JustinIdea - Justin Ricaurte's Personal Blog

Constructive Complaining

It can get pretty frustrating when people complain non-stop. Most of the time it's because they’re whiny and can seem to do anything but look at the negatives. It can also be pretty depressing talking to one of these people. Do they think you really want to hear about how they can’t stand the person down the hall talking all the time, or that they don’t think they’re smart enough to do anything productive? It might be good to ask them sometime.

While these people can be quite a drag on a day, there is a way to take what they do best and turn it into a great opportunity – constructive complaining. During the normal course of a day, I tend to complain a lot, but you’ll also find me doing a lot of writing. Why? Are these two correlated? Yes. Whenever I find something worthy of complaining about, the first thing I ask myself is how could I make it better. From just this simple question, ideas are incredibly easy to generate.

Here’s an example. I tend to focus in on the lyrics of the songs I listen to, so I work on weeding out songs with messages I don’t want to penetrate my subconscious. This process can be a pain when trying to keep track of all of the songs I listen and wanting to generate a playlist for a specific mood. So, I asked how could this be made better? One way I’ve thought of to fix it is to make tagging and labeling of songs much easier for someone. To allow a person to base it on their emotions if need be and then to be able to mix and remix songs that they associate with the emotions into playlists, because a song can be attached to multiple meanings for a person. This would make setting the mood much easier for an occasion or for helping you get pumped up or excited about something. Have a sad day and need to mope for a while? Just play some sad music until you get sick of it and want to be happy again.

Now implementation and execution is the only bottleneck to this method. You’ll generate so many ideas you just won’t have the time to work on them all at once. But in the end, is it better to have too many ideas with a few gems or too few and less of a chance of a gem emerging?

Holding true to constructive complaining, here’s something to keep in mind. When you hear one person complain, think business opportunity. When you hear many people complaining, think BIG business opportunity! Happy complaining! :D

A Philosophy of Gray

I know in many instances it is more efficient and effective to place all of your bets on one strategy, especially when working on a start-up company with limited cash.  Although when going about life, I find it interesting how people like to be one thing instead of adopting a bi-pole philosophy.  If you approach life from only one angle, then you will surely be able to capitalize on all of the opportunities that present themselves along that angle, and you will become more specialized at that view.  But at a point, the amount that you gain from that angle no longer matches the energy and effort you put into it.  You will also miss other opportunities that present themselves and it will be harder to make yourself flexible to meet new situations.

I've adopted a philosophy of gray, where I work on using both poles at the same time to maintain my flexibility to react to new situations as they present themselves.  I work on keeping these poles in constant competition and cooperation, so that I can mix and match them as necessary.  For example when solving a problem, I work on deducing the core problem that everything else seems to hinge on, then finding through induction how changing this bit many different ways may alter the system.  This is both an art and science as the questions you need to ask for a given situation are not set in stone and the path to exploring it zig-zags a lot.  There are also many dependencies that you need to account for when solving these problems.  Granted, sometimes this strategy does not work as there might not be a core problem, and in those situations I work on finding a tool set that does.

An analogy for a philosophy of gray is to view everything that you are and can do as a tool.  For example, I'm an ENTJ, the field marshal.  This doesn't mean that I always act like all of these traits.  Sometimes I seclude myself into a cave, other times something I see sends a feeling of passion through me, or I might sit back and watch what is going on in the world.  Instead of saying this is all I am, why not view each letter as a tool?  Sometimes being surrounded by people is the best way to regain my energy, other times a good book will do.  Sometimes I need to judge quickly, other times I need to take a step back and smell the flowers. 

This entire thought process came to me, because of how many self-help books there are proclaiming how you should lead your life a certain way - granted if I wrote a book about this I'd be in the same league, haha.  A friend of mine has been reading a lot of these books and is convinced that

1. that the world is moving in a direction where it will require you to be right-brain dominant to lead.
2. and conversly, being left-brain dominant will not allow you to become a leader in the world of the future. 

I argued that he'd be most valuable if he was both right and left-brain dominant and knew when to use each of them to his advantage.  Without a combination of logic and creativity, it's more difficult to ask the tough questions and generate spontaneous ideas that you can back-up with documented research.

I personally enjoy the flexibility that being gray allows. :)