rethink PERFECT

I have recently come to the view that the behavior that I will be aiming for and aim to receive is support. Finding a partner where our individual projects dovetail will be essential to get and receive such support, in my view. It is not just a matter of allowing each other’s project but a fully integrated support system for our individual projects.
This opens up the whole conversation as to how to find such a partner, with a focus on 

1. Individual project

2. Support of the project

3. Dovetailing our project together

For years I have been accused, by someone I knew, that I did not support them.

It only dawned upon me recently that I did not need to support them or their project.

Funny, the use of such language. As I now consider that “support”, in this context
is more sought from a husband or father, and I am neither of those.

Support is something that is an added bonus, in my view, like the tech support you can purchase as an add on with your product.

For me the default state with another person is to “allow”, that is not impede their
journey or project in life but if I want to team up with someone or partner with them then
I think there should be a high level of support available from either party.

Support of their project and their support of mine and in this case finding projects that dovetail into each other is the ideal support.

My project consists of my projections.

It is about projecting myself into the future and into different scenarios and seeing what will fit and what will not.

From these projections – and I would say my project consists of hundreds if not thousands of these projections, daily – I can map out or order my future in relative ease.

A recent order was (think of ordering to a waiter):

“I will have one flight to Saigon then followed by a 1100 km, 2 week bike ride to Bangkok and then flight to meet up with Steve, my bro, in Berlin for a week’s stay followed by a ski trip in Bulgaria , for a week and for desert I will finish with a week in Bangkok. In the mean time I am running our business which goes a long way to fund our new startup”.

Think of the complexity of such a trip and yet I pulled it off (still yet to return to Australia, though) simply by using my projections. And combining this with a business and startup is icing on the cake.

Understanding the process of how we make such projects and projections is only going to help me improve making my next ones, in my view. But most of all it is going to help explain my project and projections to someone else.

Yes and this, I believe, is my ultimate project or purpose. To be able to define and explain my project and my projections. To be able to find a partner that will allow me to define and explain my project and projections and for me to be able to allow her to define and explain her’s.

This ultimate project (of converging projects with a woman) is something that I have been working on for some 30 years now and although it has taken me a bit longer than I thought I still feel that my project and projections are on track. I guess time will tell but this explanation of my project and projections, here, may help.

Have you ever actually asked yourself this question?

“What is the difference between a relationship and partnership?”

I was thinking that maybe I can learn a bit more about this subject from looking at them both from a business and personal perspective.

In business is it pretty easy to tell but sill hazy. For example most people have business relationships, sharing and exchanging data, clients, money even contracts but still with one person or business being much more in control than the other. So maybe the difference lies in the power or control one has that decides if it is a relationship or partnership and maybe that applies to personal relationships/partnerships also.

For me a partnership is where there is much more involvement, commitment, risk and reward from both parties.

Having said that, the word “relationship” used in personal relationships, may be missing the mark. That is, if a couple are looking to have a family together then I would say that they would be aiming to have a partnership together but maybe they start with a relationship and progress.

So a partnership is then a progression from relationship, maybe?

If this is the case, then when applied to business again, it might be a good idea before any business partnership is formed that a business relationship is formed first.

My project for the last 30 years has been:
“To understand and form processes that help enhance business and personal relationships and partnerships.”

Understanding the differences between relationships and partnerships then is an obvious next step for this process, in my view, and something I have failed to ask so far.

Personal Relationships/Partnerships

This seems like a good article on the subject within personal relationships and partnerships:

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP AND BEING IN A PARTNERSHIP

Maybe some of these points could be applied to business relationships and partnerships also.

Business Partnerships/Relationships

What is Partnership?
“The relationship which subsists between two or more persons
carrying on a business in common with a view to private gain”

This is a good slide share of what a partnership is in business

Forms of partnership & difference between them.

We all have or should, in my opinion, have our own project, and therefore “My Project” from our own perspective.

My project, for the last 30 years, has been the developing of systems or processes for creating and maintaining effective business and personal relationships.

My brother Steve’s project has been to help me with this development through discussion and testing them out in his business and personal relationships.

A specific project, common to a lot of women, at some point in their life is having a child or children and with the help of an effective partner to share the physical, financial and emotional workload involved.

I think the key to effective matching of business and personal partnerships is to find someone who is as passionate about their own project as we are about our’s.

Now, they don’t have to be the same projects or even have to accept the other person’s, but to just allow and encourage the other to have their own project.

Ultimately, I believe that my project would be ideal to allow, for someone truly seeking such an effective partnership.

By “allow” I mean not to denigrade, demean, disparage or reject the other’s project. To simply allow it to stand, with no emphasis on accepting or agreeing with their project, just simply an allowance of their project, with any considered and constructive criticism.

I also believe that through this process of allowance and constructive criticism the other person will fall in love with their partner’s project, like dads eventually falling in love with their wife’s offspring and investors getting enthusiastic with a startup.

So what is your project and what project, of someone else’s, have you allowed to stand recently?

Q. What do you call it when someone is trying to negotiate while they are angry?
A. Nagotiate

For me life is a series of negotiations, countless thousands of them, ultimately.

Some are me negotiating through the general pitfalls of life and others are me
actively negotiating with others for what I can get out of it and ultimately them.

Sounds a bit crude but I think the better we can negotiate and do it fairly, we can expect to get so much more out of life. My best negotiations have been in recent times with my business partner and brother Steve, that has eventuated in a “successful” business/startup and another potential startup.

This has been achieved, in my view by negotiating the removal of any potential “nagotiations“. Where we agree that we will not accept any aggression or anger during negotiations. They may occur during the process but we agree to take responsibility for them before we continue with the negotiations.

I think love and personal relationships are also a series of countless negotiations, where, if fairness is the goal from both people, both can experience so much more than the sum of the two individual’s contributions.

I think I will spend the next couple of weeks working on this negotiation idea and see if I can prove that any “nagotiations”, although possibly profitable in the short term for the “nagotiator”, will ultimately result in a far poorer result than effective and anger free negotiations.

When one thinks about it our whole society is set up to find fairness.
Politics, work place relations, race relations, marriage counselling, laws, religion, philosophy, all in the search of finding fairness between us.

How close we come to finding fairness is once again debatable but that is ok as it is all a part of finding it.

For 30 years now, I have been working on this idea of finding fairness and feel I am making some progress but probably a life time journey to get even closer.

So why is it so hard to find? Can we find it? And is it worth the effort?
The answers can only be my opinion (which is part of the problem/solution) but we all seem to suffer from bias of some degree, with some suffering it more than others. And the problem with bias is that the more we have the less we can see that we have it.

Yes, it appears to be a recipe for disaster and could explain why we have had such terrible wars and conflicts in the past. It also could explain why marriages in the western world are lasting less than 10 years on average. In these cases, fairness seems to have gone out the window.

I think it is irrelevant if we can find absolute fairness or not, what we can do, I believe, is find a better fairness or reduce unfairness. We can get closer and therefore improve the lives of each other, and besides it gives us something to think and talk about.

So yes, I think finding fairness is worth the effort and I think has made my life more meaningful and ultimately more enjoyable.

Everyone is aware of the discomfort and unpleasantness that Anger brings to a relationship and most people try to avoid it, which can only compound the problem.

So why not simply make the Angry Agreement with someone before any such relationship issues or problems occur?

So what is the Angry Agreement? Well, for me it is the beginning of an understanding that we are going to need agreed to ways to deal with our frustrations and annoyances during our journey forward to grow and improve a business partnership or personal relationship.

1. The first thing to understand is that no agreement is going to be perfect and so any agreement is open to be improved, added to, suspended, and even ended as long as we both agreed to do so. This will reduce or even take away any pressure we may feel to be held to an imperfect agreement but at the same time have the confidence that things cannot change unless we both are in *consensus.
2. The second thing is that no one can bully the other person into submission as we try negotiate to get to the next rung on the ladder of improving an agreement. The listener is always protected and at any point the person listening to the pitch can let the other person know if they are feeling threatened and can simply ask for a preferred delivery method or break if required.
3. All displays of anger, due to impatience, frustration or annoyance is not going to be surprising but does not need to be accepted by either, no excuses.

The Angry Agreement would only be the start of an agreement framework that can be added to and built upon at any time as long as we both agreed, once again.

*For me, a consensus does not always have to occur as we could revert to “Apologies and Accolades”. That is if one of us is brave enough to step up and call it, then the other can simply allow this to see what the result is. If it goes well the person that stepped up gets the accolade but if it does not go so well then they will need to apologise.

I was watching a 30 something dad with his 18 month daughter at Starbucks yesterday. He was obviously waiting for his wife and so was his daughter.

For over 1 hour he sat there and in all that time he never uttered a single word to his daughter. She was starting to go a little stir crazy wanting some interaction and made up a number of games and sang nursery rhymes and her abc’s, which consisted of mere sounds rather than actual letters.

Wouldn’t it be great, I was thinking, if children learned their mother tongue from their father as much as their mother. Time for a change, me thinks.

“Are you an effective team” quote from the movie Oblivion

What is an effective team?
Is it where we we sacrifice our egos for the betterment of the team or do we risk the collapse of the team for the desire to get it “right”.

In Guy Kawasaki’s book Enchantment, he talks about having a diverse team.
” A diverse team helps make enchantment last, because people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills keep a cause fresh and relevant. By contrast when a naked emperor runs a kingdom of sycophants and clones, the cause moves towards mediocrity.”

I prefer the diverse approach to running a team, encouraging diverse views and ideas, at the risk we will have some controversy and even some disputes and conflicting views.

Having a team proficiently skilled in negotiating their own point of view, and at the same time being willing to accede to the most reasonable and efficient solution for testing, is my idea of an effective team.