Marco Milani

I just read this post in which the author depicted the main differences between works involving static environments, like accountants management, in which the way of making things changes slowly and more dynamic environments, like IT related areas, in which things change terribly faster.

Reading this I realized what I recently thought about the continue and strong knowledge process I need to face to in my everyday work and I put myself a question: would I like to live without continuously learning new things?

In last few month I become aware of one big truth: I'm not happy at night if during the day I didn't learn something new.

I suppose that this is due mainly to two factors:
1. I'm forced to learn new things every day, because technologies and markets move faster and faster and the knowledge must run ,at least at the same speed. Any IT professional is on the cutting edge of the technology and has to remain on the edge in order to offer excellent products.
2. I physically require to learn something new every day. My soul and my brain ask this.

The first is an external conditioning, the second is a condition imposed by my way of being. These two penetrate mutually in such a strong way that I can't decide which of the two is the independent cause: is my soul that makes me "decide" to become an IT professional or is the IT market that addicted me to such an high rate of changes and making me unable to live without continuous improvements?

I suppose, and I like to think that, neither the first nor the second is the unique independent cause, but both com-penetrates in making me like I am.

I also realized that is really difficult to me working on repetitive duties (sometimes this is necessary even in IT activities) without giving up to the seduction of suspend my tasks and start exploring new solutions and paths in order to find optimized and more efficient ways of doing the same things.

This is good because improves my abilities and my background, but it is also a doom because it continuously train my brain and make me addicted to a continuous learning process.

It's Christmas and another year is closing. A lot of things happened this year, as usual some are good, some other are bad. The social psychology seems to be forged to a widespread pessimism and I'm a little bit concerned about the new year.  I have no doubt in the human ability to make good things, but I'm concerned because a so wide absence of trust will make bad things happen.

Even if I don't like to see good things where there are not good things at all, I'm in general an optimist. I'm sure that only if we all try to see some good things in the  future the economic disaster depicted by media and by some politician could be avoided.

It's quite clear that in last years a lot of companies, "business men" and "managers", tried to make money creating apparent and virtual value. This should make us reflecting in our judgement ability about what happen in the world, about the real value of things and about our ability in understanding the news from media. We are all responsible if virtual value was created from nothing and we if we didn't recognize sick business systems.

I hope that the crisis we perceive in this weeks will produce s kind of "garbage collection" in economical and financial world in order to eliminate all fake businesses.

We should always remember that real investments, and the resulting economical welfare, are completely based on confidence about the future, we risk the economical paralysis if we don't trust in future.

We should even understand that if we all think that bad things will happen, bad things will really happen.

We should trust in future, we have to trust in the human ability in finding solutions to problems. I thinks that the main ingredients toward a satisfactory solution to this crisis are:

• Patience
• Hard work
• Social solidarity
• Ethics

I'm sure that if we put these ingredients in our every-day life in 2009 we will see a completely new and better world.

Try to think positive. Merry Christmas!