No return to the objective-less person I was

I was living as a totally objective-less persons without any vision of my being or my life.
along the course of my life I suffered a lot because of this attitude till I decided to change it and even reverse it totally.
I decided to have a plan for my life and th evolution of this life planning was recorded in this blogging page. This life planning included my financial objectives and the key goals in my life including the career goals.
Before this planning I was like a dead fish going wherever the life stream goes.
I was a very passive person who is submissive to the life stream without spirit to change and control and to have the full ownership on his life.
I started to read about the life planning and the as said the first step is to write down the mission and vision and that something I'm drafting now.

Travel planning

As part of my taken resolution about increasing the planning in my personal life and improving the planning skill and practicing it heavily in my life, I started since couple of months the planning of my travels and trips.
I can sense the maturation of my cumulative experience and the improvement of my planning skills by practicing it in different situations and on different levels and scales in my life and I can sense the profound value of practicing it in my personal life.
Value which has convinced me truly that the spent time in the planning is totally invested time and it is worthy.
I will never return back to the random and chaotic person who I was. Planning has become essential component of my way of living.
It is increasing my life discipline. In addition to these valuable gains, planning is considered as a very effective mental exercise and several mental skills are included in the process.
Travel planning has given me the awareness about the proper scheduling and the good sense of the time slots against each task.
Booking the flight tickets and the online checking and reducing the spent time in that was one of the byproduct gained skills.
I have checklist now for each trip where it includes the logistics, shopping items, and any travel related tasks I would like to consider.
These check list is part of my cumulative knowledge also because the majority of the items are valid for the successive trips so it has organized my preparations to the travel in general.
The planning has guided me to arrange the budgeting as well which was another valuable skill. Having this skill enabled me to estimate the required budget for each trip and how can I allocate smartly this budget.
No doubts definitely that the planning is one of the most vital skill in the one's personal and professional life.
It is totally gained skill which can be improved by learning and practicing it.
The good planning can save time and money and can generate value. I experienced that before because of the currency value between the different countries and when should I get currency for the receiving destination. The good and precise planning has grabbed my attention to these points. My last trip was a good example for that where I planned it carefully including the transit time in the airport and scheduling the duty free shopping and the lounge and I managed to use given privilege to me because as a credit card holder to have free access to this lounge. This has emphasized the value of the planning in my life and how it can ease continuously my life in many situations.
I missed before my flights and I missed essential items to have during the travel because of poor planning and mental laziness and the careless attitude I had before. These have gone for every and the disciplined person born to stay and dominate by past character.
The more attention I pay in my planning process, the better plan to cover the all aspects.
It is really funny coincident that my friend was calling me during the writing of this blog post to arrange with me the trip back to home from the office and how we can avoid the traffic jam and the best sport to manage the back trip between the bus and the car. He is one of the most disciplined person I've ever seen and he has a strong self awareness and planning character.
The good planning and the following of it is reducing a lot of unnecessary pressure and stresses which I decided to eliminate. My previous resolution before was the elimination of any unnecessary stresses and pressure as long as there is a way for doing that which could be extra effort or time ..etc..
Applying this resolution has urged me to plan better my time to the airport and allocate enough time for the luggage arrangements.
I found that getting these unnecessary stresses is one of the most ridiculous things in my life and it is totally avoidable.
As I said the continuous practicing of the planning is wearing it up and maturing the skill and the all associated skills including the scheduling and the time management and the logistics and resources planning.

Financial lessons learned

Here are lessons learned from my gained financial discipline all over the previous couple of months.
- Reducing the cash withdrawing and keeping the bulk of money as long as possible in the bank. This by itself is helpful in knowing the financial situation and reduce the risk of possessing cash and utilizing the banking fees in a more efficient ways.
- Increasing the dependency on the debit and credit card and particularly the debit card to capture expenses data and to reduce the budgeting time.
- Ceiling my monthly expenses by firstly determining expenses threshold and the target savings within the whole capital investment plan.
- Analyze the monthly budget by charting the expenses vs savings vs investments.
- Adding the total asset in monthly bases in the budget to check how the budget is affecting the total wealth.
- Adjusting the starting balance in the beginning of the year in the budget.
- Linking directly the budget to the bank statement spreadsheet and the asset spreadsheet.
- Leverage the spendings in more valuable and profitable stuff which justifies the value for money.
- Setting objectives for the expenses vs savings vs investments.
- Increase the intellectual and productive content in the expenses items against the consumables like outings, and phone bills.
- Improve the intelligent and wise spendings on more profitable items and personal development items and products rather than the consumables like buying books instead of going to restaurant or cinema or buying useful gadget instead of some shopping items.
- Expenses optimization and smart spendings objectives.
- apply Lean 6 Sigma in achieving some tasks by the better resources planning as cost reduction method.



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A financial resolution: improving the data capture of my spendings

I need to put more effort and discipline in capturing the all budgetary data to know exactly my cash flow.
I strongly believe that knowing my my spendings cash flow and getting detailed as possible monthly budget data will bring valuable information about my spendings habits and the saving opportunity and the projection of the savings.
It is essential information about the one's life and it should be known.
Any life planning also has to considered this essential spendings data.
I will continue urge my wife to use the credit and debit cards to have the shopping record from the online banking.
I will continue collecting the receipts to track the spendings and record them in the budget spreadsheet.
My objective to reduce the gap in the monthly balance to be a very narrow margin.
I will add another column for the gap between the income and the expenses to measure the performance of my spendings data capture and recording.
So If I will earn 100 and I found that I spent 50 and 30 left in the bank that means I have 20 as an unrecorded in the budget which should be reduce gradually by improving the data capturing and recording.
Definitely the credit and debit payment and the online banking will totally ease and facilitate this task.
As usual my wife will need a little push to follow this requirement and to reduce the cash withdraw against the plastic money spendings.
Any investment planning should be based on this valuable expenses data. That's why the first step in the financial planning and in any proper investment planning or personal finances discipline is to have well documented budget records.
I know that iPhone apps has one of the application to track the expenses. I will think about utilizing more the cell phone to capture the spendings data.
The next stage will be the full analysis of these captured data and to convert it to meaningful information about our spendings habits and our life style and to take the appropriate actions and decisions to improve that.

The journey from the imperfect to the perfect

I developed since a considerable time a sort of procedure in achieving things.
It is depends mainly on the gradual improvement and development of the product or the process.
Whenever I want to initiate a new task or produce something or initiate a new process, I start it in the very rudimentary form.
This rudimentary form is usually very immature and is considered as a very early form of the desired product.
I use this early form as the alpha experimenting stage and the practice area.
It is very useful and important stage because this real life experiment will give me the lessons learned to improve the product or the process.
This version 1.0 is my learning and practice area and is heavily subjected to my observation and my experimenting.
I applied this evolutionary approach and continuous improvement process in my personal and professional life and it was very effective in encouraging me to initiate a lot of tasks and processes and produce a lot of products which I was totally ignorant about.
This has represented a drastic change in my perspective toward achieving the tasks where my previous perspective was either the perfect achievement or nothing.
Missing some elements required for the perfect achievement was hindering me from doing it. Eventually I was ending up was doing nothing.
I gradually changed my mind by the partial achievement of the task as long as it is divisible or can be partially done.
This approach was matured over time and I gained valuable experience in developing these prototypes to mature products.
The imperfect product or the process was continuously improved by the time and going through very productive and effective maturation process and my learning curve was gradually in the increasing trend.
The imperfect was in exciting transition stage to the perfect or near perfect product.

empowering my blogging and improving its quality

I want to improve the quality of my blogging and enrich it is expressive power by increasing the image content and drawings.
I was painting since a long time ago but when I was so busy with the life stream I didn't draw since then.
I want to recover back this hobby and associate it with the blogging where both will increase my power to expression.
I want to increase the value of my blogging by exploring the world using more active and thinking mind.

Life planning

On conjunction with the previous post about the planning, I started since one month ago to plan through this Excel spreadsheet for my life key milestones and objectives.
I categorized the objectives to the following groups:
-Career
-Academic
-Family
-Financial
-Health
-Intellectual Objectives.
Each set has a section in this spreadsheet.
For the time being, the key milestones are stated. I'm planning to extend them to include the rest of my expected life till the retirement and post the retirement.
This has helped me significantly to think about the mid-run and long-run objectives and planning for my life.
I will consolidate more defined plan for the coming three to five years followed by life time plan.
As any task or plan I'm doing, this plan and objectives will be matured and developed by time.
the planned period will be 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years till it include the whole life span.
Panning for the life is the most important task one can do it has the power to change the one's perspective to the whole life and the point of being in life and what the one wants to do in this given time span.
The long run vision is one of the key signal about the visionary persons and it will be great source of wisdom.
I was totally short sighted and stricken randomly and without any self determination by the fate events from event to another in an objective-less and plan-less life.
I was totally passive and reacting only to the urgent needs without long sighted vision.
This life planning has triggered and urged me to raise the big question in life about the mission and vision of being in life and what and where I want to be in the coming years to go.
Planning as a skill and its profound impact on the life is continually developed by going through all these real life exercises.
Now I've objectives and better understanding about these objectives. Previously, I didn't have objectives at all.
Now I'm developing continuously these objectives and categorizing them in relevant sets.
These objectives will include the desired career achievements, and academic degrees, financial objectives, investments, knowledge and intellectual objectives, and even innovations and patents as ultimate objectives.

Planning

There are different scales and levels of planning. I'm working in developing the planning in my personal life at different levels to be well disciplined and well planned person. Starting from the day to day planning by following task planner and calendar. I need to work more on this daily planning and to do task list to be smartly organized. It is a potential room of development. Notes are working as reminder and I want to associate them in my daily plan where this will micro-manage my daily plan and will fit the to do tasks and notes in time context within my daily responsibilities.
The another level of planning is addressing the key milestones on the mid-run and within the coming 3 to 5 years. For example I want to achieve the financial security in the coming 3 years and I want to initiate and finish my Master within the coming two years in addition to exploring the chance of initiating my own business in the upcoming year. All these objectives are planned in my life milestone spreadsheet where it arranges the mid run objectives and the planning for them.
It will be extended also to include the long run objectives like the near retirement stage and the career life and the educational plan for the kids and the above 50 stage and beyond.
Life insurance can provide useful lessons regarding this long run planning and life planning.

Resources management

I've a lot of concerns about how my company is managing the human resources. Sometimes their main objective is retaining the resources and taking decisions which are not healthy for the business needs to meet their resources retention objectives. Retention should be justified by optimizing and maximizing the return on head and the proportionality between the head count and the revenue and reducing the head count by leveraging the technology and the business intelligence.
Increasing the revenue per head should be one of the essential objective for any organization by following smarter business practices and de-bottlenecking the business processes.
Investing in the training and development and the professional task delegations should contribute directly also in the increase of the individual and team productivity and revenue per head.

Blogging for self-expression

I really appreciate the blogging as a mean to express my self. Blogging is a very flexible space to express my self, my emotions and my ideas and thoughts.
It is very health healing to find space which can receive my expressions and it is very relieving to release this expressions which are trapped inside me to the outer world in a form of expressions. I can truly sense the restoration and empowering of my internal peace when I have this window of self-expressions releasing.
In addition to the valuable benefit of the blogging in maturing my ideas and thoughts to more solid and mature stages. It organizes my way of thinking also and trigger my mind to think in more systematic and productive ways.
Many random ideas were crossing hub hazard my mind before and blogging is turning them now to a solid framework of thoughts and ideas and more mature and defined forms instead of the very raw stage of these ideas.
Expressing the ideas through the language or using the other forms of expressions is essential process of maturing these ideas to more defined and mature forms.
The other value of the blogging was the journaling of my ideas and thoughts to be documented and stored in this blog.

I killed my laziness

In the past, I was choosing always the easier, the short cut, the less energetic choice rather than the right, the effective and the more productive choice.
It was part of my lazy character and the lack of energy and the lazy spirit and the non motivated attitude.
This laziness was in everything I do. It could be studying, working, thinking or even speaking in conversation.
I decided to dramatically change that by choosing the right and the effective choice and not the easier, the faster or the lazy choice.
If the laziness is my motive to choose option A I will go then for option B.

Advancing backward

Each time I go back to Egypt form my overseas assignment I feel sour disappointment about the conditions there. People are still struggling in their daily life for the very basic needs. It is a pathetic to enforce the people to live in this miserable way by thriving to get their very basic needs which supposed to be essentials of the human rights like food, home, and basic education.
Everything sucks in Egypt starting from the road conditions to the pollution to the politics to the people manners.
We are advancing backward. Any simple comparison will lead to this conclusion.
It is a very sour feeling when you see deterioration instead of improvement.

23 of July, The Egyptian revolution day

We celebrated the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution where the military officer toppled the monarchy and changed the state from monarchy system to republic system.
The revolution has ended one of the most prosperous and dynamic stages in Egypt political life. We had by this time a full liberal political life where the power was peacefully transfered from party to another. The king had a limited authority and the government was freely elected by the people. People had the rights to demonstrate in the streets and drop the government if they didn't like its performance.
The announced objectives for the revolution was the independence, the social equality and fairness, the strong army. Non of the objectives were achieved.
It is was totally military coup d'tat on the democratically elected government.
The new rulers under the justification of the justice ceased the wealth of the rich people and the elite and distribute it to the average people. They deceived the millions by robbing the capitalists and that didn't remove the poverty but it has turned all to near poor.
They adopted the social system and they ended the capital and liberal state.
On the political aspect they muted each resistance voice either by jail, execution or corrupting them.
Any political opposition was diminished.
Parties were dissolved. Jails were opened to receive hundreds and hundreds of islamists and communists who were calling for justice and freedom. The brutal torture techniques were imported from outside to torture the political opposition leaders and activists.
It was the start of the end of the freedom. Unfortunately people are still celebrating this day where all these atrocities happened and we are still living and suffering till now because of it.
It's like dancing on our graves till we be buried alive in them.

Changing my perception about money

I started since awhile now to properly taking care about my personal finances. I never did that before. I was illiterate and totally ignorant when it comes to the money and finances. I was not dedicating at all any time or effort to track and understand my personal finances. I was replacing them with doing something else claiming that there are more precious things can be done in life rather than counting the beans as the accountants.
I was naive, unrealistic and totally wrong and nonfactual. This previous perception about the personal finances and the money was strong illusive part of my personality and severe shortage in my life perception and understanding.
What drives me to change that dramatically was the realization of the importance of the money as a full understanding and way of life.
I found out that it is an essential duty in each individual's life and has to be done only by him. I said clearly to myself if I continued my life and kept my eyes and my mind blinded about this vital part I will die with a missed serious task which I didn't do it in my life.
It is a vital and serious task in each one's life to fully understand and manage properly and smartly as he could his personal finances.
Whatever his background, earnings, profession, the duty is fully common and equally important for everyone.
I said as well clearly to myself no one will do it for me. Only me who has to take care about my own money and my own finances.

Talent management

We have a major press subject now in Egypt about one of the talented soccer players. The guy singed for two soccer clubs in the same time and he is not penalized and fined with a heavy fine because of this illegal act. Apparently from the sequence of the events they guy was sort of naive and he didn't have so much experience in dealing with this matters and his agent encouraged him to go that far under the temptation of the millions of dollars.
The two major football clubs in Egypt were disputing with each other about the rights of possessing the player.
I thought about this case and it has driven me to how we are dealing with our talented people.
The case was very clear example of the abuse of the talented people under the stupid and blind greed. The case was ended with ceasing the player from playing for 6 months and fining him with heavy fine. That means his talent will be frozen for at least one year since his skills will not be polished and he will not be productive in his peak of energy. 6 months are considered as years for the soccer player.
Any wise person can see clearly that we are killing our talents.
Talents are the real wealth of any nation. They are the real driving force for any sustained development. The nation has to cheer up when they find talent more than finding new gold mine or oil field. The talent is the real gold mine.
This spirit should be developed in any nation to encourage positive atmosphere of nursing and endorsing and developing these talents to the highest possible productive power.
If you want to measure the richness of any nation and their real and effective development index, you need to quantify their pool of talents and the percentage of the leadership position occupied by these talents.
Talent is the seed and it requires continuous endorsement and growing to be matured and developed.
The talent management is an integrated and comprehensive system and so many components should be connected together in full and complete context.
This management system starts with the talent exploring, identification and recognition. the earlier recognition, the better to develop and endorse and to grow and increase the life span of the productivity of each talent.
Talent is not restricted to certain domain, field or aspect. Each domain in the world could have its pool of talent like languages, arts, sports, science, education, inventions, discoveries, hobbies.
Any qualification and certification system for the talent should be totally fair and transparent and trust-able and reliable.
any bias in the system has to be addressed and removed immediately like race or religion or gender or nationality bias.
Bias is one of the talent damping and killers in any system and it causes a lot of talent wasting and losses and damping a lot of potentials in any society. It can convert the diversity from positive contributer to the prosperity of the society to negative wasting of the talents.
The worst could happen in any community is to depress, discourage and abuse the talents.
This could happen in the level of country, community, organization, business unit or family.
Each unit of these units could be positive environment for growing the talents or damping environment.
Some of these communities act like poisonous soil where they are killing the talents and if they didn't kill them they are dwarfing them and diluting them to average and undistinguished laymen.
What happens to these communities either loosing the talents internally or the brain drain of these talents or talent drain.
It is highly important for any successful system to distinguish the talents and let them stand out in the crowd.
The talent hunter is equally important and he should be rewarded and appreciated as well. They are the gold explorers.
The talent management system should be associated with powerful funding system to empower it and turn it to value and sustain its development without abusing it to the harmful way.
Labor laws should be legislated to protect, encourage and grow the talents.

Gender diversity

I received circulated survey about the gender diversity policy of Schlumberger , my employer. Here is my opinion about the gender diversity. Diversity in general is very healthy and no doubts that it enriches any community and society. But should it be objective by itself and to be one of the corporate objectives to achieve certain level of gender balance. I disagree with setting the gender balance as an objective. I've seen in my career life more negative impact on the business because of this policy. I support that the equality and the talent capturing which is irrelevant to the balance policy. We should modify totally the policy to be the enforcement of the equality in the employment and the full fair and unbiased qualifications. Because we confined our policy to the gender balance which is a very reactive approach to support the women as a minority, I've seen reverse trend of bias toward the men by giving the women advantageous privileges to encourage and support and retain them. It is negative impact on the business because of misunderstood social responsibility and satisfying the shareholders and public opinion and the public image of the company.
Now we have the extremism of this policy and blindly support the women.
I'm still supporting the mixed gender environment as long as the ground roles are clear and respected. I agree as well that the uni-gender environment is not the most healthy environment for social and business reasons.
But the current situation is becoming very frustrating by giving the woman the full rights in maternity and paternity and on the other side the vacation balance is very restricted to the men in the majority of the countries. I feel that I'm working for a supporting my female colleague through a way and cause I don't believe in.
I'm working more so they can enjoy their social and career life and they can save more!!!!.
It shouldn't be about balance. Only talented and qualified force should join the organization regardless to the balance objectives. Otherwise they should have as well nationalities balance, race balance, disability balance.. etc ..!!!