Okay, good thing I’ve written it down. So, you said being prepared is underestimated and over-planning is overestimated. Igor and Frank talk about when planning sucks and being prepared is great.
Transcript
Igor And I’m not a very talkative person, by the way. I don’t talk that much in my daily life.
Frank I wonder if I should do this little last snippet as an outtake, or should I keep it in, because this is not recorded.
Igor No, no problem. For me, that’s fine. If you think you’ll be a good part of the edition, you can leave it in.
Frank We’ll see what happens. Ladies and gentlemen, hello, good afternoon, good evening, good morning. Part 4 of our Changing Careers topic with Igor in Curitiba in Brazil. Hello, Igor. Welcome back to the show.
Igor Thank you. Hello, Frank. And I’m very excited and happy to be here talking to you tonight.
Frank Yes, I know your nose is growing longer. Pinocchio.
Igor More than it is.
Frank Okay. So, in the couple of minutes before I press the recording button, you said something interesting, and I’m still trying to understand it. But you said you also have your story to this. You said, being prepared is underestimated. And over planning is overestimated. Now, as you can see, Igor, I’m sitting here, I have a glass of wine in front of me. I’ve only had one small sip of this glass of red wine from Italy. If anybody’s interested, it’s a Primitivo. So, I don’t think I’ve gone quite down the plug hole, but I don’t really understand what it is you’re trying to say. So, can you enlighten us, please? And I’m sure there is a good story for you to add to this.
Igor Yes, of course. So, I’m going to tell a very specific story. And in the end, I will explain the phrase. So, which is preparing it. Yes, preparing. What’s the phrase?
Frank Who’s been drinking? You or me?
Igor Okay, I remember. Preparing is overestimated and planning… No, I need your help.
Frank Okay, good thing I’ve written it down. So, you said being prepared is underestimated and over planning is overestimated.
Igor Sure. So, I’m telling a specific story and then I’m going to explain why I think that’s the case. So, when I still was in Europe, so I went to… I was doing a volunteer work in the south of France. We went to Germany, and I told the story in the last episode. I went back to the south of France. And then continuing my backpacking in Europe, I went to Germany again through Hamburg. Why did I go to Hamburg? Because I have a friend, a Brazilian friend, who lives there, and I went there to visit him. He is a friend from the parkour phase of my life. His name is Christian. So, I went to Hamburg to visit him. And in Hamburg, I met some German guys, very friendly people from the parkour community, who invited me to go to Serbia to attend the event, which would happen in the next week, a parkour event. And this event was very important because we would have a very popular parkour guy at the time doing our workshop. His name is Daniel Ilabaka. He’s amazing. A lot of videos on YouTube on him. So, they invited me, and I didn’t have anything to do better, and I went with them to Serbia. So, when I was in Serbia, we trained for a few days. It was amazing. And I met a couple who lived in Italy, in Milan, and they invited me to train in Milan. But the date they would be available didn’t match with the date I was planning to be in Europe because at the time I was already thinking of going back to Brazil. I’m not sure, but maybe I had bought the plane ticket already, but the dates didn’t match. And they invited me to go to their place without them there. So, they lived with a parkour guy, one of its founders. His name is Lohan. He lived in Italy, in Milan.
The couple I met in Serbia lived with Lohan and they told me, okay, you can go there and train with Lohan. We won’t be there, but that’s no problem. You can go and train with him. He’s fine. He’s friendly, etc. And of course, I said yes, because it’s not every day I would have the opportunity to train with another parkour founder. And I accepted. So, it’s very, again, talking about how lucky I am. So, this couple from Italy, they handed me the keys of their apartment in Milan, Italy. They just handed me the keys. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise you, I swear it’s true. Of course, we made a friendship there. It wasn’t in the first minute, but they handed me the keys and said, okay, you go there. This is the address. Before going to the address, it’s hard to get to the place because in Milan, the street address is very confusing. The metro is very confusing. Don’t go straight to the address. Meet Lohan in the place where he teaches parkour before going to the address. Then, okay, we finished the time in Serbia. From Serbia, I got a bus straight to Milan in Italy, and I met Lohan at the place where he would teach parkour. And, I met him. I introduced myself. I told them that I have met the couple friends of him in Serbia. In Serbia, of course, this couple told him about me as well, and we chatted a little bit, and he said it was something around 7 p.m. on Thursday, I think. And he told me, okay, I’m not going home. I’m going to meet my girlfriend, something like that, but you can go. This is how you get to the address, and he explained to me how to get to the address. The problem is everything he told me was completely confusing because he didn’t talk English very well. So, he would speak French, which is his nationality, and Italian, and we couldn’t communicate very efficiently. So, I said, okay, I have these complex instructions. I have the address, but if I have the address, it will be easy. I won’t get lost. So, I said farewell, and I went to the house where I had the address.
But it was really confusing, and Milan is really confusing. The metro system, it’s a mess. Everything is Italian. No one speaks English, and I got lost. I got lost from 7.30 p.m. until 5 a.m. the next day. I couldn’t find the place. At the time, I didn’t have a cell phone. I had a laptop, but I couldn’t find anything open in Milan at midnight. So, I got completely lost in Milan. I think I rode most of the city by metro. I walked a lot. I might walk 20 kilometres in a few hours because I was looking through the apartment, and I was starting to get desperate. Around 5 a.m. for some kind of miracle, I found the street, and I found another, and I got in the apartment, and I slept for all day long. And the next day, Lohan was there, saying, oh, are you crazy? You didn’t find the place. I explained to you so well, and blah, blah, blah.
So, this is a very specific story. So why I think it illustrates what I think about being prepared and over planning, right? Well, I think that when we plan a trip, and I did this mistake afterwards, like a few years ago when I would travel with some girlfriend or something like that, I did this mistake, although I had a little lesson before, which is over planning, but not preparing myself to what would happen, and I wasn’t prepared before.
So using the trip analogy, which I think is very educative, when you are preparing a trip, you’re going to over plan. So you’re going to plan how you’re going to go, where you’re going to stay, what you’re going to eat, what you’re going to do, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing is, everything can go very differently from what you planned, because it can rain, and you’re not able to do what you are planning to do. Maybe the food’s not so good. Maybe the place you are expecting to stay for one week is not good. You have to find another place. So, a lot of unexpected things can happen in a trip. And I think when you over plan and you don’t prepare enough, you kind of become a slave of your planning. And to follow the plan, your trip, in this example, I’m saying, you’ll be miserable, because you over plan it, so you have to follow this plan. And the other aspect is when you are prepared, if you are prepared to deal with everything which might happen and you are not expecting, you’re going to enjoy what you are doing.
You’re going to enjoy the trip, for example, because you are prepared to deal with whatever will come your way. So, in this specific story, for example, I over planned it because I had the address. Laurent explained it a lot. Okay, so I over planned it, but I wasn’t prepared for not finding the address. So it was a very miserable night.
In the other opportunities, the one I told the example when I went to the south of France for the first time, I didn’t plan anything, but it was very pleasant because I was prepared to deal with whatever would happen. What being prepared me in this case. So, I was healthy enough to walk for as long as I could walk. I didn’t have any expectation about the people I would meet. I was with food on my backpack. I was with an open heart to live a new experience. So, it was nothing that I planned came true because everything which happened was unexpected, but it was very joyful. And in the end, everything went fine because I was prepared.
There is an astronaut, an American, I think it’s Canadian, a Canadian astronaut. His name is Chris Hadfield, and he has a book called, I think the name of the book is The Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. I mean, I’m not sure it’s the title of the book. And something he says that I read that maybe in 2017. There’s not much time I have read that, but I agree 100%. He says that when he would travel with his family, like he doesn’t over plan. What he does is he’s over prepared. And what he does is, okay, he makes sure the car is working fine. He makes sure he has first aid in the back of the car. He makes sure he’s healthy enough and his family is healthy because if he over prepares, he knows that the trip will be very joyful. So he doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he knows that he will be prepared if something happens. And I agree. I think every time I over prepare it, I’m ready for whatever is going to happen. And that’s what I’m feeling now that I am going to move to another country. And that’s how I’m facing that. I know that it will be joyful, and everything will be fine because I am prepared. So I’m not over planning because if I over plan, I will become a slave of my plan. So I think that’s the message. And then, like, why I brought Chris Hadfield, because as an astronaut, something that astronauts does a lot, a lot, and people don’t think about that. They are prepared for anything that happens out there. They are prepared, like 150% prepared for everything. But that doesn’t mean that they over plan. So Chris Hadfield, he says in his book, when an astronaut goes through space, they don’t know exactly what they’re going to do. Of course, there is a basic plan, but they don’t know exactly what they’re going to do each minute. But they know that whatever happens in the International Space Station, for example, they will be prepared because they know what to do in this situation. That’s a good form of illustrating this line, I think, this phrase. Right. Well, I talked a lot, oh my God.
Frank No, that’s okay. That’s okay. That’s what the purpose of this exercise is. I’ve just made a lot of notes here. And I’m sort of, you know, I’ve got a piece of paper here. Right. So let’s try and unpick this because I think there’s a couple of things here that we can sort of link into this.
My wife is a hotel inspector. So what that means is that she will be, as a freelancer, she has to make a quote to inspect some hotels. And then if the quote fits, she then travels to these hotels and spends 24 or 48 hours in these hotels, checking them from top to bottom. And she does this all over the world. So, she has visited 65 countries. And as a single woman traveling, she tries to prepare and plan as much as possible. But if you are stuck somewhere in a, I think the story was in Morocco, where you are driven to the middle of a totally unknown area and then told to walk, the hotel is down that way, then you have to somehow react because you are a single woman in unfamiliar territory at 10 o’clock at night, it’s dark and you don’t feel safe. And she’s been doing this for many, many years, and she has accumulated something called experience. And I think that is the key word that takes that one step further.
On the other hand, the other extreme a couple of years ago, it was that I spoke to a very young person, he was still going to school, and he had won a rotary scholarship or a rotary scholarship to spend one year in India, living in a host family in India. And I said, wow, congratulations, do you want to talk about it? Shall we sort of prepare you for this experience? Because I can tell you now, it’s going to be a life changing experience. You do not come from France and live in India for one year without being affected. And he said, no, I’m not interested. And it took me a while to understand why. Because he at the time was, I think, 18, 19 years old. He had not known a life without the internet. And if he had a question, he could Google the question and get an answer. Yeah, totally different scenario.
Igor Yeah, I don’t want to interrupt you, but I have an interesting story about that as well. If you want me to share.
Frank Go ahead.
So in the United States, as we talked a lot, I had a great experience and I did a lot of things. It was amazing. In the last three months of my time in the United States, another Brazilian guy went to the same farm I was working on to stay for one year. So, I met this Brazilian guy. He was very friendly, a good person. But it was very interesting because he had over planned everything about his time in the United States. So, when he arrived there in the next day, he had a schedule of he wanted to do gym, he wanted to do that, do that, do that, about his personal life. So, he wanted to talk to his wife, his kids every day. It was everything very over planned. And his experience there, it was very different from mine. So, if you talk to him about his experience with Becky, for example, you’re going to think I’m crazy or you’re going to think he’s crazy because our experiences were very different. And I came to the conclusion at the time, right away I had this conclusion that he had over planned so much and he wasn’t open for any other experience. He wanted to do what he had planned for and he couldn’t enjoy. He didn’t spend much time in the farm. He was transferred to another one. But it wasn’t joyful. He didn’t learn English because he would not talk to anyone because he wasn’t with an open heart to live things.
For example, one day I remember very vividly, one day Mr. Joe invited him to have dinner and Mr. Joe was a crazy cook. He would cook very fatty and delicious food, a lot of food. And this Brazilian guy, he was on a diet. And okay, I’m not criticizing the fact of him being in the diet, but when you are in the diet, you are not open for any experience. So, he missed this dinner. And anyway, it wasn’t very joyful. That’s a story I would like to share because it illustrates what you told about the young kid who went to India.
Frank And I note it because at the beginning, when you started this chatting story, you said four words. I had a great experience. You said that subconsciously. It just came up naturally. And I think this is so, so important.
There is a link to that with the Chinese philosophy, which I think is called wu wai, which means that you basically, you take life as it comes to you. You don’t evaluate it. You don’t analyse it. You just, you go through it. You take the experience, which is why being overly optimistic is not always that good or being overly pessimistic or having positive thoughts or negative thoughts. It’s just this whole experience that we go through from the beginning to the end. So, the question there, I think anybody will have to, everybody will have to answer the question for themselves. But from your perspective, how do you live this experience? How do you, especially after I was sort of going into the future now a little bit, where we are now at this point in the story, you left Europe, you went back to, you went back to Brazil to start a marketing career with your own company, etc, etc. You met all of the people in Europe.
It was really coincidence. It was really luck. It was magic. It was whatever. But you, you gained all these experiences. So how would you, how would you advise, not a good word, but I’m not here to say it anymore. How would you advise somebody to be open to experience and not be afraid of experience?
Igor The first one, that’s a really good question. And I think the main thing, I think there is a practical advice and a more philosophical one. So, the practical one is like, be prepared, whatever it means for you. If you are going to go backpacking Europe, be prepared to walk a lot, be healthy, have a good backpack, you know, prepare yourself. I think that’s the practical advice. If you are prepared, you’re going to be, because it’s, you cannot experience, let’s say you’re going to, you’re going to climb Everest, right? Not climb, let me take a better example, because climb Everest, I don’t think it’s pleasant in any single sense.
Frank No, but okay, let’s just take it in your case. You are going to move to Los Angeles in a handful of months. Yeah. Use that example and talk about prepared and climbing because certain things you will have to plan, but certain things you have to be prepared for.
Igor Yes, good, good, good idea. So, like, if you, I will take, for example, Los Angeles, if I’m going to Los Angeles, I know I’m going to another country, for example, very simple example. So, I know that if I don’t have $1 on my wallet, probably will not be joyful, because probably I’ll have to spend some dollars when I arrive in the airport, for example. So, I’ll prepare myself because, like, you will not be pleasant being in an airport without $1. That’s one very simple example but illustrate what I want to say. So, you have to be prepared to enjoy the experience. So, if you, let’s say you’re going to hike for a beautiful trail this weekend, if you don’t, like, can be the most beautiful hiking of the world. If you don’t have water, won’t be pleasant. So, take water with you. So be prepared. That’s the first thing. It’s not over planning. It’s being prepared to, like, to being able to do stuff, to move yourself, to have mental clarity and things like that.
And the more philosophical thing, that I think it’s a long way until you understand that, and I don’t think it’s possible to force this way of thinking through everyone, but I think you, like, you pretty much can, like, you pretty much can enjoy every experience if you are open to that. If you get in the experience and you have, like, some pre-judgment or you have a very high expectation of sometimes a very low expectations, like, your experience will always be compared with you what you are feeling.
Although if you are open, as you said about the Chinese philosophy, like, you’re going to enjoy the experience itself. You will not compare that with anything else. I think I am good at it. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because I, like, I don’t tend to value things. I really like to understand my feelings. I like to understand the world. I have these characteristics. So, for me, it seems easy, but philosophically speaking, I would say, like, be prepared and be open to the experience. Don’t create that much, expectations because we are going to be frustrated most of the time.
Frank Exactly. You said, and this is something that sums it up really, really nicely. You have to be prepared to enjoy the experience.
And if we take this to your passion for jiu-jitsu, which is now your sport, you prepare yourself through training. It’s a mental preparation. It’s a physical preparation. And through this preparation, you gain experience. And then, as you told me a couple of days ago, you wanted to go to a competition last Saturday. You wanted to go participate in a competition and something happened. Totally unprepared. So, what happened?
Igor Yes. Yeah. So, in every competition, we fight in a weight class. Like, you cannot, there is a specific part of the competition that you’re going to fight with people very heavier and much lighter than you. But most of the time, you are into a category. And I have my category, which is heavy weight. So, I can weight at most 100 kilograms and 500 grams before the fight. And I was weighting more than that because I was unprepared. So, I wasn’t prepared because the scale outside was showing 400 grams lighter. And the inside, which is the official one, you can just weight in one time. You cannot do twice. I was 100g heavier. It was bad, of course, but it was my fault because I could have lost more weight and not relying on 100 grams. So that’s what happened.
And I think there are two important lessons. First one, be prepared. And the other one is like, I didn’t get so much frustrated, and I wasn’t sad along the day, not like that, because I didn’t have that much, expectations. I was just open to the experience. So afterwards, I watched my friends fighting and I hang out with them. And the day was amazing as well. So those are two lessons I had this day.
Frank So, to put this into the box, you were prepared physically, mentally to take part in the competition. Something unexpected happened. So, you were disqualified from participating at the competition, but you still enjoyed the experience because you could be with the people that you hang out with. You could see how the other members were doing, how the fights were evolving. You could maybe learn one or two things from this for your next fights. So, you didn’t come home with a medal like you did for the first time two weeks ago, but you still enjoyed the experience.
Igor Yeah. And this happens a lot with me. I think two weeks ago, I’m living in Curitiba, which is south of Brazil, and I went to São Paulo, which is a seven-hour bus drive from Curitiba. And I went to attend a Google event about search and things like that. And it was supposed to be from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. No, 4 p.m., I think. And I arrived there in the morning, but the event wasn’t great. I don’t know. It was bad. The content wasn’t good enough. The Google guys wasn’t answering everyone, so it wasn’t good, the event itself. So, I just left at 11 a.m., and I had a cousin who lives in São Paulo, and I went to have coffee with him, and it was good as well. So, I’m just hoping. I didn’t suffer because of that. Okay. So, I have to change my plans, but that’s fine. Not creating that much expectation, I think it helps to have greater experience. Something I was remembering when you talk about being prepared allows you to enjoy the experience. I used to travel a lot with my uncle because at one phase, I think when I was 17, 18 years old, I would run a lot, and I have an uncle that likes to run, and he is wealthy. He has a lot of money, and he would invite me to go to travel with him, to run with him.
And once we went to a very beautiful town in my state, and I remember we were driving, and I can remember that I saw some guy, you know, hippie, the hippie people. We saw a hippie walking and, like, asking for rides on the road, and he was, like, kind of dirty. He looked tired and things like that, and I told my uncle on the car. So, we passed by, and I thought, oh, this guy might be very happy because he’s traveling, he has freedom and things like that. And I remember my uncle saying, oh, I bet we are much happier than him right now because he’s worried with what he has to eat, he’s worried how he’s going to get to the place where he has to get. My uncle said, I bet we are much happier. And at that time, I didn’t understand that much because I had a very poetic vision in my life of people who travel freely and hippie. But now I understand, like, having money and being prepared to live the experience makes the experience way better than this romantic vision of not having anything to do with what’s going to happen, you know.
Frank That is a very valid point. I’m going to throw in something else. I’m going to go into very, very deep water here because I’m going to mention something of which I don’t know very much about. It’s the question of being prepared to enjoy and enjoy the experience and one’s mental health.
Do you see a link that maybe people are over planning or people who over plan maybe may suffer from, I’ll say it anyway, it’s probably wrong, but suffer from mental health issues, whereas people who are prepared and open for experience and being just going through life might actually be less confronted with mental health issues. Or is that too simple? It’s probably too simple, but is there somewhere where there’s a link?
Igor Well, I think it’s for some kinds of mental health, surely. It’s because, like, mental health, it’s a very broad term, right? So, I think for, let’s say, mental health related to people who doesn’t have a clinical problem in the brain. For those people, yes. So, anxiety, maybe a little bit depression. I think, yes. And I don’t think there is a unique cause. I think there are a lot of cause, but the fact that we live in a complex world with a lot of scripts and expectations, I think things get very worse, you know, because it’s very, I’m going to deep waters as well. So, it’s, like, if you stop to think irrationally, and I’m not saying that I can’t think irrationally all the time, it’s very rare. It’s difficult for me as well. I’m not saying that I am the person who knows the truth. But if you stop to think very rationally, most of the things we worry about, like, has no foundation. So, I have friends that they are very wealthy. Like, they have huge companies. They are financially happy. Like, sometimes they have, like, purpose in life, and they are worried with a lot of things. But, like, even they don’t explain why they are worried, because I think there are external force for that.
And the main ones I can think now is, like, the scripts. I don’t like to say market because market is very subjective. But, like, people want us to follow scripts, and if we don’t follow those scripts, most of the time, like, fiction scripts. So, like, the happy formula of you being successful in everything, you’re just winning what you are supposed to do. This is a myth. It’s a fiction. It doesn’t exist. No one is successful in everything. But we receive this script, and we are told that we have to follow this script. And when we are not able to follow this script, we get sad. We think we are not good enough. And this causes a big mess on everything. So, I think this script of following what those fiction scripts tell us, and also the complexity of the world, make things very difficult in terms of mental health, you know. And I think not creating expectation is a solution, but I think it’s a long way from where people are. I think people should focus on different things.
Frank We’re right into philosophy territory now.
Igor Yes, a lot. It’s very difficult.
Frank You know, Spencer Greenberg, in his newsletter last Sunday, last Sunday, Monday, said, you know, we have these debates where different elements of society pronounce that their philosophy, their way of doing things is perfect and right, and we should follow that. Whether you’re leftist or rightist or some other, some other straight thing, but everything is oversimplified. In actual fact, we should be, we should be talking, looking at these things because they are much more complex. Yeah. So, I think, I think, and I’ve been trying to think of the songwriter who wrote this song for the last few minutes, it all boils down to one little phrase, “Don’t worry, be happy”. And that’s the advice given 30 years ago
Putting this into the context of career planning and career change and this whole discussion. So, I suppose you just go forward in your career, try to get as much experience as possible, be prepared for a whole lot of things, because it makes you richer in terms of value to the company or the employer. And it also makes you richer as a human being, not financially, but in terms of soft skills, soft power and things like that. So, the more we go out and it goes back to a whole lot of things, the more we go out and actually do things and not take part in the TV screen or computer screen or gaming screen or something like that, but actually physically go out and do things. We are richer, healthier, fitter, more agreeable, interesting people. And we have great stories to tell. I mean, it’s as simple as that.
Igor In terms of career, just to connect the dots, I was having lunch with that friend on Monday. By the way, that’s why I couldn’t make it on Monday. Sorry. But I was having lunch with him, and he was telling me a story that illustrates very much what we are talking about. So, this friend, he’s a manager of a company here in Brazil, and he was telling me a case that he had an event. He had to go to an event in Portugal. Every year in Portugal, there is a very popular marketing event. And my friend had to go, but he couldn’t because he had some unforeseen in his family. So, he went to the guy who he would supervise, so a second level manager, and he told that guy, okay, I can’t go, so I will buy the ticket in your name and you go in my place.
And the middle manager, the second manager, he said, oh, I can’t go because the event is next week, and I don’t have a passport. And Brazilians can go to Portugal without visa. We can go, we just need a passport. It is like 40 euros to get a passport in one week in Brazil. It’s a bureaucratic, simple thing to do. And this friend, which was telling me the story, he said, how can someone who works with marketing, has 30 something years old, doesn’t have a passport? Because if I get you tomorrow, you have to go to this place. How are you not prepared to do that? So, you are working a globalized world in a market where we know that there are important events in marketing, and you don’t have a passport. And this friend was very frustrated because he was thinking, how can people be so unprepared for success?
Because it’s a very simple thing to have a passport. And that’s something that relates to everything we talked about. So, in the career perspective, are you prepared to go to the place if you need to? Do you have the certifications you must have if you are offered a job, a good job in your field? So that’s a good reflection to do as well.
Frank How can you be unprepared for success?
Igor Yeah, that’s the phrase my friend used. It’s awesome.
Frank It’s one of the wonderful phrases that really sticks there.
Igor Yeah, exactly.
Frank So I could just throw everything overboard to wrap this session up. I was not very well prepared for seeing me because we had no plan, but I enjoyed the experience anyway.
Igor Cool. That’s what I feel with those podcasts we are recording. We don’t prepare, we don’t have a plan and it’s always joyful because we both are open to talk about those stuffs.
Frank Yeah. And we can always find a discussion point and we can speak along. And if we are both forced to think, how am I going to carry on this conversation? And you have to think how am I going to answer these weird questions that I get thrown at me?
By way of teaser, we’re not planning, we’re not preparing, we’re simply teasing. Where are we going next week?
Igor I think we should go back to Brazil and talk about the last experience I had in the field of dairy technology because I had a short experience after coming back to Brazil. And then we’ll see.
Frank We don’t know where the future is. So I’ve got experience in dairy technology. Igor, I look forward to it. I will be prepared to enjoy the experience, but I have high expectations, so don’t hesitate.