In One Side, Out The Other

While I still have a little brainpower left before the end of the day, I will write for a few minutes to clear my head before diving into dinner. It is at the hotel, so it means that I haven't steeped foot outside at all today, though I did manage to get up and into the gym in the morning before breakfast, for the second day in a row. That is not a bad effort.

Today was the first day of the actual event and most people arrived yesterday afternoon. One large group from Finland all came in on the same plane and had a charter bus shuttle them from the airport to the hotel. Unfortunately for my friend, his bag didn't make it. It went into one side of the hold of the bus at the airport, and it was taken out of the hold of the bus by a thief on other side. It never made the trip to the hotel.

He lost everything.

And he was very upset. As you can imagine. But it wasn't about the stuff in the suitcase, or his work laptop that had all of his material for his presentation on one of the days, it was far more personal.

He has been in sales for around 8 years now and has travelled around Europe a lot, spending a lot of time away from his family through some periods. While he can't make up that time, while he was away, he kept a journal for his son, reflecting on the trip and experiences and various thoughts and reflections, with the intent to give it to him at his graduation, as a token gesture to make up for all those times he was away, demonstrating that he was always in his thoughts.

That is what he lost.

And he was shattered.

I actually mentioned this writing in a post about a year ago, when he told me about it while we were on another work trip together. He is one of the few people at work who knows that I do this on Hive and he has actually got an account here, but it is dormant. He isn't the kind of person who would post his personal reflections publicly, even if he is anonymous. However, it is exactly for this reason that I write on Hive, because I know that I am far more likely to lose a book or have a hard-drive die on me, so that it would be lost to the world and I would be shattered too, just like when I have lost important digital photos, years and thousands of hours of work - gone.

Having at least the writing in a decentralized environment gives me some piece of mind and unlike writing in a journal, there are other values that compound the practice. Essentially, writing on Hive is incentivized, which can give a financial reward, but what is probably more important, is that it gives an additional reason to stay consistent. This is further compounded by the interpersonal interactions with the community that doubles-down on the value proposition and encourages more consistency again.

It is an amazing process.

Not that everyone sees it this way, and perhaps less use it this way, but Hive is an incredibly powerful tool in helping a person change their behaviors through reflection and feedback. It is like those who consistently exercise getting the feedback of results to look and feel, which encourages them to keep going and remain consistent. For me at least, daily writing is a mental exercise that brings in a strengthening of my mind and emotional state and depending on the content I am writing about, it can improve my interpersonal relationships, or my processes for skills and decisions, expanding access to opportunity.

Multiple value streams is one of the goals of investing, but in my opinion, it should be our goal for a lot of our activity, where an individual action adds value to other related and potentially non-related activities too. By doing this, we increase our impact efficiency of our behaviors, which gives us better results and more space to improve in other areas.

I feel for my friend and we will talk about these things again once he has had time to come to terms with it, but no matter what has happened and what he has lost, he still knows where he is heading from here in terms of moving forward - the only thing ha can do.

He is going to start again.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]