Reflections on the year

(more a post for myself than for anyone else...)

One year ago today I left Venezuela.

Since then I have been: a person just quite joyous to be home, then a person a bit bored at home, then a crazy job seeker, a very motivated interviewee, an enthusiastic Christmas market stall-holder, a high-value IT contractor and finally I reached the objective of getting a position in the Capgemini graduate scheme and moving to the big big city.

Over the year, I’ve caught up with many great friends and – since moving to London anyway – certainly made a few more. I have begun to build up a social circle full of people who I enjoy spending time with – definitely work in progress but getting there. I have properly entered the corporate world – some aspects of which are great and some slightly frustrating. I’ve had a few adventures, but certainly not on the scale of the year previously!

It feels a bit like it’s almost been a year in transition, moving from one world to another, trying to find my place in this new world while at the same time trying to hold onto or re-establish the things I enjoyed about the old one – doing something creative that I’m passionate about, working with great inspiring people and living a life of exploration and adventure.

I’m part of the way there, but it feels a bit like compromises have been made, or things aren’t quite where I want them to be. This is the reality. And it is – at least somewhat – in my control. So I am going to make the most of it and I am going to steer it in the direction I want it to go.

And what will the next year hold? Seeking new challenges in my professional life, continuing to find great people to share my life with and making sure to live some fun adventures both around London and in some far away lands.

That’s the idea anyway. We’ll see what happens!

Expressed without words

Wall-E is Pixar's greatest film yet.


The real beauty of it is the simplicity.

That so much can be expressed in a film where the two main characters say no words except for each other's names is an inspiring reflection on the human race.

Companionship, joy, surprise, dance, laughter, beauty, fear, purpose, love - all these things can be expressed without words. All these things can be shared across humanity, regardless of background, culture, language or preconceptions.

So this is not only a story about love; it is a story about humanity. More specifically, it is about our place on this planet, and what we are doing to ourselves as a society and as a world.


Wall-E is set 700 years into the future. Earth has been abandoned and the entire human race lives aboard a gigantic pleasure-cruising spacecraft. Everything is comfortable, every need is taken care of, every amenity is provided. Everything runs according to the pleasant and monotonous daily routine of "perfection".

But in that routine, life of course loses all meaning. If everything stays the same, and there is no challenge or surprise, then what's the point?

The sad reality is, right now, for many people, that kind of life is what they are striving for. We plug in our iPods, shut ourselves off on our daily commute, play our trivial games on our phones, go through our day’s work, eat our microwave food, watch our on-demand TV, absorb some advertising, then repeat. We spend far too much time on making trivial choices and enjoying completely superficial entertainment, slowly making things more and more comfortable and convenient for the next generation.

That can’t possibly be our purpose on this planet. That can’t possibly bring us real joy, fulfilment and happiness.

In the film, the real joy comes when humanity realises that no matter how difficult it will be, it must return to earth, cultivate the planet, take action, strive to become at one with the ecosystem of our world once more, and to reconstruct a society based on human passion and endeavour.

This is the real important message of the film: Joy doesn’t come from routine or comfort, it comes from seeking new adventure, challenging ourselves, finding a greater purpose, working together to achieve something that at first may seem almost impossible.

Laughter Clubs

Children at Heart

The Laughter Club. What a great concept.

If all those around you are laughing, it is impossible not to laugh. One of the universal human truths across all cultures?

Apparently the human body cannot tell the difference between fake laughter and real laughter.

There are around 6000 laughter clubs in 50 different countries, with people just getting together to share in the experience of laughter and embrace the joyous ridiculousness of it all.

I think I have to try this.

Next session in London is Wednesday 20th August, 6.30pm at Lincoln's Inn Playing Fields near Holborn.

Learning to fly

I am in quite a philosophical and reflective mood of late.

This is inspired by:

1. On Saturday, attending a great session called Life After Now run by a great guy called Houston Spencer. It was all about challenging our ideas of what we wanted in life, and how we intend to go about achieving that. A life of passion, if we so choose.

2. Which then led me to buy a beautiful and wonderful book - Jonathon Livingston Seagull: A Story.

The story is about a seagull learning to fly, really learning to fly. But it's really about life. And meaning. It makes you think, a lot. It made me realise a few things that I already knew about what really is important.

I urge you to read the Seagull book. It will probably change your outlook just slightly, in a very good way. It will at least make you smile, in a big way.

quite world people, great things

These are the words I have used most in my blog.

Clearly I'm not very good at adjectives, but it definitely pleases me that world, people and things are what I care about (actually not sure about things, I wonder if I mean tangible or intangible things?), and community and experience are important to me.

Right now I am in quite a comfortable world, I don't have too many things and I have a few special people around me. I am part of several communities and I am experiencing a few great things.

Increasing the people, communities and experiences levels will be a good thing. Things things things. Everything's a thing. Oops, now I've done it.

CSR in balance

One of the great things about the company that I work for is we do some really interesting Corporate Responsibility stuff. My manager calls it CSR in balance, meaning that he chooses initiatives that benefit both the community and as well as us, the employees, and in turn, the company. It makes sense. A couple examples of "extra-curricular" activities I've done already in my short time with Capgemini:

1. A community project with Raleigh International

Raleigh International gives people of all ages experiences that allow them to make a difference to communities and environments all over the world.

A couple weeks ago, 23 people from my programme spent a weekend in a big lodge somewhere in Surrey rejuvenating a nearby forest area for the community. It was beside a pretty poor council estate, and had previously been used by drug addicts, and filled with quad bikes, burned out cars, etc. But it's been under development for a few years so is now being used by the community in a good way now.

Filling up the dumpers

Our main task was to build a path through the forest to enable access for parents with prams, the elderly, dog-walkers, etc. Turned out this was quite a physically demanding task indeed, as we had to cart many tons of recycled motorway that we were using for paving. Lots of running around with very heavy wheelbarrows!

Constructing JD Corner

As well as definitely helping to foster a good team spirit and sense of community in our group, we were given quite a lot of responsibility in terms of deciding how we would structure the work and form work-teams to carry out various tasks.

Leadership

We all got a chance to lead some part of the project for about half a day - this is where the value of the experience really comes in. As the first leader of the path building team, people turned to me to make decisions about how we would start this off. So very quickly and with no more information than everyone else, I had to decide how we would do things and adapt this as we saw what worked well and what didn't.

One thing that was really interesting is as everyone gained confidence in what they were doing over the weekend, the effective leadership style changed into less decision-making and a more nurturing style, supporting and encouraging people who were by now quite exhausted but still working very hard.

I think this is quite an accurate reflection of situations that would present themselves during the leadership of a consulting project: having to make quick decisions with limited knowledge, and later on effectively using the knowledge that various team members have built up.

In the end we all felt a really big sense of achievement as we saw the first members of the public enjoying our beautiful woodland path:

The path receives its first actual user!

2. Bringing business to life for school students with Business Dynamics

I took my first proper volunteering day on Friday, with a charity called Business Dyanmics that goes into schools all over the UK to get young people excited about the world of business.

I like getting people excited about things, so I was up for this.

With just a short training session behind me, and a basic activity plan, I was pretty much thrown in at the deep end, in charge of a class of 30 13-year old boys for an entire school day.

Quite challenging

Having had almost no experience working with children, this was quite a challenging experience to say the least. Very exhausting, but very rewarding.

The idea of the day was to split them into teams each representing a small company who was to design, prototype, market and pitch an idea for a new roller-coaster at a large theme park - all the time relating what they are doing to my own experience and stories of the exciting world of business.

On one hand, it is quite an easy crowd as they do automatically have at least some respect for adults and they are excited to have a school day that's not just their normal lessons.

But as soon as you bring out the interactive activities and they're in teams working away with paper and card and a single marble shared between the whole class, boy have you got trouble!

I did manage to maintain order for a time, but at one point it did just descend into chaos with teams trying to buy and sell people from each other, people being fired, others quitting, the marble mysteriously disappearing, and even the odd outbreak of minor violence.

It was certainly a blessing to always have a real teacher in the room to bring everything back to order every now and then. They are amazingly talented people and I now have *a lot* of respect for them.

But very rewarding

I was very impressed with the creativity and enthusiasm of the students, and very encouraged that several of the teams realised that a key issue would be building and running their roller-coaster in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly way.

Seeing the final presentations and discussing with them what their key learnings had been during the day was really great. They talked about growing in confidence, learning about working in a team, enjoying the day a lot, and wanting to do business studies and even start their own businesses when they're older.

Certainly kids these days are slightly less respectful of authority and harder to control, but I do think they are also more entrepreneurial and have more of a sense of the issues in business.

But a couple things I did have to clarify - no, I have not been on Deal or No Deal, and no, I do not (quite) earn enough to own a Ferrari :-)

Green Smoothies?!?

118 188 recently launched a service in the UK whereby you can ask any question by text message and they will send you an answer. Any Question Answered (63336) have been doing this for years.

Today, I had a question. (I have been experimenting with alternatives to coffee in the morning)

I just bought a freshly-made smoothie this morning. It contained red berries, juice, yoghurt and an energy shot. It was pink/red but now it has changed green. Why?

Both sent me an answer within a few minutes, but you can see the quality of the answers really varies:

118 118: If you refrigerated the smoothie, the color might not change but if it does, that indicates that it already passed out. Thank you!

63336: Fresh cut or mashed fruit oxidise rapidly in the air. Depending on the initial mixture can go brown or greenish colour. Lemon juice would slow the rot.

Passed out??? That's not even proper English! (neither is color). Dubious.

Very impressed with 63336's answer though. Explained the problem, and gave a solution. I'm off to tell Pure California to put some lemon juice in their smoothies...

Bit of a random blog, I know. Have been enjoying things far too much to blog :-)

I built an awesome path (challenging and rewarding, painful afterwards), went on my first stag do (crazy and great times with old friends) and may or may not have participated in a "very irresponsible" party on the tube ahead of "them" banning alcohol on it (one of the most random nights of my life). Tomorrow I'm going back to school.

Yes, I am working too :-)

Maybe the smoothie was going green to celebrate World Environment Day.

London, Induction Week, Roundabouts, Barcelona and Urban Golf

Wow, it's been quite some time. How things have changed.

This is going to be one of those "compress everything into one big post" things, just to warn you!

A joyous train journey – with all my valued possessions crammed into two very large suitcases – saw me make the move to London on March 7th to embark on the great career.

And it started off pretty great, with a week-long induction welcoming the ten of us into the Business Technology Consultants programme. There was lots of corporate branding, several Vice-Presidents, lots of chocolate and coffee to fuel us and (of course) some great team-building activities. By the end of the week I knew I was in the right place – a very valued business unit and intimate community within Capgemini with loads of opportunity to develop and find my place in a company that is innovating, progressing, growing and leading.

Then the shock of the first assignment as all of us were whisked away to the small town of Telford – roundabout capital of the world – for our first taste of the consultant lifestyle of long train journeys and living in generic hotels… and working long hours on a high profile and very time-critical project for a very big client. It was a lot of fun, and a good chance for us to bond further as a group, within the confines of our generic hotel in our generic business park of course. Although we did make a few notable forays outside, including one to marvel at the very first iron bridge in the world (in a town coincidentally called Ironbridge) and enjoy some fantastic Thai food.

And I spontaneously spent a weekend in or near Barcelona, mainly to piss someone off by missing their phenomenal party, but also to see a whole load of AIESECers who’d come over for Iberoamerica's regional conference. Best moment was arriving at the hotel at midnight and being greeted very loudly by 20 Venezuelans most of whom didn’t know I was coming :-) Great stuff.

They've come a long way. Last year we were less than half that number at the conference, and the AIESEC Venezuela was officially "on alert". So I felt very proud that those two things had turned around and the country is now a full member once again, and to hear about the successes of some of the accounts that I had started. It was really great to be in that atmosphere again, but I also know it was the right decision and it was time to move on.

It was really fun exploring Barcelona – it's a really vibrant city with a very nice lifestyle. I do miss the adventure of life in another country a little. I think it's the uncertainly, not knowing quite what to expect, being surprised by things. That happens less in London.

But it does feel good to be living here. There's a lot going on. I've had a lot of fun doing all those typical touristy things with various visitors from around the world. Last weekend Drew and Lina came to visit. The highlight was definitely Urban Golf. What an idea! Right in the middle of Soho, you can find yourself anywhere in the world playing golf. Naturally, we chose Pebble Beach, California. The idea is you have a big projector screen, and a set of very nice (and real) golf clubs and a bunch of balls to whack right into the screen, where they magically turn into virtual balls in a kind of Wii-like experience but on a much grander and more realistic scale.

At one point Drew did manage to get a ball to rebound off the roof and hurtle towards our table – where it could have caused havoc and only narrowly missed about three glasses. Apparently nobody's been injured "yet". I'd certainly feel much safer if they provided helmets. They should also give you 3D glasses and have a small fan to simulate the fresh air that I think is quite an integral part of the golfing experience. Golf carts would be a plus too. Man, it could be so much better! Anyone else have experiences with unusual sporting locations or novel simulation ideas? Or slightly crazy things to do in London?