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It's all about the people



So here I am again, lying on the floor while enjoying the darkness of my claustrophobic room. This horrible carpet always turns out to be the best place to gather my thoughts and write (when I feel rich I go and reconnect with my oppressed hipster soul and write at the local Starbucks, but it’s not that time of the month yet).

The Pink Floyd are the only company I’ve got left this cloudy morning, a shy beginning of the unpredictable English summer.

English summer… what a big lie! It sounds nice, though. English summer… I should probably create a cocktail and name it like that. I bet it would sell and finally make me rich so I could move to a bigger room with a bigger carpet where I can gather bigger thoughts.

Damn digressions! The point is… no holiday for me this year. Just a very short escape next month. Summer in the city... I am trying to imagine how that’ll feel like.

Most of my friends have left, creating a vacuum in my daily life that I am trying to fill with virtually anything in order to fool the boredom and push the specter of loneliness away. 

So I do a bit of everything: my job, an online Spanish course, a few psychology books, internships applications (all failed so far) and a leadership programme.

I know what you’re thinking right now: leadership programme??? what the fresh hell were you thinking when you decided to join a place full of smart people who know a whole lot about finance, mathematics, business and international politics while you even have trouble counting the change at Tesco?

Yes, I applied for the Global Leadership Exchanges this year. Needless to say, I was rejected. But then someone must have had a celestial epiphany and decided to take me on board anyways.

I told myself that it would be good for me to hang out in an emotionless environment made of numbers and policies and business (yes, in my mind businesspeople were heartless monsters) and take a break from the right side of my brain and start doing something about the underdeveloped left side.

At the end, this course turned out to be one of the best learning experiences I’ve had in quite a while, allowing me to develop leadership strategies from an emotional, behavioral and psychological perspective.

Oh Jesus! It’s kind of like Mohammed and the mountain. If I don’t go to the drama, drama always finds a way back to me. But at the very end, I’ve realized that something like that was what I actually needed. 

And God, what a revelation! (Did I just mention Jesus, Mohammed and God in the same paragraph? I didn’t do it on purpose but I am sure I could find some room for the Buddha at this point)

I went with the intention of extending my network of contacts and become a bit more pragmatic but I ended up creating an unprecedented kaleidoscope of human connections that left me emotionally dried. In a positive way, clearly. And at the end of the day, my friends, that's what matters. It’s never about things: it’s all about the people. 

And the people I’ve met in these days have permanently changed the way I looked at some things: they broke the barriers,helped me understand, but most importantly they made my abnormal emotional sphere look less weird, for the first time. And it's just the beginning.

Yesterday, someone very wise said that ‘’our flaws are just exaggerations of our best qualities.’’ You know what that means? Stop trying to change yourself, get your shit together and start valuing what you have. 

Without your flaws you wouldn’t be you, and come on, being you might suck sometimes but it’s still better than pursuing the utopic ideal of a fake perfect life that to be honest I don't think really exists. 

I know that I am the least appropriate life-coach in the whole world and that this whole speech sounds insane. I honestly would never buy a self-help book written by me and neither should you. 

However I thought that I would share with you this small life-lesson and end it with a quote from one of the best books I’ve ever read and that you might not necessarily find relevant. But I don't care and I'll write it anyway:
‘’I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance. I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane.’’

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