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Etienne Garbugli
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Homepage: http://www.lifehack.org
Posts by Etienne Garbugli
How to Set Yourself on the “Right” Path
Sep 28th
A few years ago, I stumbled on a letter I wrote to my future self when I was 15. I’ll spare you the bad writing but, it was frustrating to see how far I had strayed from the plan.
I hadn’t moved to Australia, I wasn’t an architect. I wasn’t rich and I wasn’t travelling 6 months a year.
In the eyes of 15 year old me, I was a failure, yet, I had done many other things.
Turns out, John Lennon had it right…
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
Although I had done other things and made progress in other ways, I had lost track of what my ambition wanted me to achieve.
Through being busy, I had chosen opportunities, relationships and a lifestyle that only met my short term needs. It was time for me to reclaim my ambition.
You can’t rely on serendipity
Some people are lucky, they find passion for acting, medicine or police work early in their life and stick to it. But, they’re the exception; it’s a lot harder for most of us.
Through trial and error, we’re good at discovering what we don’t want (a 9 to 5, a business, a boring job, stress) but terrible at discovering what we really want to do.
How can we know how we’ll feel about things we’ve never experienced?
At some point, whether we know what we really want to do or not no longer matters. We need to earn a living as we’re swallowed by the flow of daily life.
Along the way, serendipity might hit us or it might not; you can’t rely on it, you need to be in control.
Interrupting the flow
The first step I took in order to regain control of my ambition and stop letting life drive me was a drastic one: I moved to Asia.
Moving to Asia meant abandonning some relationships, closing a succesful consulting business, discarding many things I owned, embarking on an unclear path, but most importantly, interrupting the flow. I took a step back and started to understand what my “right” path should be.
I was away for 331 days, travelled 92,364 kms, worked, didn’t work, looked for work, started my own thing, closed my own thing and moved back with a newly gained perspective on what my life should be.
I think its a huge step to know what you want. I know how things can steamroll and often, we have a hard time to take a step back, look at the big picture, analyze, realign and move forward. – Ex-colleague
What you can do for yourself
Through being busy, we often lose our ability to take strategic life-changing decisions. Without ever wanting it, we’re swallowed by the flow and a form of self-perpetuating status quo sets in.
To reclaim control of your path, it’s essential to have time to think and know what it is you want to win in life; you need a plan.
If you have one, make sure it’s loose enough to adapt when life changes on you. If you don’t, why not set up a series of experiments to help you proceed by elimination and identify what you no longer want in life.
To force a serendipitous outcome, you can try jobs you’ve never done, mingle with people that are nothing like you, restructure your life in a completely different way or be willing to listen to opportunities you would have never listened to before.
The important thing is to realize that the best opportunities in life are not the short wins; they’re the opportunities that best match your long term vision and “right” path.
Everyone’s on a path, but are you moving in the right direction? Are you on your “right” path?
Etienne Garbugli has been dabbling in Web and entrepreneurship since the launch of his first (Geocities) Website 15 years ago. He has since launched 3 businesses, learned quite a lot and started 21lives.com to share the outcomes of his experiments.
Imitate Your Way to The Top
Aug 10th
This is truly a lifehack.
As kids, we learn by repeating what we see and hear around us. We don’t necessarily have to understand the reasons why things are done a certain way, we just do and eventually, it becomes second nature.
Then, school begins and things start to have to make sense. We no longer just repeat behaviors; we have to understand why we do the things we do. We minimize the importance of repeating success.
But, repeating or imitating success can get you very far.
After all, you’ve all heard the clichés:
If you fake it long enough you eventually become it
or
Fake it ’til you make it
It’s not lying if you believe it…
The story goes that, as a child, Theodore Roosevelt was frequently sick, had a weak body and suffered from asthma. His father once said to him: “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body.”
Roosevelt was a brilliant boy that realized early in his life that all the successful men he knew (including his father) were all models of health and good shape. So, he worked hard to build his body through an exercise program his father devised. This drive and desire to be the image he wanted to be stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Often times, pretending that you are what you say you are can be enough. Other times, as with Roosevelt, you need to put the work because, “faking it” is about credibility. You need to stop thinking that no one will believe that you’re a succesful this or that and start believing it yourself.
You need to be able to hold the lie. I know lying is not good but, sometimes, what you are right now matters less than what you will become…
Practice
Growing up, my friends and I used to outdo each other pretending we were this or that when we were going out. We used to invite ourselves to company parties pretending to work in the archive room… or go to house parties saying that we were friends of John or Jeff… It didn’t always work but, the challenge was to push the limit a bit further… For the time of an evening, I could be a swedish businessman, a tv star or a scriptwriter.
This was a lesson in understanding that, as long as you’re able to hold a role and exude confidence in it, you can get away with a lot of things. It also made me realize that you can say very audacious and daring things as long as you don’t flinch. If you’re serious and stand by what you say, people will tend to accept it as the reality.
This led me to believe that credibility is within… if you make your story realistic and have the empathy to understand the composition of the people you pretend to be, you can truly imitate your way to the top.
Until you no longer can…
I used to work with a smart, beautiful, confident and talented girl. Although her title had the word “manager” in it, she wasn’t officially a manager. This made her unhappy and eventually made her leave her job when a better opportunity presented itself.
In the next year, she would become senior manager in a tech company then, a few months later, director in a large retail chain. She was, by far, their youngest director… but, it didn’t last very long.
Ultimately, “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” (Peter Principle). She quit her job before getting fired. Turns out, it’s very hard to keep faking it.
Although you can definitely “fake” your way to success, it can be a dangerous gamble. If you don’t give yourself the time to eventually become it and adjust to your new role, you can easily fall down the ladder. Tortoise and the Hare after all…
Etienne Garbugli has been dabbling in Web and entrepreneurship since the launch of his first (Geocities) Website 15 years ago. He has since launched 3 businesses, learned quite a lot and started 21lives.com to share the outcomes of his experiments.
How I Managed to Out-Learn the Competition
Jun 21st
In my family, people read a lot. While my mother reads fiction (mostly thrillers), my father reads business books (lots of them).
Growing up, I was always fascinated by the effort and energy that my father put into underlining anything in books, reports or magazines that could be relevant to his work. It’s hard to imagine how much work that is but, to give a rough estimate, their basement is nothing but bookshelves, boxes and filing cabinets filled with knowledge.
While fascinated by the process, I was also very skeptical. Not only was it taking the fun out of reading, it was also taking him a good hour everytime he wanted to show you something…
As my father kept underlining (and still does), I joined the workforce, had ups and downs for years until I decided to quit and start my own thing.
Now, with starting your own business comes the opportunity to create your own rules and experiments. So, to address this problem, here’s what I did:
- I realized that de-centralized nuggets of knowledge weren’t searchable or worth maintaining.
- I created a simple Word document (probably works with another text processor ;).
- I systematically took note of every new thing that I learned.
- I reviewed the list every month. Combining, improving and adding elements as I went through it.
Simple no? Here’s what it did:
- It created a repository of knowledge that freed me to learn, knowing that I’m building on something solid.
- It created a list of objective insights that I could revisit, learning new things at every read.
- It allowed me to monitor my evolution and find out when I’m learning and when I’m not (gotta keep learning!).
- It allowed me to keep track of who taught me what at what time.
Learning by Sharing
I started this experiment 3 years ago. Over these 3 years, the list grew quite a bit with now close to 500 insights on topics as varied as business financing and relationships. It’s not only a who’s who list of famous insights; it also contains original thoughts and things everyday people have taught me.
Sitting on so much information led me to start blogging again. Through blogging, I’ve come to realize that, not only can we learn through peoples’ interpretations of our writing but, the process of thinking through these simple insights generated many many new ideas.
Out-Learning the Competition
It’s very easy to buy all the bestselling business books and read everything novel that comes up on Twitter or your favorite blogs but, your competitors probably do the same and… this will only lead to information overload.
The real goal with knowledge – and where you can out-learn your competitors – is to internalize learnings and let things you learn change you. After all, you can know the name of all the tools in the shed but, if you’ve never learned to use any of them, your knowledge isn’t worth very much.
By actively seeking opportunities to learn, absorb and reinterpret knowledge, you build the thinking that will allow you to out-learn and, eventually, out-teach your competitors.
Make sure you have the best learning process in your market. Reading is only half the battle.