Hi all,
In what I think is a Humankind Tradition, I raced to get this over to listserv, this despite the rush I got from getting the lottery email that made my heart race and put a smile on my face. The problem you see is recurrent, the natural flow of a busy life gets in the way of sudden opportunities, or small things and small gestures in a very quick mental calculation that guesstimates the amount of work needed for the amount of accomplishment and because inertia operates outside the physical world, sometimes going with what you have is the most likely outcome.
Now, I have mixed feelings about this, and I’ve had mixed reactions as well, mid through university - Computer Engineering - I realised I wasn’t really having the time or my life, and most importantly, I wasn’t accomplishing much, so in the course of a few months I made the decision to quit, during that process I started my own company and I went from there. A few years later, things were ok, we had a central office in Lisbon a small but very good team and the river was flowing, but a business opportunity came and we went for it, we nearly doubled the team size, we put a lot of money upfront to make sure the project would succeed, come 9 months and a baby boy later and the project failed, miserably at that, and I had some of the worst months of my life, between managing a snow ball of debts, managing family and close friends who had helped or had stakes in the business and everything around that.
At that point I decided that I would fix this The Right Way (tm) and got a job - while keeping the company open - with one of the best IT companies you could work for in Portugal. For a few years I laboured and split the money between myself and my growing family and the debts that I set off to payoff, and fell back in the flow. Come three years and another baby boy :) and amongst the usually linkedin avalanche of generic recruiter emails, one caught my eye and it pointed to Dublin Ireland. For two months we created spreadsheets, we made plans, scenarios, we looked at maps and cost of living and finally we rationalised a decision we had already made, and the four of us got on a plane and flew over to Ireland - a country we had very little knowledge about.
A year has gone, my two baby boys have grown and learned a second language in a way grownups can only be jealous about and here I am now, on The Summit conference making a decision on whether or not to follow up on an opportunity, an opportunity to reach a group of people who are open to reading what unknown humans decide to put out of their brains and I still have a conflict, I still have a hard time investing in something new and I still procrastinate in front of the computer instead of simply writing things down and assume the risk of failing and I still don’t have an answer or a system to do these things, but then again, I look back, and through pain and joy, I realize I made decisions that aren’t compatible with procrastination or sticking to what you know, and I don’t think I can rationalise that very well :)
Anyway, I don’t think I can make a deep introspection here or give any generic advise that would be helpful to anyone except that yes, as we all know, risk is part of human nature - as is rationalising - but consider at least that taking risks is what you do with the future and rationalising is something you do with the past, and with that in mind, don’t mix the two too tightly, you really don’t know what’s going to happen :)
Thank you all, I hope I managed to make some sense amongst the sudden introspection I DIDN’T set out to do :)
Cheers, love to all
David Ramalho
[email protected]
Dublin, Ireland