Octav Druta

The Art of Focus

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:45:46 +0200

Graphic created by Octav Druta. Inspired by Craig Damrauer

How do you define focus by the way?

Stop Solving Problems For A Moment

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:15:00 +0200

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness. - Charles Spurgeon

Look around, everyone is seeking to solve problems. Take health care for example. There are over 40 drugs to treat Nausea, over 100 drugs to treat Insomnia, over 400 drugs to treat Pain - the list is huge.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have many alternative treatments for health problems, but isn’t the world focusing too much on solving problems in general?

How about looking at why people are healthy? How about looking at why people are happy? How about connecting with those people so that you can have access to what they do well, to what makes them happy?

I personally started to do this already. I connect with people and find out what drives them, what makes them happy. This activity fills me with a tremendous amount of energy because I can always join their projects and their activities in general. Here are a 10 ideas that inspire some of my friends to be happy:

Catalina Rusu loves tango nuevo
Dan Ciotu loves to play football
Dragos Ilinca loves to travel to Iceland
Dragos Manac loves to listen to the music of Notorious BIG
Iulia Stanescu loves to love me
Radu Spineanu loves the burgers from In-and-Out Burger
Razvan Roman loves tourbillon watches
Lavi Marcu loves improvisation
Vladimir Oane loves to listen to podcasts about tech and religion
Vlad Stan loves to take photos of people filled with emotion

These are just a few ideas and they are just some of my friends. Imagine being connected permanently to new ideas that inspire them to be happy :)

I challenge Catalina and Vlad to write a blogpost about 10 ideas that inspire their friends to be happy. Make sure you also chalenge some your friends to do that!

PS: If you want to get access to thousands of ideas that inspire you to be happy, check out this fresh new link: trigwee.com

Join my dream of learning GO

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:31:00 +0200

So simple, yet so hard. I knew about GO. I knew that it’s remarkable for its strategic complexity despite its simple rules.

I felt that I should experience this mysterious game some day. With time, this feeling turned into a quiet voice - a constant longing in my mind.

Photo credits: tasuki

My trigger for action was in the summer of 2009. I’ve read about my friend’s Daniel trip to China. He shared his extraordinary experience of playing GO with a master.

Suddenly I felt the urge to turn the longing I had into a dream and I did - on Trigwee only a day after reading Daniel’s post.

I felt like I had removed the pressure from my shoulders after sharing my dream with my friends.

And finally the beginning of 2010 it all came back to me when Daniel finally invited me and a couple of other friends to learn the game. I couldn’t wait until my first lesson of GO with Daniel.

Afterwards I went to the AppStore, downloaded a GO game for my iPhone and started playing regularly. The game is simply fascinating. It is surrounded by a vast amount of knowledge, wisdom and culture.

Even though the rules are extremely simple, playing an actual game of GO is challenging. Therefore I wanted to learn more about it - but I found too many resources online that I felt overwhelmed: Software, books, audio lessons, iPhone apps, etc. I needed some guidance to explore the information in a structured manner.

At some point a thought crossed my mind: “Isn’t there some sort of online GO school?” So I asked Bjoern from Supercool School about it. He runs this crazy awesome online platform that allows people to build their own schools online. His dream is to give people worldwide access to education.

Now we are searching for a principal to lead a GO school - to make my dream of becoming a 1-dan GO player reality. I am sure that all around the world there are people that want to learn the game and become better at it by joining a great community. Help us find a GO principal!

Add yourself here to join the dream of learning GO.

Please send me an email to octavdruta at gmail dot com if you are interested to become the principal of the GO School.

Power to you

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:11:00 +0200

What is power to you? Before rushing to submit your answer in the comments section, watch this cute little video. You’ll find it… well, you tell me how you found it - I am curious to learn about your opinion!

Looking in a mirror without using one

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:11:00 +0200

You smile, he smiles. You wink, he winks. You wave, he waves. You know exactly who I’m talking about, right? It’s the “Man in the mirror”.

Little Spy. Image copyright Vlad Dumitreanu

Listen to Michael Jackson’s song: “Man in the Mirror”. It’s both a source of inspiration and a great opportunity to take a look at yourself in the same time.

Looking at yourself is a nice way to start brainstorming about what you want to achieve. I’d like to ask you to share and/or think about how can one look into a mirror without using an actual mirror. Here are three examples that I thought about:

Create something. By creating something you’ll have the chance to observe your interests and skills.
Experience something new. Experiencing the unknown will expose your deepest emotions. Our emotions and what/how we think about them are among the biggest barriers to achievement.
Start a conversation with your friends about what you think that is right or wrong. The environment, the experience and the education shape our beliefs. A key factor of evolution is adaptability. One’s beliefs about what is right or wrong can often hinder the ability to adapt.

Here we go, three ways one can use to “look into a mirror” without using an actual mirror. It’s your turn now :)

Please do get infected

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:14:00 +0200

Disclaimer: I am one of the advisors of Seedmoney

Striving to get infected with a virus isn’t the best thing to do, you know? Well, believe it or not, there are exceptions. How would you like to be infected with happiness? Or let’s say… inspiration? Maybe passion? Perhaps Motivation? Knowledge? Extraordinary results?

Photo copyright: nomoco

They say that your friends can make you fat, lonely and even happy. It’s been decades since various sociologists and philosophers advanced the idea that behaviours can be “contagious”. So, are you already asking yourself about great social environments where you can get infected “constructively”? Well, there are many of them.

If you’re interested in building Internet companies, I can recommend one myself. It’s called: Bucharest Hubb. You can only join this community if one of the Seedmoney advisors recommends you or by direct requests. If one of the advisors recommends you, you can join as a member by paying a fee - which is quite acceptable.

There’s even one way to join The Hubb for almost free. The Hubb community needs 9 persons that want to help voluntarily with activities that require 2 up to 3 hours a day - for someone that is already involved in a personal project or even a job. If you want to help out with the logistics of the Hubb, you can get free membership throughout your activity there. If you’re interested, feel free to contact Cristina: cristina[at]seedmoney.ro.

This is a great opportunity for you to join a community where you can get infected “constructively” :)

You can register to take a tour of the Hubb by following this link: http://www.bucharesthubb.com/register.php

What are you building?

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:03:00 +0200

Launch48, Harry Potter and JetCarStunts. An event for startup enthusiasts, a world famous character, and an iPhone app. What do the three have in common?

Image copyright Lego.com

I think that they’re all about building something. I had the opportunity to experience the three of them last week.

Launch48 - building a webapp in 48hours that should make sense as a business;
Harry Potter - building a captivating story around a character;
JetCarStunts - building the skills of driving a hybrid between a car and a plane across 5 levels of difficulty (just learning, easy, intermediate, hard and impossible).

Building - what am I building? I asked myself this question back in 2008. Then, I wanted to explore how much of my activity is centered around consumption and how much of it is centered around creativity.

It’s an interesting exercise.

you take a sheet of paper and split it into two columns;
during the day/night, stop a couple of times and look at what you’re doing. When you’re building/creating something, you write it in the first column. Similarly, when you’re consuming something, you write it in the second column.
at the end of one week you count how many times you built or consumed something.

Here are some examples that denote consumption:

reading something
watching a movie
eating / drinking

And here are a couple examples that denote creativity:

writing something
drawing
cooking

I believe that there should be a balance between consumption and creativity. When we consume something, we take something from the world. When we create something we give something to the world. Most of what you consume couldn’t have been available for you if others wouldn’t have created it. Learn to say thanks by giving back. Build something!

What next?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:20:30 +0200

Here’s a wonderful video in which Hans Rosling outlines the change in life expectancy and income per person over the last two centuries with the help of Trendalyzer.

What do you think that the world will experience in the next 200 years? How do you think about the future?

What does it mean to achieve a dream?

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:32:24 +0200

Is it about running blindly for a prize?

What does it mean for you? Can you share?

Dreaming of a breakthrough in technology

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:18:00 +0200

Kwabena’s dream is to create a computer based on the “organized chaos” of the human brain.

Image: Kwabena Boahen/Stanford University via Discover Magazine

While pursuing his dream, Kwabena wants to solve a problem related to energy efficiency. He says that “Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers”.

Read more about Kwabena’s dream and watch his TED presentation. I find his dream fascinating as its achievement could open a wealth of new possibilities for the humanity. Can you imagine?

Setting up your Online Footprint

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:52:00 +0200

I wrote a little something on the theme of “Setting up your Online Footprint”. The article was featured in the 5th issue of Beyond the Pond - the Alumni Magazine of Jacobs University. Feel free to explore it and drop me a line if you liked it or not, ok?

The dream that envisioned the Web

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:03:00 +0200

It all starts with a dream. Even the Web started with one. Here’s how Tim Berners Lee described his dream of the World Wide Web:

Photo Copyright: Living Juicy

“I have a dream for the Web…and it has two parts.

In the first part, the Web becomes a much more powerful means for collaboration between people. I have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create. The initial WorldWideWeb program opened with an almost blank page, ready for the jottings of the user. Robert Cailliau and I had a great time with it, not because we were looking at a lot of stuff, but because we were writing and sharing our ideas. Furthermore, the dream of people-to-people communication thorough shared knowledge must be possible for groups of all sizes, interacting electronically with as much ease as they do now in person.

In the second part of the dream, collaborations extend to computers. Machines become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web —the content,links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web,” which should make this possible has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines, leaving humans to proivide the inspiration and intuition.”^[1]

[1] Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. Harper Paperbacks, 2000.

My way, your way, their way

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:27:20 +0300

What you see in the image below is a timeline of the universe, from the big bang to the present. In order to get a sense of how big this is, imagine that the lines around the cylinder are about a bilion years apart. As you can see the diameter of the cylinder is increasing. This increase represents the expansion of the universe.

Somewhere deep in that huge universal silence, people say that something should, ought, must or has to be done in a certain way. Hilarious isn’t it? Enjoy your choices my friend.

Today's meaning of 25

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:00:24 +0300

I employ numbers for various purposes and I guess you also do. I am taking 25 for a ride today. I want this number to tell a story for me. I promise it’s very short. Here I go: Today, I am 25 years old! Done.

Twenty Five. Copyright Octav Druta

I’m no different than bacteria or any other organism in this Universe. We all struggle to be different and that makes us all the same. Still, there are some things that I want to mention:

Thanks Mom and Dad for “seeding” me
Thanks to everyone who taught me, advised me, inspired me, created with me, scolded me, hated me, struggled with me, cried with me, danced with me, played with me
Thank you all for existing and contributing to what I am

I finally thank myself for being here and now, grateful for the freedom to work on my dreams.

You are what you watch

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:59:00 +0300

I often hear the expression: “X shaped my Y” (i.e: Networking shaped my relationship with people, Exercising shaped my body, etc). I use it myself quite often. In fact, I’ll use it right here. Here I go: “Movies shaped my culture”.

The picture above represents a selection of the movie genres that I prefer. How did I get to it? Well, jinni.com knows most of the movies that I’ve seen by now and generated this nice movie genre cloud for me.

“Jinni is a Taste Engine. We look at film through the lens of what makes you love or hate anything you watch. With a Taste Engine, you don’t search by what you’re looking for, you search by what you like. And recommendations are based on analyzing your preferences, not statistics.”^[1]

Please leave a reply in the comments section below. I’m sincerely curious to know your answers to the following questions:

What are your favorite movies and how did they shape you?
What movies would you recommend me?

[1] Jinni.com, “About us”. October 13th, 2009

You are what your friends are

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:02:11 +0300

In Romania there’s this popular saying: “Tell me who you befriend so that I can tell you who you are”. You might have heard this saying in various forms in your home country.

Photo Copyright: -Antoine-

Is my behavior influenced by my friends? I did some empirical observations on Facebook, my primary social network.

I often immerse myself in the stream of items (photos, videos, links, etc.) shared by my friends on Facebook. Depending on what they share, my mind wanders and creates stories about my friends, automatically tagging them: Cool guys, Business guys, Crazy guys, Party animals, Geeks, Lovers, etc. Based on those classifications, my intentions and my emotional state, I comment and like their shared items. It’s obvious, my actions depend on what my friends share and how my mind classifies my friends.

Clive Thompson wrote a comprehensive article about this topic in the New York Times. If you read Clive’s “Are Your Friends Making You Fat” you’ll find out that:

behaviors can be “contagious”
good behaviors - like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses
happiness is more contagious than unhappiness
this network thing can cut both ways, subverting our ability to have free will, but increasing, if you will, the importance of us having free will

What we are is more than what we think we are. The fact that we’re able to explore the aspects that affect our behavior is a great opportunity to design ourselves at new levels of consciousness.

Playing with the perception of time

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:00:00 +0300

Yes, I am crazy. I want to be able to increase or decrease the resolution of time and I found one way of doing it. I had this thought while realizing that my perception of time varies when I experience similar events.

Image copyright Siebe

I usually feel that time passes slowly when I’m bored. On the other hand, time flies when I am doing exciting stuff. I bet that you felt the same many times.

When I dreamt of being able to modify my perception of time, I was thinking about control. It seems that wearing a pair of special glasses would do it. A new study shows that wearing prismatic glasses that adjust your vision 10 degrees to the left will “slow down” the passage of time. A similar adjustment of 10 degrees but to the right will “speed up” the passage of time.

Whenever you have a crazy thought, write it down, share it, talk about it. Sometimes, only the fact that you brought it into your awareness will reveal a lot to you.

Honda's power of dreams

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:23:00 +0300

“One must keep chasing one’s dreams” - Soichiro Honda

The dream behind the man in the mirror

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:53:00 +0300

One of Michael Jackson’s greatest dreams as formulated by himself: “Give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.”

“No message could have been any clearer if you wanna make the world a better place”.

What religion are you working on?

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:56:00 +0300

Whether you participated or just tuned into the buzz around Madonna’s eighth worldwide concert tour: Sticky & Sweet, I want to share a little something with you. Whether you’re aware or not, you are participating in one of Madonna’s greatest dreams. She declared it a good while ago and it goes like this: “I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God”.

Image copyright: madonna.com

Engaged in Madonna’s dream you’re probably listening to her songs, criticizing, reading news about her, going to her concerts, sharing information online, etc. A dream you dream alone is just a dream. Madonna did a fantastic job in engaging the world in her dream of “becoming as famous as God” and that gives her the power to transform the dream into a reality shared by hundreds of millions of fans worldwide.

I sincerely don’t know if she’ll ever become as famous as God. What I do know is that by declaring this dream and engaging the world in it, she achieved extraordinary results: she created her own religion.

Madonna herself invited the world to “Never forget to dream”. What religion are you working on? How many followers did you engage in activities that generate the reality of your dream?