The Next Wave – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

Two questions that keep you prepared

Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash

Lessons sit below our awareness, and bringing them up takes a wider view and, above all, humility. In everyday life it’s easy to miss what could make us grow, precisely because we’re so immersed in the everyday. Now, pushed into an enormous challenge, we’ll surely come through it with the strategies we may already have discovered and that are helping us bounce back. Here are two questions that can prepare you for the next time.

Timing this post was a challenge. Letting empathy decide the when, I held off on the two questions I’m about to ask. They’re simple and basic, yet their answers hold the chance to grow, give our best and, above all, have the tools to avoid what Aristotle described this way: "Nations that ignore history are condemned to repeat their tragedies".

The first wave has probably passed, and we may be on the eve of a new normal. It was a wave of fear, uncertainty and strong emotion that put us on the front lines. No one knows how, when or under what conditions a second wave might come. Still, what we built during these days of "riding the wave" or fighting in the field will carry real meaning for our lives. And that meaning comes with a personal, liberating responsibility: the lessons.

What have you learned so far? What approach did you discover that kept you going? What discovery, at the bottom of the sea, let you rise to the surface, breathe and realize there’s hope? Naming those lessons lets us make the most of the bond between emotions and experiences, their imprint on memory and the chance to turn each lesson into a winning strategy later on.

Naming a lesson is the first step toward fully using it in the future. The transformation comes with the next question: what will you do differently from now on? That "differently" we commit to is what will protect us in five, ten or fifty years when something like this happens again.

Even if everything changes overnight and our goals need rebuilding, we’ll keep living and leaning on our natural instinct to survive and adapt. What matters most is learning so we remember, and when people talk about reinventing yourself, remember the thing you’re willing to do differently.

The best is yet to come.

Warm regards and my best wishes,

Rodrigo Baccaro

This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: The economic effect of COVID-19 on agriculture, a graphic analysis. A webinar by my Zamorano professor Fredi Arias, PhD. A masterful talk on how he sees the situation today. Excellent and worth watching.
• What I’ve been Listening to: If a Virus Could Sing. One of the most fascinating things I’ve read and heard: the musical notes assigned to each part of COVID-19.
• What I’ve been Reading: Who pays for this. An informative article that gives a clear sense of the scale of national debt, especially in the US, given the funds deployed to keep businesses and people afloat through COVID-19. It’s worth recalling a bit of history and looking at what the debt was in the 1930s and some 14 or 15 years later, when World War II ended.
• What I’ve been Learning: Google Analytics for Beginners. A very important, powerful tool for me. As a fan (no expert) of analytics, it’s been a great resource for continuing to learn the subject.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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