Pen Thoughts

Sometimes I enjoy flipping my notebooks to read some quotes I registered from different authors or articles; today, I stumbled against an article quoting Morgan Housel , a columnist at Wall Street and an author as far as I know. I never had the chance to read anything for him though. The quotes were about finding the balance between optimism and pessimism; I guess it is the perfect timing for my Lebanese peers to read this out; here you go: "Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that's incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favour, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact, you know it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.&qu

  I read the following by writer and entrepreneur Kevin Kelly on the value of friends “Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.” with a bit of sarcastic opportunism, i tend to fully agree :) cheers to #Friends #entrepreneurship #entrepreneur #MondayThoughts

I remember in 2016, I came back from UNESCO seminar for youth in France, having met hundreds of people from all over the world, I was in euphoria. I participated therein "culture and faith" exhibition from East Asia. It made me realized so many things. I had discussions with speakers, monks and youth from different faiths and different backgrounds. I bought a book there for Sharon Salzberg: "Faith". I will write a small passage here that I like and hold as conviction: "It's not the existence of beliefs that is the problem, but what happens to us when we hold them rigidly, without examining them when we presume the absolute centrality of our views and become disdainful of others"

I was reading "A Short Guide to a Happy Life" by author Anna Quindlen on building a spirit a couple of years ago and I took notes from the book, as I usually do. to my surprise, I got the same paragraph by email today; so I thought to share it with everybody as a little reflection: "There are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul. People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit. But a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, ... You cannot be really first-

I had the honour to meet yesterday one of the greatest cleric social workers in Lebanon, currently the Archibishop of Zahle for the Christian Catholic family, his Excellence Issam Darwish. I heard so many stories about him before the actual meeting. His reputation is as white as it could be. He created Dar El Sadaqa technical school and orphanage, in his own words: "to answer the needs of the communities". After he initiated the orphanage (Al Dar) in Ksara area, he fought to change the support system within the Ministry of Social Affairs, which they were surprisingly positive to his proposition, terminating the work of orphanages and support families to keep their offsprings at home (of course the positivity died with time passing, for it, was a successful initiative, like every success in this miserable country that was put to sleep). This initiative could have affected negatively Al Dar. Yet, in his excellency's mind, the prosperity of the association that he crea

Two men were travelling from one town to another. They came to a stream that had risen due to heavy rainfall. Just when they were about to cross the water, they noticed a young, beautiful woman standing there all alone, in need of help. One of the men immediately went to her side. He picked the woman up and carried her in his arms across the stream. Then he dropped her there, waved good-bye, and the two men went their way. During the rest of the trip, the second traveller was unusually silent and sullen, not responding to his friend's questions. After several hours of sulking, unable to keep silent anymore, he said, "why did you touch that woman? she could have seduced you! Men and Women cannot come into contact like that!" The first man responded calmly, "my friend, I carried the woman across the stream, and that is where I left her. it is you who have been carrying her ever since."  "Some people are like that" "They carry thei

Useless information that I would like to share! Larry wasn't the first to discover copy paste. In 1940, scientist Barbara McClintock discovered that if she damaged the DNA in corn maize, the plant would reconstruct the damaged section by making a copy of other parts of the DNA strand, then pasting them into the damaged area. DNA was the first to use copy past # JustSaying   # DealWithIt   # GoogleIt   # TrueStory

A fish was swimming one day in a cool pond at the high western mountains of Lebanon, happily and peacefully. A frog came along and asks the fish: "Heyy, how is the water". The fish look at the frog surprisingly and blankly, responding: "What's water"! If you live in Lebanon, you don't need wittiness to understand who's the fish and who's the frog might be. Yet it is always surprising how resistant some Lebanese on seeing clearly the true colours of our crisis; thus, are completely blind on who hold the responsibilities. It could be blindness, collusion of interests and/or a mixture of both. In any case, this never stop being a perplexing dilemma for Lebanese citizens who have freed themselves from the slavery of sectarian autocrats, or to whom have never given their knees. Even when it comes to advanced liberal forces who have fought against the tyranny of neighbours, they have fallen, as their pride did, into the cracks of the sectarian sy

Organizational Development was always part of what I do. Many disciplines that I went through during the university years, being a double major student in Accounting/Finance and Software Engineering, developed my abilities to understand organizational structures and dynamics. It allowed me as well to continuously learn and change perspectives about how things work in an organization. The learning years have rewired my brain to understand everything in a structured fashion. Accounting and Software Engineering are two rigidly organized sets of learning that are essential pillars for any organization to do business. My background allowed me to work in positions that profited from all the skills I learned during my study years. Even now, in my current job as an operations manager, the combination of skills and knowledge base gave me an edge, an advanced lookup on the optimistic ways to organize the work and obtain results. However, almost always the project management success remaine

I was born in Lebanon in 1981. until the day I started to gain consciousness about my surrounding social paradigm, I learned two things. Our reactions as a cultural entity highly depend on emotions. We can be stupid and illogical. A lot of things changed during my 38 years of living in this shit hole. but the abovementioned facts never changed. In fact, it got worse. We believe silly lies. We discuss meaningless subjects. We do useless jobs, though we hate it, we never try to change. We say whatever it comes from our one cell brain without owning any responsibility. We are fearless and full of fears at the same time. Utterly sectorial. Full of empathy and careless at the same time. We have to admit firs that our downfall, the current one more precisely, is a direct implication of our destructive mindset, contradictive and irresponsible behavior. Lebanon, this is what we are, own it