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Are you playing to be a sheep?
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People accept atrocious conditions, or simply stupidities without questioning. I’m not going to talk about giving around 50% of what you make in your salary to the government in taxes. Let’s keep that for another day. Let’s talk about “changing the hour” or the Daily Saving Time thing. When was the last time that you voted for such a change? Have you been every asked? People think that they live in democracies and have right to vote or at least have an opinion. Well… the idea of changing the hour is old. Very old. Benjamin Franklin, as soon as in 1784, suggested that people could save candles by getting up earlier in the summer. He said it as a joke. But then, a New Zealander, George Hudson, an entomologist, in 1895, suggested shifting clocks to gain more daylight in the evening so that he could have more daylight after work for collecting insects. Con dos cojones! Or “with two balls”... Things like this is why I love NZ… But well… reality is that Germany was “jodida” during WWI and thought that playing with the hours could be a good idea to save energy… the guys were starving. The allies did the same, because if Germany is doing it, of course, it must be good. After the ward, the measure was abandoned... until WWII, where leaders thought that if bullets are still effective to kill people, “changing the hour” must still be good for saving energy… After the war, everyone forgot the idea… too much trouble, no real benefits. But then, the energy crisis in the 70s made that the U.S. passed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act in 1973. Then, countries started to copy Uncle Sam, until today. Today, plenty of studies have shown that the savings in energy are negligible… although that’s not the case for the effect on the health of hundreds of millions of people around the world exposed to a change in habits that they didn’t ask for… We don’t work, eat, sleep or consume energy like 100 or 50 years ago… but here we are. Absurd conventions perpetuate themselves without questioning. Lazy leaders. Customs. Playing to be a sheep. Things that you do at your company… Ideas that you have in your mind about money, your career or your personal growth… Many are just conventions imposed by someone else that probably have more negative effects than good ones. Questioning why is a superpower. This one and many others are explained in the link below. ​Join my mentorship - Only $24.90 - LAUNCHING PRICE​ By the way... There is an AI machine that says that you may like what's below. PD 1: If you liked this email, don't keep it in secret and forward it to a friend. They will thank you enormously one day. PD 2: If somebody has sent you this email and you want to receive emails like this yourself, visit vicentevalencia.com PD 3: If you want unsubscribe, click the link below. |
Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
Not the usual story about engineering genius. When George Washington Goethals took control of the project in 1907, he inherited something close to a nightmare. The French attempt had collapsed. Two American chief engineers had already left. The workforce was enormous, multinational and frustrated. People lived and worked in brutal conditions, with disease, landslides, accidents, racial discrimination and constant labour disputes surrounding the project. Goethals was a military engineer. You...
This weekend, I went to a mall. At a weird hour. But this is what you need to do to keep the kids busy. Food court. People wearing trousers two sizes bigger than necessary… Not even Lululemon, by the way. Queueing for 15 minutes at McDonald’s. The intense smell of fries and KFC… I got it very quickly. I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here. When was the last time you felt that way? Knowing you could be somewhere else, but instead you had just walked into another room smelling of...
Politics is a pain in the a$$. But you can hardly avoid it. It is hard to be brave all the time. It is hard to tell every person throwing bullsh*t into the room that they are wrong. It is also tiring. And sometimes, it can backfire. Badly. It can put you in a difficult position. And it can put the people behind you in a difficult position too. So yes. Sometimes, at high tables, you need to swallow. You need to let something pass… Let them, as Mel Robbins would say. You need to smile when you...