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- Rebellious Thoughts #65 - 🤘 Feels good
Rebellious Thoughts #65 - 🤘 Feels good
By Gus Balbontin
Edition #65
Happy new year everyone!!!! Yew!!! Here we go 2025! - I still struggle to get my head around it - I’ve written about time before and while I practically understand it, emotionally I wish I were a photon so time didn’t pass for me (remember photons travel through space but not time! Go on - ask chat GPT hahaha)
We’ve had a bunch of new sign-ups during the break… YEW! thanks for joining and thanks for sharing this newsletter!
SO if you’re new, my offer is simple: I promise to provoke you to stay adaptable in less than 5 min once a week.
Anyways.. If you follow me on socials you would have seen I’ve recently returned from our break in the Phillipines with the fam - wow - what an amazing country.
First half of the trip was a crazy adventure, deep into the cordillera, where the roads are so zig-zaggy that it takes 12 hrs to cover 300km… and to get to your accommodation you have to trek!
As always, even though I am on holidays my brain is ticking over, so here are a few observations and their relevant provocation - let’s go!
Natural v Synthetic
To get the trip started we trekked through the ancient rice terraces of Batad, they are a sight that will take your breath away - the kind of visual stimulus your brain struggles to process and turns it into a painting cos it does not compute with reality.
Small - simple - now is the way of life here. Uncomplicated, practical, tangible.
As we were walking up and down the terraces I noticed that the terraces and the climbing steps were built following the natural shape of the mountain - a symbiotic dance in which nature provided form and we humans created function - just looking at them has a calming effect in contrast with our synthetic city grids - maybe we need less 90 degree angles in our lives - nature doesn’t really make them in the first place.
When you watch the locals move up and down these terraces, it looks effortless, when you get close to the “stairs” they use they seem unrefined, inefficient, clunky compared to our perfect 90 degree 24x18 predictable steps.
Turns out after a bit of adjusting the natural, organic, random looking steps were way more efficient and effective than our forced unnatural looking ones - and most importantly - 2000 years on - they were still perfectly functional - I don’t know if in 2000 years any of our modern stairs will still be around. Ç
As Joker our trekking guide said “our ancestors were the best engineers”.
Look closely… the stairs we use today are the modern/westernised ones.. you can see on the wall the original/ancient ones!
Question- what’s the equivalent of this in business? When do we force the customer/market to bend to our organisational processes and structures - our perfect 24x18 steps, instead of organically shaping our businesses to follow the natural shapes of humans interacting with each other?
Disconnection
Ryan, our guide, kept banging on about wild chicken soup, “it’s better than the stuff from the supermarkets” and as we finished saying “ok let’s give it a go” Germain our host started trying to round up her chickens!
“I can’t get them, I fed them already, they have all gone to sleep” - Joker jumps up and says “I think my sister has a few.. I’ll go down get it”.
In the next 15 min, we thanked the chicken for feeding us, plucked it, cleaned it and put it in the pot with some veggies and lots of ginger.
The kids joined in to help with everything muscling through the strange awareness that life sustains life - that our food does not come from supermarkets or grows in a packet. Luckily this wasn’t new to them, we have had chickens in our house here in Yarraville as well as 20 plus fruit trees, all the veges and herbs and all the bees a garden can handle, and being Argentinean and coming from a small town, there were plenty of opportunities growing up to connect and be reminded of where food comes from.
Warning! Sensitive content.
Here comes the provocation: the same way as we modern city humans have mostly disconnected from our sources of food, the larger the corporation the more we disconnect from our sources of income: the customer.
A person in finance in an organisation with a few thousand employees is probably as far away from the customer as a human picking up some “drumsticks” in a supermarket - when was the last time you spent some time with the customer?
Community
As we drive off Manila and encounter smaller and smaller towns it’s obvious that Filipinos are very community-focused - there’s a buzz, a level of very public activity and conversation happening you don’t find in other countries - it’s as if everything that happens is happening live right in front of you and everyone is helping everyone else.
Turns out there is a powerful Filipino value - Bayanihan - that represents the spirit of communal unity, cooperation and collective action. It’s helping and expecting nothing in return - it seems to be rooted in centuries of survival requiring putting always the “team” above the individual.
The time we spent in Batad made us realise that there is little you can achieve on your own here, it’s a simple life but it requires many to make it happen - rice needs collective effort.
Here are a few more beautiful values:
Pakikisama: Harmonious interpersonal relationships.
Utang na loob: A sense of reciprocal gratitude.
Malasakit: Empathetic concern for others’ welfare.
Are these values being manifested in your business and teams? Can they become part of the fabric - the way in which you come together to achieve great things?
Ok enough.
Lots of love,
Gus
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