Is there any doctor who would care first about the immune system of his patients rather than of his own? Do you know any farmer who intentionally leaves the weeds to invade his crop? How many pessimists do you know who have achieved significant success? Have you ever read of a top athlete who does not keep track of his own performance?

So why, so often, we are reluctant to scrap the dead weight which inevitably appears in our lives? More important, what can we immediately do in order to build an immune system which should automatically protect us from the bad influences. This applies in our lives (from jobs towards relationships), applies in projects but may well be applicable to  organisations and countries.

There may be several ways of looking at this topic, but from my experience the four best things to do in order to enable your immune system are:

• First of all, be aware of the most dangerous forms of degradation: those actions which – like the blind spots – are not perceivable and do not produce any immediate results. Spotting that slow, not so obvious, regress which does not leave any noticeable changes in the short term is the first step for building an immune system. HINT: religiously implement a measurement system, and compare the current status with a previous state (for the web use web analytics, for your waist grab a tailor ruler)
  
• This may be counter intuitive, and is a paradox when related to the previous point: develop a tolerance to failure. Everyone can make mistakes, including us. But way too often, we fall in love with our own current way of doing things, either because we hate to be wrong or because we don’t want to beat ourselves up with regrets and remorse. So ignite your immune system by allowing to be wrong – after all is just part of being human. HINT: make a brief inventory of wrongdoings and accept them as a part of who you are, then envision a way to take corrective action and renew your habits with a proper way of doing things
  
• See things in a different light, a bright light. There are enough shadows from the past fueled by fears and frustrations which may blur our clear way of seeing things. Our past experiences have shaped our emotional paths and thought patterns and it takes time, acceptance and effort to change those. However, the now moment presents us the reality like a virgin territory – it is up to us what and how we decide to see. Using “the old pair of eyes” will show us the world as an old dusted museum, whereas looking through “the present pair of eyes” will bring more discoveries to us. HINT: boost your immune system by living in the right now, present time which enables us to see more the positive aspects of the surrounding activities, contexts, people, experiences…
• Make yourself the most important person in your life. This advice was suggested by the flight attendants when explaining the role of oxygen masks: first put your own mask, then apply it to your kid. This may sound very selfish, but is not. Let’s me be clear on this: unless we first take care of ourselves, and make ourselves stronger first, we can not be truly be kind others, without jeopardizing our own immune system. HINT: First help yourself, then help others

Bottom line: build your immune system by measuring everything, by accepting and then replacing the bad habits, by seeing the bright side of things through the right-now lens and by placing yourself first in the priority queue.

How many of us have experienced the following signs of living in a shallow world?

We don’t take enough time to fully engage anymore: there are way too many things on our plates, and we want to taste them all (as they all seem delicious), and even more and more new kinds of nibbles are landing on our daily plates

We  are too easily distracted and even confused by the massive inflow of alternatives: remember the time when the milk was just milk, and not a variety of regular, skimmed, calcium enriched, organic, etc? Sometimes having few choices feels like an easier way to get things handled

We look, too often, how to get just the instant, no-pain solution: instant gratification is driving us cut corners with the least effort. While getting things done more efficiently is what we should aim, abusing it may be a sign of immaturity: chasing only the “quick and easy fixes” like the pain killers, a liposuction or attending a fast-forward course on yachting, deprive us of the confidence going through and learning how to cope without modern help.

We prefer to consume everything in a refined, pre-processed state: I am not talking here just about what we eat or drink. Most of the facts, sounds, thoughts and even emotions have already been filtered by someone else: think of the damaging effects over an immature person being exposed to so many PhotoShopped images

We act as the slaves of the mighty availability: the mobile, the email, the twitter and the social networks, to name a few, are pushing us to react rather to respond. We too often mix up a technological capability with the way way we should engage the world through that piece of technology.

We have a hard time in extracting useful information from the data swamp: we are literally flooded with so many opinions, advices, facts, requests, from so many sources – that sometimes we overlook the important while magnifying the wrong stuff. The one who will bring clarity and relevancy in our worlds, should not be our friend, but our best friend.

We spread our attention, our preparation and our performance too thin: multitasking, dealing with multiple activities, faces, technologies, topics, demands from others are all sapping our energy. So next time not only ask yourself: am I juggling too many balls at once, but am I doing the right thing here?

We allow our feelings to make more and more decisions for us: sensations and excitement are constantly crawling our existence. That is an important reason for which we rush to want too many things, too early, with no resources. When was the last time when you have seen a commercial in which a lolly pop was not animated?

We live less and less our lives: like some automaton zombies, we overly protect ourselves by not learning new things, through avoiding the pain and the hassle of braking worthless habits, by not being in touch of our true feelings through renting the others’ experiences from fake realities (watching movies or gossiping) or just shielding our emotions through evading maneuvers of not engaging with someone, or something, so we won’t get hurt.

The above list is not complete, but may be applicable to the whole range of aspects from our existence: our relationships, activities, possessions, our thoughts and feelings. Find for yourself, where in your life, profession, etc you allow yourself to be too shallow: feel free to bring in your perspective on this.

How a small, unpredicted change in a part of a system may produce terrible effects in another part of the system, and what to do about avoiding the entire chaos

The Butterfly Effect is a term from chaos theory: in simple words, the wing movements of a butterfly in New Zealand may cause tornadoes somewhere in Europe. And we all have experienced the butterfly effect: something which seems insignificant triggered a set of high impact events.

Let’s consider this scenario:  some well intentioned guy suggests, at the end of a meeting: “… and BTW, we are going to improve our URL structure using  shorter, human readable format”. You immediately see the SEO benefits, but hey: there may be more. Without assessing how complicated this may be from a sys admin perspective, the hassle of those the customers who visit site through links found on other websites, or impact over the web tracking system, etc this might be soon pretty messy.

What to do when a member of your team or the sponsor of the project asks for a small “deviation”? Or when someone from the sales team asks for a on-the-fly change of the reports in a webanalytics project? Or when someone in your life asks for a small favor?

Here are some guidelines which I use in such a case:

Analyze and decide whether the change is a real need of just someone’s desire and then check its effects it may produce, in short, medium and long term:  create healthy boundaries. For a online project, use the most important word, especially to ASAP requests: develop a habit of saying NO when you hear it, like: “I’ll get back to you on this, after I assess the full impact”, and then stick to your promise. For an webanalytics project, check with all the report stakeholders, and create a parallel, test account. In life, double check before you commit if you have the energy, time, attention, etc to stick to the new change and integrate it into your life.

Also, as much as possible, try to build or work with modular things, keep items separate – like black boxes with inputs and outputs: untangle things, processes, responsibilities, decisions and use of resources.  For an website, it may well be separating the project team from the product team (and interact just though change requests, using a clear protocol).  For a webanalytics work, it may be separating performance reporting based on the various sources of the traffic. For life, in general, separate experiences from the past, to those from present and from the coming ones.

Last, but not least: if you decide to go ahead with the change, look for those conditions and resources which would make the change an inevitable success, let everybody know what is about to change and happen and how this will likely to impact their lives.

Bottomline: there are not too small changes to be approved and executed without considering their effects on the entire system.

Have you ever asked yourself which are the very first signs of a person who is immature? As for today I am in the 40+ age category group: but let me make this crystal clear – age does not equal maturity. Also, acting as an adult in one area does not imply acting the same in all the areas – feel free to use the following thoughts as an indicator for those spots where you want to be a grown up:

When learning, the immature is looking to get the tricks first, rather than the fundamentals which has as consequences not being able to go to the next level and hesitation in adding variations (“his own style”) in doing things

When asked about the purpose, the immature does not offer a clear answer: not knowing what she wants is the norm and usually she is heavily influenced either by others views or by the current context

When being exposed to new knowledge, the immature acts judgmental (“I knew that”) or is in denial (“this is not possible”) and – therefore he does not apply immediately what he learned: delays implementation saying to himself things like “I kneed to study more”, or “It’s too easy – is unfair to do this”

When taken off the tracks - like being in a new, unexpected situation, the immature person either completely shuts down (basically blocks himself of taking any action) or runs wild (taking totally irrational decisions – acting like a chicken without head)

When doing things, the immature is interested in looking smart, rather being efficient and trying to learn – sacrificing the long terms gains for the short term benefits of being perceived as “the expert”

When looking at the bigger scheme of things, the immature has a single perspective – his own: and the clear sign of this is that he goes with the first solution which came to his mind

When challenged, the immature does not feel comfortable in her own skin: she does not ask for help, until is usually too late: and the main reason for this is that she does not create healthy boundries

When making an error, an immature not only blames others, but he is not learning anything form his mistakes, so these occur over and over and over: even more, he does not help others to avoid his own mistakes, to avoid going through the same pain

When others share, the immature will not as she may fear that others will laugh at her, or that the information she possess is not too interesting or that the others may take advantage of gaining “powerful insights (which are usually common sense) and therefore she will loose the “expert” status

Thanks for reading my post, and Please feel free to add your own perspectives on this generous topic.

Once in while, junior project managers ask for immediate tips, tricks, and advanced ninja moves which could bring them some serious advantages, with almost zero effort. And you know they are junior – whether this is written or not on their business cards – as they keep asking about quick fixes to their project issues, before even knowing the basics of the project management.

Of course – there are a lot of tips and tricks to be shared: but how valuable are those if you don’t handle the fundamentals? Imagine that you want to know how to drift a racecar, but you don’t know how to shift gears… And – this is probably the hardest lesson I had to learn, going through lots of pain – but no rookie seems to be interested in finding out the fundamentals.

So here it is, the most plain, powerful, single word you have to know, and use when managing a project:

NO

Yes, it that simple: NO, NO, NO. Knowing how and when to say no, is so important. In project management is one of the most ecological tools, as it helps saving resources, energy and time to be dispersed with minimum effort. For example, read this gem, from 37signals.com blog:

“The hardest part about making good software that ships on time is knowing what and when to sacrifice. As programmers and designers, we often fall in love with our requirements and are unable to kill our darlings. We mistake what we said we’ll do with what must be done. It’s rarely so; you can always do less.”

So my friends: please do say NO – as you can always do less. As a team member say NO, when your project manager or sponsor volunteers you for a mission impossible. As project manager say NO, when a team member wants to implement something which is not essential to the project, or is sapping on the project resources (especially when asking for more time).

One more thing: please say NO, but do it graciously. Otherwise your ecological efforts will turn you into a dictatorial neysayer. And this has nothing to do with being a solutions seeker, a good submarine captain or a project manager.

For more tips, hints, and updates follow me on Twitter here.

A good friend of mine and one of the Internet gurus in Romania – Orlando – asked me the other day why would I even consider going to a blogging workshop. Afterwards, what else could someone with my experience – more than 12 years in the web space, having access to the web analytics data of major websites like Yahoo, MSN and insights from Nielsen Online – would learn from a blogging workshop?

Oh, but he is right… what was on my mind? This was my very first thought, probably fueled by the fact that Orlando has a very successful blog in Romania, which has been published without any training whatsoever. And guess what, I have already learned a great deal on blogging from Orlando.  But then, the reasoning voice came back and secretly whispered, somewhere in the back of mind: “Hey, listen Bogdan… how many times have you ever been successful in doing things without having a clue, without any plan, and without any clear end in mind?”

So here I am, today, taking part of a blogging workshop. Being again vulnerable and ready to fail, in order to learn. To learn how to blog. How to better communicate with individuals who might be interested in knowing the lessons which I have learnt from my life, without going through the same pain and efforts I had to endure to know all this stuff which now wants to break free. How to share and refine my areas of expertise: digital, project management, personal development, web analytics, irrational behaviour.

Here is the deal: if I share only a quarter of my perspectives on what I am good at, I believe this lesson is worth taking, no matter the pain. Yes, I know I will make some blogging mistakes – but through consistent learning I can be better and help others become better.

I am not alone here: Dragos has besides me another apprentice: Valerica. Let’s enjoy the journey!