The year the world stopped

 This global crisis had different impacts in every region of the world but i think that most of the lessons learned were the same worldwide. At the beginning we didn't knew how to react, we where accustomed to a fast passed life with lots of work, studies, activities and so on. First we thought that it was going to pass relatively fast but it wasn't long before we realized that we were in the midst of an historic event.
 
The hours turned to days,  the days to weeks and the weeks to months... suddenly we started to feel the effects of a drastic change of life. I'm not just talking about quarantine and lockdowns, but also it was now a hazard to go to the supermarket and things so simple that we didn't realize that were so important in our lives like hugging a loved one.
 
 It was at this point that we started to realize what is really important in life. we began to notice things that we took for granted and all our past worries of pre-covid times were taken into perspective.
 
I realized that a second passed with my family and loved ones is immensely more valuable than an hour at work, i realized that movie night with friends is something worth treasuring. The constant bad news made me appreciate the things that many of us took for granted like having a roof over my head, food on the table and our loved ones healthy.
 
The year the world stopped we discovered who were the people that are really dear to us and we to them, we learned how to pass time with ourselves. Governments, businesses and huge corporations learned that money in this life is not all mighty. We realized the importance of the essential workers and got a new found respect for their labors.
 
The day the world starts moving again we must not forget the lessons learned, the heroes and heroines that got us out of this of crisis, also the villains, and most important of all we must not forget the health workers that have been fighting in the front line since the beginning, risking their lives and the lives of their loved ones all to help strangers, even the ones that don't care about the pandemic and kept behaving completely selfish and irresponsible. To all and any health worker reading, i want to give my truly heartfelt gratitude for all your selfless sacrifices, i want you to know that without you we couldn't  still be here and that all humanity is in debt with you.
 
In the most sincere way possible …thank you.

The year the world stopped it was something truly unexpected, we've always thought that it was going to be something out of a Hollywood movie, but there was no alien invasion, nor any zombies roaming the streets. To our surprise it was the tiniest possible antagonist... a virus.

People not machines

Have you ever been in a class or a job in which the teacher or boss pictures you and your classmates/ coworkers like machines? it's like that for that person your solely purpose in life is to study for that class or to work for (in some cases) nonstop during the day. I have been in a similar situation and all i could think of was on how unprepared the person was to be in a position of leadership or mentor-ship. 

Only one teacher in all my college life told us that he was aware that we as humans could be having good or bad days and also that his class was not the only thing that we had in our lives, and that knowing this he would try to be as reasonable as possible with us during the course and also that he would expect for us to reciprocate.

It is alarming that during 5 years in college, taking classes with highly capable professionals and extremely smart engineers, just one teacher had this way of thinking and openly told us so. I could say that 90% of the teachers i had treated their course as if it was the only course we were taking, assigning us ridiculous amounts of work.

Don't get me wrong i'm no expert in human resources or psychology but i think that it doesn't take to be an expert to realize that if you want productivity from people, exploitation is not the answer. 

In our modern world there seems to be a fascination towards self exploitation, i've heard countless times people proudly talking about how they worked for ten plus hours, or that they had to work at their house during the weekend. don't get me wrong, i'm not against hard work, and i understand that there are sometimes that we need to put those extra miles to achieve the goals, all i'm saying is that we need balance and also we need to realize that resting is essential for productivity. 

It is also important to give our time the value it deserves, i'm an avid thinker that at the end of our lives we are going to regret the time we've lost to be with our loved ones rather than the extra money we didn't earned.

All this is not a new subject of study, Abraham Maslow created a philosophical model called "the Maslow's pyramid", in which he represents the levels we as human need to satisfy to achieve self-actualization (desire to become the most that one can be), the theory says that when we reach the last level we'll experience a drive to become our best version and this obviously affects our productivity.

The pyramid consist of five levels: physical needs, safety needs, love and belongings, esteem and lastly self-actualization; we can see that the base of the pyramid basically consist in people having a house, food, water, etc. If we have those first two levels then we can look at more sentimental aspects like friendship, family, intimacy, self-steem, etc. and if we have those four levels satisfied then we can thrive and try en become our best version.

And basically with Maslow's pyramid i can show all the argument i'm trying to make, we can't be asked to be extra productive or our best version if we haven't fulfilled the bottom levels, and in a class or job in which we are required to sacrifice a big part of our time with loved ones or even just time for ourselves we can't be expected to perform at our best. In my opinion job managers should be familiarized with this and they should plan accordingly, that way they could get the best out of their employees and overall achieve a better working environment. 

As a student it took a lot for me to realize all this and since then i try to apply it in my life, i hope this helps you in your job or class and makes you reach the top level of the pyramid and thrive towards being the best version of yourself.

The power of self-image

During my life i have been lucky enough to witness the power that self-image has in all the things that we do and think of ourselves. In high school i wasn't a particularly  good student, if i had to define my academic performance during that time i would have said it was mediocre but not necessarily bad... i think the correct word would be average.

When i entered college i decided ( and that is the important part , i decided) that i could become a better student and possibly the best in my class. that little change in my self-image was the first and most important step towards a successful academic life.

I wasn't really aware of how or why i was able to achieve such a drastic change in my habits until i took a class in my last semester with a professor that had the same experience as me, but for him it was an even extremer change.

This professor told us that he was a dreadful student in high school, only getting bad grades in the courses he didn't failed. When he entered college he had a really good first semester because he took classes that he had to take several times in high school because he failed them, so naturally he was very familiar with the subjects of the course and was able to get good grades.

Thanks to his outstanding performance in that semester he was awarded with the "highest grades of the class" award in that semester; in that moment he realized that the self-image that he had of himself ( that was highly influenced by a lot of students of his high school and even by some teachers that told him that he wasn't going to achieve anything in his academic life) was wrong, and it also was the one thing that held him back from even trying to achieve good grades, because his self-image of a good for nothing student told him it would be useless to try. 

He decided that he was going to be the best student in his class for the rest of college, and he did, he was awarded with the best of his class award and he didn't stopped there, he went to his masters degree with the same positive self-image and was also the best of his class there, and thanks to that he could do a doctorate in arguably the best college in the world for his area of studies.

Hearing this story helped me realize that this life changing thought could be applied to every aspect of our lives and that everyone can do it. The first step is so little that sometimes we overlook it and it is to change our self-image. Think about it, picture a person that has been trying to loose weight for some time, he or she always focus on the basic things like what training routines to do or what food to eat, but he or she can have the best training routine or the best meal plan but if the person starts the project of loosing weight with a self-image of someone that is unable to follow a diet or training  (something like, "i´m going to try but i'm a person that can´t keep a diet for more than a month"), then the project is doomed to fail from the beginning. The first step should be creating a self-image of someone that can and will succeed in the project.

Being able to make this mental process of changing our self-image will remove the barriers that we put in our own road towards our goals, it is very different to start something believing that we are capable people, than start it believing that it is something we will most likely fail at because we have a negative self-image about ourselves.

Learning this things that i'm trying to share with you has helped me a lot in my life, not only in the academic aspect of it, but also in several personal aspects (it helped me to stop drinking sodas, for example). I encourage you to start any project with this small yet giant step, because i really believe that it is one of the strongest tools towards self-improvement and also mental health.

I would like to finish this post with a quote of one of my personal role models and childhood hero, the 3 times boxing heavy weight champion of the world and civil rights activist Muhammad Ali. I think that this quote relates perfectly with how self-image can help us in the road to success, because it shows that Ali started his journey with the self-image of being capable of doing great things inside and outside the boxing ring.

"I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was"

 

 

- Muhammad Ali 

About me

So... what can I say about me and about my blog?

I am a civil engineer that likes to read and to talk about the little, yet important things in life, the sort of things that we experience and that have a big impact in our daily life, but at the same time we seldom talk or reflect about them.

I started journaling as a way to keep my fresh toughts on specific moments of my life and, by doing so, being able to come back and read them years later. It felt like having a conversation with my past self and, eventually, I came to love journaling. This led me to the idea of starting a blog; this blog is my way of sharing thoughts and reflections that I consider could be interesting or helpful to somebody out there, and in the process grow by reading all of the readers' feedback, because sometimes all that is needed is a second opinion.

The other reason for starting this blog is because I would like to post a kind of opinion or review of the different books that I read and also from books that have been recommended to me. I think this could be a win-win situation, because I write these reviews and in the process it helps me retain the information much better, and at the same time I hope these reviews can help the readers decide weather to read the book or not. I can summarize the idea that blogging can help me retain more information of the books with a proverb that i read in "The bullet journal method" by Ryder Caroll.

 "The palest ink is better than the best memory"

-Chinese proverb

with nothing more to say about me and about this blog , I trully hope that you can find something useful in some of my posts , and also I would love book recommendations!