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Showing posts from October, 2017

Of Peanuts, butternuts and big pumpkins

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So, it's Halloween time...yay!!! Just kidding. I've grown up in Italy, where Halloween is not part of the culture. The first time I heard about it was probably reading Peanuts and all the comics with the big pumpkin. Until recent years, Halloween stayed where it belonged. Not in Italy or among Italian people, where superstition is rampant and celebrating death and horror was taboo. The times, they are a'changing, apparently. I am not in Italy any more, but I hear that celebrating Halloween is now very trendy, almost compulsory. There are even parties in school for this occasion as (maybe even more than) for Christmas. Anyway, the place where I live now is no exception and today in the canteen people where talking about the thematic parties of the week end. But I am old and grumpy and boring. So this post won't have much to do with Halloween. The only thing I like about Halloween are...pumpkins. I like eating very much. And luckily enough, I like cooking

The right to give up

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I have started this post some months ago. I have drafted it, thought a lot about it, changed it, deleted many paragraphs, rephrased ideas... In short, it's a difficult one. You might be surprised by the title of this post. If you browse the thousands of blogs and articles on personal development, you will find plenty of useful tips on how to develop resilience, strategies to forge your stamina through the fires of hell and slogans to never, never, never give up. They can be very useful. Why this title then? I find it's easy to follow the mass and encourage people to develop resilience and go go go and conquer the world. But in the end you have to be honest, at least with yourself: can you go on forever? If you are looking for popular or easy solutions, probably this is not the blog for you. This is not a blog for the people who pass by things and just say "fuck it", for people who like to post pictures on social networks with their mouth wide open, for p

The best job in the world

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"Are you looking for new challenges? If you are creative, resilient and have good personal skills, this is the job for you." This could be the beginning of the job ad for the best job in the world. Some years ago, I was the right hand of a big boss. I had a lot of responsibilities: coordinating people, drafting policies of the company and taking care of the "behind the curtains" for my boss. Dirty work included. In other words I had to do everything to give him visibility and let him make "bella figura" [untranslatable Italian expression which means more or less "good impression"]. Among many other tasks, I had to write speeches for my boss. He was considered an excellent speaker and he was invited to many conferences to share his wiseness. Let's give credit where it's due, he was quite comfortable in public speaking and he was able to improvise when necessary. Writing speeches required long researches and a lot of extra hours of work