Amr El Beleidy

You change what you see and what you see changes you

My yoga instructor told me that wandering teachers normally set up shop in the most stressful cities. This way they know there are a lot of people who are in need of their skills. Yoga sure does calm you down and brings yourself back to you.

But they don’t last there for long. Soon, it becomes too much for them and they have to move on again.

You see, they came to change the city, and they probably have, but the city has also changed them, and they didn’t like these changes.

This makes me think about the idea of living in Cairo. Sure, all my family is there and most of my friends, but maybe it is not such a good idea to live somewhere where your sanity is constantly assaulted, where you struggle daily just to keep your cool, and not lose it all.

Does it make sense? What good does it do for anyone to stay trapped in this mind-numbing hole?

Sure it’s a challenge, and I want to be able to adapt, to be able to live peacefully in my own hometown, and not to dislike it. But we don’t chose where we are born, nor brought up, and maybe this challenge is really meaningless. Maybe I am better off living somewhere else, where my sanity is better preserved.

Imagine you are born to horrible abusive parents. Does it make sense to keep fighting to change their behaviour and be able to live with them, or does it make more sense to just leave the house and become independent? Or does it depend on how much damage you think you will sustain in trying to make a difficult situation better?

There is a law in physics that tells you that you cannot see anything without changing it. That is, you can never know had you not seen it if the same thing would happen or not. One of those, if a tree falls and no one was around to hear it, would it still make a sound type of thing.

But it now seems to me that the relationship is reciprocal, not only do you change what you see, but what you see also changes you. And seeing Cairo day in day out, breathing its air, being trapped in its traffic, dealing with its stressed out people, surely cannot be good for anyone.

Maybe I will leave again soon, or maybe I should stick it out this time and really do an effort to stop moving from place to place. Two very conflicting simultaneous feelings.

Time will tell.

Relationships and successful women

Many women think that by being high achievers they intimidate possible prospects. They tell themselves, that it is difficult to find a man who can handle her, and how successful she is. They tell themselves that a man will be jealous, that she is better off toning down her successes lest she repels possible suitors. The belief goes that men are threatened by smart, ambitious and successful women.

This reminds me of the same argument that goes along the lines of, if no man is approaching you, that’s because you are too beautiful it intimidates them. Most probably this is not true.

Sure some men, heck even if you want, most men are intimidated by beautiful successful smart and ambitious women, take that if you want, but not all men. So if you’ve never been approached by anyone, or if all your relationships have failed, don’t blame it solely on the men. Like I said in a previous post, most clashes are due to issues from both sides, and this includes you.

Here are some reasons why relationships with successful women (and maybe men) might not be working… or working.

1. You are a lower priority.

In general we have to balance a lot in life. You need time for yourself, your work, your hobbies, your friends, your family and your partner. Most successful people will be spending more time than average on their work (or hobby, depending on where their area of succes is), which means less time for you. If they are workaholics, you pretty much have very little space in their lives, and you might not like that. Add to that the possibility of ditching you if something comes up, because let’s face it you can wait but work won’t.

2. You cannot really complain.

If a woman complains her man is working too much, he’s seen as not giving her enough attention. But if the man complains then, he’s probably jealous. He’s needy, clingy and jealous. He’s the type of man who wants to lock you up at home, because he’s so afraid of how successful you are. You show him girl. Ugh!

This attitude makes working things out even more difficult, since both parties are already coming from a place of blaming each other.

3. They’re probably insecure.

Have you not heard the expression insecure overachiever? Yup it happens, not all the time but it happens. The majority of high achievers and 80% of criminals have a weak sense of self, whatever that means. I’m not sure actually what it means, it’s a good idea that you google it. In all cases it’s very possible that they are doing all this because they need to be “successful” in order to feed their self-worth.

This explains why work is uber-important, because it’s not about work, it’s about their self-worth and if you get near it, they’ll be very defensive.

4. They’re probably very competitive.

Again, it won’t always be the case, but it is highly possible. They are used to winning and they want to win. If you end up with a super-competitive person who is not able to differentiate between winning a race and winning in life and especially in a relationship, their ego will come in the way big time. They will want to come out of a relationship as winners. This means you are either a trophy or you will get dumped. If they feel like you’ll dump them, they’ll probably preempt and dump you first, because they don’t want to be the one who “lost”.

At the end of the day every person is different, but on other levels we’re all the same. We’re probably all the same differently.

A relationship is a combination, and some combinations as outrageous as they seem actually work.  A sadist and a masochist both have major issues, but put them together and they’re happy. So don’t take these aspects in a negative sense. Some people don’t want a relationship where they see each other so often, some will be so busy they won’t have time anyway, some need an insecure woman to feel more comfortable and others will relish the competition they provide.

So enjoy!

Quitting twitter: Self-destruction or self-saving.

Last night I did not sleep well. My mind was very busy with many things. I was not feeling very good. I have to take a number of rather difficult decisions and so thinking about them was taking all my brain power.

I woke up in the middle of the night, with a very strong sense that I should quit twitter. I had been thinking about this for a while now, it was not a spur of the moment thing, but the decision was. I figured I’d give myself a couple of weeks to really decide and see.

Having a strong feeling to do something does not always mean it’s the best thing for you. I keep remembering the story of this man, I don’t remember his name, who every time he achieves something, he becomes very self-destructive and starts all over again. But also holding onto things that hurt us is not good either.

First I’d like to tell you how I got to my 6,350 followers. The number may sound very big outside of Egypt, but I would say it’s average for your heavy twitter users here. We have the 50K level, the 25K level, the 10K level then the 5K level. There is also the 1-2K level then your newbies. The number of people in each level obviously increases as you go down.

Nevertheless 6.5k is a substantial amount of people who want to know what I’m saying and possibly have a conversation, and I appreciate each and every one of them.

Pre-revolution.

Right before the revolution I was at about 900 followers, this was at the time, quite a high figure although again not top tier. Two years before I had started using twitter. I was not aware of the Egyptian twitter community and its figures yet. I started following a lot of people who have bios that share my interest. I was more or less following / followed by 900 people.

Soon enough I found following this number unmanageable, there was a lot of noise as well on my timeline. So I stopped using twitter for about a year. Later I decided to mass delete all those I follow. When I did that naturally my 900 followers soon dropped to 650.

A while later I discovered that my tweets were not being indexed in search and I later found out that my mass unfollowing was the reason. I sent to twitter telling them I just wanted to reset my twitter experience and that I promise not to do that again. They let it go and they indexed me.

So on went the tweeting until I went up again to 900 followers.

Post-revolution.

I woke up on Friday 28th, unaware that the internet had been cut off. I switch on my laptop and voila I’m online. I had been one of the few whose ISP was still working. I guess I was one of the earliest to wake up that day (7am on a Friday) and so got a lot of attention, a lot. By the end of the 18 days I was somewhere around 5, 5.5k followers.

Eventually I stopped tweeting about politics and demos and I started losing followers again, probably seen a 500 follower drop. I guessed many were following me to know what was happening in the country and once everyone else was online, and I had stopped providing info they were naturally not interested.

Nevertheless a lot of Egyptians were joining twitter post-revolution and I was tweeting heavily, with some politics and citizen reporting when I went down to any protest. So my numbers started climbing up again slowly until I reached the 6.4k today. To give this some scale I figure your average Egyptian regular tweeter has between 1-2k followers.

What now?

Now, I’ll just need to decide how to deal with twitter.

Why is quitting self-saving?

1. I’ve become too transparent. My inner thoughts and feelings are always there in public. We were not meant to function this way. We’re meant to hide some of  how we feel and what we think, especially about other people, to oil social interaction and make it smoother.

2. It’s an unhealthy way to send a message. I know you are following me, I know you will understand you’re the inspiration behind this tweet, so I’ll tweet it. I’ve had friends look at my tweets and say, did you mean me here? Yes, yes I did.

3. It’s an unhealthy way to vent anger at the world. A lot of us are doing it. I dropped my phone, I got into an argument at work. Traffic sucks big time. I burnt the food. Life is unfair. I hate SCAF, etc… Venting the negativity out, and out onto other people, instead of just sucking it up like we used to before the smart phone days and just not making it a big deal. When you tweet about it, you make it into a big deal and you are throwing your negativity at everyone else, in exchange for a short burst of relief.

4. It’s false security. Having a large follower count plays with your ego. We all check our stats regularly, our followers, our retweets. Some more than others but we all do it. We want to know what others think, and we take security into thinking thousands of people want to listen to me, I must have something good to say.

5. It gives a false sense of achievement. What did you do today? I might have lazed around all day but it’s ok because I tweeted some stuff and got some more followers, so I’m good. And while sometimes tweeted some stuff would be important if you are spreading critical information, but most times it’s as productive as small talk in a  party.

6. It’s addictive. I check, check then check again for anything new. If my phone is not with me, I want to check and I’m not fully concentrating. Sometimes I feel I have withdrawal symptoms similar to substance abuse (but much less in intensity).

7. I’m not fully with those around me. When going out with friends, or sitting with family, constantly checking your phone is not ideal. Your mind is somewhere else most of the time and you are not really there, giving them the attention they deserve and the attention you deserve. When I decided that I won’t be looking at my phone a couple of times I went out with friends who don’t have twitter accounts, it was much more full, and human.

Why is quitting self-destructive?

1. Twitter, like money, is an awesome tool. If you’re using it incorrectly then don’t just throw it away. Learn how to use it and use it correctly. In my case however, I still need to figure out what the correct use for me is, and how to be disciplined enough not to fall back into misuse. It’ll be a good lesson on learning how to manage things, instead of avoiding them because they can have a negative effect.

2. People. I’ve met some awesome people off twitter. I’ve even made a friend or two. Where else can you find such a group of interesting and exciting people?! And even those who I didn’t get to meet, I’ve had informative and interesting conversations with.

3. News. I get to find out what’s happening before the rest of the country in many cases. It feels like the back-office of Egypt, with inside info on what is really going on. This is particularly useful since media is super censored.

4. Information. When you have more than 6 thousand people you can ask about anything, someone is bound to know. Someone with real experience and solid knowledge.

At the end

There are definitely more positives and negatives and if you have more please do leave a comment telling us what you think. But that’s what I could come with on the spot, and probably these are the ones that hit home the most.

At the end after seeing what I came up with, I feel that my online life is taking up more of my time than it should and definitely more space in my head that it deserves. I probably won’t quit twitter completely, but maybe I need a break until I change my approach to it, until I have more ability to handle it, without letting it get to me, without it taking over, seeing it for what it is.

For many twitter is just an extension of their professional lives, or passions, online. For me, it seems to be an extension of my personal life. And personal should stay personal, or maybe blogged about, where we don’t expect immediate response, and where we don’t know who’s read what. Writing has a soothing effect, of getting things out of your system, like this blog post.

Maybe after taking it from twitter to my blog, I’ll start writing posts and then not publishing them. I know, it’s called a diary. Maybe this is what I really need. Time will tell.

Don’t let the bad guys get to you!

Both the British and the Americans had notable terror events on their land, the 7/7 bombings and the 9/11 events. Responses in both countries by the public have been very interesting. While I did not do an actual study, it seems like there have been two main themes along which the responses took place.

The Americans, who had been hit first, were quick to go into their shell. Everyone waited to see what this means, the response was a knee-jerk reaction, and a lot of new rules were up, blocking many people from doing many things.

The British on the other hand, despite having their busses and tube blown up, put a yellow police line around the blown up bus (which I have personally seen) and got the rest of the busses to go around it. Everyone was back on the street the next day, fully knowing that they could be next.

The British did not let others scare them into changing their life. They were willing to take the risks, they refused to be frightened into submission. They wanted to take the bus, and if someone blew up a bus then they won’t stop their life for it. The important thing here is not letting the “bad” people win, and not letting them change the way “good” people live their lives.

Another British example is the bendy bus. While the usual busses have one door to go up and another to go down, the bendy bus has three doors and you can go up or down from any of them. On usual busses you present your ticket to the driver as you get on, but with the bendy bus you don’t need to.

They put these busses on the crowded routes, and since the point is to get crowded routes moving faster, they realised it’s easier not to make everyone wait until the driver sees every ticket. So keeping this in mind, and focusing on making the life of paying passengers easier, they figured out a way to make not paying not worthwhile. The priority here was to make the life of the “good” passenger better, and not catching the “bad” passenger.

Their way to deal with it was having random checks by inspectors while the bus was moving. If you get caught you pay a fine of equivalent to 50 bus rides. So really if you get caught once, it’s not worth it, just pay. And even if the system allows some free-riding, it’s still the best system that makes the life of the paying passenger easiest.

Some of us, including myself at a certain amount of time,  have focused on the wrong thing in our personal lives. When we go through a bad experience, we try to protect ourselves by going into our shell. We let others in or we’re nice to them and they take advantage, and we’re hurt or feel bad afterwards. Little by little, we end up locking ourselves completely in and we only hurt ourselves. Don’t let the bad people win!

My nose did that very same thing. In response to an allergy, it decided that the air coming in carries the allergen and so the best way to protect itself is to block that air. It got inflamed (from the inside) and grew in size, in attempt to block the allergen carrier. Needless to say it did not make my life easy not being able to breathe.

So if your love has been used against you, next time love even more. If your generosity has been abused, be more generous. With time you’ll start getting better at spotting who’s abusing your good side, and you’ll cut them off. But don’t stop. Don’t make it a rule. Don’t lock yourself in to protect yourself, it only makes your life miserable.

Don’t let those who hurt you win. Focus on giving more to those who deserve it, and not cutting out those who don’t. Focus on the positive, not the negative. I don’t remember who said it but it makes sense, “Living well is the best revenge.”

Celebrating my birthday for the very first time

I had never understood why people celebrate their birthdays before. It just didn’t make sense to me.

A lot has happened lately, and a lot has changed both in me and around me. I now have my reasons to celebrate.

I’m officially announcing to the universe that I’m planning to celebrate my next birthday

The girl with the most beautiful voice in the world

There once was a young girl. She was young, weak and frail, so thin and small one wondered how anyone could be so small. A King and Queen saw her, all alone, abandoned by her parents. They took her in and let her live with them.

As the girl grew up, the King and Queen brought her the best singing teachers. They would not let her out of the palace, except in very exceptional circumstances, and they needed to occupy her time. This way she can also sing and fill the palace with joy, or entertain the King’s guests, whenever the King desires.

As it turns out, the girl had the most beautiful voice in the world. Her teachers were very impressed by her and encouraged her to sing to many people. It was a shame, they told her, that such a beautiful voice should not be shared with the whole world.

The girl went to the King and told him what her teachers have said, that she should go out into the world, and share her voice with everyone. It would cure hearts, she told the King. He stopped for a minute to think.

The King had taken a particular liking to the girl, some of his own daughters thought he liked her more than he liked them. She listend to what he said, he was the most valuable person in the whole world for her. He was ambivalent. If he lets the girl out, there is a good chance she won’t be as obedient as she used to be.

She’ll open her eyes to the world and might want to wander off. And despite having protected her from such thoughts, she has been showing interest in going out.

The Queen was adept at removing any signs of resistance to orders. She’d skillfully remove any foreign thoughts the girl developed, either through her teachers or her father’s guests.

The Queen had been complaining lately that she thinks the girl is becoming rebellious. She could smell it, and she doesn’t like it.

The King then reached the conclusion that the girl should share her voice with the world. Maybe if they give her something she wants, a little bit of freedom, she’d stop her rebellious thoughts and realise that the King and Queen are who she should listen to.

Upon hearing the news of the King’s decision, the girl ran up to his quarters, and in an unusual act, opened the doors without knocking, ran to the king and gave him a strong hug accompanied by many kisses. The King smiled, he had made the right decision.

Soon enough the King realised he was wrong. The girl, instead of being obedient, started asking for more time away from the palace. And she became more assertive about it. She had started loving life outside the walls. She started seeing the King and Queen as her captors. She started despising being forced to sing for the King’s guests. She saw herself as much more than banquet entertainment. She would heal the world with her voice.

Then one day, when her demands were too much for the King to bear, in a burst of anger, he told her she can leave. She can leave, but never to return.

The girl, with a waterfall of tears flowing down her cheeks, did not know what to do. The King and Queen were everything she knew. She’d never lived outside the walls. They were her food, water and shelter. They were affection and security. They were everything.

She wanted to leave so much, but she couldn’t bare to see the King angry or the Queen upset. They were the ones who did everything for her, as they many times reminded her. They were the ones who gave her her voice. If it wasn’t for them, she’d be just another abandoned baby with an unknown future. And she loved them so much.

The King opened the palace door, pointed to the outside and shouted at her, “Don’t you want to leave? Leave!”

She looked at the world outside through the door frame. It seemed so far and scary. Her tears were now in full flow. She looked down and away from the door. Trapped in her fears, she walked back inside. She never dared ask for anything again.

Where does our time go?

I’ve just spent three days in an oasis. And instead of the usual desert trips we actually stayed in someone’s house, in the green area of the oasis. Time there flows slowly, and people seem to do nothing. Eat, eat and then more eating.

You would think that people there are completely unproductive. Their conversations revolve around mundane and simple things. The order in which they should drop something off and pick something up for example can be the subject of a 15 minute conversation, whereas given the size of the place and that there are only five cars going around, they could have dropped off anything and picked up anything in the time they had the conversation. But what else is there to be talked about? Not much happens in your average day on in the field.

Oh! Look! That palm tree is growing. Not exactly exciting.

Sure when it’s harvest time, the village is all over the place with loads of action, but that’s about a month every year.

Back to the city, I’m wondering where my time goes. I’m almost always in a rush, running out of time and loosing count of all the things I have to do. Many times I skip a meal or even forget to eat. Why? What am I doing really?

And given that I have all these technological advantages that don’t exist in the farm, shouldn’t I be a hundred times more productive? Although I can tell you now that about 2-3 hours of my day everyday are lost in traffic, so that’s one thing we can start with. And I spent another 20 minutes writing this blog post, no one on the farm is writing blog posts.

I would like to conduct an experiment where as many Cairo people as possible would track what they’re doing with their time every day for a week. This should help us figure out whether we really do anything of value or not. If you’re interested leave me a comment below

Love is its own reward

In a previous life I’ve thought of a relationship as an investment, not any more.  A lot of people talk about the investment of emotions, effort, time and sometimes money they’ve put into a relationship. And when it ends, they feel the other person has wronged them, they have taken all their investment and threw it into the wind, leaving them with nothing. The natural reaction is then to try to pick a better person to invest in the next time, so as to minimise loss.

This is ridiculous. An investment is giving up something now to get more later. So if you give up some money to your bank, you should be getting more in the future. Or if you start a business, you’d be giving up money, time and effort to make a ton of money later on. So how does a relationship fit this model?

What are you giving up? What do you expect in return later on, and when is this later on? How do you calculate the internal rate of return on a relationship?

Love is its own reward. A relationship is continuously rewarding, every time you feel something, every time you see the other person, every time you smile, every time you miss them and every time you think about them. It’s constant reward.

Sure, sometimes it goes sour, but if you have an understanding partner who is willing to fix things, the fixing process itself is a bonding exercise. Might give you some pain, but pain is part of being human. Some people would kill to feel anything, even if it’s pain, just to remember they are alive.

And it might have ended, no marriage, no kids, none of what you expected. But if marriage and kids are your sole targets there are easier ways to get there.

A relationship ending is not always easy, sometimes it’s really difficult. Yes you are going through hard times, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve lost an investment. Just because you’ve lost a future you imagined in your head, doesn’t mean you’ve lost. You can’t lose something you don’t already have. Cherish the past, and move on to the future.

If you are doing things out of love, your actions are your reward. Enjoy it!

Thoughts about overthinking

Today it hit me right in the face that I overthink. People have been telling me since forever that I overthink. I let them get away with it because everyone tells me that, so ok, fine, I overthink, whatever that really means. But I could not do anything else except think. What I call thinking they call overthinking, so be it, that’s how I’ve managed my life so far.

Then today it hit me. I was thinking about noise. That’s what it means to overthink.

When sending a signal to mean something, sometimes we involuntarily send something along with it that means nothing. Our message is in there, but there is added noise. A speck of dust in someone’s eye would make it look like they’re winking at you, but they aren’t. So you’re trying to figure out what that wink was all about, and how it fits in what they’re communicating but really it was not meant to be sent and it really means nothing.

You know who overthinks, everyday? Stock market commentators. I had this job once. I had to write about why the market went up or down one or two percent. Needless to say there were days where nothing really happened, so I had to make stuff up. I had to figure out what signal the market was trying to send by going down 1%.

But really, there could be no fundamental reason, it could all be just coincidences coming together. Those doing the buying and the selling are human beings. They have circumstances and moods, and they make illogical decisions sometimes. What if someone needed the money to finance their gambling addiction, so they sold off a good amount of stock driving the prices down? What if someone wanted to sell but couldn’t come round to it yesterday so they did it today? What if someone had a bad experience with the customer service of a company and they happened to own stock there, so they sold it off in revenge?

Sometimes there is no trend in the market and all this jitter reflects the sum of a lot of coincidences. There is really nothing to read into. And sitting there trying to come up with a reason will send you off balance. Sometimes things mean nothing.

There is an art to figure out when there is a trend or not. Deciding which piece of information is signal and which is noise, what to process and what to throw away. It will take me time to reduce my thinking of noise. But one thing is for sure, if you think about everything you will think about noise.

The question that comes to mind now is, am I overthinking about overthinking?

The mistake of making no mistake

It takes two bad drivers for an accident to happen. OK, maybe not all the time, but in most times. And in conflict in take two parties messing up for a conflict to turn to war. Needless to say, that’s assuming the two parties are genuinely attempting to avoid conflict.

So the conflict happened, turned to war, and now you’re not talking anymore. What next?

Learn. The biggest mistake you can do is to completely blame the other party/parties for the war. Because then you will go on, doing the same things that might have helped start or escalate the conflict, and you might get yourself in trouble again, when you’re not asking for any.

If you’re lucky the other party wouldn’t just disappear, they’d give you an earful before they left. And it would be full of anger, reprimand or any other negative emotion. Look beyond the emotions and try to figure out what is really behind them telling you all these things. What did you do that pushed them to this?

You will always find you’ve contributed something to the conflict. Or at least you could have handled it better. The only person who loses from you being obstinate and thinking you’ve done nothing wrong is you. Think about your mistakes, learn, and move on.