How to fail in the right way

Motto: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Samuel Becket)

You will now that something is wrong with our society when someone become angry while driving after 5 red lights. If you consider the green light a win, you have the right to be frustrated. We are conditioned to win, and to achieve more than our parents did. Sometimes we will achieve their dreams for them. Why? What happen if i want less than my parents? What happen if i would like to be a painter, even if both of them are doctors?

I repeat. We are conditioned to win. This being the source of our every pain. We do not know how to lose. We do not know how to fail. This is mostly a Western culture problem. Imagine that a Japanese try to solve a riddle for 20 years. And he did it in the end. Can you see yourself doing something similar? We all want to be rich, to be succesful, to have everything we think we deserve. But what if we do not deserve anything? What if we have the same bragging rights like everybody else in this little town where we live. 290.300 equal citizens.

Learning to fail is the most important thing in life. Because the result of that is a neglected skill called perseverance. When you persevere, you can do anything. We often heard about average people, surpassing geniuses. What is their secret? Perseverance. If you learn how to fail, but you fail better every time after first try, eventual you will refine your aim. And reach the final goal. The insurmountable one.

Fail again. But never in the same way.  Fail better. And keep doing that until you succeed. Life is too short to live in an average way.

Good night!
G.

Pokemon go? No!

As I study the happiness and the delicate mechanisms behind the hedonic adaptation, I did a very interesting field study on the release of the new virtual augmented reality game Pokemon Go!. I will start with that classic story of first release of internet on the plane, in Seventies. The story say that when this was first time presented to the passengers, they were amazed, ecstatic even. Internet on the plane, during flight, imagine that. Many of them did not have internet at home, and the mobile connected phones were yet to be invented. But sometimes in the middle of the flight the connection will drop, and everybody become angry and frustrated. That is just how much a miracle will last.

Now back to our pokemons. The goal of every game we play is to bring us some kind of satisfaction, to improve gradually or to compete with others. Pokemon Go! is bringing all this at once, through the capture of your own pokemons, and competing for the gym, to get more gold coins, basically. They will make money through the general public tendency of impatience, the modern culture of "I want it now", although seems that you can get everything for free if you want to walk enough. The innovation is that people need to physically walk to get the eggs open, and to find new pokemons to capture for your Pokedex. At the moment connection is difficult, if not impossible, as the people told me that they tried to login and couldn't for 90% of the time in the last 3 days. They like the game, that is becoming a global phenomenon, but the problem is that at the moment everybody is frustrated because they cannot play. It is only a fine line between being a craze and being the biggest failure of all time as the potential is practically unlimited, starting to influencing even the economy and marketing of the small or bigger businesses. The tipping point is here, and they need to get together, fixing the major bugs (the screen is freezing faster then Elsa's room in Frozen) and building a sustainable server or they will lose all.

We will see what happen.

How to predict the future (part 366)

According to a longitudinal study that was done for more than 50 years, you can predict the future of a relationship from a 10 minutes discussion between the two partners.
Short version:
1. If you identify one of this four negative traits: contempt, stonewalling, criticism and defensiveness, chances are that the relationship will not last. All four traits and you got 92% chance to not be in that relation after 10 years.

2. If you have these positive traits, the more the better, chances are that you will live happily ever after. The positive traits are: humor, simple acts of appreciation, forgiveness and communication (being emotionally open to each other, to be more exact).

Not that you know this, you have no excuse. Apply it and be happy. Together.

See you soon.
G.