Freedom is not free

I've been having a hard time with balancing my time with studies and personal life - you know, with the following taking a lot more time as I'm an exchange student. That's also why my blog has faced the not unusual dilemma of lack of updates. There is no balance, there are only trade-offs.

This text is about some feelings from September, which was already from more than a month ago. Let's see if I'm able to identify with my past self.

Ooh and good news, everyone! I was selected for blogging for the world students in Korea! I'm a member of the 4th batch.

2. Feel
Freedom, energy

Freedom

I need freedom. That's not necessarily as easy as you're led to believe, as there are a lot of forces opposing whatever deviates from the norm. Besides, too much freedom generates anxiety so you'll need to balance the level of freedom anyway. Here are some requirements for the freedom that I require:

I need approval from others. The environment I live in and its attitudes affect the quality of my life. Well, that's obvious, but let me explain further how this is connected with freedom.

Basically, the society can provide you with two opposing ends of environment. The first one is the (mostly) western one where you are an individual who's independent and responsible for yourself. Now there are a lot of good things about that and ultimately we see the western world having the upper hand in productivity etc. However, the alternative to the individualist environment is the collective environment. Here you basically belong to a part of a group. I'm not talking about communism or any other theory that has no relevance in the real world. Rather, I think there's a correlation for left-wing and right-wing politics and what I just described. My point of bringing this up is that some people have a need of belonging while others don't have that need or it's lower.

From these two environmental opposites I need to find a compromise of the both, as I am looking for freedom but on the other hand I also need a sense of belonging and am not as strong as the alpha male you think of when you hear Tarzan or Batman. The conclusion is that I probably won't have a future in Finland because of the scarce population and respect for the quiet & strong type. This conclusion isn't a very good one, though, as it only excludes Finland where I have my family and friends. Is it possible to find a place where the opposites meet at my ideal environment? That remains to be seen. What I'm going to do about this is to continue my career in the organization which so far has provided me with an ideal environment. Just take a look at this.

What else do I need to reach the freedom I want? I need to find the opportunities that provide it to me. First of all: I need to socialize, I need friends. Long story short, I didn't have many friends earlier in my life which is why I appreciate them even more right now. Provided that I have friends that I can count on I can freely do the things I want to do and there's someone who doesn't judge me. At the moment I'm going towards the right direction.

Friends: I'm quite satisfied with the way I'm now able to trust the people in my life. This means that I haven't always been able to do or say anything without being deceived. This doesn't mean that I'm able to trust as much as I'd like to, though. Were I able to share my experiences with more people and receive attention to something that's important to me I believe I'd be happier. There are so many barriers that we face when trying to communicate with people we'd like to get to know better. For me the most important thing is to be able to break the cultural norms. Often I notice myself doing something that wouldn't be accepted if it wasn't done on purpose; that I do it on purpose and jokingly makes the others realize the humor in it. Not everyone identifies with my humor of course, which sometimes leads to undesirable situations. My way out is the people I can trust.

The most concrete thing I need for my freedom is resources. The tangible. The money. The rich and the famous. I've been pretty lucky to have nice parents and relatives who've provided me with what I've needed. That's why I believe I've developed a certain base value: I don't care about money. Riight. I think I'll need to explain this.

The intangible. I believe I'm good at what I do: conceptual thinking, such as leadership, organizations et cetera. And I know I'm not that good about details. I know that you need to have a certain formula for profit maximization and I know how it works - that's enough for me. I don't care about writing down the formula and calculating the optimal costs and revenues.

What I still need is more education to have the structures to work on them and to convince people (myself included) that there's value to be gained from my work. I need experience from working on these structures.

Now I'm not going to go deeper into this, but the point is that I'm sure there will be demand for what I do - besides, I don't really care about five star hotels and sht so even if there's financial risk involved I'm ok with it.




Energy

Energy is something that I've been looking for for a long time. I guess I've been doing good in my life so far and all that, but I often feel and consequently also look tired without no clear explanation for it. Because of that I'm not even going to start on trying to find the reasons for it and will write about my way of dividing tasks based on energy levels: robotic, explanatory and imaginative. I base this division on the tasks I need to accomplish to be able to write my blog.

a. Robotic: routine, no-brainers.

Example: Transferring data from my diary to my blog. The kind of tasks where I'm at my worst. Being a lazy badass is good because what I do I do well and effectively because I don't want to waste time and energy on it. But you simply can't avoid the routines.

b. Explanatory: based on robotic, need to analyze & express them.

Example: What I'm doing right now. I have the thoughts, I have the keywords - but then there's communication. What an easy world it would be if we didn't need it. I need to spend energy on explaining you the thoughts I have and I try to do it in a way that helps you understand my thoughts.

c. Imaginative: need the flow, the less inhibited the better.

Example: Brainstorming. This is my favorite as you now can tell. My mind is my room. Untidy, and at times I need to clean it. It's not the cleaning part that I don't like; it's getting started. That's what takes energy, and from then on I usually get on a roll. Kind of like daydreaming; I don't need to think about what others would think. I just need to make sense, or not really even that. Just making connections with things you usually wouldn't make a connection with.

Getting things done requires not only the structure and routines (see a, b, c above) for getting them done but also, and more importantly, self-discipline for it. How to do that depends on who you are - my self-discipline depends on relationships. I've found that I need to have somebody to push me to do things or to feel that somebody needs me to do whatever task is at question. I believe the other source of self-discipline

This is very very much connected to motivation, but not exactly the same thing. Where motivation is the driving factor for you to start doing things, structure is there to support you and self-discipline works as the whip.

I'd love to be able to draw a picture of this but that's not really one of my strengths. Quite nasty being a visual learner and then not being able to draw huh? Yes that's the same video again, I like to emphasize my point

I don't remember if I told you about my after-conference feeling before. Basically I use the concept for the mood I have the day after going out when I'm sleep-deprived and my brain cells are sleeping. The open-mindedness and free-flow thinking I get from it has enabled progress in my projects related to change management. The downside of this after-conference feeling is that I'm tired and anxious, kind of neurotic: sometimes I need to move, can't stand still and occasionally feel hyperactive. But the upside, again: I find the state of uninhibitedness very effective to progress with my thoughts.

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Time has gone fast. I'm writing this blog from the notes in my diary and one of them says wow, I can't believe it's week 2 already. I almost feel bad for not writing this stuff earlier as I now only have 5 weeks left here. Then again, I believe it's more important that I at least have the notes in my diary. Maybe that way you'll get to read about them one day.