Month: Sep 2018

“If you build it they will come”

This quote is at the top of the list of the most relevant quotes in the history of cinema and comes from a late-eighties film titled “Field of Dreams” directed by Phil Alden Robinson and starring Kevin Koster and Burt Lancaster among others, a film about the crazy idea of ​​the protagonist (Ray Kinsella) of investing all of his resources to build a baseball field in his farm by removing all his corn plantation as inspired by dreams and visions of former pro players willing to come to play on it. But in the process Ray discovers himself and his own values. A film therefore talking about dreams, hope and madness in believing in the impossible to achieve the incredible.

This sentence has always been special to me because, as in the film from which the protagonist was faced with the need to embark on a mad enterprise for which he felt an intuition that led him to firmly believe in his business despite all adversity. So the idea that there is no limit to our dreams if not in our mind is a suggestive element of my reflection today.

Dreams almost impossible but in which it is believed and for which it has persevered are often those of successful entrepreneurs in innovative sectors that have created successful global companies and brands. The most shining examples are John Rockefeller (who revolutionized the oil industry at the end of the nineteenth century), Henry Ford (first large-scale car manufacturer), Thomas Edison (the inventor of modern electricity), Sam Walton (Wal-Mart), Walt Disney, Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple and Pixar), Richard Branson (Virgin), Elon Musk (Tesla), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Niklas Zennström (Skype), Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA).

All these successful entrepreneurs have in common boundless courage, huge confidence in themselves and the ability to focus their efforts to develop ideas that have revolutionized the world and the market despite no one believed them even though they started from nothing.

Without people who looked beyond the then know reality and knowledge the human race would not have progressed. Of course one can judge the quality of this progress according to one’s own convictions. Without the cars invented by Ford, there would probably be less pollution, without Iphone and Mac there would be other products on the high-tech market, without Tesla’s electric cars, we could have certainly having cars as we could definitely have had coffees without Starbucks. But undoubtedly progress such as that brought by innovative and visionary entrepreneurs such as those above have certainly elevated the human race.

So the concept of believing in the vision before everyone and with the utmost conviction is the basis of any successful initiative in the professional field.

But I believe the same concept can also be applied to interpersonal relationships, when believing in the value of people and persevering can create the best and long lasting relationships: “perseverance” or “consistency” are the keywords I would use.

Demonstrating that one really cares about someone through concrete, constant and continuous actions really gives people the sense of affection we feel for them. So it all starts with getting to know ourselves first and what we rally want, shaping our “vision” like the entrepreneurs above, but in this case having clear values ​​that we intend to pursue and reward with our time and our efforts. So if we believe in friendship we’ll have to show that we hold to our friends, if we want to pursue a professional career we have to choose the paths that allow us to fulfil our aspirations, if we believe in love we have to prove it with concrete and constant gestures.

As in the case of the baseball field of the film mentioned above, the great achievements the human will has reached are therefore the results of the process in which someone believed he could achieve something unthinkable and applied himself with all his means to do so.

I wish you to be on your way to fulfil your boldest dreams.

Paolo

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Sunset from Camogli (Genoa, Italy)

 

Surprises beyond the horizon

The horizon has always been synonymous with the unknown. In the middle ages when people did not have the geographic knowledge of today they even believed that beyond it there was nothing but the border of the Earth as flat as a coin!

Beyond the horizon, however, there were peoples with incomprehensible languages ​​and different habits, climatic conditions completely unknown. Even civilisation as ambition and as invincible in their time as the Roman Empire or the Napoleonic Empire failed to govern for a long time as they conquered by force expanding beyond of their natural environment. Neither the “commercial” expansion granted the British Empire a lasting dominion but a false expectation of being able to control the majority of the countries of the known world until the nineteenth century with the largest colonial system that was the Commonwealth. And then history reduced its ambitions.
Human ambitions to dominate what is beyond their natural horizon have always failed in the long run because their approach has always been to forcibly bend the less developed peoples to their own cultural models.

I do not intend to take any position in favor of or against imperialistic economic policies, because they have also had positive effects from a cultural or civil point of view, but I would simply demonstrate that, also if the world has evolved making distances much  shorter  and traveling much faster, people is today objectively much more mentally isolated as it’s much more attracted by the routines of life within local communities where rules are known and in general has ensured comfort (at least mental).

The habits consolidated for generations, the comfort of the linguistic habits, the proximity to the original “family cores” are all elements that favor remaining anchored to their communities and live lives as within “mental prisons” boundaries even without realising it how limited these lives can turn into.

The concept of traveling most people have seems to be to “rest” from the stress of everyday life, “exploiting” the natural beauty of remote places that are visited for the sole purpose of escaping from the routine, in order to capture a moment of that feeling of discovering the unknown beyond the “mental horizon” allows.
Something similar as the feeling of spectators going back home after a very engaging movies that took them of the routine for a couple of hours the theatre.

Yet the horizon as a “mental concept” opens up the possibility of having new opportunities for life, work, experience, knowledge, being in contact with new people, routines, realities different from the usual ones and being able to rediscover the pleasure of the almost endless new opportunities the world offers.

Mental horizon can therefore also be only one’s own city or local community, whose limited opportunities are satisfied, but also the circle of people around us, limiting their possibilities to be fully realized as individuals. Or the social rules created by generations of cultural models that have imposed extended families as “clans” almost impermeable to external influences.
The nationalist political movements that are taking root particularly in Europe and in the USA are nothing more than the defensive response of this “looking-backward” scheme that should protect against the fear of the unknown.

But if we really open your minds and hearts to what positive can be beyond the horizon we might really reborn and improve our little world and leave a mark through a life that is so short that it makes no sense to protect our own comfort which is as short as the blink of the eyes in the economy of History.

The best period of my life is  the one I have been living since I expanded my mental horizons thanks to a very stimulating job that allows me to test on my skin on a daily basis the benefits of these increased exchanges of experiences with the world, and which I am sure are enriching both myself and the people I meet.

I wish you could also find the strength to break the mental barriers and to open up to discover the surprises that await beyond the horizon.

Paolo

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