Giấc mơ về một tình yêu

Internship mistakes that students make

For many, an internship is the first real job experience—don’t screw it up. Avoid making these mistakes as you apply and interview for internship opportunities.

Not caring. You live in the here and now. It’s hard enough to think ahead four months to final exams let alone to a future career. Internships should be regarded as the cornerstone to the job you will eventually have.

Procrastinating. Summer internships are filling up NOW. Don’t think that in April, you’ll be able to land one just as easy.

Bad grades. Employers aren’t just looking for a warm body to fill in at the “intern desk.” During the interview, they’re evaluating your performance abilities. The greatest indicator of performance for college students is their GPA.

Racing through applications. A summer internship may not be the most important thing on your mind at the moment, but give it the attention it deserves. Check spelling, punctuation, and be sure you have all names or locations correct.

Irrelevant references. Though Grandma can surely vouch for your hard-working and attitude, it’s best that references come from people other than family. There are plenty of “references” in your life: high school teachers, youth group leaders, program directors.

Awkward interviews. You’re applying for a job. Dress like it. Wear slacks and a nice shirt or sweater. Show up on time, bring copies of your resume, speak articulately, and look your interviewer in the eye. And don’t forget to give a good, firm handshake. Maybe your dad can show you the ropes.

Not following up. It’s ok to contact the interviewer after the interview. In fact, it’s best. Send a “thank you” note and call or e-mail the next week to check your status. Avoid badgering the poor woman though—there are other things on her plate.

By Kathryn Knight

Source: fastweb

Why LESS is MORE

I’ve been playing a lot lately with these concepts: less, more and the thing in between (usually called balance). Why do we need more? And more of what? Why sometimes we tend to value balance, while otherwise we tend to lean towards one of the ends? And, most of all, why sometimes less is good?

The following list is my answer to the last question. And, being a list about less, I will skip every unneeded clutter and just start it away (it won’t take you more than 10 minutes to read the whole article):

1. Less Money in Your Life Will Push You To Value More Everything Else

The money rat race is a never ending game. The more money you get the more money you want. It’s a thrill in many ways similar to the one you get by putting your fingers in a power outlet. You get an amazing experience but at the same time you slowly decrease your overall resistance and health. Next time you’ll need more because you created a little bit of tolerance to it. And then a little bit more. And so on.

Money is just raw energy. Without a goal to direct it, without a plan to make it something material, it will remain in its raw form. And every form of raw energy is a dangerous thing to play with.

Now, imagine you won’t aim for this raw energy all the time. Imagine you aim for something simpler. Climbing on top of the world for instance. Or having a balanced family and raising kids. Or writing a fantastic story, painting or sculpting. All in all, just getting out your creative potential. The less money you’ll aim for, the more you’ll want to put your creative potential to work.

Less is more: less money is more creativity.

2. Less Negative Thoughts Will Make Room For More Positive Thoughts

Now that’s an easy one. It works out of the box and everybody could understand it at the first glance. Just eliminate the negative thoughts and you’ll make room for some more positive thoughts. Alas, it’s not always like this. The problem is we’re having different understanding of the concept “negative thoughts”. What I perceive as a negative thought may be something natural for somebody else. Negative thoughts are highly personal. They are shaped by our life experience, upbringing, current environment and more.

So, how can you identify those negative thoughts in the first place? My number one trick in doing that is: are they making me feel angry? Am I experiencing feelings of fear and abandonment? If yes, that’s a negative thought. No matter how “right” that thought may look like in my own internal values system, if it triggers feelings of anger, revenge or fear, it’s a negative thought.

Less is more: less fear, anger and revenge will definitely make room for something else. And that something else has no chance left but being something good. We already got rid of the bad stuff, right?

3. Less Fights Means More Time for Understanding Yourself

Fighting is a constant activity in our modern society. We’re doing it almost on autopilot. Every time we’re not heard, every time something is not working according to our own expectations, every time somebody is making us feeling bad, we’re starting to fight. Most of the time, we’re doing it on the inside. We’re arguing, we’re playing our case, even if we don’t say it out loud.

We’re getting better and better at that. I know I won thousands of fights on the inside: I knew I was right. But in the end, it doesn’t really matters who is winning a fight. All that matters is that you’re using your resources in something useless. You’re spending time and energy on something irrelevant. Ok, it’s in the past now. Move on.

Fighting is such a waste of time. Just make this simple exercise of writing down every argument you had in your mind (or out loud, if you’re more extrovert) and be amazed about how much time you’re spending on this. Now imagine how it would be to make this time available for something really important, like understanding yourself.

4. Less Compromise Means More Power for Your Own Decisions

Compromise is a good social tool. It was invented to keep some sort of a balance between different opinions and create a middle path, allegedly a safer one. As such, compromise is a useful tool for survival. But as with any other good thing in our lives, overusing compromise made it toxic. We compromise on almost everything.

When was the last time you gave full power to your decisions? When was the last time you took into account your own desires and goals, without getting infected by external intentions? If you live in a modern society, you did this last time when you were a kid. And I bet it wasn’t very well received, either.

Less compromise will bring back color and shape into your life. It may not be the color and shape you would expect, but it would be your color and your shape. You can start modifying that world, once you get a hook on it. But without shrinking compromise to the size it deserves (a last minute survival resort) you won’t be able to get a grasp on the correct world. You’ll work on an infected vision of it.

5. Less Procrastination Will Push You To Get More Done

I bet you didn’t know that, by even procrastination can be done in a productive way. Joke aside, spending time without doing what you are committed to do is such a waste. Procrastination is the bigger client of our modern time expenditures. We spend more time procrastinating than maybe sleeping.

Imagine how it would be to have less of procrastination in your life. Less time spent on nothing. Naturally, you’ll start doing things. You’ll start making the world spin again. Staring at something (a project, a task, a client) without acting on it will make it stop. It won’t move, it will be dead. Procrastination is just a softer way to slowly kill your time (in both senses).

6 Less Something Is Always More of The Opposite

And with that, we’re getting to the core of it. Less something is always more of the opposite. That’s the fundamental principle of quantity and it’s a basic rule of our perceived Universe. Some of you may think that’s just a normal fact and I emphasis a normal fact too much. It’s simple, everybody knows that less of something is more of the opposite. Well, for those of you who are really getting this, I apologize. You’re not into the target of this article.

But if there are some readers who think that less of something could really trigger more of the opposite, and that is an incredible powerful tool for switching our world, our life, our universe upside down the way we need it, the last item on the list is for you.

7. Less of This Blog Post Means More Time for Your Brain To Ponder Things By Itself

That’s right, I could go like this forever. But I won’t. I think it’s far more better for you (and, to some extent, for me too) to let you think things by yourself now. If you mentally allocated 10 minutes to this blog post, be happy: you only spent 5 so far, so the remaining 5 are going to be used for somebody really special: you.

Just leave this blog post behind and start thinking: do you have too much of something?

How less of that can give you more? And more of what?

Source: dragosroua

I wish to make a complaint

Sometimes, it's difficult to be the guy who complains when all around seem satisfied. However, criticism, when well-founded, has its place. It's an idealogical equivalent of an attack, and you sometimes make things stronger by attacking them. For example, in nature, only the hardiest and most efficient creatures win the evolution game when competition exists. The more pressure a species is placed under, the stronger it becomes. It has to.

So it is with Linux, but sometimes a sense of loyalty forces people to hold back from honest criticism. Yet I encourage people to embark on a program of criticizing Linux whenever they reasonably can. I have a favorite maxim for situations like these: you don't have to be loyal to something that is genuinely good.

My attitude is inspired by my early experiences from a time before anyone other than Linus knew what Linux was. As a British schoolboy, in the 1990s, PCs and Macs weren't that popular amongst my friends. We all aspired to own machines like the Commodore Amiga and my own dear Acorn Archimedes (the origin of the ARM processor). If you aren't familiar with these systems, and you have any interest at all in computer history, look them up. They were dynamite with a mouse attached (and a lack of adequate separation between processes). They fell over a lot but did amazing things with hardware that would seem comical by modern standards. If they were one thing, they were miles ahead of the mainstream "serious" platforms. However, odds are, you're not using one to read this.

Both platforms started out with an amazing technological lead. The Amiga had graphics that were only bettered by dedicated workstations that cost as much as a car. The processor on the Archimedes was about twice as fast as anything else on the market. When did you last hear of a new system with that much of a lead on the competition? But apart from an enthusiast community, both platforms are long dead. If you're wondering what killed them, I'll give you an answer that might surprise you: It was loyalty.

These were machines that were beloved by their users but the machines themselves quickly began to loose the massive lead they had started with. "Pah," was the cry from the forums, "why would I want more than 256 colors?". Other forum dwellers would tell you that they didn't need a faster processor, crash free multitasking and the that the Internet was a passing fad. Tragically, a loyal backbone of users were prepared to keep using their favorite platform even when it wasn't as good, and that's death for a computer platform.

Things are the same with Linux. There are some areas in which it's a bit weak. Take one of my personal annoyances: setting up the screen. Somewhere, a Linux developer probably has a perfect reference setup of monitor, graphics card and computer that works properly, but the rest of us are not so lucky. There is something very wrong with screen setup under Linux, and as often as not, I have spend far too long fiddling with text files in order to get a new install working. In short, it's just not good enough and it's a sufficiently serious problem to drive away potential new users. And yet, I've seen people almost accused of lying when they complain about this problem on the forums. Another common one is the dubious defensive logic of "it worked for me, you must be doing it wrong."

Linux has other problems as well such as poor performance in some areas (flash for example), occasional, unacceptable hardware support regressions and network setup tools that tell you that your wireless network is set up and working when it isn't. Frankly, I don't think that Mac owners would sit back and accept problems of this sort. Trust me, complain whenever you can, you're far more likely to do some good than any harm.

Source: linuxjournal

Evolution of a programmer

As a software developer, it's common to learn new practices every day. Although there are jokes about how the more a programmer ages, the more his lines of code counter goes sky high even to accomplish simple tasks, usually this process results in an overall improvement. People that start using source control don't go back; the ones that start using distributed version control do not go back to centralized systems; and so on.

The issue with learning supposed best practices it's that they are not best by definition, but only better than the ones we were using before. Continuing the example of source control systems, Subversion is an improvement over CVS, but Git surpasses both (or, as Linus Torvalds says, tarballs are superior to CVS and Git is superior to tarballs... matter of taste.) It's common for a programmer like me and you to encounter a new tool or a new methodology and think that it is the best thing since sliced bread, but this is far from the truth in the majority of cases.

The most plausible model of this improvement process features different stages, where usually to arrive to stage N you have to pass from all the M<N stages. It's not that the upper stages are somewhat difficult: some of them are a simplification of the lower ones; but a typical programmer won't see the need to grow to stage N until he is arrived at stage N - 1 and experienced its limitations.

The example of Subversion and Git is enlightening. Back in the 1990s, CVS was all the rage and open source projects rely on it for collaboration (Eclipse Foundation still uses it today.) It was a pain to use, as merges were complicated and to compute the differences introduced in a file the client has to communicate with the CVS server. And network speed towards remote hosts wasn't as high as today's...

Then came Subversion, and its motto CVS done right. In the Subversion development model, you have a local, hidden copy of the revision you're working on. The result is svn diff does not take ages as cvs diff did: disk space is cheap today and doubling the space occupied on my machine is better than having to wait for a server on the other side of the world (as it is the case with open source projects hosted on SourceForge) for a diff. For the average programmer, Subversion is (was?) beautiful, and it was the closest thing to a time machine for code.

But then, with disk space becoming even cheaper, came Git. In Git, you do not have a local copy of the current revision to perform diffs: you have a local copy of the entire repository. Seriously: the first operation to start contributing to a project is git clone. For a while, I considered the Git movement something that will eventually fade or stabilize; instead, more and more open source projects are switching to Git. I guess it is the next stage.

Probably a junior programmer won't see Git as a savior, and he will start from Subversion (I hope not from CVS.) But eventually, he will grow to the next stage. I wonder what is the stage after Git and distributed systems in source control management, but I can't see it for now, as I'm still living the Git stage, and see the next ones only as buzzwords.

However, what I've said in regard to source control systems is often true for other practices we employ every day in coding, and progress towards some stages in a field may not imply similar progress in other ones (you can use CVS and still implement Test-Driven Development, although the overall result may not be very nice.) I collected here some typical evolutions that occurs in object-oriented programmers. Follow an hypothetical programmer in its progress towards enlightenment...

Comments

First stage: he does not comment his code. Comments are not necessary to get a working application, right? So why wasting time over something the compiler just strips away? The flow is so simple. Of course after two weeks he does not understand anymore what the code does.

Second stage: he comments everything, and although it helps the comprehension of the code for other programmers, his comments are often redundant and fall inevitably out of sync with the code.

Third stage: he writes self-documenting code, and makes use of docblocks for inline Api documentation. Variables and data types have meaningful names, along with routines.

Properties

First stage: he exposes public properties over all classes. Why write a method when you can simply access them directly?

Second stage: he plainly says that public properties are wrong and fix the situation by using getters and setters over private variables. Although this improves the flow by allowing him to intercept accesses and modifications of the private properties, it still exposes data subject to changes to other classes.

Third stage: he favors encapsulation and makes fields private by default, without any getters nor setters. Fields become accessible only if the computation that involve them cannot be moved to the class itself.

Collaborators

First stage: he puts everything in the same class, which has a nice main() method.

Second stage: he factors out responsibilities in other classes, and creates collaborators in the constructor of the mediator object.

Third stage: he injects collaborators via init*() methods or via the constructor, and breaks dependencies via small and cohesive interfaces.

Static

First stage: all his methods are static, so he does not have to instantiate an object, an operation that is usually considered a treat to performance.

Second stage: he recognizes the static keyword as a marker for code artifacts that belongs to the class instead of the objects, like factory methods and collections of instances.

Third stage: he recognizes the static keyword as a procedural one, and factors out collective methods in a first-class object.

Testing

First stage: he does not test. This code is so simple it should work.

Second stage: he performs manual testing of the application, covering edge cases. He even writes test main() methods sometimes.

Third stage: he automates testing in unit and acceptance suites via frameworks that serve this goal. He gets to write the test ahead of the code and uses them as a design tool.

Of course some of this stages may be broken up in several sublevel ones, but I wanted to keep the list short.

Feel free to add superior stages if you have already reached them. We all have something to learn from each other. :)

Source: css.dzone.com

Điều ba không muốn nghe từ con gái

Con yêu dấu…

“Em không thể sống nếu thiếu Anh”

Là câu Ba không muốn nghe từ Con Gái
Tình yêu không là điều gì sai trái
Chỉ vì Con tìm chưa đúng nửa mà thôi

“Em không thể sống nếu thiếu Anh”

Là câu Ba không muốn nghe từ Con Gái
Dù cho Hắn có là con người vĩ đại
Có đáng thế không, Con Gái của Ba à?

“Em không thể sống nếu thiếu Anh”

Là câu Ba không muốn nghe từ Con Gái
Dù Con thấy tâm hồn mình trống trải,
Cũng đừng quên rằng Con vẫn có 1 nơi…
Ba không thể cùng Con đi suốt cuộc đời
Cũng không bên Con mỗi khi khó nhọc
Chỉ một điều Ba mong Con không học
Là cái câu Ba chẳng muốn nghe.

Đừng bắt Ba tìm giúp một nửa của mình
Vì Con biết đó là điều phi lý
Con hãy làm theo con tim và lý trí
Giữa biển người, đừng vội nhé Con yêu.’,

Ba yêu dấu..

Con hứa…

Một bờ vai vừa đủ để gục đầu
Một ánh mắt hiểu điều Con không nói
Một giọng trầm không bao giờ khiến tim Con đau nhói
Hay chỉ là sự im lặng thấu tận lòng Con

Một người bình thường biết tôn trọng Con
Và cũng đáng để cho Con tôn trọng
Không cần nói nhiều để khiến Con hy vọng
Chỉ cần làm vừa đủ để Con tin

Một người bình thường không quá thông minh
Đôi khi chịu cho Con nâng mình lên chút xíu
Đủ tinh ý để biết khi Con nũng nịu
Nói những điều vô lý cũng nhường Con

Một người bình thường có những tật xấu con con
Để có cái cho Con quan tâm nhắc nhở
Trong mỗi bước đời có điều gì trắc trở
Luôn muốn Con là người biết đầu tiên

Một người bình thường không có quá nhiều tiền
Để Con không thấy mình như thân tầm gửi
Người không bao giờ khiến Con phải tức tưởi
Vì cái cười nhếch mép khẽ thoáng qua

Một người bình thường nhưng biết lo xa
Không để Ba phải bận tâm về Con gái
Biết phân biệt đâu là điều phải trái
Biết khiêm nhường, từ tốn để vươn lên.

Một người bình thường đủ để nhấc Con lên
Như thuở còn thơ Ba hay làm thế
Đủ kiên nhẫn ngồi nghe Con kể lể
Dù thế nào cũng không ngắt lời Con.

Một người bình thường đủ để thay đổi Con
Chín chắn hơn và biết nghĩ về người khác
Biết cảm thông và sẽ chung lòng gánh vác
Những chông chênh, nghịch cảnh trong đời…

Liệu Con có đòi hỏi những điều quá xa vời
Để mỏi mắt cả đời không tìm thấy?
Để Ba đêm đêm trở mình lo ngay ngáy
Con gái mình, một mái đầu xanh…

“Em không thể sống nếu thiếu anh”

Là câu mà Con sẽ không bao giờ nói

Người ta cười, cho lời Con như sương khói
Nhưng đó là lời hứa… của Con gái với Ba

St.

Hôm qua và hôm nay

Ngày hôm qua anh chỉ nghĩ rằng: Amstrong là người đầu tiên lên mặt trăng, nói đến chinh phục mặt trăng, là nghĩ ngay đến Amstrong, nghĩ ngay đến bức ảnh đen trắng chụp bước chân đầu tiên của Amstrong trên đó. Nhưng chưa bao giờ anh từng nghĩ: Ai là tác giả bức ảnh?

Ngày hôm nay anh biết đó là: Oldrin, người đã cùng lên mặt trăng với Amstrong, người đã chụp bức ảnh đó. Oldrin đã bị tất cả lãng quên, nhưng ông không hề ghen tị với Amstrong, ông thầm lặng nhường tất cả vinh quang cho Amstrong. Vì thế tất cả những ai biết Oldrin, đều kính phục ông, ông là một nhân cách lớn.

Ngày hôm qua anh còn chê bai Mỹ Tâm với bài hát: "Hát với dòng sông". Cái đoạn: "Tình yêu đến em ko mong đợi gì, tình yêu đi em ko hề nuối tiếc!". Hôm qua anh bảo: Vớ vẩn, tình yêu là thứ thiêng liêng nhất thế đến ko mong đợi gì, đi ko hề nuối tiếc. Nhưng hôm nay anh mới biết: Tình yêu đến em ko mong đợi gì ngoài tình yêu chân thật. Và khi đã sống hết mình, yêu hết mình rồi mà vẫn ko giữ được thì tình yêu đi cũng chẳng còn gì mà nuối tiếc cả.

Ngày hôm qua anh vẫn nghĩ, khi con người ta đã có những ngày tháng đẹp đẽ nhất bên nhau và có những phút giây tột đỉnh của thương yêu sẽ làm cho người ta mãi nhớ... Nhưng hôm nay anh mới biết, có những ngừời chỉ coi đó là thú vui xác thịt trần tục không hơn không kém, họ có thể dễ dàng lãng quên như chưa từng bắt đầu...

Ngày hôm qua anh vẫn nghĩ câu " Đàn ông nông nổi giếng khơi..." là các cụ đã nói đúng. Nhưng ngày hôm nay anh mới nhận ra , có những người đàn bà đúng với nghĩa đen của " cơi đựng trầu " nông toẹt chưa đến một gang tay thử hỏi độ sâu sắc ở đâu ra ?

Ngày hôm qua anh vẫn nghĩ tình yêu là thứ tình cảm thiêng liêng mà ai ai cũng coi trọng và nâng niu nó. Nhưng ngày hôm nay anh đã biết rằng , không phải ai ai cũng như thế .Tình yêu đối với một số người nó còn là trò đùa dễ dàng cho đi...

Ngày hôm qua anh vẫn nghĩ rằng kiến thức , trải nghiệm rộng lớn về cuộc sống cộng với tấm lòng chân thành là đủ để nuôi dưỡng một tình yêu thế là đủ .Nhưng ngày hôm nay anh mới biết thêm rằng , để nuôi dưỡng tình yêu người ta cần có thêm sự dối trá và lọc lừa lẫn nhau.

Ngày hôm qua anh chỉ biết: Tình yêu là sự chia sẻ. Anh cứ nghĩ rằng: chỉ có tình cảm chân thành mới đến được với nhau. Nhưng ko phải thế, cũng giống như ngày hôm qua anh chỉ biết Phương Thanh hát "Một thời đã xa": "Và em sẽ ko trách anh nữa, chẳng trách anh đâu khi ta đến bên nhau tình yêu dối lừa" – ngày hôm qua anh thấy câu hát thật vớ vẩn. Nhưng hôm nay anh mới biết lời bài hát được phổ từ bài thơ:

"Chẳng trách anh đâu dù tình yêu có thể đến với nhau bằng những dối lừa".

Ừ từ hôm nay anh sẽ ko trách em nữa, chẳng trách em đâu, vì tình yêu có thể đến với nhau bằng những dối lừa mà...

Ngày hôm qua anh vẫn nghĩ rằng sẽ lưu lại những kỷ niệm về nhau và coi đó là một phần trong quãng đời còn lại.

Nhưng ngày hôm nay thì anh đã xoá đi tất cả bởi vì đơn giản em không xứng đáng!

Sưu tầm.

Xin trăm năm em về tinh khôi...

Bờ vai ơi đừng quá nghiêng nghiêng
Đánh rơi buổi chiều thơm ngát
Làn môi ơi đừng quá run run
Lỡ tia nắng hồng tan mất

Xin âu lo không về qua đây
Xin thương yêu dâng thành mê say
Xin cho ta nhìn ngắm lung linh
Từ đáy đôi mắt rất trong

Bàn tay em là cánh sen thơm
Ướp trong vòng đêm mái tóc
Nụ thanh xuân còn ấp e nơi
Nét xinh áo lụa thơ ngây

Xin trăm năm em về tinh khôi
Đôi tay ta dang rộng hân hoan
Xin cho ta một khắc reo ca
Vui cùng em

Vì biết đâu có đôi lúc em xa vời vợi
Biết đâu có đôi lúc con tim nghẹn lời
Biết đâu có đôi lúc ta quên chờ đợi
Kề bên nhau quên một chiếc hôn
Biết đâu sớm mai nắng nghe phơi cuộc tình
Biết đâu sớm mai gió tan cơn mộng lành
Biết đâu biết đâu đấy xin em lòng thành
Và xin cất lấy trái tim nay nhớ nhung phút giây

Vì biết đâu cánh mây trắng yêu em gọi mời
Biết đâu gió tha thiết mang em về trời
Biết đâu bỗng em thấy tim ta chật chội
Và em tan đi cùng ánh sương
Biết đâu bỗng em thấy đôi chân mỏi mệt
Biết đâu bỗng em thấy sông Thương cạn kiệt
Biết đâu bỗng mưa nắng gieo tim buồn phiền
Và em sẽ cất cánh tung trời hóa thân giấc mơ

Và em sẽ cất cánh phương nào thênh thang mây khói

Start your own business

Ten years ago I started my own business. At that time I felt this was the best decision ever in my entire life. Ten years after I still feel the same with all my heart.

Having your own business is one of the most challenging situations in which you can put yourself. And I’m not talking only about the financial part of a business. Most of the crash-courses on how to start your own business have a strong focus on the profit and financial facts. They are all selling you methods to reach profit quickly. And, to some extent, those are good and proven methods, but they have nothing to do with the pre-conscious choice of having a business. Those profit making courses are assuming you already took the decision.

In fact, having a business is not at all about profit. If you are serious about it, and if it proves to be a good and mature choice, you will have to face the profit challenges sooner or later. It’s in a business nature to have profit in order to survive. But making profit the most important part in having a business is just wrong. It’s something that you deal with months or years after you started your business for real.

The choice of starting your own business is more like an adventure than a spreadsheet. It’s more about risk taking than financial security. It’s more about personal development and growth than bank statements and material wealth.

In today’s post I’ll share some thoughts about how I decided to start my own business, and how this decision still benefit me after ten years.

The Drive

I was 29 year old when I started my own business. Until that age I was mostly dragging around, living by talking out loud (really, I was working as an anchor man on FM radios, I have a pretty radiophonic voice) and never making plans for tomorrow. For several years in a row I was mostly drinking my evenings out with the same people, borrowing their misery and trying to find reasons to wake up the next day.

But around that age something started to change in me. Never knew how to define that. It was a drive for deep, fundamental and meaningful change. And that desire for change was spreading over all areas of my life: personal, as well as professional. To make a long story short, it was a mix of bad personal choices and amazingly risky professional decisions that lead to the final result: setting up my own company.

I won’t go into technical details about how and when exactly I did it. I want to focus more on the inner reasons that took me there. And those inner reasons are made of only three main qualities: courage, curiosity and enthusiasm. All three qualities mixed together created a powerful drive for change.

Courage

The definition of courage is for me the ability to change at any given point a status-quo without hesitation and with all available energy. Regardless of the overall context, of course.

And the overall context at that time was simply horrible for starting a business. And when I say horrible, I mean it. Cash was simply intangible as a resource, you couldn’t borrow money from the bank without accepting an interest higher than 80%. Yes, higher than 80%, which means credit was simply prohibitive.

Cash was the smallest problem, by the way. You had to face corruption, lack of qualified people – which made me to learn a lot of different skills, and an almost desert market for online products. Basically, you were far better at that time if you could secure a job and get on with it.

But against all odds I started this business. And my very first project was worth over 20.000 USD, an amount who let me finance my activities for the first year, until I set up a qualified team and a location. Not even my associates believed me at that time, until they saw the contract.

I started the business as an act of conscious change, despite of an unfriendly context.

Curiosity

Curiosity as a quality is often underrated. It’s amazing how useful curiosity is for a balanced life and for constant growth. I think boredom is a chronic imbalance with curiosity. I also think curiosity is somehow related to our ability to create and maintain happiness.

Although I was working as an anchor man – well, ok, I was climbing on the hierarchy and go through all the levels of a FM radio diagram, up to the position of program manager – well, besides that, I was constantly expressing interest in other, completely unrelated areas.

I remember that I was fascinated by fractals at that time. I was also into computers and internet, and bought my first books on programming. I started to learn Borland C++ on the bus, while going at the radio. I was literally obsessed with learning new stuff.

And out of curiosity I decided to have a business in the online field. At that time online was something yet to be defined, of course, nobody could predict in 1999 that we will actually have the Internet as we have it today. But I had this unstoppable urge to do something in that field and learn as much as I can.

I started the business so I can learn more of what I liked.

Enthusiasm

The first three years of my company I worked 16 hours a day, no weekends. I actually worked more than 1000 days in a row, and I can tell you in all honesty that I’ve never been tired. Not a single day. I was fueled by enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is such a gift. It’s a state of your conscience in which you are channeling a lot more energy than usual. But enthusiasm is also a function of what you like and don’t like. You can’t really get excited about something you don’t like, and then spend 16 hours a day, 1000 days in a row on it. You simply can’t.

I was doing something that I liked, soaking myself in a completely new field of activity. I was courageously spending each day looking for ideas, people or resources in order to build something that I truly believed in. Of course I was literally exhaling endorphins.

If I didn’t have enthusiasm I couldn’t make it over the first three years. And my enthusiasm was a consequence of my choices: I was doing something that I loved and with courage and determination. I finally found something that put me in that enthusiasm state and let me there for good.

I started my own business because I was so excited to do something I really loved to do.

***

As you can see, my drive to start my own business had nothing to do with money. There wasn’t any single mention of the money and profits in my first 4-5 months. I was so confident that things will go well that I simply overlooked this part. And for that period, that was a very clever thing to do, because it allowed me to focus on other, more important areas. Later on, I had some periods in which I overlooked the money flow the same way, but with some disastrous consequences. Maybe I’ll blog about those times some day. Having a business is not at all a pinky lifestyle and every mistake develop a strange tendency to blow everything away.

Starting your own business is not a matter of money and profit. It’s really a matter of courage, curiosity and enthusiasm. Whenever you mix those three fundamental qualities of your being, something big happens in your life.

In my life that mix gave birth to my own business. In your life, that mix can manifest something different, but it will always challenge your core for growth and personal development.

Maybe it will be your relationship that needs courage, curiosity and enthusiasm, maybe it will be your social life. Whatever field it will chose to manifest in, the alignment of courage, curiosity and enthusiasm will change your life for good.

The Catch

I’m sure you already learned by now that “starting your own business” has nothing to do with bank statements and formal certificates of incorporation. It’s all about creating value out of genuine curiosity, with great courage and backed up with enthusiasm.

You can as well work for somebody else as an employee, but if you do that with courage, curiosity and enthusiasm, it would be like you already started your own business, and your boss is just your most important client.

Source: dragosroua

I wana be 4rever young

Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while
Heaven can wait we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?

Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power but we never say never

Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music's for the sad men
Can you imagine when this race is won
Turn our golden faces into the sun

Praising our leaders we're getting in tune
The music's played by the madman


Forever young, i want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever forever
Forever young, i want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever
Forever young


Some are like water, some are like the heat
Some are a melody and some are the beat
Sooner or later they all will be gone
Why don't they stay young
It's so hard to get old without a cause
I don't want to perish like a fading horse
Youth is like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever
So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams are swinging out of the blue
We let them come true

Forever young, i want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever forever
Forever young, i want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever forever forever
Forever young, i want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever forever

Forever young, i want to be forever