There is no enough words I can say about these day. First of all – I’ve received quite a lot of congratulations from the agencies I’m working with. And they are really Fantastic people, but still – I give them job, give them orders. I feel that their congratulations where real, but still not so real as from my friends. Even if guys read all these, it’s still really cool to receive congrats from you. No one friend can afford a present you give to me. Maybe you are even better friends for me after all, or not? Something tells me that no – but still why?

As David Allen says, we are actually reacting, we rarely use our time to sit down and to plan the whole thing. And even if we do it in the beginning, we often forget to get back to our plan. So day after day we work like this and after a few months you just get used to not to think and not to plan. You feel exhausted at the end of the day and the only thing you want is to sit behind the TV, or drink a glass of beer, or play a game etc. It’s self destructing process.

I’ve mentioned a few symptoms of it on myself and all inside me is against it. There are a few things that helps me keep going – I’ve started GMAT preparation and I’m very much in my goals settings. The first one keeps me in tone, the second help identify the following steps to keep up with the evolution.

On friday I’ve tested them on a few people, people really enjoyed them. Show me your cards!

I can’t leave without Music. I think this is one of the most powerful way to enforce your emotions of any kind. For me certain types and styles of music suits to different situations and moods. So roughly I can divide all the music that I listen in the following categories:

1. Dancing/Club/Party – here comes all the modern electronic music like House, Drum’n'Bass, Techno etc.
2. Working – I prefer acid jazz or minimal techno for the working environment
3. Relaxing – ambient, acid jazz, atmospheric drum’n'bass suits here just fine
4. Thoughtful – in this mood I like to listen indie of all kind
5. Energy out – commercial house, pop-punk, industrial works fine for me here

So you see, how it is difficult for me to explain, what music do I like? And when I see in somebody the same problem answering my question, it’s a signal for me that the person is interesting.

What role plays music in your life? Sometimes I will post some of my most adorable track.

What is good about games is that you try to do your best there. Wouldn’t that be cool if you work as hard as they play? Or as you yourself sometimes played? You just need to love your work as they love their games.

The theme of this post is Systems approach. As you may know, currently I spend a lot of time in researching it: I read books, read lectures and conduct trainings based on systems approach. The biggest problem in it is its explanation. People want to know in simple words, what is it all about and how it can help them. I’ll try to explain it on my personal example.Actually we all know about the main principle of systems approach. For religious people it’s clear: if you act bad, god will punish you. Generally speaking, all what you do will come back to you. This idea is based in the system approach, that says that everything is connected. From the theory of chaos we know about butterfly effect, we will use it as a proof of global connections.

Everybody knows these things, but we still act as we usually do. We do not think about consequences. Why? Because we only know that they will happen, but we don’t know “WHEN” and “HOW”. And this fact diminishes their (consequence’s) significance.

So we come to the main advantage, that I received from understanding the systems approach. It allows me to build feedback or at least estimate it. So I can make my daily decisions more precisely than before.

If we go more deeply, to systems modeling, we will also find a very interesting shift of paradigm here. After understanding modeling principles, you begin to analyze the world from different perspective. “Reservoirs” and “flows” are basic elements and they give your another, very useful tool for understanding and analyzing of daily processes and happenings.

That’s all for n0w. I will cover in detail both “systems thinking” and “systems modeling” in later posts.

It’s been a long time since my last update. I was busy on many things, but the idea of my blog always stayed in the air. I thought about why I cannot update it regularly? And why some of my old posts are much more popular than the last ones. And I think I know the answer, but first, let me tell you a story.

I started my own blog in the beggining 2006 (almost three years before). I was encouraged by the literature about blogs, by Seth Godin, Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki and other internet gurus. I thought of it – as a platform to share my ideas. And first posts were really “mine” – my thoughts, my experience. It was unique and thats why it attracted so much attention.

But reading more and more other blogs I began to copy them – copy style of posts, ideas of posts. But copying wasn’t so simple, because I cannot combine all those “not mine” ideas with my experiences and life examples. So the latests posts became boring and absolutely not usefull. Moreover I pretended to write on management, and limiting myself in such way made it even more difficult to write good content.

I hope that these are my real problems, and understanding them will help me continue blogging. Otherwise you won’t see another post for a few months here =).

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Merry HDR Christmas
Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

And now my answer – Trevor you are absolutely right. Now let’s think why. I got a few ideas:
1. Being rude and demonstrate bad manners leads you to acquiring bad reputation. What’s about it, you will say. Well sure – the world is big, and if you do something wrong in England, nobody will know about it in Germany. But here we comes to the point 2:
2. You never know when and where the reaction on your today’s action will be. Everything is connected (check the butterfly effect) in our world, and acting bad today can result in getting negative feedback 10 years. Moreover with Internet info of your reputation spreads quite fast today.

I’m not even saying here, that demonstrating bad manners is bad by definition.

• The Hitcher @ imdb