Walter Riviera

To my dear “papi”

2020 has definitely redefined the concept of having a challenging year. Regardless to the background, the context or the region of provenience, this pandemic has been mentally, economically and emotionally tough to address for pretty much everybody in the world.

Being an Italian (from northern Italy) living in UK, I can sadly say it hasn’t been easy seeing some of the people you love dealing closely with it.

However, since “every cloud has a silver lining”, In this post I’d like to share:

1. the perspective that transformed my perception of the lock-down into a happy corner
2. the 3 key lessons I’ve got out of this experience

The Challenge:

Lock-down disrupted our lives without asking permission and forced us into a “world in a box” type of life.

Outside of it, losses, risks and fear of the invisible.

Wow! That might look like the set of a horror movie. However, for as extreme as it might sound, I’m sure there is who agree with this view, like there are people that might find it too pessimistic, or others that would make it even sadder not seeing a way out.

It really depends on how we perceive things and how we describe them. We might not have direct control on the first aspect since most is happening at the subconscious level. Nevertheless, the second has more to do with our awareness and how we handle what’s been perceived. I believe there is a mutual relation between the two: we can’t describe what we don’t perceive but at the same time, the way we choose to describe things affects how we perceive them.

I think this concept is extremely well captured by the Chinese word WēiJī.

The ideogram is translated in English as “crisis” and represents the union of 2 terms: Wēi, that stands for “risk/danger” and “Jī“, often associated to “Opportunity**” .

According to it, critical times bring risks as well as opportunities.

Inspired by the quote I then started asking myself:

“Where is the opportunity here? How can I apply this concept to what’s going on in the world right now?”

Sounded like I should have gone beyond the lock-down and appreciate the rest, but how? I honestly couldn’t see anything outside of it.

The silver lining (?):

It took some good (mental) effort to realise that I was using the wrong approach.

I was pushing myself to pretend that “the elephant in the room” wasn’t there, subconsciously keep staring at the risk and not seeing the opportunity. I was expecting the opportunity to be somewhere else, but in Wēijī the two aspects overlap: the danger and the opportunity originates from the same situation.

This consideration made me realise that I was perceiving the lock-down in a bad way: I was trying to map the current situation (full of constraints) to the standard life before Covid-19.

As usual, identifying and acknowledging the problem is the first step to solve it.

This encouraged me to look at the whole situation in a different way, as a new beginning, forgetting for a seconds what I knew being the “normality”.

From that angle, the walls where I was confined in during the lock-down, were not only keeping me away from the outside world,  they were also protecting what was inside. Basically, by changing perspective, a prison became a shelter.

The dark Wēi suddenly started colouring up as a Jī.

At that point the question was: “what can I do while I’m inside this shelter?”

Making an analogy, it would be like knowing that for a limited amount of time there won’t be any water in any of the oceans or seas on earth. All empty (but don’t worry, in the example there would still be water to drink). What would you do? would you take the chance to explore and enjoy the space released or rather complain because you couldn’t go to the beach in summer?

Here comes the sun:

Well, it didn’t take me too long to find options to take advantage of that “corner of peace”.

In standard conditions I’d travel a lot for work and commuting would usually blow lots of my hours away.

Here is what my flight tracker captured in 2019!

Thanks to the lock-down, I realised I was given the chance to finally read that book, take that online training, watch that movie, work on that personal project, cook that recipe, that I’ve always wanted to but never found time for!

And that’s exactly what I did! here is the list of achievements:

1. Increased productivity: being able to focus on 1 task per time and getting “in the zone”, was instrumental. Turned my living room into a studio and recorded this video series on AI: When you come up with some crazy idea and the marketing team makes it even crazier! 🙂

1. Self-development ++: With the time saved from travelling, I managed to complete the Deep Learning Specialization
2. Chartered engineer: lots of documents to fill and an exam to prepare, but was all worth the efforts!
3. Student career award: Had the honour to share my story -as student and your professional- for a blog managed by the University of my studies. Here is the original article and here the english version
4. Lifestyle Boost: gained physical health by establishing good habits like going to sleep at the same time, eat healthier (more time to cook!) and do more activity!

   

    

5. Built this website! After 2 years of good intentions and zero actions, I finally managed to document myself on how to do it and took on the challenge of pulling it together!
6. Federated Learning: AI is constantly evolving and staying up-to-date is a must! This topic became one of my favourite and I’m looking forward to keep learning and developing my skills in the near future. If you’re looking for something to play with, this repository might help you.

Conclusions

I was able to achieve all these results because I challenged myself to find another point of view. However, I’m also aware that I belong to what I would call a “lucky” category of people. Lucky because I didn’t have to deal with any major loss in my family or among my beloved ones. My only concern so far has been represented by the lock-down itself and nothing more.

I’m perfectly aware that my experience might not apply to everyone. My hope is that sharing this experience will help or inspire someone else in the similar situation.

Having said that, let’s wrap this up with the key takeaways I’ve got out of this experience.

The key takeaways:

1. You count and likely have more power than what you think. You may not control how you perceive things, but you can definitely decide how to react to them. Be the pioneer of your own life!
2. Don’t’ give up! Finding the right angle to spot the Jī and hide the Wēi will take some good effort, just don’t give up! Your opportunity is there. Every single attempt to chase it, is worth the energies invested!…And if you can’t see anything but the “elephant in the room”, just think about how you can take advantage of that elephant!
3. Dream Big: throw the ball one step above, then go get it! Once I was able to see the shelter, I had to decide what to do while in it. Defining goals can be funny, but finding the motivation to move towards them might be tough. I was able to focus on my achievements because my passions (books, movies, my jobs, food etc..) were strong enough to drive me. Your dreams and passions are your allies: just focus on them and they will keep you away from bad thoughts.

**The interpretation of Jī is a bit stretched as it would require additional symbols to actually be translated as Opportunity. However, given that in tough times hope is a bless, just use some magic thoughts to make it work 🙂

Special mention:

I drafted this article in June 2020. At that time I thought I would have welcomed a fair amount of anomalies already. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The 2nd half of the year kicked in and completely changed my life. It all started with the unexpected and premature departure of my dear Dad Valentino. He was the first person inspiring me to build this website and the first user that registered for the blog section. This first post is for him.

As of today, I wouldn’t change a single word of this article. I like to think that Life was just helping me strengthening my mindset to get ready for what was about to come. The challenge described above and the learning of the 1st half, were (and still are!) instrumental to deal with all the difficulties and critical decisions I had to take lately. Above all, the one that made me change my life in 2 weeks.  …But that’s enough for another story…

Goodbye 2020…Goodbye Dad.

Happy 2021 everybody!