I have written a a brief post about balance. About the lute that is not too tight, nor too slack. If you read the post, the poem below is the most beautiful expression of what Buddha meant when talking about the lute.

Ultimately we are here on this journey to experience everything that life can offer. Good or bad. When thinking about finding our calling, I have changed my view what “our calling” actually is. Looking at it pragmatically you have couple of shots in your lifetime to be true specialist or many calls when you choose to be generalist. By simple math, I choose to be generalist since I have not discovered my calling by the time I was 15. Not that you have to but it gets little but more complicated over time. Our nature is to control the outcome, in this case the outcome is our life. I believe we must oscilate between risking and stabilizing. Without taking new risks, challanges we can live in comfort but never truly figure out what our calling actually is. So why so many people prefers boring comfort over riskier finding of their potential? Fear! Fear that has been defined in our past. So in order to find your calling, I believe you must go to your past and clean the fears you have in order to find your calling. Your calling paradoxically lies in cleaning your past, not in your future. Then you can go and take risks, experiment, be smart, find confluences of contexts you are interested in and create new domains merged by those contexts, unique to your skillset. That is I believe you can find your calling and it can happen at any stage of your life. Good luck!

Our past defines our future. If we understand what things we fear, what beliefs we have formed around those fears to feel more "safe" (which is yet only another illusion), we can free our trapped souls from past and stop fearing future. By talking through situations and uncertainties we have faced when our beliefs were formed, we can clearly see that those beliefs were created based on things that do not make any sense, yet we are still driven by them. When we analyze, in my case what works best for me is free writing, those situations we can free that trapped soul from the past. 

Lets face it! We are just mammals with brain enabling for better cognitive skills then our animal competition. Never forget that. As humans we usually forget that we are just animals with all our primary instincts that happened to live in the age of 5G internet and handheld devices smarter then any scholar in the history of mankind. By forgetting who we really are (hairy monkeys with developed prefrontal cortex), we beat ourselves up too much too often for having limits, for not being good enough, for not remembering important information or tasks, for forgetting, for not always behaving according to social standards and on and on and on. Then we have to live with this guilt that is stored over and over deep into our beliefs and later develops into depressions, burnouts or other modern age health conditions. This self-imposing guilt, this not forgiving to ourself, this forgetting who we really are is simply not serving us well and is stopping us from living life the way we have been given it to live: to learn and experience life in all its forms (good and bad). So lets stop being too hard on ourself, we are "just" hairy monkeys with more developed brain.

Trust is elementary attribute in a colaboration success. If you feel safe with your colleagues, you know that team has one shared goal and don’t have to compete between each other, you can easily speak up and express your opinion. If all people can freely express their opinion, multiple contexts are then assembled and strong narrative can be build. Trust is also key factor in having thoughtful disagreement when disagreement appears. If we trust each other and we agree on how we should resolve this disagreement we can build this narrative much faster. That is why every leader should focus first on building the trust first within the team. 

Over the years from childhood to adulthood we build masks and patterns (beliefs) that define us. After we climb at our first mountain (achieve things we always thought will make us happy and achieve success from the society point of view) we realize that lots of these beliefs were false beliefs created to get approval of others, to get their love, to avoid fears and not to get hurt. We have to start unlearning those old beliefs and learning start learning new one. I believe it is our journey in the life we got to learn from this experience. One thing I have been experiencing on this journey has been the sense of accepting whatever fear I have. In the past I was mainly absorbed by the fear and then try to avoid it at all cost but recently I have found out that what we resist, persists. The more we resist it, the stronger it gets. Whenever I feel I am worried or scared, I immediately change my approach and rather then resisting and try to welcome my fear and accept that I can have this fear. I am allowing myself all spectrum of emotions not judging myself anymore. I also try to understand what belief triggered this particular response. 

Since more and more of what we do moves into the cyber world, we are plugged and becoming more and more reactive. System wants us to be reactive so we can buy more shit we dont need and obey orders of so called trendsetters and fake role models without even knowing it. I believe we are growing into the age when if the page does not load within first 3 seconds or the on-boarding process is not super straightforward, we are out of here. Right? They do not deserve our attention, they did no make it easy for us so fuck them, right? Add little bit of multi-tasking ideally with high degree of context switing and that only certain neurons are firing when we are consumed by cyberworld and no muscles are used (your handwriting is totally different to your keyboard writing in terms of what parts of brain are activated). Sum it all up together and you have a recipe for impatient obediant cyber junkie.

I have learned the hard way that life is about seeking that balance. Like a string on the lute not too tight, not too slack. Living extreme for some time but knowing how to get back to your bat-cave regularly to rebalance, recalibrate (because even Batman had a bat-cave). One of these mids is your void. Your core. Your solar plexus. Place of endless energy and love. Place where you can connect and get in touch with the ultimate power of now. Place where statements like these are truly working: "That who is aware of fear, cant be fearful. That who is aware of anxiety, cant be anxious". I encourage all of us to search for our mid, our core in everything we do. It teaches us patience and focus. It teaches the way how we can magically slow down the time just by our mind. It is time to seek that mid in everything we do and this maybe a good encouragement to pause and ask yourself today, where is the mid I can tune in today?

After five years of hard work and good laughs, long days and countless travels, I have quit the company I have helped to built. It was a hell of a ride. We have grown the company from 20 people to 150 people in the development (DevTribes as we like to call it) and build four development offices in both Czech Republic and Belarus. We went through all possible and known failures such as:

You know the story. You have been hurt. Somebody stepped into your territory and break your toys. Sometimes stole those toys from you. That emotion has strengthen that neural pathway connected to this memory. It created pattern for the future. Your future is now defined by your past. There is a saying, show me your past and I will tell you your future. Unless you forgive those who created that emotional synapse firing in the past, you cant move forward in the future. Because even if you leave people who created this emotional injustice, there will be other people firing the same pattern over and over no matter where you will go. And the more energy you will give to this emotional injustice, the stronger those neural pathways will be in the future for whatever similar situation no matter where you will go. Fortunately we have been given great tool in our mind toolkit: forgiveness. By forgiveness we can heal our wounds, we can weaken those pathways that are damaging for our mind and body. It is time to identify those old and new grudges and time to forgive.