Category: Thoughts & Scribbles

Pay What You Want For What You Want

British rock act Radiohead has a new album coming out soon called “In Rainbows”. The album will initially only be available on their site in the form of online downloads without copy restriction software, in other words no DRM (Digital Rights Management).

But even cooler than all that is that Radiohead is letting the buyers choose their own price for the online album, thereby asking fans to establish a monetary value for their music, even when widespread piracy means that it would be available free.

Personally, I think this is the way it should be done, and it should be applied to everything not just music.

Value is a two-sided concept; the creator sees a certain value in his creation, and the consumer/buyer sees another value in it that could be pretty different just like it could be very near.

The way business is done now, the final value of a product/service is totally in the hands of the creator/provider which is unfair to the consumer/buyer.

So, the way I think things should happen is that the seller can set a minimum value for what he has created that covers what he spent to make it, and then leave the rest to the buyer to set based on its value to them.
This way the whole process is fairer to both sides.

[Source: NY Times]

The Teleportation Device

Transport is so unpractical in our world nowadays.
It just takes too long to get from a certain point A to another point B.
I can’t believe that over the years, mankind haven’t been able to invent a faster method of transportation than the airplane.

A dream method of transportation for me would be a teleportation device.

There would be public ones, phone booth like structures that you find on every street corner, or private ones that you could buy and use from the luxury of your home.

You’d walk into one of these booths, to find a little ATM like device/interface waiting for you. You slide in your magnetic card, which acts as a passport, a credit card and contact/destination storage device.

You don’t enter your pin number, those are so out-dated, you rather get an Iris check or maybe even a quick DNA check, then you’re given access to the main interface, and your personal homepage is shown.

You have the possibility to choose one of your saved favourite destinations, the top 5 of which appear on your homepage, or you can search for the nearest booth to the place you want to go to; ads for places like restaurants, hotels and whatnot will be shown on the side, tempting you to drop by when you’re in the area, maybe even offering you a free or discount round-teleportation-trip.

You choose where you want to go, and then the system checks your card to see whether you have the necessary visa/authorization to go to that place, and if you have the required funds to cover the price of the trip. The price is determined by a set of different factors, among them the person’s mass, the distance to be travelled, …etc.

When your destination is chosen, you’re found to have the authorization to travel there, and your trip is paid, and well you’ve also re-confirmed your wish to travel there: the teleportation begins.

In a matter of seconds, if not less, you’re in the teleportation booth that you chose to travel to; your card pops out from the system in that booth for you to collect, and you walk out right where you want to be.

All this in less than a minute all in all. Perfect, simple and ever so practical.

Oh, how I wish, something like that were possible right now.
Travel would be an even greater joy than it already is.

The Person In The Mirror

Mirrors are all around us, and there isn’t a day that goes by without us taking a look at ourselves in at least one of them.

Some people spend more time in front of the mirror than others, while some just take a quick glimpse while walking by.

Most times, when you look at the mirror, you see a dumb reflection of yourself, you straighten your hair, check out your smile, sweep your tongue over your teeth in an attempt to make them even whiter or shinier, maybe wink at yourself if you’re the kind that does that, and then go.

But sometimes if you look a bit closer, the reflection will disappear and in its place you’ll find a person staring back…

This person is one of two: A happy you, who feels good about where he is in life, and recognizes himself directly, and is comfortable with what he is and where he’s going.

Or the person looking back at you could be someone you don’t recognize, someone who looks just like you but who is not really happy, who isn’t really where he wants to be in life, somebody you just don’t see your true self in. And that’s a signal that you have to do something to get your life back on a track that will make you a happier person.

Mirrors are everywhere, and they hold this great power to tell us where we stand in life, and how happy we are about it; so maybe we should try to use them towards this effect more often.

To end this post, I thought I’d share this great quote I found, by an unknown source, that goes:

People: Roles vs. Personality

Something I’ve noticed many times over the years is how some people seem to slip into different personalities when they change or assume different roles in life, work or elsewhere.

It’s as if a dial in some imaginary control room is turned, switching the person to another completely different personality.

And in most cases it doesn’t feel natural at all, it’s just an act the person is putting up, just because he thinks he should be acting in a certain new way, because of their new status.

I’ve seen this in newly married friends, colleagues who got a work promotion, people who have just had a kid, and in various other instances; and the people just change, abruptly, without warning and unbelievably.

People change. That’s a fact. But normal change is mostly done over a period of time, naturally, with people barely feeling it. It only hits them after a long period when they look back and see what a big difference there is between what that person was and what he now is.

But, the change I’m talking about here is the kind that happens almost over-night, and when asked, a lot of these people simply reply that their new responsibilites or their new status in life require a new way of doing things and handling themselves.

Is that true?
Doesn’t it mean that the person isn’t doing it because he naturally progressed to it and because he wants to, but rather because he feels that he has to?
Doesn’t it imply that he wasn’t proud of or confident in what he was?
Plus didn’t he get to the place he is now because of how he was and what he was like? So why should he change it once he got there?

It’s true that certain things in life and certain responsibilities require some changes in how a person deals with things, but I think they’re more or less small targeted changes that touch on a specific area of that person’s life depending on whether it concerns his household, work, passions & hobbies or whatever else; but not a total flip of that person’s personality.

I think it’s very important to have a balance between a person’s roles and his personality, because it can be very tiresome and troublesome to act a personality for a role, or to bend a role for a personality.

Each and every one of us is unique in his own way, that shouldn’t be lost just to fit a certain stereotype of a role, but rather used to enrich it, all the while fulfilling the new obligations of the role.

What Would You Do On A Sabbatical Year?

For a couple of years now, I’ve been wishing I could just stop, take a break from everything and take a sabbatical year, and just do whatever I want to do in it.

When you come to think of it, it’s not really such a hard thing to do after all, I think that if you’ve got yourself financially covered for a year, meaning that you’ve managed to save what equals 12 of your paychecks, then you’re good to go and have yourself a year off from work and the everyday responsabilities you’ve had for the past years.

Ok, it’s not that easy to save all that money, but well with a good savings plan, it’s not that hard either; let’s just say you get there, then what? that’s the really big question!

You’ve got enough money to keep you going for a whole year, you don’t need to work at all, and you can, at least in theory, use your time to do whatever it is you want to do. But what is it that you want to do?

Over lunch these past days I’ve been asking some friends and colleagues from work what they’d do with their time if they had a whole year covered financially. I was expecting some really inspiring answers, but what I got back was more like blank unknowing replies.

I’m not any better, although this isn’t a question someone just threw on me while I’m chewing my lunch and thinking how great it’d be if the bug waiting for me at work would just decide to dissapear; This is something that I’ve thought about many times, but every single time I come up with a different answer.

Is it that we don’t know what we want to do with our lives?
Is it a lack of passion in us?
Is it that we’ve got so used to work that we don’t know what we’d do without it?
I don’t know, but I somehow think it’s a problem, because until we know what it is we want, we won’t know where we want to get to, how we’re going to get there, and whether we really want it or not.

So, try it, what would you do if you had a sabbatical year?
If you have an answer in your head right away, maybe that’s what you should be doing instead of whatever you’re doing in life now, and if you don’t know, then it’s about time you start thinking about what it is you want in life, and then base your goals and decisions around it.

It’s All In The Way You Say It

At work, one of the things I’ve become known for is a saying I believe in, which is more or less translated into: “It’s all in the way you say it”.

This holds when you’re having a normal discussion with someone, passing on important information, joking with a person, telling someone about something they did wrong, asking for something, … anything; I believe it’s all in the way you say what you have to say.

This is not about sugar-coating things you have to say, it’s just about knowing how to say a certain thing to a certain someone at a certain time in a certain place in a certain mood for that person to fully accept what you have to say and react to it the way you want.

So, really when you need to say something to someone, you have to take all the different factors into consideration:

The message: what is it you really want to say? what’s the message you need to get across? how does it have to be said for full effect?

The person: what is this person like? what type of personality? what things should be avoided not to push their bad buttons?

The time: Obviously, not every time is the right time to talk about something, this should be taken into consideration. It has to be a good time for both you and the person you’re talking to; not always perfect, good can do sometimes.

The place: Where you are plays an important role in what kinds of issues you can talk about and how you talk about them.

The mood: the mood you’re in, the mood the person you want to talk to is in, the mood of the whole environment around you, all that dictates whether you can talk about a certain thing or not and how effective it would be if you talked about it.

So really it’s not just the way you say something, it’s about intelligently finding the best way to say it, taking into consideration all the different factors of the moment.

The Power Of A Smile

So many people underestimate the power and importance of a smile, that simple little facial expression characterized by an upward curving of the corners of the mouth.

A smile has many meanings: pleasure, friendliness, welcome, amusement, and many more; and it is part of a universal body language that doesn’t need any extra interpretation.

Plus a smile, with all its simplcity and beauty, can be a very important factor in many aspects of our lives:

– You fall in love with a new country you visit because its people greet you with a welcoming smile everywhere you go; other countries you just don’t like even though they might have more history, nature, entertainment and whatnot because their people don’t seem so friendly or accepting.

– You feel like buying from a certain store when the vendor welcomes you in with a smile, sometimes even if you wouldn’t intially have bought anything; and in other stores, even though they have exactly what you need or better, you decide to walk away because the vendor doesn’t look welcoming at all.

– You want to give a waiter a good tip when he serves you with a smile, even if the food turns out not that good; on the other hand, sometimes you’ll have some of the best food ever, but you won’t feel like giving the waiter a tip, even if you do, because he was grumpy.

More and more examples from our everyday life show how much a simple smile can change everything.

Forever engraved in my mind will be the smiling faces of the people of Thailand, the friendly pizza delivery boy, the welcoming supermarket vendor, the nice cashier at the bank, …etc.

It is these smiles that keep me wanting to go back, and that keep us all wanting to go back; looking at it from another view, if we break it down using business sense, a smile is one of the most effective means to generate sales and develop customer loyalty.

On top of all that, a smile is a very simple and easy thing to do, so it amazes why no one bothers to do it, it not only makes the person in front of you better, but it also makes you feel better as well, and I’m not making this up, it has been psychologically proven.

Personally, I’d like to see more smiling faces in this world; in the airports when I enter a new country, in companies, government agencies, restaurants, hotels, banks, everywhere; and I think it is up to governments to campaign about this, and even make it obligatory in certain important places like airports, hospitals, hotels…etc.

Let’s all simply smile 🙂