Category: Thoughts & Scribbles

A quick random thought…

When the weather is beautiful and all spring-like; everyone says this is a perfect day to be out and about, not to be wasted in-doors.

When the weather is cold and gloomy; everyone says this day is best spent snuggled up in front of the TV drinking something hot.

When the weather is hot and stuffy; everyone says this day is best spent at the beach or the pool, and sipping on some iced drinks.

I’ve never heard anyone say, the weather is so and so, this is a perfect day for work, not a minute should be wasted.

What does this say about us?

And is there a perfect weather to be in the office working?

[Cue show’s title music]
The silhouettes of a group of overweight people walking towards you appear on the screen.
The silhouettes start becoming clearer and we see the group of contestants.
The name of the show flashes on the screen.
“The Biggest Loser”
(A show where a group of overweight people are challenged to lose weight, and where the person who loses the most weight, hence the title “The Biggest Loser”, at the end of the show is the winner of a hefty cash prize.)

[Fast forward to the Arab world]
As with a bunch of other reality tv shows or game shows that find some level of success elsewhere in the world, some Arab channel secures the rights to introduce that show in the Arab world.
In the case of this show, it is MBC that introduces the show in the region, but here’s the twist, the name of the show is changed, it becomes:
“The Biggest Winner”

Now, this might be quite a subtle change, but I think it’s just a tiny example, a telling sign of a bigger problem we have in the Arab world: the fear of losing, the taboo of being associated with failure in any way.

In this case, even though the person who would get the title of “The Biggest Loser” would actually be the winner of the show, and would walk away with a really nice cash prize, MBC judged, and maybe rightfully so, that using the word “Loser” in the title would turn people off from being part of the show (even though the same TV station aired the original show too with its original title before producing the local version).

This fear of failure is ingrained in our Arab culture; Failure is regarded as the end; a burning mark, a label that will be associated with the person for the rest of his life. The society looks differently at people who have failed, it looks down on them in some way; even people whose accomplishments in life never amounted to much think they are better than people who have failed.

Yes, in our culture, whether we like to admit it or not, it’s regarded as better to sit around doing nothing, never try and never officially fail than to actually go out, take on a challenge, try and fail.

This is a fear that is imprinted in the back of most people’s minds, holding them back from going out there, trying new things, experimenting with new projects, overcoming boundaries, and fulfilling their full potential along the way.

No, everyone wants to be a winner, and they want to win from the first time; it’s either they have that, or they’d rather play it safe, and just hover around in life not taking any risks, letting their great ideas and ambitions wither and die, and not really accomplishing any of the things they really want to and can if they just tried.

But obviously, things don’t work that way, not everyone can win from the first time, not everything will work from the first time, we know it by nature, and we’ve witnessed it in events big and small throughout our lives. Count the numbers of times we stumbled before we could walk, the number of times we fell before we could ride our bikes, the number of mistakes we made that we regretted and swore we’d never do again …etc. It’s in our nature to make mistakes, to have these little failures here and there, in order to learn, get better and build up to our bigger wins.

It’s just that at some point in our lives, we were taught, against our instincts, that it was very very bad for us to fail; that no matter what happens, we should make sure we never fail; that people who fail are losers and will always be losers.

But that’s so wrong; we have to stop looking at failure as just the end; it is an end of something that didn’t work, there’s no doubt about it; but it’s also the start of what comes after it, the start of something new where you can apply all the lessons you’ve learned from previous experiences, and build towards something better and bigger, and eventually succeed.

A great quote by Irish writer Samuel Beckett about this is:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

And that’s pretty much how things go, we try, we fail, we try again, and we keep going, getting better, until we succeed and win; and then all those little failures along the way amount to nothing but part of a bigger success story.

This is something I’ve had bothering me for a while now, and that I’ve been wanting to write about for some time.

On the news, in newspapers, in conversations, everywhere; whenever there is an incident, war or whatever with deaths involved; numbers are pulled out… X number of people died here, Y number of people died there, more people died on this side than that, less people were lost than in some other incident… and they go on and on and on.
The bigger the numbers, the more tragic they display it to be, and the more they talk about it.

But what they’re actually doing with all this is just cheapening down human life to a set of meaningless numbers.

People aren’t statistics!

Every single death means that a person who was once a parent, a sibling, a child, a spouse, a lover has left this world, and left a group of people aching with broken hearts. To those people, it feels as though the whole world was lost, as if everyone is gone. To those people, in that moment, they don’t care how many other people died, or how their loss compares to someone elses, all they care about is that someone very dear to them is gone.

Some might think that sounds selfish for them to only think of their loss and not that of others, but whether we like it or not, that is basic human nature and totally understandable, when in a moment of grievance such as the death of a loved one, no one is in a spot where they can afford the luxury of selfless thinking. At moments like those, they hurt more than if all of humanity was lost because of some tremendous tragic disaster.

In the end what I guess I’m trying to say is that death is death; one death, one hundred deaths, thousands or even millions of deaths, all amount to the same thing: a tremendous amount of pain, a huge loss, and that to at least someone, somewhere, it feels as if the whole world came crashing down and took everything with it.

So instead of insensitively counting numbers and turning lost loved ones into just another numeral on a piece of paper, that we use to compare and evaluate loss, maybe we should accept death as an absolute constant value, and react to it as something that we should do everything we can to stop it from happening in vain.

I’ve been in Dubai for almost three months now (oh, how time flies by), and being the highly adaptable person I am, I have managed to fit in rather comfortably very quickly, and I have to say that I really like it here and am enjoying my time a lot.

One of the things I love about Dubai is how mixed it is, and how you get to meet people from all over the world every single day; That is always a great thing to me and a very enriching experience.
A friend of mine called it a World City (Global City) because of that, and I agree. 

There is another side to that coin though, which is behind the problem of Dubai. Unlike other global cities, Dubai is not a melting pot, and that’s where its problem lies.

If you take any of these other cities, you’ll find that the majority of people have moved there to settle down, build a life, invest in their future; and as a result of that they work hard, they blend in to the fabric of the multi-cultural society, they build strong personal relationships, they develop a sense of belonging, they care about the city, and the country, and they contribute to its growth and its cultural richness; because it is home to them, and their lives and those of their children are closely tied to it.

Dubai, on the other hand, is just considered a station by the majority of people living in it; they come here and they’ve already decided that it’s going to be only for a few years, and then they’ll be moving on to somewhere else, or back to their home countries. That means that they’re not as involved, they don’t develop a strong sense of belonging, they don’t really invest much into personal relationships, they never really care enough.

And that makes a world of difference, and everyone visiting Dubai feels it. Not everyone knows how to put it in words, but some of the things I’ve heard most, from before ever setting foot here, are that it feels ‘fake’, that it’s too materialistic, that it lacks identity …etc.

And why is it this way? Simply because it’s almost impossible for expats to be granted citizenship, and so sooner or later they’re going to have to leave, if not at their own free will, it’ll be because a point in time will come when they’re no longer allowed to stay.

And so people plan it in advance, they don’t let themselves get too attached, they don’t invest more personal effort than they have to, they don’t feel they have any obligations towards the city or the country, and their time is reduced to revolve around a main mission, which is in most cases acquiring money; which all explains the feeling visitors get.

Of course, I understand the point of view of the government here, and that opening the door to immigrants from all over the world, from different backgrounds, cultures and religions, will permanently affect the country in many ways; and of course it is a choice, and one where there is no absolutely right or wrong answer.

Personally, as with every other expat in Dubai, I know that I’ll be here for a few years only before I move on, but as with every other place I’ve lived in throughout my life, I’ll be blending in, I’ll be building friendships, I’ll be playing my role and contributing whatever I can, and I’ll be enjoying myself along the way.

Home to me is where my little family is, and where I lay my head down to sleep at night; and for these coming years, my home is Dubai.

Last night, I sent a little tweet on twitter asking: “What do you do when even fate is having trouble deciding what do with you?”

It was a question that occured to me and that I thought was quite funny, after a little surprise I found waiting for me in the evening, that reminded me how sarcastic our old friend fate can be, and how it sometimes chooses to mess around with your mind for fun.

The message on twitter got replicated on my facebook wall, on friendfeed and elsewhere; and it got a number of interesting replies, one of which was by my friend Amine Kochlef, that got me thinking more about life, fate and its inner workings.

Amine’s take was: “We decide for ourselves, fate is just a mirage built upon our cultural background.”
Very beautifully said, but I don’t totally agree, yet I don’t disagree either.

That view eliminates fate altogether, implying that everything is in our own hands, we decide for ourselves, we build our own lives, make our own choices, and go wherever we want to go.

The problem with that view, as much as we’d like to believe in it, is that it only works in a world where we’re alone, with no exterior influence, only affected by our own actions, with a direct and clear cause and effect relationship for everything.

The thing is we’re not in such a world, and people’s actions are complexly intertwined in a way that a little action by someone could have a direct or indirect effect on someone right next to them or someone else halfway across the world; now multiply that by several several times. 
All these actions are things that a person has no control over, but are all factors that come into play in their life, and affect the outcome of their own  decisions and  actions.

This plethora of actions taking place around us, sometimes fall into place to work in our favor, and in other times against us; and some of the words we have created to describe all this are: luck, coincidence, jinx, …etc.

One of the definitions of fate is: “An event (or a course of events) that will inevitably happen in the future; Your overall circumstances or condition in life (including everything that happens to you)“.

This view eliminates our role in determining what happens to us, putting it fully in the hands of this so-called fate, which basically means that whatever we do, the results will be the same as it’s all pre-determined no matter what we do. That of course cannot be true, because it goes against basic logic and truth.

Like most things in life, I think the truth falls somewhere in the middle; we don’t live in a strictly direct action/effect world, and neither do we live in a world where only the effect exists no matter the action taken. I think it’s more like a bunch of  actions/reactions/effects combinations.

These combinations of actions, reactions, effects, coincidences, lucky strikes, jinxes and what not are what I think fate really is; a living ever-changing sequence of intertwined acts that touches every single one of us, plays games with us, gives us a break at times, blocks a road some other times, puts us at a crossroads every once in a while, and creates the circumstances around us that we operate and

The end of the year is approaching, and with it comes the whole end of year evaluations frenzy. As a manager and a friend, I’ve had a number of people coming up to me, from my team and other ones, to talk to me about the coming evaluations, trying to get a sense of what to expect, and asking for advice on their careers.

And after having repeated the same idea in different words so many times, I thought it would be interesting to just put it in words on my blog, and share it with everyone.

I think a lot of people have their priorities all wrong when it comes to their career lives; they’re starting out thinking about positions and money, when instead of that they should be thinking of themselves, their knowledge and experience.

Building a career is just like being in investment, you can’t expect big gains without investing big and investing right, and in your career life that big investment is in yourself, through the knowledge and experience you acquire, through the serious work that you do, and the great reputation you build for yourself. Positions and money will follow automatically from there, as a direct result.

Your motivation should be how great a profile you can build for yourself and how many interesting things you’ll be able to work on; not what position you can get to or how much you can earn.

Working with the sole objective of getting a certain position or more money means that you’ll be losing focus of the most important thing that will justly get you there, your work and how much it matters.

I’m not saying a person shouldn’t have professional objectives to grow in their career lives and take on more responsibilities, of course they have to, but they have to understand that the only way they’ll get there is by putting their work first, building their profile to a point that will entitle them to the position they’re going after.

Another problem that is caused by people having the wrong priorities and losing focus, is that they can also end up taking the wrong career choices, choosing to change companies solely based on salary or position, neglecting the most important point which is how beneficial the new company will be for their experience, how will it build on to what they’ve acquired up to that point, and how will it get them closer to their overall professional goal?

I see many people quitting a certain company, throwing away all the experience they’ve acquired and all their accomplishments there, to start a new job somewhere else where they start over, not making use of most of their knowledge, and not getting anywhere near what they want to accomplish in their lives.

This can also be because of a lack of vision; I think it’s very important for everyone, to take some time out with themselves, and think really seriously about what it is they want in life, where do they want to get to professionally, and not let go until they have a clear picture in their heads.

That vision, that goal, will serve as a guideline for their career lives, and help them in their career decisions, making sure that they only take a step that will move them forward, in the direction of making their dream come true.

I could go on for hours, I guess, but I think I’ll just end this here, having talked about the main points I had in mind, and will leave the rest to another future post.

Good luck to everyone getting to your destination in life.