is lost - and when it’s lost, we feel disappointed, we suffer, we feel hurt, disoriented: “He who binds himself a joy / Does the winged life destroy”

I personally find it very hard not to be attached to the world around me. That’s why, I’d like to be “awake” whenever I create attachment. With attachment come expectations, ownership and selfishness. Giving up attachment brings freedom, generosity and authenticity: “But he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

What’s your perspective on attachment?

See the world like never before

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:32:00 +0300

I spend a quite lot of time online so I get to stumble across new technologies often. That’s awesome. What doesn’t happen to me that often is to stumble across jaw-dropping technologies.

A while ago I’ve read about yellowBird, a technology that promised to deliver a product that would create the next revolution in online film and video. Remember the 360 degrees virtual tours such as these ones? Well, the yellowBird team built the same thing but for video - live video.

If you want to see an example, take a look at the video below. Once it loads, place your cursor above the video and drag the image in any direction. You’ll see what I’m talking about.

If at any time, you discover an awesome piece of technology, please share it with me, I would love to learn about it. Also, if you know technologies that impressed you, post a comment below.

Why is it expensive to be evil nowadays?

Sat, 08 May 2010 14:00:00 +0300

Jeff Jarvis might say that the answer has to do with the notion of hyper-connectedness: “In a hyper-connected world, the costs of evil explode”.

Umair Haque goes a few steps further and offers an interesting perspective on why the costs of evil and the benefits of good are amplified in a hyper-connected world. He argues that in a hyper-connected world there are six forces which inherently punish the bad and foster the good. So what are these forces and what are they all about? Here’s how Umair describes them:

Image credits: Octav Druta

The force of Information - When information flows faster and freely it’s easier to identify who’s good and who’s bad.
The force of Discipline - Universal and cheap access to information allows for collective action - which means that punishing the evil or rewarding the good is easier.
The force of Competition - With better collective action comes an enhanced incentive for competitors to provide what incumbents can’t; to do good where there’s evil.
The force of Disruption - Competition increases the probability of high-level innovation - new business models, strategies, and institutions that reinvent the deep economics of an industry, market, or sector.
The force of Rule-making - As new disruptive innovations, proliferate, regulators take a more active interest in assessing the social costs and benefits of each, and selecting the most productive ones. Conversely, visionary organizations make new rules in their own ecosystems that alter the incentives for their buyers and suppliers to do more good, and less evil.
The force of Self-correction - Ultimately, the good should be self-correcting in order to achieve a dynamic equilibrium. When an industry or market’s connected tightly enough, doing good becomes the only game in town - unless, of course, you want to melt down catastrophically, like Wall Street did.

Awesome! How can we all foster the good? A first step would be to strive to create transparency and a free flow of information in our communities. Then, as Umair suggests, we can think of this set of forces as a ladder that people, businesses and communities must climb in today’s economy. There seems to be no way to “shortcut the crap out of this” as Gary Vaynerchuck says - so climb, climb, climb!

Excerpts taken from The Case For Being Disruptively Good by Umair Haque

Why DJs should use services such as Spotify

Thu, 06 May 2010 13:31:00 +0300

DJs select and play music for various types of audiences - they are curators. Each of their live performances is based on a playlist of songs which are mixed and matched with the help of various pieces of electronic equipment.

Armin van Buuren at Global Gathering. Photo Credits: ishootdjs.com

Services such as Spotify, allow anyone to be a music curator. You can easily create a playlist of songs to which anyone can subscribe. For already established DJs this is an amazing tool that they can use to further engage their audiences. Imagine attending an amazing performance of Armin van Buuren - one of the top DJs worldwide - and then listening to his playlist on Spotify. Amazing!

A Spotify playlist

There are other services such as mugasha.com that allow you to listen to DJ sets recorded at various events, but Spotify is simply amazing because it’s easy to move songs to one playlist to another and share them with people from all around the world in an environment that brings benefits to both music fans and artists.

You can check-out my Spotify playlists over here.

What do you think?

Tribes rock. Which ones are your favorite?

Wed, 05 May 2010 14:23:00 +0300

I love to discover new tribes because I can learn about their distinct approaches to various aspects of life.

Photo Credits: cinci_juggalette, eggz, stevegreaves, dirtmerchantdigital

Let’s start a conversation about what tribes you like and why you like them. Do you like surfers? Why? Do you like bikers? Why?

Let me start with a couple examples:

Entrepreneurs. They can offer you a distinct perspective on work, risks and responsibility.
DJs. Imagine travel from a Dj’s perspective. Tiesto, which is one of the world’s most famous Djs, visits around 5 countries per month (sometimes on different continents) with one single purpose: to party.
Surfers. Waves cannot be changed, that’s why surfers know a lot about adaptability. They learn to adapt in order to be in sync with the wave.

To share your favorite tribes and why you like them, submit a comment below.

"Sharing is the new Search."

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:42:24 +0300

“Sharing is the new Search.”

- Octav Druta

Rodeo: On wild horses and crazy cowboys

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:56:00 +0300

Entrepreneurs and ideas are similar to crazy cowboys and wild horses. When looking at rodeo or tech entrepreneurship the obvious might not be useful. Why?

Well, here’s why:

you tend to think that holding on to the horse as hard as possible is ok, but it’s not: there is a very high chance that you’re going to fall.
also when you build a startup you tend to think that simply shaping a concept and building it will bring you a lot of money. No, there’s also a very high chance of failure.

So, how can one tame the horse? Build a successful startup? I sincerely don’t know a lot about taming horses but I have a passion for startups.

In the startup world you can use customer development in order to minimize risks and eliminate waste. Customer development is not a recipe for success but rather an interesting and relatively new approach that you can experiment with. It’s awesome and I think each tech entrepreneur should learn about it.

In this presentation I gave a bird’s eye view on customer development. Enjoy!

Rodeo: On wild horses and crazy cowboys

How do you see the world?

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 14:07:00 +0300

It might be useful to stop for a few minutes and observe the world around you. How do you see it?

Image Credits: Octav Druta

Ruth Bebermeyer wrote a song about how she sees the world. I’ll share it with you, let me know what you think about it!

I’ve never seen a lazy man

I’ve never seen a lazy man;
I’ve seen a man who never ran
while I watched him, and I’ve seen
a man who sometimes slept between
lunch and dinner, and who’d stay
at home upon a rainy day,
but he was not a lazy man.
Before you call me crazy,
think, was he a lazy man or
did he just do things we label “lazy”?

I’ve never seen a stupid kid;
I’ve seen a kid who sometimes did
things I didn’t understand
or things in ways I hadn’t planned;
I’ve seen a kid who hadn’t seen
the same places where I had been,
but he was not a stupid kid.
Before you call him stupid,
think, was he a stupid kid or did he
just know different things than you did?

I’ve looked as hard as I can look
but never ever seen a cook;
I saw a person who combined
ingredients on which we dined,
A person who turned on the heat
and watched the stove that cook the meat –
I saw those things but not a cook.
Tell me when you’re looking,
is it a cook you see or is it someone
doing things that we call cooking?

What some of us call lazy
some call tired or easy-going,
what some of us call stupid
some just call a different knowing,
so I’ve come to the conclusion,
it will save us all confusion
if we don’t mix up what we can see
with what is our opinion.
Because you may, I want to say also;
I know that’s only my opinion.