WAYS 9 – THE DANCER

Motto:

Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything dances.

Dance is the hidden language of the soul.

Maya Angelou, respectively Martha Graham

(Two independent quotes, invited to dance together by my hand today…)

Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Martha Graham, Maya Plisetskaya, Rudolf Nureev, John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Ecaterina Gordeeva, Serghey Grinkov, Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Shakira, Carmen Amaya, Joaquin Cortes, Michael Flattley... the list can go on … beautiful artists, bringing joy in our hearts and smiles on our faces, teaching us to dream about flying on a perfect music, only barely touching the dance floors.

This morning, as I was surfing through the internet, a couple of sad news caught my attention: the death of Ben. E. King (the singer of ‘Stand by me”) and of the Russian ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya. Many other bad news were decorating the screen with their ugly headings, mostly reminding me that what we started to call ‘crisis’ for some years now is just the current state of affairs, no matter where we live in this world.

Positive news however got also some attention, as a new baby-princess was born in the British Royal family yesterday. If you can ignore the collateral damage done by journalists, this certainly brings a smile in my heart, the same heart that also sheds a tear for Ben and Maya’s departure.

I smiled some more, as I remembered that the day before yesterday I met a baby-girl named Maia, who was born this April. Who knows? Perhaps she will become a famous ballet dancer. Or at least she will learn how to gracefully hold her head and ballet her way through school and further on, as far as she may dream!

I have no idea why, but the song that came to my heart today was ‘Time of my Life’.

It happens to me quite often to sing a song in the back of my head throughout the day. Usually it is something I hear in the morning, either at home while I get ready for going out or on the way to work. Sometimes it is not something I hear, but a tune which I reminisce from the past and I carry with me for the whole day, or just until a more appropriate music replaces it, according to whatever happens during that day… It gives me a certain mindset and also a certain rhythm for the things I have to do.

Shortly after midday, I lit up a candle and then started to walk through the beautiful streets of Vienna. Today I decided to wonder to some new places, where I never walked before. I looked at the quiet buildings, their harmonious architecture and majestic lines. I tried to imagine them full of life, as I suppose they should be on any given (but preferably sunny!) working day.

Suddenly I realized that … I was dancing! Not obviously, not physically, not like Gene Kelly in the rain, but … I was singing ‘Time of my Life’ and my soul was dancing to it, while my body was walking down the streets of Vienna. And my steps were somehow harmonized with it, as my walking just felt ‘in-sync’ with the tune. Because this is one of the songs that always make me get up and dance, no matter how tired, disappointed or hurt I am …

While dancing with the buildings, the trees and the clouds, I wondered how long it has been since I have written something. In 2013 I thought I was quite close to finalize my ‘ways’ series, while now I am not even sure whether it should have an end anyway. I could be just gradually adding to it in the years to come, as work in progress throughout my daily life.

(A short note for those who do not know or cannot remember what I am talking about: I started to write some thoughts about the world crisis, back in 2011. It started as a collection of thoughts about financial and sovereign mess, which extended to human rights and tolerance, then somehow evolved into a so-called ‘roots’ series. They are basically personal views for the dilemma ‘what went wrong’? The ‘ways’ series came later, in an attempt to find answers to the other, somehow circular dilemma - ‘and now what?!...’)

Today a ballet dancer, a singer and a royal princess made me pause and listen to my heart. And there I found one of the simplest and the most beautiful of all the ways to approach life and take on problems head on.

I therefore would like to invite you to take your bodily presence in this world … for a dance - today, tomorrow and for the rest of your life! No matter if the dance of your choice is ballet or tango, if you are on thin ice or on soft carpet, if you need to invoke rain or fertility, if it’s time to mourn or to party, if you plan to start a game or launch an attack… No matter if the song of your heart today is ‘Stand by Me’ or ‘Beat It’, ‘Kalinka’ or ‘Zorba’, ‘I’m a believer’ or ‘Hit the road, Jack!’…

Some may argue that dancing is a form of art and that they are not ‘gifted’ for such an endeavor. Of course, we are not all Fred or Ginger, same as not every singer is Maria Callas, every scientist Einstein or Edison, every basketball player Michael Jordan or every gymnast Nadia. I am not talking of THAT kind of dancing. I am talking about another kind of dancing, which transcends everything – art and religion, as well as any line of work. A form of human expression which I suspect to be older than the speech, one which resides in every living soul, no matter how easy or difficult it is expressed outside. Every act of creation has its own dance.

Every one of us has a rhythm inside, and so we dance to it every day. Our dancing part may be our heads, our hearts, our stomachs, our feet or our fingers … our music may be something we hear, something we feel, something we dream, something we fear … our dance may express harmony or disruption, peace or torment, despair or hope. Dancing may come out as elegant or erotic, majestic or common, provocative or inviting, intimidating or encouraging.

We are investing significant part of our waking hours to communication with many living creatures in our limited universe. In particular, I find humans quite difficult to convince that reason does not exist in the absence of feeling (and that feelings are easily hurt or misread), theory and practice can coexist in parallel worlds just like the Sun and the Moon, law does not always mean justice and education does not always mean character. In my daily life, I need to do a lot of dancing with many people that dance on very different music. Sometimes it is hard to follow the tune but, same as everything in life, practice brings one closer to perfection. And for those who have seen me dance, they know what I am talking about …

Last year I have discovered that I start each day with a smile. Today I noticed that a tune is also somehow involved in the universal conspiracy of my daily life. I do wonder what the next year will bring new to my understanding of life.

Until then, I leave you with a feminine smile … As I started with a motto compiled from two great ladies, I shall end with a very important thing you should learn about dancing:

Dancing is wonderful training for girls; it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

Christopher Morley (Kitty Foyle character)

Good night!

Georgina Popescu

ROOTS 10 – THE COMMUNICATION

Motto:

' We are sinking, we are sinking!!! '
' What are you thinking about?... ' (For proper understanding, this needs some visual effects - you can find them here)

Brain waves. Hugs. Signs.

Words. Music. Dance. Sculpture. Painting. Building. Flying.

Papirus. Paper. Morse. Feather. Coal. Chalk. Pen. Keyboard. Touch screen.

Radio.Tv. Computer. Phone.

Theatre. Opera. Multiplex.

Pigeon. Horse. Post. Courier. Internet. Email. Call. Sms. Chat.

Evolution or involution? Curse or blessing?

Fear or desire? Irony or smile? Tear or laughter?

Love or hate? Acceptance or rejection? Hurt or embrace? Anticipation or avoidance?

Honesty or deceit? Reality or dream?

Photo or paint? Live or unplugged?

Eloquent or ambiguous? Intimate or public? Gentle or aggressive?

Build or destroy? Divide or join? Break or conquer?

Manipulate or convince? Seek or avoid? Share or hide?

Give or take? Endorse or disclaim?

Listen or hear? Watch or see? Say or insinuate?
Loud or whispery? Stereo or surround?

Read or heard? Seen or imagined?

Flat or curved? Colored or b&w? Sepia?...
Touch. Hold. Hug. Kiss. Weep. Smile. Frown. Laugh. Blink.
Speak. Feel. Smell. Hear. Taste.
Morning. Lunch. Afternoon. Evening. Night. Late at night. Early morning.
Clock. Tick-tack.
Life.
Over and out.

By now I have already communicated to you more than in all the other nine roots put together. This would be true in case you have been reading properly each line and everything lying between and behind those lines. If you haven't, I invite you to slooowly read them again.

Did you find different meanings? Did you imagine different scenes and different persons on the second reading?

That could be triggered by the common while abstract nature of those words. We go through life convinced that we listen, understand and react. Actually we may very well spend most of our life imagining, translating and acting on what we think we know.

Why do I believe that current communication pattern has become one of the deepest roots of the current status of our world? One reason could be that we started to take too many things for granted. We got used to so much communication, on so many levels and coming to us in so many packages that we are gradually turning off old-fashioned communication, the one occurring on a basic intuitive level. We (ab)use surrogate communication so much that we are gradually convinced that we know it all. We get carried away by online presence of hundreds of remote friends, adrenaline rush of movie characters, news about public persons, accomplishments of sportsmen and emotions of artists, most of them happening on a flat cold computer or television screen, while we are comfortably snoozing on our couch. We are nicely fitting in pre-packed life stories and consume the enormous supply of communication which is being fed to us. Quantity seems to have won the war over quality and is now taking heads-on another challenge: our time.

Some of us even got used to the idea that robots and people have daily access to our communication and don't even bother about it anymore. A handful is fighting to win back the right to intimacy, but the 007 Genie is out of the bottle for a long time on a planetary scale. One can only hope that the paranoia of supervised communication may actually have positive consequences, such as bringing back into our life the communication channel which matters the most: eye to eye. One can dream that someday we will go back to using all our given senses at the same time (including common sense!) and therefore minimize as much as possible misunderstandings.

I wonder what else is to be said as a closing note. I believe at this point it would be better just to challenge you to remember any classic French movie, so you can draw your own conclusions. When I was young I used to hate the fact that those movies had no ending. Today I would just smile, turn off the tv and move on. 

I have learned that one should not seek answers to all life questions. Some things, facts and people are just there for a reason which will reveal itself much later in the process. There are events which just happen - for apparently no reason. Asking for answers and looking for endings in advance just leads to misunderstanding of much bigger pictures.

Georgina Popescu

WAYS 6 – THE TEACHER

Motto: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

Albert Einstein (attributed)

Twenty-one years ago, on a nice October day, I stepped into the big festivity room of the Academy of Economic Science, where the official opening of the university year was held. I was a fresh(wo)man. After the usual opening words from the Academy officials, Professor Doctor Anghel Rugina was introduced to the audience, as a prominent American Economist of Romanian origin. He was 79-years-young back then (he died in 2008, at the age of 95).

It was the first time I have heard about this guy, however after I listened to his very short speech, I knew I would remember him for the rest of my life. He told us to value every moment of the university years ahead and to pay attention to all our teachers, no matter how we judge them – good or bad, strong or weak. He said we should always have in mind that there is much to learn also from the bad teachers; from them, we learn how we should NOT be in our future life. And sometimes such learning may prove more valuable than the positive one.

Later on, I discovered during a Six Sigma training that one of the most powerful methods of brainstorming is practicing the negative thinking. It is very useful especially when you hit a dead end in terms of solutions. You challenge the participants to think of anything which can make the situation worse than it is. Negative creativity is far more imaginative than positive one. And then, you identify those actions which, by reversing the idea, have potential to become constructive solutions.

My dear friend Peter (the ‘owner’ of this English blog who is generous enough to host my postings here), is another fervent supporter of the constructive power of the word ‘NO’.  He has developed a sensational set of rules for problem solving. Most of those rules I apply in my day to day life. Peter had found supporters of his ideas worldwide and thus they helped him translate those rules in many languages. You can look for a version in your own language here.

I come back to the learning process now. That October day in 1992 marked one of the most important lessons for me, even thou Prof. Dr. Rugina was never on my university curriculum. Another memorable day was when I realized that the ‘Golden Rule’ which was instilled to me as a child would be better applied in its ‘Platinum’ version. More exactly, not only you should not do to others what you would not like them do to you, but you should basically do to others what they would like to be done to them (something like first observe, then empathize and only in the end actually deliver).

I would stop here with examples of my past learning, as it would be totally unfair to mention some great teachers from my life and omit others. Therefore I will mention none. It suffices to say that I consider myself extremely lucky, as I have had the opportunity to learn from everyone and everything that surrounds me. I have been learning from family and school, work place and nature, friends and foes, dreams and reality alike.

Why do I consider ‘the teacher’ as one of the ways we have to focus on, so that we can get ahead? I believe no extensive arguments are needed. It is obvious for most of the people that the current worldwide situation (which I am not sure we should even call ‘crisis’ any more) is deeply rooted in the moral hazard that has gradually swamped most of the inhabitants of this world.

I do not believe that we will solve our moral dilemmas by splitting the world into 99% vs. 1% - the poor and pure vs. the rich and rotten. No one is free from moral hazard. Almost any man or woman in this world is exposed daily to temptation, corruption and sin. The difference between the 99% and the 1% is the type of temptation they face – more or less expensive. Mankind is full of sinners and saints, liars and truth-holders, with a rather reasonable distribution on all regions, religions, professions and income levels.

There is of course one significant difference, which is that the 1% decides on taxes and laws, respectively distribution of wealth and punishment. And they do so, basically as they please. But in this respect we should wake up and see reality for what it is. It was always like this. There were always kings and servants, nobles and peasants, generals and troopers, priests and sinners. There was always a reasonable middle class, providing services to whoever could afford them, and there were always taxes and duties.

What got really complicated in the past decades was the increasing interdependence between democratic systems (which need electors to legitimate their rulers) and financial systems. In theory, each democratic system is based on separation of powers. In practice, they are all interconnected and fueled by one circulatory system, which is the financial system – the blood that irrigates all the state organs in the contemporary society. And also in practice, there is no humanly operated system which is immune to moral hazard. Everyone started to bend moral rules in order to get what they targeted – some wanted power, other wanted profit, most of them wanted both.

I believe everybody has heard of the little Golden Fish (you know… the one who can make dreams come true!) or of Aladdin’s lamp. In the past decades, the financial system assumed this fairy-tale role for whoever wanted to make a wish come true. Car, house, political or legal power, and so on. Some had smaller and other had bigger dreams. As you know, some things cannot be bought… for everything else there is xxxx (will not mention the credit card provider, but you get the point).

Therefore, we have nice theoretical separation of powers and nice theoretically functional macroeconomics and nice theoretically working financial systems. Practically, informal systems were born from the interaction of the initially planned theoretical ones. And they started to grow and lead a life of their own, just like tumors in an apparently healthy body. Doctors only noticed when it was too late. It is metastatic already.

It is hard to tell which system has sinned more and who is to blame for what. All the ‘systems’ which should be theoretically functional are practically as good as their human operators. Just as it happens with machines and company – their lives depend on the quality of the people behind them.

And thus I finally get to the point of this Way edition: why do we need to redefine our Teachers? 

Because we cannot kill our systems. It would be like a mass suicide, as they are actually our working places, our source of income, our future education and health service systems. We need to re-adapt them to a practically functional reality, in a way which is acceptable to our moral standards.

Communities cry out nowadays that their educational systems are failing. Unfortunately, they seem to refer purely to the organized school, college and university education; however I would like to go one step further. I would also blame it on what Peter likes to call it the new religion – Moneyteism. 

And specifically on one of its Gods - the Career God. It is killing most of our teachers. Families are dying because of lack of focus on personal time (while home education is crucial for a successful school impact). A large number of managers do not follow a teaching path because of the perceived competition. They are afraid to lose power and thus they keep information and prevent knowledge sharing. They are afraid that their own people may learn too fast and shine too much when (alas!), they should know that people reflect their light upon their teachers. By suffocating talent within a team, managers are basically getting in the way of their own future development. Good managers should spot talents and encourage them to learn as much as possible, regard them not as threats but as opportunities. The talent pool can either provide successor ship (and thus set their manager free, to further expand their own career) or can become peers in other important areas of the organization and create an ideal network for their former teachers and colleagues. A manager, who treats the people as potential future stars, is on the way to own personal growth.

Is then the Career God a bad God for us? I believe not. I believe that if we start seeing It as a Teacher we can improve our life as a whole – both professional and personal side. And the same goes for other Moneyteistic Gods. If we learn good things from them and not let them rule us, we can live a fulfilling life.

I will end my post today with a common sense question: WHO should be the Teacher of tomorrow?

The short answer is: me, you, us together. And we should be also pupils at the same time, all our lives. Because we have to walk before we can run, we have to learn before we can teach, and we have to be proud to have lived before we can die in peace.

We are the teachers of our families (husbands and wives, kids, parents, other relatives), of our work places (colleagues and bosses), of our friends and our enemies equally. We are good teachers and bad teachers in one and the same body, because we cannot be saints all the time - we are merely humans. We should not be afraid of this but embrace our nature, while remembering all the time that WE ARE THE TEACHERS. 

The people around us will learn both from the good stuff and the bad, how they should and how they should not be - every day! Sometimes they will get it wrong, misunderstand our ways and misjudge our actions. But we should never give up being ourselves, with the permanent knowledge that we are the masters of our life and the teachers of our fellow people. And as such, we need to live our life so we can smile when we see ourselves in the mirror – every day.

All the best,

Georgina Popescu

WAYS 5 – THE WAY HOME

Motto: All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

James Thurber

More than ten years ago I have read ‘The Alchemist’ by Paolo Coelho. I remember the hero’s excitement about taking life into his own hands, in search for something important. The peace and comfort he got when finally finding it, together of course with the message that it was actually in the very place he left in search of adventure – his original home.

There is one question which comes back to my mind from time to time: could the hero have recognized the happiness in his own home, unless he left it behind for a while, and embarked in his travel around the world? I would suspect that probably he could have not. He needed to search for answers and calm down his restlessness before he could find his peace.

More recently, I have read one of the many wise thoughts of Robert Brault: "Sometimes we don't find the thing that will make us happy because we can't give up the thing that was supposed to."

I liked it so much that I shared it with some close friends. One of the receivers raised several questions in response to me: why do we think people should be happy at all? Isn’t the need for happiness somehow over-stated?

It was not the first time when I was confronted with somehow similar rhetorical questions (as the people asking usually do not actually expect me to answer ...). I have come in contact with such dilemas three times over the past year, coming from separate cultures and triggered by different contexts.

One person was purely wondering if we deserve to be happy in general. He seemed to feel that because of our imperfections, flaws, bad thoughts or purely lack of focus in the pursuit of happiness, we should be realistic and not expect that someone just gives themselves away to us (you know… to have and to hold… with or without proper documentation these days).

The other was more inclined to say that some people are just unable to be happy, no matter how hard others strive to make them happy. They are ‘programmed’ in such a manner that they are permanently unsatisfied with the world around them, or suspicious about people's intentions or at least this is how their life evolves in the world they live in.

Finally, a more complex but rather similar question popped up in connection to one of the youngest and dearest members of my family. The question was whether a kid should learn from a very young age how to act, with intent to correct his unhappiness. Whether he should strive to change things, make them different, so that he becomes happy with the results (or at least “happier”, by comparison)?

As all life’s great dilemmas, also this one should be answered under consideration of reasonable balance: yes, I believe people should strive to change whatever makes them unhappy, they should address the pain and the hardship with the aim to improve the situation. However at the same time they should be careful how far they go in the pursuit of their own well-being, take care not to hurt others, recognize responsibility and not give up on certain things to soon, just because they may be unhappy for a while. They should learn how to set ambitious yet achievable goals, learn to differentiate as early as possible between things they can and things they cannot change, when to act and when to accept.

Recently I have also learned (from here) that human abilities for issuing moral judgment regarding other people’s actions and feelings are based into a certain area of our brains, which is gradually forming while we are young, from childhood throughout as far as our teenage period. Therefore children’s ability to correlate happiness with moral criteria about how their actions affect others does not have to do only with education. It is also correlated with the physical development of their brain, which needs to reach a certain maturity before being able to issue sound moral judgments.

This being said, I wish parents good luck and a lot of patience while guiding their kids through nice moral dilemmas! Those steps are really important if they want them to grow being ready for a fulfilling and happy life.

And so… tonight I started to wonder again how come that some people grow up with so different expectation and even perception about happiness. We know now that childhood sets the frame for our physical and emotional readiness for life, for happiness and empathy, for integrity and success. We also know that during our adult life, experience is the one that keeps on shaping our behaviour. I believe it is safe to say that character is formed in our childhood and wisdom is gained throughout the entire life. Intelligence?... it has partially to do with genetic endowment, partially with access to education and partially with personality (as curiosity and intelligence are somehow similar to the egg-hen dilema...).

You may intelligently wonder by now what does this have to do with the idea of 'home'. Well... kind-of everything!

There is a common saying that home is where your heart is. I can add to that a large number of hints about what ‘home’ should ideally represent. One hint that you are home is when you feel that the place makes you happy and serene, comfortable and safe. In that place you can share your sorrows and find courage to confront your inner demons. You can re-charge your batteries and mend your wounds. You can dream happy dreams and start building your way towards achieving those dreams. You can have nightmares and wake up knowing they will go away. Home is where you can create special rules and games for shared living, happily mixing the right proportion of freedom and dependency which define that small (or big) circle called family.

There are many individuals in our world today that are living mostly driven by adrenaline rush – no matter from where they draw this energy (career focus, dependencies of different sorts, moneyteism, power fights, intrigues and gossiping, fierce competition, episodic love and so on). Wasting time, money, energy and innocence may seem painless and easy when you are young, as it still seems that all those are inexhaustible. They are not. And every individual needs to find his way home while still young enough to dream. Then start building the comfort associated with that chosen home, in order to prepare for the next phase of life – the one where the resources become obviously limited.

I sometimes wonder why I am so childishly determined to be happy. Even more, why I am so inclined to see myself as being already happy. Just because… a myriad of things happen around me and I am grateful to witness their happening (no matter if they are little or big things). Finally, I wonder why I am so determined to try anything in my power to make other people happy around me (or at least convince them that being happy may be good for them in the long run…).

One thing I have learned from the last three years of my live. Geography has gradually less to say about where home is, in our contemporary word. We have become more dynamic and the idea of home basically is given by other less material elements that keep a family together.

Once we find our way home, we can also accept that we can be comfortably happy, for as long as we are. And then some…

Have a nice Home!

Georgina Popescu

ROOTS 9 – THE RISK TAKER

Motto: It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. Seneca

For a long time, I did not consider myself a risk taker, but a rather conservative person with habits and expectations, reasonable fears and a prudential approach towards life. One day however it came to me that I was so used to taking small risks on daily basis, without actually paying attention to the fact that I was actually taking risks. I purely called them actions, decisions, choices … but not risks.

I started to see there is a distinction between treating personal and professional decisions.

More exactly, in my private life I have a tendency to take actions that can easily hurt me, for the sake of various arguments – basically connected to my feelings, preferences, personal comfort and moral principles. In my professional life I am more prudent and cautious, as most decisions will change other people lives. When comparing the two approaches, I see that they are basically built around the same principles (whoever said there is no business ethics but just ethics was right!), my approach being more conservative whenever the decisions impact other people – their money, career, life in general.

I was recently talking about this strange feature of my character with a friend, wondering whether this sounds normal or not. Lucky for me, he understood very well, as he admitted to (re)act basically the same. Maybe this is a joke played on us by nature. Darwin would turn in his grave seeing how we contradict his basic thesis. Humans are supposed to be self-protective and fight for survival under the most adverse conditions.

A couple of weeks ago I was watching BBC World, broadcasting a round table with successful turnaround managers (here is the audio version). They participants seemed to have had in common the same risk taking profile, respectively their own image or survival as managers did not matter for them more than doing the ‘right thing’ for their employer. Later on in the week another story, of yet another similar character. The famous turnaround cases (national post, national railway company) were similar - complex deeply troubled situations, which needed drastic and unpopular measures. Those men invited at the helm during the difficult times were hated by employees and trashed in the local media back in those days. But now, 10 years down the road, they are regarded as geniuses. A world in crisis is seeking their advice.

Their most important messages were that you first have to stop pretending everything is fine; then you should be enthusiastically curious and ask the right questions to the right people (which are usually not the ones at the top of the company), to get to the root of the problems; then you just need to correlate and act. One of the most interesting things one of them said was that usually the lower management levels knew exactly what was wrong within the organization, but could not give solutions for that. It was natural, as solutions can only come from the top, after all roots of the problem are correlated and a strategy is decided. Without knowing where you want to go, you cannot achieve a successful turnaround.

Today I was watching a CNN broadcast, again with some guest participants talking about the financial crisis. One of the participants started explaining her view about why banks should not be blamed for the excessive lending. She said that if the bank would offer financing for a house or a project which you as a borrower knew you could not afford to repay, it would have been your moral responsibility as a borrower to say “no” to that bank. She was saying that the guilt should be shared between the banks and the society, as it is not only about mistakes of some lender giving away too much money without proper assessment, but also about individuals and companies which were knowingly signing on loans they knew they would not be able to repay. The truth is, as always, probably somewhere in the middle. One should have not taken too much, the other should have not given. And the main trigger was most probably the changing perception of front office bankers about banking, which gradually became a reward-driven sales business, with a rather easy task - selling money to people who do not have...

Without further judging the 'blame' logic of the lady too much, I started to think of my last ‘roots’ edition (The Waste). I was writing then about our human nature, being inclined to buy more than we need and often even more than we can consume. Actually this is the basic and predictable behavior that sales and marketing are based upon. Marketing has scientifically gained such a manipulative power that can easily induce false needs nowadays. The approach is towards consumer-oriented lending in the last decades, which has less to do with financial advice and more to do with pure selling – products, promises, dreams… it has become not much different from the sale of clothing, energy drinks or electronics. And more than that, it has one intrinsic characteristic which makes it the most powerful and dangerous of all the consumer products – the lending ‘product’ can be associated with and exchanged for any other real ‘product’ already aggressively marketed, thus multiplying its penetration rate by thousands of times.

The aggressive sales of all types of products create an artificially inflated … need of money. And this is when the banking products come in the picture and they don’t even need to be too creative about it. Just link the loan to the idea of shopping or housing or exotic holiday or whatever is ‘trending’ on the market and … here you go! You have a loan. I remember one which was saying something like ‘if you cannot afford a house don’t be sad, we can lend you the money!’ Right! What about affording both the interest and the house price in this case? ...

And so I come back to the topic at hand today – the risk taking. In every decision we take in our life, risk assessment is involved. For every choice there are alternatives and for each alternative a risk-return (or risk-result) judgment must be passed. Every person has a unique decision-making mechanism which translates into lower or higher risk taking profiles.

I will use an over-simplified classification today, structured around two characteristics of a risk taker – the attitude towards risks affecting the self and risks affecting the others. More bluntly, people frequently pretend to ‘do the right things’, but they usually act as per their own interests and desires. Greed and social acceptance are the greatest drivers of excessive life styles and consequently, spending.

I would then group the people as per their self-protective vs. others-protective actions.

First, there are the genuine risk-adverse folks. They permanently think (if taken to the extreme - too much!) about protecting both themselves and others around them, sometimes passing good opportunities and ignoring basic needs, because of their fear of failure. They live their life apparently safe, away from the dangers of a nasty world. They are most likely not among those who triggered the crisis, but they may very well be a large part of the victims, as they most probably placed their life savings in some “safe” investments... One of the basic flaws of the current banking systems is that it uses the ‘multiplication’ approach on all types of financing sources, therefore at the same moment when the risk-adverse folks use banking services for managing their cash (salary, deposits etc.), they unknowingly become risk-takers, as their money are used to leverage the system.

Second, we have the self-protective folks which do not care much about protecting others. Those people ready and willing to take almost any risk as long as it does not negatively reflect on themselves (either in terms of money or other resources, image, comfort, or security…). If we look upon the outcome of their actions, on the positive side of the spectrum we may find some genius entrepreneurs or charismatic leaders, who manage to build exceptionally successful businesses. In the middle we have either silly day-dreamers who don't take much action because other do not entrust them with their resources, while on the negative side of the spectrum we find criminals or plain crooks. There are famous movies about this character profile, usually the story of success which came out of nothing (“don’t ask about the first one million…” kind of tales), but also a lot of bad-loan borrowers actually fit into this profile. And one of the most hazardous situations comes whenever this type of character benefits of a legitimate personal gain scheme directly connected to the level of risk taking he can advice. I believe this is also a strong point in the classical debate about misuse of bonuses in the financial world.

Third, we have the ‘hero’ profile, respectively the self-destructive (or self-careless or at the very best the self-neutral) people, who care about protecting other people. Some of them made history, others just died anonymously throughout our history. I read once a practical psychology book of F. Lelord & C. Andre (How to manage difficult personalities). I found one of their suppositions very interesting: we may be genetically predisposed towards paranoia, inherited from our ancestors. They were saying that the brave and fearless heroes usually died young with little time and chances to generate a succession line, while the prudent and paranoid ones lived longer life and had bigger families, with descendants in our days. Interesting, no?

Fourth, we have the absolute dummies, who do not care either about themselves or about others. I strongly hope this is a rare species, as they either hurt themselves really early in life and migrate to any of the other categories or become purely medical cases and we don't see them too often walking freely among us... so I will not insist on those guys.

Finally, we have a ‘reasonable mix’ risk-taking profile, stretching across all the above four categories, in a moderate manner. Here I include those people who combine a healthy self-protective profile with a good sense of responsibility for protecting others. People who fall in this category take decently calculated risks and assume the consequences of their decisions. Ideally, most of the active population should fit into this category. Practically, I still wonder on a daily basis...

Actually, there is a fine border between those over-simplified types of risk takers. The same person may present different types of reactions to different types of risks in different moments and in different positions (or relationships) in his or her life.

I believe that in today’s world too little importance is given to psychological profiling when people design their career plans, but also when companies recruit staff. From both sides (the employee and the employer) there is much more weight placed on education (watch out – I did not say knowledge, but education!...), monetary and status considerations, both on the side of the applicants and the recruiters. Education on the other hand is also frequently driven by family expectations, young students prepare themselves for jobs that pay better and offer quick growth prospects. Mature people become trapped between their own dreams and the social pressure, start making questionable compromise quite early in their professional life, in an attempt to fit into models that don’t even suit them.

Profiling should address many issues, from ethical principles and moral standards to aptitudes and talents. It should be encoded in our educational system and later on in our career planning. And for those professions that are highly exposed to risk taking and moral hazard, such tests should be a prerequisite not only on managerial, but even on entry level. I know it sounds like utopia, but we have to start thinking outside the box if we wish to change things for our children. Just because a young graduate is good with numbers does not guarantee he or she does not leave the University with the mindset of a crook. Technical background is not enough to succeed in a sustainable way, not if we want to redesign the financial sector and put some trust back into the system.

And the same conclusion applies to almost any industry, even if the financial world is currently the most covered by media. It is natural to be in the spotlight as it runs through the entire system and connects all other areas (just like the blood in our bodies). Still, it is definitely not the only one corrupted because of moral hazard. Food and drugs, sports and entertainment, politics and social service, research and education – if you search the news you will easily see that the ethical roots of the current crisis are spread throughout almost every area of our life.

If I was to put together what I have learned in the past few months (be it from industry turnaround managers, financial gurus, famous journalists or striving regulators), it seems that we are running in circles. The world is trying to put more technical rules into various systems which are actually sinking because of moral hazard and excessive risk taking, personal gain and creative number manipulation. The approach is partially correct, but unfortunately incomplete. Whenever new and more restrictive regulations come into any market, it takes that market probably around 6 to 12 months to re-adjust to those rules, by introducing new controls and adapt the statistics it generates. However the core (dis)functionality of that market will not be steered if intervention tools remain on paper and limited to technical standards. The way out of this crisis can only be paved if the intervention of the regulators will start focusing on the people. And to be honest now - we should not want to see a collapse in the current financial system before we have created something that can reasonably function in its place. Unless we are ready to go back several hundred years and fight some nasty wars in between.

How can we change then? Well... we will need lots of authentic turnaround managers to show us the way. I see now that with my ‘roots’ series I have been positioning myself in the category of lower management who can see parts of the problem but cannot solve it. I believe this is a good start ... for the time being!

Georgina Popescu

WAYS IV – THE MANAGER

Motto: Never point a finger where you never lent a hand.  Robert Brault

Today I decided to share with you some thoughts about what I believe should be the main focus areas of a good manager. To put the things into perspective, I would have to say that by ‘manager’ I do not necessarily refer to a boss and a professional life. Management is a part of everyone’s life just as much as air, food, sleep. We are all managers in our private life, when we relate to our families or circle of friends. The manager is basically a person which manages something or someone. You hear often ‘he/she manages well under the circumstances’ – referring to either state of mind or behavior or results.

What I will try today to put in writing may be seen as an oversimplification of management function. I love simple things and I believe all our life should be governed by simplicity. We are the ones who overcomplicate matters. And sometimes bringing them back to their initial simplicity is the shortest way to seeing their beauty again.

Why I have chosen to do this under the ‘ways’ series and not the ‘roots’ one? Simply because I have decided to focus more on the positive part – how it should be. Of course ‘the manager’ can be always re-written as a ‘root’ piece, by simply pointing out the negative side of things, the fact that current crisis is deeply rooted in management errors or pure mismanagement – on different levels.

Enough introduction, let’s get started. You will not find here any history of management trends or any definition of management styles, as this is really not the purpose of this exercise. Personally I believe that most of the things written and spoken about pluses and minuses of management styles have their fair share of truth and deceit. I will just share with you my personal view of various areas of daily business (or daily life) which a manager needs to address for success. And I will do so without separating personal from professional, as I believe in two basic ideas. First is that both the road and the destination are important. Second that there is no business ethics, but just ethics (there is even a book about this, by John C. Maxwell).

I will start with the results, because most part of management was (and still is) focused on this. It is natural, as the basic idea of ‘managing’ relates to a purpose, a destination. You can of course wonder around and do beautiful things out of luck and without any direction, but that is definitely not management. So, first thing we need to have when we start managing something is a purpose, an idea of what we aim to accomplish. Usually the definition of expected result is called target or objective. During the management journey, it may change and this is one of the most important (and beautiful) aspects of successful management – the dynamism of the objective. Because in normal environment, every manager deals with more than one objective and there is always a relationship between various results. Sometimes the relationship is clear and can be anticipated, other times it is hidden and therefore unforeseeable. A good manager recognizes if and when some of his/her objectives need adjustment and stops before following an unrealistic objective that can even damage the bigger picture which is pursued.

I will use a simple example: going by plane from A to B. Simplest way to optimize this route is to fly on a straight line - fast and efficient. However if you add the restrictions regarding no-fly zones for example, you may find that the plane needs to take some alternative routes which do not seem rational for someone who is not aware of such restrictions. Furthermore, unless you fly a charter, you may find out it is impossible to fly with just one plane and need to change 2 or 3 to get at the destination. Ultimately, once you are in the air, the pilot may need to go around a storm in order to be able to deliver you safely, at point B. You may remember the ‘Cast Away’ movie with Tom Hanks – the parcel gets delivered in the end; whether that is an acceptable result or not, depends of course on the way you look at it.

So it is obvious that the result may vary in terms of quality and therefore one of the biggest challenges of management is to describe as reasonably as possible what is expected. But I will put this aspect on hold for a while, as this comes a little later in my story.

Going back a little, the result is something the manager targets to achieve. Therefore it has to do with the future. Does it also have to do with the actual act of management? Yes and no. Yes, as it is the crucial element shaping the day-to-day actions. No, as it is about the future and we all know that if we want to make God laugh we should show Him our plans.

Then what is actually the manager expected to do? This is simple: to manage his/her way towards the result. How? Let’s take the points of intervention, one by one.

First a manager must efficiently manage available resources. What does ‘available’ mean? Simply what he/she already has, plus what he/she can get in order to accomplish the objective. How limited are those resources? Well, this usually depends on the type or resource but also on the creativity, resourcefulness and personality of the manager. A golden rule about managing resources is that there is a right place, time and purpose for everyone and everything. Sometimes exceptional situations can be managed with exceptional approach toward resources, however in the long run you must clearly understand the structure, strengths and weaknesses of your resources if you really plan to make them more efficient.

In an over-simplified manner, I can imagine grouping resources in material ones (from money, buildings and equipment, car fleet, to paper and coffee...), information and intellectual property, time and human factor (here I include the composition of the staff but also the network linked to it - in case of work; respectively the family, circle of friends etc. - in case of personal life).

The crucial resource proves to be always the human, the only one who can actually make sense of all the rest and is decisive regarding the quality of the result. For example, the same amount of information processed with the same material resources over same period of time but by different people, will translate into different levels of knowledge and will generate different interpretation and correlation paths, thus delivering various results.

Second aspect on which a manager needs to focus is management of situations. Throughout our daily life, things tend to happen around us. Few situations are really neutral on the participants, most of them represent either opportunities or threats for the future chain of events and the humans involved in them. Those effects are commonly referred as consequences. What is also interesting is the fact that every person notices different things from a similar event (that is if he/she notices anything at all). Therefore, a good manager needs to be as attentive as possible to the situations around and at the same time as assertive as possible, interpreting and correlating potential consequences which may arise (either threats or opportunities). A crucial part of the result delivery is translating the situations; playing them to one another, then adjust them to available resources. In this process, a good manager should be always ready to adjust expectations if this proves to favor an overall improvement in results.

And thus, we reach the third crucial focus pillar: management of expectations. A good manager must transmit with clarity, both downwards and upwards, the expectations regarding the result. The message must be tailored to the recipient and must represent a fair correlation with the other pillars. What does this mean? As managers usually depend on others for delivery, they must have a fair understanding of the tasks they cascade down (in terms of both resources and situations), so they can assume realistic result parameters. For example, when you know that one of your staff members has a sick kid at home, you should not expect him/her to stay until 10 pm to finalize an urgent report if this report can be delivered by another staff member or can wait for another day. If you however insist on doing so, you should be ready to ‘compensate’ for the exceptional management of the situation and also understand that by repeating this exercise you will damage the human resource attached to it, in terms of enthusiasm and commitment.

Fourth and somehow already introduced by above three focus pillars comes the management of intervention tools - actually the personal touch given by the personality of the manager. Here we could spend days talking about management styles, but this is out of the scope of today’s exercise. I will just stop on some ideas I have in mind and invite you to expand on your own with whatever fits your managerial profile: enthusiasm, knowledge sharing, prioritization, motivation, recognition, delegation and empowerment (always together!), fairness and ethics, understanding efficiency (always check both quantity and quality of results!).

There are still many things to be said in terms of management however as this is not intended as a lesson, I will move towards closing now.

I believe that human and time factors are amongst the most important for a manager. The rest are easier to attract and also manage, once you get it right with those two. Everything is then indirectly connected to the third pillar described above – the management of expectations.

At the end of the day, a good manager is the one who enjoys the way to the results and thus masters the resources with enthusiasm and fairness. If management is perceived as a struggle, it can sometimes bring results – but only on a short term and is definitely not sustainable. Of course life will put us in front of such situations every now and then, also as a test of our management abilities. We should be able to face such challenges as they come, and temporarily be ready to apply different tools than our usual ‘kit’. But we should also be strong enough to come back to the more sustainable way of managing situations, to that natural way which fits best our personality and life style and allows us to look to ourselves in the mirror with a smile before we go to bed.

Fairness and appreciation for the people, completed by deep understanding of resources and situations, for the benefit of the result – all that sustains a manager’s success in the long run. I firmly believe this is the way we need to approach management if we wish to overcome challenges - be it in our daily personal life or at work.

And remember: There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire (John Churton Collins). Be careful how you set expectations and do not allow them to corrupt your ways as a manager.

Wishing you a great day!

Georgina Popescu

WAYS III – THE PATIENCE

Motto: How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?  Paul Sweeney

It should be generally accepted as a universal truth the fact that with every day of our lives, we are getting older. We can of course chose any other word instead of ‘older’, there is quite a wide range - smarter, wiser, nicer, richer, fatter. However those would be no longer acceptable as universal truths, because we evolve differently during our timeline, depending on a great number of factors.

I have browsed through the Quote Garden this evening, like every time when I plan to write something, in search of a nice motto. As expected, patience is regarded mostly as a virtue, the aptitude of wise people. Perfectly qualifying as one of the ways out of the so-called crisis (or better say one of the ways to survive in the new world paradigm which we are experiencing lately).

Why choose ‘patience’ as a way ahead? First reason that comes to mind is because I admire it in some people around. Of course not all people who do not (re)act can be qualified as patient, there is a fine line between virtue and weakness, just as in all character features. 

What would then be the definition of patience in my view?

I would describe 'patience' as a certain type of action (or even a certain lack of an obvious action), at a certain moment, sustained over a certain time, triggered by a certain evaluation of a certain situation, correlated with a certain decision regarding the best choice of action, with the ultimate purpose of achieving a certain goal in the wisest possible manner.

Have I lost you already? ...

Have a little patience and try reading it again, perhaps even putting it in a certain context relevant for your own experience (sometime when you really believed you were patient...). I strongly believe that if any of the components in that phrase are missing, then the action cannot be qualified as patience and the person is not really patient. If the time line is wrong or if the evaluation of the situation is not proper or if the choice of action (or lack of it) is mistaken or if the purpose is not achieved, then we actually deal with bad results or at least with missed opportunities.

The most frequent mistakes made by impatient people are either uselessness (unneeded actions which do not harm but also do not help anyone, are just a waste of energy) or even destructiveness (usually actions without reasonably understanding the situation). The difference is most important for the impact on the community around the impatient person, as some actions which seem just useless for some, are destructive for others.

Sometimes the actions of the impatient can be constructive, but this would be mostly triggered by coincidence. A chain of lucky coincidental events can trigger the persistence of the impatient in his / her behavior and even a gradual worsening of the destructive potential. Usually such person is not even ill-intended, as in case of planned destructive behavior we usually deal with patient planners.

On the other hand, patience does not mean just waiting loooong before you answer a question or endlessly gathering data before acting in a certain direction. The patient’s wisdom comes from knowing exactly when is time to act and when is time to wait and see or listen or gather more information. This knowledge is partially inherited, partially educated and partially driven by experience. Therefore the sooner you experience harmful effects of your own impatience, the faster you get better at feeling that right moment or at choosing those right battles. Just like John Dryden said almost 400 years ago: ‘Beware the fury of a patient man’.

And so, the second reason why I have thought about this way ahead was because I have begun to build on my skills in terms of patience and have already learned that the best possible teacher is the negative experience.

And cooking... well, this is a big part of it, and the motto is very much right. And I realize more and more how much I miss the regular patience lessons from my kitchen. The childhood for example was a constant lesson of patience - either queuing for food or waiting for miracles to come out of the oven. I was always amazed about how long can half an hour really be, when you are not allowed to open the oven door, no matter how curious you are whether the cake is really growing. Because once you opened it prematurely, the disaster was guaranteed. And back in my childhood there was no glass window on the oven door… There was also clear for how long you have to mix the eggs with the sugar so that they become puffy enough. 

I also knew how long it takes to get to my grandmother by train and already learned that sleeping and talking makes the time go faster. And I was never really a train sleeper …

Usually there is a direct (but reasonable!) correlation between good things and waiting time.

When I was very young, there was one Romanian movie called “Hurry up slowly!” My mother liked the title so much (the movie was also nice…), that she tried for years to carve those words into my mind. I believe she was never really happy with the results of her efforts, as I was always more the type ‘Oh God, give me Patience! NOOOOW!”

Lately I have seen that it is better to slow down and take more time to understand things before acting based on my emotions. I believe this is especially important when people experience negative feelings, which are usually bad advisers. There is something to be learned from stones, rivers and trees, but also from birds and bees, or from predators and prays. We should learn to be patient without forgetting that we need to act in time, efficiently and in the direction of our purpose.

The way in which a wisely patient person chooses to live his/her life should be highly correlated with one of the roots I approached last year, respectively ‘the tolerance’. Such a person should know just how much he/she can tolerate without action, what action needs to be taken and why, when and for how long, so that the result is consistent with the intended purpose. And this can be best achieved when it comes naturally, part intuitive and part reasoned, in a beautiful combination of self-confidence, maturity and courage. And in order to achieve this, some of us need a lifetime, some less and some even longer than that.

This Christmas I wish to all of you that you may learn the lesson of patience early enough in your life so that you can contribute in teaching it to others.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Georgina Popescu

ROOTS VIII – THE WASTE

Motto:

The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one. Paul Heyne

Today I decided to go back to the ‘roots’ series, as I have suddenly realized that I missed one of the main causes of our current troubles. It came to me just like that, in the morning...

The motto comes from a guy who died in 2000. The biography on the Wikipedia is not long, however seems that the guy made a professional choice that enabled him to fight the war of morality in a certain age segment, where he probably believed he can induce greatest change – adolescence.

This reminded me of my mother. She was also a teacher in the same field and also has chosen the undergraduate segment, even if she could have taken the university (much better paid, and with higher recognition). Probably the reasons behind their rather similar choice were a little different, however the fact remains – they did exceptional work in their field and, as far as my mother is concerned, I have seen some of the people that came out of her ‘hands’ and they are great individuals, with good moral standing and healthy family lives.

Coming back to the motto, I have to admit that it was quite a challenge to pick one today, because there were so many great quotes I found. So I decided to share with you also the other finalists:

He who buys what he does not need steals from himself (Author Unknown)

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more (Kin Hubbard)

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell (Edward Abbey)

As you may suspect from the title, I decided to dig out today the WASTE root of the crisis.

It happens to be one of my biggest weaknesses and probably this is why I have not singled it out before. I live with it every day. Even thou I am trying to overcome it, it is a very powerful enemy and it frequently gets the best of me.

This morning I just realized how much it has become like a cancer for our current way of living. The sad part is we got so much used to it, that we are not even aware of the damage it actually does. The trigger for realizing this may seem strange…  I was unpacking a simple ordinary pack of toilet paper – nice and pink, slightly scented. And suddenly a big part of my childhood started to pass before my eyes...

I got transported back into the 80s in my home town (Bucharest), when toilet paper was also pink, but not so soft and funny scented. It was sold in bookstores next to other paper products and was a very scarce resource. Just like food and electricity and a lot of other things which we now take for granted. We used to be very careful how much we use and we actually had a lot of jokes about alternatives to toilet paper – will not bore you with details.

Basically this is how we managed to overcome the scarcity of resources back then – with a lot of humor and love. We were happy and valued everything in a different way. Bananas were shared between me and my sister and I can hardly remember my parents having any. Cakes were made in house once or twice a week, as sugar was rationalized per person. We were actually sharing with some of our neighbors, nice old ladies who also had great skills for sweets-producing, so they were also sharing their cakes with us. Pop-corn was the result of team work for preparing and we had a special supply of it, so were very popular amongst other kids for having it.

Cooking was in general carefully planned (as gas was scarce), food variety sometimes optimized also by cook-times criteria. On special occasions we would indulge with oven-cooked meals and also some ‘fire intensive’ specialties. Heating was confined to the ‘winter rooms’ and the kitchen was quite an adventure for my mother in cold season, but she managed it with love and dignity (results were always tasty, no compromise on quality…).

My father was also cooking, but he was the ‘bad boy’ of the family in this respect, as he was not so economical with either raw materials or cooking times. He used to display 2 or 3 cooking books when he was ‘creating’, so he optimized only the tasty outcome. This is why my sister and I were so delighted whenever he performed one of those acts…

Now when I think back on those times, I believe that the variety and at the same time scarcity that was blended by our parents into our daily meals really ensured the healthy growth of both our bodies and minds.

Clothing was mended with love and care, passed on from older to younger siblings, always clean and sometimes transformed, so it does not look exactly the same. Soap was also made in house for washing clothes and was excellent disinfectant (good for hair-washing also). We had some hens in the courtyard that were giving us ‘natural’ eggs for years (the birds were already too old to be eaten and were family members anyway...).

In school, apart from the standard subjects, we were also learning basic housing skills (cooking and sewing) and were creating some nice things that we still have stashed somewhere in the attic.

What is happening today? Various forms of creativity are certainly encouraged also in today’s schools, even wider choices that in our childhood. However the abundance of disposable things is gradually eating up many hard-working ways of collecting memories. It is difficult to choose a favorite doll when you have tens of them, or to look forward to eating your half of a banana, while your parents are begging you to eat healthy from hundreds of options.

The older we get, the more we are drawn into the waste tornado. Some of us are swallowed by it in our daily personal lives, others in our professional lives, many of us in both areas. Some give in to this temptation on daily basis, some less frequently but with bigger collateral damage.

But… what exactly am I thinking about when saying WASTE?

About buying too much food and throwing it away. Using too much paper and throwing it away. About getting the newest and most technologically advanced piece of equipment and throwing away the good old one which is still fully functional. About manufacturing things for single use, just to ensure permanent sales (in this category I include not only those official one-use towels or similar, but also those things for ‘long-term’ use, which actually break immediately after the warranty expires, just because they were not really designed to last).

I am thinking about all those billions of options in terms of cosmetics, clothing, accessories, food, medicine, cars and IT gadgets, wondering what happens to all those who are not chosen to come home with us. About millions of things which are chosen from billions of options to come home with us, just to sit on some shelve and never get used, and then get thrown away (or in the best case donated to some charity which usually proves to be just another business, that re-introduce them in some second hand stores in a distant country, waiting again for someone to pick them and take them home...).

I am thinking about the billions of residential, office and commercial square meters which are being built as I write, to add to the offer of already vacant billions of residential, office and commercial spaces that wonder if they would ever be chosen by the less and less wealthy ordinary people, as well as by the less and less successful middle businesses. I am thinking of businesses which over-expand, counting on their product being better than the competitors, but then killing each other in the process, as the prices go down for everybody.

I am thinking about the waste of our beautiful imagination, which is blown away every day by a civilization which creates more and more brain robots. About a month ago I was sitting in a bus, next to a kid and a young man. The kid was talking about the most recent movie he has seen and the guy next to him asked him something else instead - when did he last read a book. The kid was rather confused and replied that it is much easier and entertaining to see a movie. Then the guy told him: ‘yes, but a movie will never give you what a book can. In a movie you see a very narrow world – the one which the director imagined for himself and imposed then on his public. When you read a book you can imagine things the way you like it, in the colors you choose, and you can make the character as beautiful or as ugly as you wish. In a book you read with your own mind and feel with your own soul, therefore build your own world; while in a movie you are just a passive observer of someone else’s world.’

I wish there were microphones in that bus and this creativity lesson coming from a simple (but wise) young man was broadcasted on all TV channels during prime time. However this could not happen in this world, as we are only programmed to waste that prime time with negative news which turns us into passive observers of someone else’s perception of world events. This is what modern communication channels make of us, correlated automatic answering machines, triggered by certain stimulus which the owners of this channels orchestrate - negative, panicking, gloomy, “global-crisis-self-fulfilling-future-losers”. It is indeed a waste of our creative, positive, loving, solution-oriented and long-term surviving selves.

What else do we waste, apart from material things and spiritual potential? Basically we experience a huge waste of our otherwise very limited… TIME.

We spend it nowadays in so many funny ways that do not enhance our spirituality. Let’s take for example politics. In the good old days when media was not so wide-spread, this used to be a necessary evil of the organized society. A handful of people were paid from contributor’s money to spend their time playing political games with a reasonable outcome, which I suspect was to preserve some ground rules and proper order in the society. Nowadays, apart from the fact that the purpose of the politicians is not very clear anymore, we also have another systemic problem: every citizen with voting right is now wasting time on politics. I believe nothing more needs to be said, readers should know already why I would categorize this as a total waste. And for this waste we pay very much, much more than we can even begin to imagine.

Plus that the term ‘politics’ does not refer only to government, as it is a much wider area of our life – we have to act political at work, in our personal circle, sometimes even in our home. A reasonable part of this politics is good and brings positive result; however making it the main driver of our life would really turn it into a big waste. As with everything else in life, finding the right balance is the real challenge.

And I could continue on many other forms of waste in our day-to-day life, but then I become guilty of the sin of a movie director – imposing my view on the story and thus stopping your imagination from running wild, all by its own. I bet you can come up with huge number of waste examples of your own, so I will invite you to do just that.

To wrap this up, I would just ask myself how did we get so fast from there (childhood scarcity) to here (current waste)? In the case of the former communist countries this change was much faster, in case of the more advanced economies the transition happened slower. In some case the scarcity is still there and it is another proof of the cancer-like waste which we experience (as we do not have enough will and determination to put our waste to a good use and help them…).

I believe that the transition, from scarcity to wealth and then further to waste, is connected with human need for comfort and security. This was originally a good and desirable evolution, if only we knew when and where to draw the line before switching to waste.

The difficulty is connected to the fact that temptation has become a global business. Behavioral economics is one of the recent trends in economic science, basically revealing how our faulty human nature rules our choices, how manipulation games are called “marketing”, and how silly we can behave when we face of our own weaknesses and are addressed with the right temptation (‘right’ meaning a mix of dosage, place and time plus ... as someone said so nice ... lack of witnesses!…).

More than that, modern financing schemes really disconnected our purchasing power from our real net worth (and more sadly also from our social and health insurance schemes…), creating a bubble exactly from what the motto points out: it made some of our dreams become possible even in those cases when they shouldn’t have ...

It is nothing wrong with dreaming, as long as we can still distinguish between dream and reality. Unfortunately, the good old sense of responsibility and accountability got diluted in this process and people took what they thought they deserve without asking themselves who will pay for this in the end. I do believe that the bill will be paid by all of us and even sadder is that it will be paid by our children, unless they rebel and refuse to pay for the waste created by the ‘old folks’.

Therefore, with the risk of repeating myself, I will say it once again: we are not living a crisis, but a paradigm change, something that happens almost every century, a transformation which will give birth to a new world. For better or for worse – this remains yet to be seen. I hope we have become wiser at least in the way that we should not shed blood for cleaning ourselves. We can still do it with water, soap and self-control.

We need to wake up and re-assess our behavior according to our needs, both material and spiritual, and also both as individuals and social-wise (addressing all the dimensions of our societies). We need to bring back the reasonable into our lives, to search again the long-lasting sense of satisfaction, which got lost in the run after the quick sense of easy pleasure.

There is also some good news in today’s writing and thus a glimpse into some ways ahead. First of all, I know that not everyone has given into the temptation of waste; there are deep roots of morally healthy people which are raising beautiful kids. There are also beautiful teachers still fighting for the morality of our future generations.

And the greatest news is that this is a global problem for which no global resources need to be identified. This one we can and need to tackle individually by ourselves, in our family and circle of friends. It is also the hardest part, because it means we should all realize that every one of us is personally responsible for our own choices, but this is also where our hope for the future lies.

Yesterday I bought a very nice Jiminy and I hope it was not a waste, but a helpful material representation of a friendly consciousness.

I wish us all good luck!

Georgina Popescu