quality-friends

Friends, not the tv series, but the friends we have in our lives and who are divided on many categories. Every now and then we look at these categories, we try to sift them and mostly we move friends from a category to another given the moments and experiences we have lived and this behavior looks so natural as humans.

Then you meet 1 new person, in a social gathering or at your workplace or thru common friends.

At the beginning, you are cautious then with time you start discovering how good this person is and how much value and positivity he is bringing into your life. With more time, you get to know how ethical and transparent he is to this friendship, and how this person sometimes becomes a mentor on many and different subjects (life and/or business), then you realize that all these positive qualities and attitudes are given to you without expecting anything in return while he keeps pushing you all the way up by being extremely supportive and without judging you.

Yes, quality friends can still be found! I have found one.

anger management

Sometime ago I was reading an article over the net about managing your moments of anger and how to reply to angry emails and keep the life and business ethics running smoothly without ruining your relationships. The writer of the article was proposing to start a new email and writing in it all what you are feeling, good and bad things (but most probably you will include the bad things) then not sending the email to the person in question but instead to save it in your draft folder and come back to it after a period of time, till you cool down.

Few days later and luckily after reading the article, I had to deal with someone (will keep calling him someone in the blog post instead of losing time finding him a more appropriate word, as it is not worth it). This someone behaved in a very weird way (and not for the 1st time) and I was so angry that I wanted to say many things I felt just in his face and suddenly I remembered this famous article and I directly went to my Gmail, and started writing until I decided that it was enough and without reading back what I wrote I saved the email in the draft folder.

I came back to it few times later and it was so interesting seeing what people can say in a moment of anger (no matter if what you are saying is right or wrong), at one point I really felt relieved because I did not send the email, not because I am afraid of this someone, but because I think some people will not change no matter what you tell them, or how nice or bad you are to them.

And because those who don’t understand your silence, will never understand your words. Cheers To Life!!!

Few days back I saw a question on Quora asking: “Is there a person, a stranger, whom you met once in your life and are likely to never meet again, who affected you in some profound way?” and yes it made think of a stranger i met 2 years ago.

It was in December 2011 while having my camera and was strolling in Warsaw, Poland where I met a beggar, I had my eye in the viewfinder and waiting for the right moment to snap it and then suddenly he turned and looked at me and gave me a smile.

A smile that means a lot when i look back at his photo, maybe for him it meant yes you can take my photo and drop me few coins to get some food, or he used to get snapped by total strangers and this was his way to look cool, but every time i remember this guy or look at his photo, it means “don’t worry, be happy”!

warsaw beggar

“I want to be rich.”
This is a statement every single human being said once in his life, if not loudly, then with himself. Everybody wants to be rich, the poor wants to be rich and the rich wants to be even richer.

Some people are born rich and some people become rich because of hard work, of luck and sometimes a combination of both (hard work + luck) and few times because of illegal work.

But no matter how someone gets rich, they suddenly start thinking they are or became more intelligent and wiser and start seeing things from a different perspective and much better than someone standing next to them and looking from the same angle, which unfortunately most of the time is incorrect.

I don’t know why, but suddenly the whole world looks so simple for them, they start asking for problems because they think they have the solutions for everything. They allow themselves being philosophic and throwing life theories to the right and to the left and whenever they are present in a room, they believe they are the most clever person in that room. Even sometimes they convince themselves they are from a different mankind than the regular and average people.

For those who are born rich, I am sure if we take everything from them and ask them to start from scratch without any resources, sadly most of them won’t make it, even to 1% of what they have when they were born rich.

For those who became rich, no matter how hey did it, please don’t forget that few days back, you were still one of those average class people.

Many of friends who read my blog will feel concerned, I have friends who were born rich and friends who became rich, please don’t take personal.

And as a friend said to me back 12 years ago, “nobody believes me because I am not rich”.

I am reading my 1st ebook in 2012 called “I was blind but now i see” by James Altucher and I would like to share with you an excerpt about crappy people.

There are only four types of people. If you understand in advance how to deal with each of these four types you will be infinitely happier. Ultimately, interacting with the four types in the way I describe below will make one fit firmly into the first type, however difficult it is. That’s the goal. You don’t want to go through life unhappy.

#1 Happy.
#2 People in pain.
#3 Good people.

#4 Crappy people: People who will do you harm, no matter what you do, for no reason at all. They never will get it. They will say and do things to you and they will never ever understand how evil they are.

And you will hate them. HATE THEM. And they knock on the door of your brain at three in the morning and they want to yell at you. And you yell back. And they yell back. And on and on. All day. All afternoon. The ongoing conversation with the shittiest people in the world. They will torture you, kill you, rape your wife and slit the thoughts out of your mind and not even care because they think they are doing the right thing. You know who I’m talking about. Because you have a good 20 or 30 of these in your life just like I do. They might even be former friends, relatives, neighbors, bureaucrats, whatever, whoever, whenever. They swoop down on your life and are just plain crappy and they won’t even know it.

Sometimes, in a weak moment, I think to myself: What if I run into them again? How badly I will hurt and destroy them. Maybe just casually walk up to them and smash a glass over their head so their nose is broken, glasses broken on the floor, blood all over their face. Arm broken after I hold the elbow and stomp on it.

STOP!

This is the worst category. I’ll tell you one more anecdote. Two seconds ago someone posted a horrible comment on my blog. I won’t repeat it. Racist, mean, rude to me, whatever. I deleted the post, blocked the user, blocked his IP address. And then I was going to send him an email telling him what I thought of him. I was angry. Then I stopped myself. You have to stop yourself.

Remember this: When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig gets happy.

There is only ONE only way to deal with these people in a way that will make you happier instead of sadder. ONE WAY. And it always works. COMPLETELY IGNORE THE EVIL PEOPLE:

  • Completely ignore them.
  • Don’t think about them.
  • Don’t talk to them.
  • Don’t write them.
  • Most important: Don’t give them advice. They will NEVER listen to your advice. It’s arrogant and stupid to think they will. It will only lead to more cycles of pain for you. The goal for me is to stop all cycles that cause me any pain at all. Giving advice to crappy people will only result in more pain for you. That’s the only possible result. Much better to be happy than to flush knotted up brown advice down a toilet that caused you agony to push out. This is hard.
  • Most important: Never gossip about them behind their backs. Just completely disregard. We don’t care about their happiness or how evil they are. We only care about you. Its hard to do. Never ever talk about them behind their backs. Repeat this 500 times. This is hard also. Because it’s an addiction.

James Altucher is an American hedge fund manager, author and blogger.

Altucher is the founder of StockPickr, which was sold to TheStreet.com in 2007. He also was the founder of Reset, a developer of websites for entertainment companies (including HBO, Miramax, New Line, BMG, and Sony), which he sold in 1998.

He was a weekly columnist from 2004-2009 for The Financial Times, and wrote articles for The Street.com Seeking Alpha, and Daily Finance. He frequently appears on CNBC, and has written several books on investing. Altucher is a frequent guest contributor to The Daily Ticker feature on Yahoo! Finance & TechCrunch.