Before I ramble over my non-cancer related experiences I want to share a key lesson I've been learning through this journey with brain tumor. My timeline changed and I became a lot more mission oriented, questioning very strongly everything that deviates fom my personal values. This of course has implications because the world continues to operate under its normal course.
My sense of urgency, which was already accentuated, became even more intense. I became less patient and more action oriented, but the world still operates at the same pace it did before my brain tumor. While time became a lot more precious to me it continues to have the same value to others. All of a sudden I became very sensitive to how I use my time but of course my life is not just me, my life is everyone that surrounds me - my family, my friends, my co-workers. How other people use their time and how it affects mine became very important and I went through a big adjustment of accepting that we all have different views on priorities and therefore use of time. What may be in my view the obvious and most productive course of action and time may not be the same to others.
As an example I will share my experience at home. Accepting our imperfections at home and compromising to keep the family happy is key for a healthy family life. While waiting for anything at home became a huge exercise of patience for me I had to re-learn that waiting is a fact of a married life. I had always been and became even more impatient with my wife when she is running late due to the traditional chores that women submit themselves to for social occasions and to look great. I am very lucky to have a very commited wife that is patient enough to show me the way, and I am applying these lessons again in other spheres of life where I was losing my patience.
Life is a constant exercise of revising priorities and compromising to achieve what gives us the most satisfaction (or like I learned with Uday Rajan, my managerial economics professor, utility). We are social creatures and constantly deal with the natural tension of doing what is good for us as individuals and what is good for us as family members and members of society.
Throughout history we created mechanisms to deal with these tensions in every sphere of life:
- Family Ties: the commitment to accept the imperfections we all have as humans and that become significantly more evident with our close relationships. This applies particulalry to our parents, wife and kids;
- Religion: the commitment to accept a view of the world and life that unites groups around faith and our existential questions about what life is about, what should be a commitment to Humanity;
- Corporations: the commitment of many people around a cause and an economic purpose that creates value for all stakeholders. Of course most people think it is just a company with job opportunities but in fact it is much more than that;
- Government: a framework created for people of the same culture, or in heterogeneous countries like Brazil and the US, different cultures with evolving values, that need a common legal framework to stay together and act as a giant group of people;
Most people think that one person can't change the world. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact the world only changes when individuals decide to change it. All it takes is one person to organize many and change the world. Brazil just bred another amazing example of an enlightened person. Joaquim Barbosa, the Supreme Court President, just lead the trial and conviction of several high ranking politicians. The first black man to lead the Supreme Court started his life as a janitor and studied his way up to the Supreme Court and he created a spark that I hope will significantly change this country for better, illustrating that from now on the Rule of Law applies to everyone in Brazil.
Despite all the mechanisms and lessons from others many people still live a life that they do not enjoy, hoping to compensate for it later. There are examples of people that abandon everything when they uncover cancer. I heard a case of a guy that was diagnosed with cancer in the UK, quit his job and family to make the trip of his life only to find out later that his diagnose was false. The key lesson here is that while we will certainly go through a drastic revision of priorities we should never forget that we might, and I really hope that most certainly will, live many years to come. My goal is to live another 62 years to break the 100 years-old barrier!
As an example many people take jobs for the money so that when they get older they can finally do what they like. This is to me one of the factors that leads to the increasing rates of stress that spills into other aspects of life. I was very lucky not to fall in that trap.
Early in my life I learned a great lesson. I once worked at a financial services firm where we all worked for the money. Me and many of my peers worked from 7AM to 10PM to make a big fat bonus (when you are 22 years-old a big fat bonus is neither big nor fat). Interestingly after dedicating a whole year to this insane schedule the market went South and the company closed. The partners of the firm founded an Asset Management company and invited me to join it. My "interview" was at 8PM (who interviews at 8PM?) and I was left with the same message, "you are going to work very long hours, maybe more than before, but the money will come". I left and went to a friend's house to watch a big soccer game. I spent the evening there having a lot of fun and enjoying my friends' company. The very next day I declined the offer, I realized that if I worked there I would have missed precious moments with my friends, that my time would not come back.
I continued working at my job at the time where I learned one of the most profound lessons in life. One of the partners at that firm once taught me that we need to work on what we like and believe in, the money will follow. Today this company is a case study in the services industry, one of the first Brazilian service companies to go global, and its culture continues to be a winning culture.What is also interesting about this is that my working hours were not that different, I reduced my hours from 14 to 12 hours, but I felt a much bigger sense of purpose and came home happy every single day.
The key lesson here is to avoid waiting until you are old to be happy. However for the newly diagnosed don't think you can change the world in a few days and compensate for your life's poor decisions in a few days. Short-term decisions always lead to bad outcomes, the world is plagued with it at several levels:
- Government leaders making bad decisions to win elections;
- Public company leaders making bad decisions to hit the quarter;
- Small businesses owners evading taxes by not recording sales and profits;
- People commiting crimes to get money they did not earn.
- Be honest: never lie to others or yourself, we all have the right to be happy and enjoy life but that responsibility is 100% ours. Being honest will always help us to prevent regreting decisions;
- Be patient: Work hard to change the things you can change, accept the things you can't change and be wise to know the difference between them;
- Be mature: accept that people will look at you differently, being closer to death accelerates our maturation process but don't expect others to be as mature and that does not make them worse;
