--- title: "Personal development" --- # Personal development # Personal development "It's never too late to be what you might have been." George Eliot "**Successful people do what others are unwilling to do. Don't wish it were easier; wish it were better.**" - Famous motivational speaker Jim Rohn emphasizes the discipline, hard work, and commitment required for success and personal development. It involves pushing beyond your comfort zone, taking responsibility for your own growth, and a mindset geared toward continuous improvement. --- ## Four Equations My Father Never Knew — and the Price We Both Paid **The Workshop** My father had a workshop in the back garden. Not large — four metres by five, perhaps, with a wall of planks blackened by grease and smoke, and a shelf on which sat, in an order only he understood, keys of various sizes, rubber stoppers, screwdrivers with worn red handles, a cardboard box of screws sorted by length. It smelt of diesel, of warm metal, and of a thing I don't know how to name other than *hard-won order*. That's where I watched him work whenever I had the patience to stay. Neighbours came with ailing cars, broken wheelbarrows, water pumps that would no longer start. He listened first — not to the engine, but to the man. He let the sentence finish, even when the sentence was long and imprecise and contributed nothing technical. Only after that did he put his hands on the engine. I never heard him say he didn't know. He'd say *"let's see"* — and in his way of saying it, *"let's see"* was not a hesitation, it was a method. He said an engine will tell you itself what's wrong if you listen to it properly. That haste ruins any diagnosis. That the worst thing you can do is replace the part you suspect before checking the one next to it. He died without knowing there were four equations that described exactly what he did. Not in the workshop — there his intuition was precise. But in life. In decisions. In money. In health. In the choices he made without instruments, with common sense and the experience of a man who had lived in scarcity and who had learned that caution costs less than boldness. Sometimes it costs less. Other times it doesn't. > **Transparency note:** This article was written with AI assistance. The biographical anchors, the judgements, and the voice belong to the author. --- [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/four-equations.md) ## The Bullet Holes You Still Armour: Why You Keep Making Abraham Wald's Mistake  *You know the story. You admire its elegance. You have probably retold it at a dinner party. And yet, today — almost certainly this very hour — you are repeating the exact error it was designed to prevent. This is an essay about why that happens, and what, if anything, can be done about it.* --- **I. A Hungarian Mathematician Steps Into the Room** It is 1943. The United States Army Air Forces are losing bombers over occupied Europe at a rate that is becoming strategically untenable. The planes return — or rather, some of them do — pockmarked with bullet holes clustered along the fuselage, the wings, the tail sections. The cockpits and engines, by contrast, appear relatively unscathed. The obvious conclusion, the one reached by men of evident competence and reasonable intelligence, is to reinforce the areas under fire: bolt extra plating to the wings, add armour to the fuselage, protect the places that the data show are most vulnerable. Then Abraham Wald walks in. Wald is a Hungarian-Jewish mathematician who fled Austria in 1938 after the Nazi annexation — an act of exile that saved his life, given that almost his entire family would perish in the Holocaust. By 1943 he is a member of the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, a wartime body tasked with applying mathematical rigour to military problems. He is so trusted, and his work so sensitive, that his secretaries had to physically remove notepaper from his hands the moment he finished writing — he lacked the security clearance to read back his own classified analyses. As Jordan Ellenberg recounts in *How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking* (2014), there was a running joke in the Statistical Research Group about Wald's Kafkaesque situation: the man solving the problem was not permitted to know the solution. What Wald tells the officers is this: armour the engines. Armour the cockpit. Reinforce precisely the areas showing the least damage. The reasoning is as simple as it is devastating. The planes they are examining are the ones that *came back*. The bullet holes visible on those fuselages are not a map of danger; they are a map of survivability. The aircraft hit in the engines and the cockpit are not on the tarmac because they never returned. They are scattered across fields in France and Germany, unreachable and uncounted. The data set before the officers is not a sample of all planes hit by enemy fire. It is a sample, systematically biassed, of planes resilient enough to absorb damage in non-critical zones and still limp home. The absence of bullet holes on the engines is not a sign that the engines were protected. It is a sign that planes struck in the engines did not survive to be counted. Wald's original 1943 memorandum, "A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors," was classified and circulated only internally. It was not published in the open literature until 1981, when the Center for Naval Analyses released it. By then, the insight it contained had migrated from military statistics into economics, finance, medicine, management theory, and psychology — becoming, arguably, one of the most consequential statistical ideas of the twentieth century. And it has changed almost nothing about the way most people reason. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/abraham-walds-mistake.md) ## A Letter for the Day You Understood It Was Time to Move On  This essay would not exist without a Facebook post by Cristian Stancescu, published on 24 July 2026, on Romania's Border Police Day. The post was brief, direct, without literary pretension. Someone had rung him that morning, whilst he was savouring his coffee. *Come to the pitch, we've gathered for a kick-about.* When he arrived, the teams were already warming up. Former colleagues from the Botoșani Border Police had organised a tournament. A fishing competition, football, chess, backgammon, tennis. *It was lovely, a moment of stories, of "oh, what a team we had."* That was all. But behind that *oh, what a team we had* lay something a Facebook post could not fully contain: the feeling of a man who looks at former colleagues and understands that his identity is larger than the function he once carried. That what remains after years of uniform and discipline is not nostalgia, but character. That post was the spark. This text is the fire it lit. --- > **A note for international readers:** This essay grew out of a gathering held on Romania's Border Police Day — a national commemoration observed annually on 26 July. Former officers and current colleagues met on a football pitch in Botoșani, a city in north-eastern Romania, near the border with the Republic of Moldova. The event itself is incidental. What follows is not a report of that afternoon, but the essay it made possible. --- [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/it-was-time-to-move-on.md) ## Standby mode has negligible consumption… but after two or three years? Standby mode — the state a television or other appliance enters when you switch it off without fully disconnecting it from the mains —![Standby mode has negligible consumption… but after two or three years?](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/sdand-by.jpg "Standby mode has negligible consumption… but after two or three years?") is one of those domestic facts that most of us accept without question. The device isn't on, but it isn't dead either. It waits, drawing a trickle of current, ready to spring back to life the moment you press a button on the remote. **In brief:** I ran an experiment. I left nine LED smart-lighting systems on standby — all switched off through the app, drawing their rated 20W only when lit — connected for twenty-four hours to an official digital energy meter supplied by my electricity distributor. The result: 1.3 kWh over twenty-four hours, or 39 kWh per month, or 468 kWh per year. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/standby-after-three-years.md) ## What I'm Reading — Just Other People's Blogs? NO! For the more pragmatic reader, the correct title would be "From Toxic Expectations to Rational Estimates" — I should warn you that **the topic of my online reading is secondary** and creates a frustration of utility. *Read the text without expecting perfection, but instead estimating what can usefully be extracted from it. If the estimate is confirmed, good; if not, recalibrate for next time.[![What I'm Reading — Just Other People's Blogs? NO!](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_bloguri.jpg "What I'm Reading — Just Other People's Blogs? NO!")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=318:people-s-blogs&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503)* **The hospital corridor, the yellow chair, and the theory of estimates.** I was waiting on a yellow plastic chair in the radiology corridor of the County Hospital in Botoșani, and I don't know why I noticed it then — more acutely than usual — the colour of that yellow: a bleached yellow that had long ceased to be yellow, that had become a memory of yellow, a yellow that had given up on itself without being replaced by anything, remaining in that state of nowhere that clings to the retina and follows you after you leave. I had a dull ache in my right shoulder for about two weeks — the kind of pain that doesn't kill you but doesn't let you forget that you exist, the kind our grandparents — practical people, people who had no patience for vague ailments — called rheumatism and treated with spirits rubbed on the spot and a philosophical shrug of the shoulders, *nothing to be done about it, it'll pass*, while I was treating it with ibuprofen and postponement, which is the oldest Romanian therapy and probably the most ineffective in the long run, though in the short run it is admirable for its convenience. This article is not an advertorial and contains no sponsored content. My son was next to me on the adjacent chair — not that he wanted to be there, because at fourteen hospitals are places where old people and sick people go who are not you, not yours, and his presence there was more of an errand on Saturday's timetable than a voluntary act of filial solidarity. He had come with me on foot because I don't drive short distances when my right shoulder is compromised, because his mother couldn't, and because, in the end, I asked him to come and he didn't say no — which, at fourteen, is already a form of love, even if nobody says so out loud. He sat with his head slightly tilted towards his own screen, headphones on, with music from which deep bass tones leaked into the air between us like an invisible glass wall — I could see him, I could feel the warmth of his shoulder ten centimetres from mine, but we were, at the same time, in completely separate worlds, each in our own screen, though each of us would occasionally look up when I shifted in my seat and said hello or exchanged a few words with acquaintances, neighbours, childhood friends — you know how it is, the world is very small, and yet these people had no real business being there but would appear exhaustingly from nowhere... no, in fact it was a hospital. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/people-s-blogs.md) ## You Are Not Independent When You Do Everything Yourself. You Are Alone. The idea that takes shape beyond the story and beyond personal intuitions is a cold and economic one: it is not the quantity of work that makes the difference, but **the way in which it is distributed**. [![](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/Faci_singur_si_tocmai_asta_te_costa_cel_mai_mult.jpg)](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=323:you-are-alone&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) I think about my father's hands. I don't know why I start there, but that is where I go every time I want to understand something about real work — about what it actually means to know how to do something. His hands had a texture I have never been able to forget, though I have tried. Not because they were ugly — on the contrary — but because they held something I do not have, something that still intimidates me now, at my age, when I ought to have moved past this kind of comparison. They were a mechanic's hands. Cracked at the knuckles, with nails that no amount of soap could restore to the white of an office worker's hands. The black of engine oil had settled there as a second skin, older and more truthful than the first. My father knew how to do everything. He repaired cars, of course — that was his trade, the workshop in Botoșani where the air smelt of burnt oil and the warm metal of an engine cooling after a long journey. But he also repaired the roof when the rain came in, and the electrics when there was a short circuit, and the neighbour's rubber boots, and the black-and-white television, and my three-speed bicycle, which I broke every summer with the same systematic enthusiasm. He never refused. That was his pride — that there was nothing in the world he could not do, fix, or restore to the state it ought to be in. And I admired him for it. Sincerely, without reservation, with that uncracked admiration of a child who has not yet seen enough of the world. --- I am forty now and I understand something different. I understand that my father was exhausted. No one asked me that at the time and I didn't ask myself — children don't see their parents' tiredness, or they see it and choose not to name it, because naming it would make it real. But the tiredness was there, in the way he rose from the table and went straight to the workshop after supper, in the way his day of rest was never truly rest, because someone always turned up with something to repair, and he could not refuse, because to refuse would have meant saying he didn't know how — and that was unthinkable. He knew how to do everything. That was precisely why he could never stop. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/you-are-alone.md) ## Why I Cannot Recommend Linux to Others… Honestly There are moments in the life of a technology enthusiast when the relationship with one's working tools becomes something profound, almost visceral. [![Why I Cannot Recommend Linux to Others… Honestly](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/linux-don-t.jpg "Why I Cannot Recommend Linux to Others… Honestly")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=339:why-i-cannot-recommend-linux-to-others-honestly&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) For the past ten years, Linux has been my primary operating system — a deliberate choice **after decades of oscillating** between Windows and macOS. Before that transition, Linux had populated my servers for two decades, working **quietly and efficiently** behind the scenes, far from the spotlight. This dual experience — as both a daily user and a system administrator — has afforded me **an almost unique perspective** on the Linux ecosystem, with all its remarkable qualities and **its exasperating contradictions**. The paradox I live with is unsettling in its simplicity: I love this operating system with a passion I have never felt for any other platform, yet **I cannot in good conscience recommend it to friends**, colleagues, or family members. This paradox does not spring from destructive criticism or disappointment, but from **a lucid awareness of an uncomfortable reality**: Linux works admirably only for a certain type of user — the patient one, the enthusiastic one, the one willing to invest hours in configuration and troubleshooting, the one for whom the very process of solving problems becomes **a form of intellectual satisfaction**. In that sense, what follows is neither an apology nor a condemnation, but a nuanced examination of a technology that, whilst mature in many respects, remains surprisingly immature in the most vital aspect: the experience of the ordinary user.  This is not a matter of technological elitism or a desire to keep a well-guarded secret. On the contrary, this article aims to reveal, honestly, both the impressive achievements of the Linux ecosystem and the fundamental obstacle that prevents it from becoming a viable option for the vast majority of users. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/why-i-cannot-recommend-linux-to-others-honestly.md) ## On What Does Not Change — The Eternal Human Condition Last night, whilst repairing a server that had gone down somewhere in Braşov, I came across a slip of paper on the terminal screen bearing a fragment from a Greek tragedy. Someone had left it there like a sign — these words of Sophocles: 'Many things are terrible, but nothing is more terrible than man.' I closed my eyes for a moment and saw an endless chain — from the writers of ancient Athens to the programmers of Silicon Valley — all of them carrying the same questions, the same fears, the same hopes.[![On What Does Not Change — The Eternal Human Condition](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_Eternal_Human_Condition.jpg "On What Does Not Change — The Eternal Human Condition")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=342:eternal-human-condition&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) I want to tell you about the things that do not change. Because you live in a time when everything seems to move too quickly — artificial intelligence is learning to write poetry, robots are operating on human bodies, and machines are speaking to us in our own tongue. But beneath this restlessness, beneath the noise of progress, there is something that beats as steadily as your heart: the human condition defined by constants that cannot be modified by an UPDATE. **Death That Knocks with an Equal Foot** Horace, a Roman poet who lived two thousand years before us, wrote: *'Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede'* — pale death knocks with an equal foot at the door of the hovel and at the gate of the palace. In his day, people died of plague and war. In our day, we have antibiotics and relative peace, but death still knocks. It knocks at the door of the poor man in the Rahova neighbourhood and at the gate of the billionaire in Primăverii. I once saw, at the Floreasca Hospital, a young doctor walking out of an operating theatre. He was wiping away tears without caring who might see him. I was reminded of what Epictetus had said nineteen centuries earlier: 'It is not death that is to be feared, but the fear of death.' That doctor was not weeping because his patient had died — he was weeping because he had not managed to save him. The difference is small, but it matters. You, who live in a world where iPhones are replaced annually and trends last a matter of days, must know this: the only absolute constant is that all things come to an end. The Greeks had a phrase for it — *memento mori*, remember that you will die. It was not a threat, dear reader. It was a call to life. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/eternal-human-condition.md) ## Human Misalignment Mirrored in AI — Five Friends and a Question **I. The WhatsApp Group, Tuesday Evening, 22:47** It all began the way important things usually begin in our lives — with a throwaway message in a WhatsApp group. Mihai — a full-stack programmer with fourteen years of experience, the kind of man who can write working code in any language given an hour and a black coffee — sent a link accompanied by three words: *'read this, lads.'* The link led to an article about the implicit misalignment of artificial intelligence: the idea that neither humans nor machines come *by default* calibrated towards the common good. That alignment — whether human or artificial — is always a construct, never a natural state.[![Human Misalignment Mirrored in AI — Five Friends and a Question](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/dezalinierea-umana.jpg "Human Misalignment Mirrored in AI — Five Friends and a Question")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=344:human-misalignment-mirrored-in-ai-five-friends-and-a-question&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) Andrei, a systems engineer at a public institution in the county, replied within ten minutes: *'nothing new there — that's bureaucracy every single day.'* Ciprian, the other programmer in the group — a backend specialist, the type who speaks rarely but precisely, like a compiler with no errors — sent a grinning skull emoji. Bogdan, the IT man in equipment sales, someone who knows more psychology than tech but would never admit it aloud, wrote: *'let's talk on Friday.'* And Relu — the third programmer, the youngest among them, twenty-nine years old, who had caught the React and cloud wave and who uses ChatGPT with a casualness that makes the others feel suddenly old — added: *'Friday works for me, but I reckon AI is better aligned than people. Fight me.'* *'As the saying goes: the dog barks, the caravan moves on,'* replied Bogdan. *'We'll sort it out on Friday.'* --- **II. Preparing for the Meeting — Thursday Evening, Each at Home** Andrei sits at his desk in the living room, laptop open, a slice of bread and brined cheese beside the keyboard, reading. Not for the first time is he reading about misalignment — he has worked for nine years in a state institution and experiences misalignment daily: in procedures that fail to align, in objectives that contradict other objectives, in forms that request data nobody processes and nobody uses. But now he reads with different eyes. Not as a frustrated employee, but as a man trying to understand why things are the way they are. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/human-misalignment-mirrored-in-ai-five-friends-and-a-question.md) ## Comfort as Unwritten Rule The portrait of the urban man, "why comfort is dangerous, similar to the Lotus Island in Homer's Odyssey" — and what we can do on Monday morning — on a Friday in May as an argument. --- > *'He throws his rubbish out of the window in the hope that nobody sees him.'* --- It is half past seven in the morning, a Friday in May, and I step out the door with a simple intention: the market. Not a delivery app, not a supermarket with white lights and ambient music calibrated for mild anxiety. The market. The one with faded awnings, with the smell of pickles and warm bread mingling in the air like an old promise, with people who know your name and with conversations that have no hashtag and end with no call to action.[![Comfort as Unwritten Rule](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/comoditate.jpg "Comfort as Unwritten Rule")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=348:comfort-as-unwritten-rule&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) I take the same road I have taken for years. Botoșani on a Friday morning has a particular rhythm — it is not the rush of a large city, nor the drowsiness of a town that sleeps in. It is something in between: a community that wakes, recognises itself, exchanges a few words, and moves on. A human rhythm, pre-digital, resistant to optimisation. I am not sure I realise in that moment that this day will become, in my mind, an argument. A counter-argument, more precisely. Against a portrait I have watched grow around me like a sophisticated weed: the modern urban man, comfortable to the point of disalignment, at ease to the point of emptiness. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/comfort-as-unwritten-rule.md) ## Oroftiana, the Spruce Forest — Waiting as a Form of Love I am sitting in the cinema and thinking that there are places which have no need of publicity. [![Oroftiana, the Spruce Forest — Waiting as a Form of Love](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/oroftiana.jpg "Oroftiana, the Spruce Forest — Waiting as a Form of Love")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=354:oroftiana-the-spruce-forest-waiting-as-a-form-of-love&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503)Places that breathe within their own silence, indifferent to the fact that no one comes to photograph them or transform them into weekend destinations. Tudor Giurgiu has just finished the film. *The Spruce Forest* — that simple, almost banal title, which conceals something you do not know how to name: a particular density, a humidity of the air that enters the lungs and stays there, like a thought you return to without meaning to. The director is now in dialogue with the audience. He answers with that apparent ease of people who have thought deeply before speaking — and I listen to him and think about the way some people seem already to have digested what others are only just beginning to feel. > …the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air. The Holy Fathers would have said that there is a work of the heart that precedes the word. That before one can speak rightly about something, one must have passed through it with the heart, not merely with the mind. Saint Isaac the Syrian, in his *Words on the Ascetic Life*, writes that one who has not wept does not know what joy is — that these are not opposites, but steps, one after the other, one through the other. Giurgiu's film has brought me, without my knowing it, to one such step. And so I say, without thinking too hard about it, that our county too has a spruce forest. At Oroftiana. I say this and immediately feel how something shifts in the auditorium — a silence that is not indifference, but rather a pause, a brief stillness in people who hear a word they are not sure whether they have heard before or only dreamt. Oroftiana. A name with a particular weight, with those long syllables that sound of another era, another world — a world in which places had owners with names, in which the nobility left their mark on toponymy, in which the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/oroftiana-the-spruce-forest-waiting-as-a-form-of-love.md) ## The Bad Cop and the Girl with Painted Nails: the Theatre of Loyalty in Corporations *From the cold notification to absurd negotiations — how corporations see us when they ask for more money.* > 'Put a little soul into that bill, would you!' --- **The problem — shameless price hikes[![The Bad Cop and the Girl with Painted Nails: the Theatre of Loyalty in Corporations](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/unghii-colorate-fidelizare.jpg "The Bad Cop and the Girl with Painted Nails: the Theatre of Loyalty in Corporations")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=355:loyalty&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503)** A few days ago, something happened to a friend of mine that happens to all of us, in fact, at regular intervals, like a clock of administrative misfortune: he received a notification from his mobile operator. The message was brief, dry and — most painfully of all — utterly devoid of any trace of regret. A cold, almost robotic communication in which Orange informed him that, 'due to the economic situation', it found itself obliged to increase his monthly plan by 6% of its current value. No apology. Not a single tear. Not even a 'We're sorry, but…' that might at least preserve the illusion that one is dealing with human beings. In place of that basic humanity, the message conveyed something along the lines of: 'It happens. Pay up. Everything else is your problem.' [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/loyalty.md) ## A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step — Lao Tzu The journey of a life is full of challenges and opportunities. [![By embracing radical change and the spirit of innovation, we can overcome the obstacles that confront us and transform our lives. Every step counts; every change draws us closer to who we might become](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/lao-tzu.jpg "By embracing radical change and the spirit of innovation, we can overcome the obstacles that confront us and transform our lives. Every step counts; every change draws us closer to who we might become")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=371:a-journey-of-a-thousand-miles-begins-with-a-single-step-lao-tzu&catid=2:uncategorised)Every step we take draws us closer to wherever we are heading, and every decision we make alters the route. In this essay, we explore the significance of the first step — and how change itself can become the catalyst for everything that follows. We will consider radical transformation, the role of innovation, and the particular difficulties we encounter in the process of reinventing ourselves, both personally and professionally. Ancient Chinese wisdom, preserved in that celebrated line from Lao Tzu, reminds us that every great achievement begins with a single, simple act. This fundamental principle teaches us that the road towards success is not measured only in the total distance travelled, but in the courage required to set out in the right direction in the first place. In a modern world saturated with distraction and infinite choice, the ability to begin something new — and to persist when the going becomes difficult — has become more precious than ever. We are constantly bombarded with stories of overnight success, which tend to obscure the reality: that behind every remarkable achievement lies an enormous accumulation of hours, failures, and stubborn perseverance. This essay explores not only the importance of beginning a journey, but how small steps can be transformed into significant, lasting changes — changes capable of redefining the shape of a life. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/single-step-lao-tzu.md) ## A Letter to My Daughter — A Guide to Life as a Teenager My darling daughter, I know that our days blur into one another, and that I — **though I am home all the time, I am always at my desk**, caught between virtual meetings and deadlines that seem to stretch on forever. [![A Letter to My Daughter — A Guide to Life as a Teenager](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/adolescenta.jpg "A Letter to My Daughter — A Guide to Life as a Teenager")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=372:a-letter-to-my-daughter-a-guide-to-life-as-a-teenager&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503)Looking through my office window, I watch you growing, becoming less the little girl I remember and more the young woman you are today. And I understand, each time I look, that time waits for neither of us. This letter is my attempt to be present for you in the ways I have not always managed in person. These are the words I would say if we sat together on the terrace every evening, watching the stars and talking about life — **the way I dream we might do more often.** --- **Personal Development and Identity. Building self-confidence and managing anxiety.** My darling, the morning I saw you crying before a school presentation, I realised that anxiety is not a privilege of adulthood. I notice how your hands tremble when you have to speak in public, how your cheeks flush when someone makes a remark about you. I recognise in these small gestures my own vulnerability at your age. Self-confidence is not an inborn quality. It is a skill, cultivated daily, like gardening. Every small personal victory — a maths problem solved, a disagreement with a friend resolved with grace — is a seed planted in the garden of your own worth. When you see me in online meetings, speaking with apparent authority about projects, know that I too have moments when I question my own competence. The difference is that I have learned to acknowledge my emotions without letting them define me. Anxiety is like the shadow cast by our body — it accompanies us constantly, but its depth depends entirely on the angle at which the light falls. I notice how, after hours spent on your phone, your restlessness seems to increase, and your breathing becomes shallower. The algorithms governing the platforms you use are designed to hold your attention through relentless stimulation, creating a neurochemical loop that mimics natural anxiety. The dopamine released by every notification disrupts your capacity to be present in the current moment, and turns quiet into discomfort. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/my-daughter.md) ## The Story of the Institution That Collects Romania's Taxes There is an institution in Romania that almost every adult knows by name, yet few truly understand. It stands behind every receipt you receive in a shop, behind every salary your parents earn, behind every school and hospital that keeps the lights on in this country. We are talking about the National Agency for Fiscal Administration — ANAF.[![The Story of the Institution That Collects Romania's Taxes](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_anaf.jpg "The Story of the Institution That Collects Romania's Taxes")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=379:the-story-of-the-institution-that-collects-romania-s-taxes&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) When I was younger, my grandfather used to tell me about the days when taxes were paid at the counter, with banknotes counted out carefully, when tax officials would appear at your door clutching thick ledgers under their arms. Today, everything has changed beyond recognition. ANAF has evolved from a Soviet bureaucratic labyrinth into a modernised, computerised institution capable of tracking millions of transactions in real time. But this transformation did not happen overnight, and it certainly did not happen painlessly. For a teenager, ANAF can seem like an abstract entity — something belonging to the adult world, tedious and remote. The reality, however, is that this institution determines how much money the state has to build new schools, to pay teachers, to maintain the roads you travel every day. It is a cog in a complex mechanism that, when it works well, allows all of us to live better lives. When it works badly, it can become a bureaucratic nightmare that stifles business and frustrates citizens. This story deserves to be told, because sooner or later — when you get your first job, when you open your first business, or when you inherit something from your grandparents — you will have to deal with ANAF directly. Let us make sense of this institution together, its virtues and its failings alike. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/the-story-taxes.md) ## 18 Simple Ways to Maintain a Positive Attitude at Work ![18 Simple Ways to Maintain a Positive Attitude at Work](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_pozitive-ai.jpg) There is a persistent confusion — almost charming in its stubbornness — about what it actually means to have a positive attitude at work. Most people reduce it to a kind of social performance: the bright smile at the entrance on a grey Monday morning, the reflexive declaration that it's going to be a *wonderful* day, the performed enthusiasm in the team meeting that fools nobody, least of all yourself. And yet, if you look a little more carefully, you begin to see that this confusion — between authentic positivity and displayed positivity — is itself the source of a great deal of emotional exhaustion in the workplace. A genuine positive attitude is not a mask you put on. It is something closer to an interior calibration — a way of regulating your relationship with uncertainty, with the minor failure on a Wednesday afternoon, with the colleague who manages to irritate you before 9 a.m., with the project that keeps refusing to behave. Contemporary psychology — and I mean here not the motivational literature that fills airport bookshops, but serious academic research — has arrived at several conclusions worth considering before constructing any list of practical advice. Recent work within the PERMA+4 framework, developed from Seligman's (2011) foundational model and extended by Donaldson and Donaldson (2021), demonstrates that positive emotions are not merely the *consequence* of wellbeing but an active *cause* of it — they mediate the relationship between individual resources and professional satisfaction, functioning as an amplifier of everything else that is going well. In other words, you are not positive *because* things are going well; things go well also *because* you are positive. That distinction, quietly radical, changes rather a lot. A substantial body of research has shown that a sustained positive outlook correlates with better psychological and physical wellbeing, and may even prolong life expectancy (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener, 2005). The person who has genuinely cultivated this orientation sees their life as a wide space full of possibility rather than a narrow corridor of closed doors. That vision, almost of its own accord, exposes them to new experiences, new competences, a different quality of daily presence. When it comes to work specifically, your mental attitude shapes not only how others perceive you, but also your own professional satisfaction, your resilience in the face of obstruction, and the quality of what you actually produce. Given that many of us spend forty hours a week — sometimes considerably more — in the same physical or virtual space, alongside the same people, under the same pressures, cultivating a positive mental disposition is not a luxury or an affectation. It is a pragmatic necessity. What follows are eighteen concrete ways of maintaining this attitude — not as surface technique, but as genuine interior practice, grounded in research and, in places, in the kind of honest reckoning that a list of this nature rarely allows itself. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/positive-attitude-at-work.md) ## An Evolution of Local Non-Bank Financial Institutions **From moneylenders to mobile apps: How the institutions that lend us money without being banks have transformed themselves** *An investigation into a century of credit, swindles, and financial hopes.* --- **Introduction: When money doesn't come from the bank.** [![An Evolution of Local Non-Bank Financial Institutions](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_non-bancare.jpg "An Evolution of Local Non-Bank Financial Institutions")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=390:an-evolution-of-local-non-bank-financial-institutions&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503)Imagine you urgently need money to buy a computer for school, but your parents cannot get a bank loan because they lack the right paperwork, or their income isn't considered sufficient. You might turn to a quick-loan company, to a leasing firm that hands you the product today and lets you pay in instalments, or even to a mobile app that transfers money to your account within minutes. All of these are non-bank financial institutions — companies that deal in money without being banks in the traditional sense. They fill the gaps left by the conventional banking system, reaching places where banks will not or cannot go. These non-bank financial institutions, known in Romanian as IFNs, have become an integral part of the country's economic life. From the large leasing companies that help businesses acquire machinery, to the rapid-loan apps that promise money in your account within ten minutes, the diversity of this sector is remarkable. They manage investment funds through which ordinary people set aside modest savings for retirement, offer insurance for cars and homes, and provide financing for small businesses that would otherwise have nowhere to turn for capital. In Romania in 2024, these institutions administer tens of billions of euros and serve millions of clients — from individuals on ordinary incomes to multinational corporations. The road these institutions have travelled across the Romanian landscape has been a winding one, marked by moments of genuine hope and bitter disappointment, by brilliant innovations and shameful swindles. From the first loan houses of the Kingdom, through the communist wasteland when the state controlled everything, to the chaos of transition when people lost their life savings in pyramid schemes, and on to the present day when digital technology is rewriting all the rules — each phase has its own dramatic stories. This analysis reveals not merely the technical evolution of the sector, but the human dramas played out in its corridors: people stripped of everything they owned, families rescued by a loan granted at precisely the right moment, fraudsters who cheated thousands of trusting souls, and digital revolutionaries building the future of finance. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/non-bank-institutions.md) ## The TikTok Algorithm's Escalating Demands — From Engagement to Addiction: Myth or Reality? **The Digital Mirror** It was a Thursday evening when I understood, with quiet unease, that TikTok **knows me better than I know myself**. [![The TikTok Algorithm's Escalating Demands — From Engagement to Addiction: Myth or Reality?](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_tiktok.jpg "The TikTok Algorithm's Escalating Demands — From Engagement to Addiction: Myth or Reality?")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=405:the-tiktok-algorithm-s-escalating-demands-from-engagement-to-addiction-myth-or-reality&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503)I was scrolling absently, hollowed out after a long day, when a video appeared about burnout in the creative industries. I had never once searched for that subject on the platform. I didn't follow anyone who talked about mental health. And yet the algorithm knew. It had registered that in recent days I'd been lingering on cat videos — my digital refuge when the world presses too close. It had noticed how I skipped past aggressive motivational content without pausing, but stopped at origami tutorials. Somewhere within its vast matrix of data, **a map of my inner state was taking shape** — one I hadn't consciously charted myself. That feeling of being *seen* by an algorithm raises questions that cut deep. When a platform becomes so **attuned to our emotional needs that it anticipates desires we haven't yet articulated**, where does usefulness end and addiction begin? --- **The Anatomy of the Algorithm — How It Learns to Know Us** **The First Encounter** The TikTok algorithm is, in essence, a learning system that evolves alongside us. In those first moments of interaction, the platform casts a wide net, testing the waters of our preferences with a calculated diversity of content. It is rather like a first conversation with a stranger — polite, exploratory, unburdened by assumption. In this phase, every gesture counts. Watching a video to the end signals interest. A rapid scroll communicates indifference. A replay suggests fascination. The algorithm catalogues each micro-decision, assembling the first rough sketches of our digital profile. It is a subtle dance of revelation and discovery — one in which we believe we are exploring the platform, whilst all along it is quietly exploring us. **The Refinement of Taste** As interactions accumulate, the algorithm begins to detect patterns. Not merely in the broad categories — comedy, education, lifestyle — but in the fine grain of our preferences. It may observe that we prefer absurdist humour at weekends but gravitate towards educational content on Monday mornings. That we linger over animal videos when it is raining outside. That we have a weakness for acoustic covers of nineties songs, though only when sung by women. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/the-tiktok-algorithm-s-escalating-demands-from-engagement-to-addiction-myth-or-reality.md) ## One Dollar and Ten Cents: The Most Expensive Wrong Answer in the History of Thought The first time Kahneman's framework became professionally useful to me, I was not reading about cognitive bias. I was looking at a procurement decision that had gone quietly wrong — the kind that leaves no obvious villain, only a room full of reasonable people who had collectively failed to check something because checking it would have implied that the answer was [![One Dollar and Ten Cents: The Most Expensive Wrong Answer in the History of Thought](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_fast-and-slow2.jpg "One Dollar and Ten Cents: The Most Expensive Wrong Answer in the History of Thought")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=417:one-dollar-and-ten-cents&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503)not already obvious. It was obvious. It was also wrong. What struck me was not the error itself but the social architecture around it: the mild impatience with anyone who might slow the process down, the slight embarrassment of the person who eventually did raise a question, the retrospective accounts that reconstructed the whole episode as a series of understandable pressures rather than a single unexamined assumption. I had seen this pattern before, in different rooms, with different numbers. I had probably produced versions of it myself. What I had not had, until Kahneman, was a name for the mechanism — not the human failing, which everyone already knew existed, but the specific structural reason why intelligent people acting in good faith reproduce it reliably, why showing them the error afterwards changes very little, and why the confidence that preceded the mistake was not a lapse in judgement but a feature of how judgement operates. That distinction — between cataloguing human weakness and mapping its internal mechanics — is what I found worth five hundred pages and what I find worth returning to still. **Daniel Kahneman: The Man Who Proved Confidence Is a Lie.** A bat and a ball together cost one dollar and ten cents. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The answer arrives before you finish reading the sentence. Ten cents. It is warm, immediate, and feels entirely correct. It is wrong. The ball costs five cents. If the ball cost ten cents, the bat — costing one dollar more — would cost one dollar and ten cents, and the total would be one dollar and twenty cents. The correct answer requires roughly four seconds of arithmetic. Most people do not spend those four seconds, because the wrong answer arrives first and feels like a conclusion rather than a guess. What makes this uncomfortable is not that ordinary people fail it. Approximately half of the students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton — people who passed some of the most rigorous entrance examinations in the world — give the wrong answer when the question is presented in a standard survey format. Not because they lack the mathematical ability. Because they did not check. The feeling of certainty performed the function that checking was supposed to perform, and nobody noticed the substitution. This is not a puzzle. It is a demonstration. And it is, in miniature, the life's work of Daniel Kahneman. --- [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/one-dollar-and-ten-cents.md) ## The Northern Marathon #botoshine **Botoșani, a Sunday in June** --- [![The Northern Marathon #botoshine](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_botoshine3.jpg "The Northern Marathon #botoshine")](https://cojocarupetru.info/en/blog/personal-development/427-the-northern-marathon-botoshine.html)The scent of lime blossoms reached the pedestrian street before the barriers did. The lime trees know nothing of marathons. That matters. The orange plastic cones had arrived in the night from Saturday to Sunday, delivered by a van and unloaded by two men. Months of preparation for an operation lasting two and a half hours. Unirii Pedestrian Street received the barriers with the same indifference it had shown to all previous closures—whether for City Day or ministerial visits—but this did nothing to change The Sunday morning mood of the people who had come out for their usual stroll. The man at the pretzel kiosk stood holding a warm pretzel in both hands, watching the cones. He said nothing. It was early. Everything could be sorted out later. Ten people at the bench beneath the lime trees. That was all. Enough to form an opinion. They had come out as they did every Sunday—in their good clothes, the ones kept for after church or the morning promenade—and found the pedestrian street occupied. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened to them, and it probably wouldn't be the last. Botoșani always organized something every month. ---  The woman in the bordeaux coat with a fur collar stood with her hands clasped in front, watching a young man in a yellow vest driving a plastic peg into the asphalt with a rubber mallet. Each strike of the hammer made her flinch slightly, a reaction she immediately suppressed with the discipline of someone who had decided it wasn't worth reacting to. Beside her, an old man with a white mustache—the kind that had gone out of fashion in the seventies and had never quite accepted it—turned his cap in his hands. He turned it without knowing he was turning it, the surest sign that his mind was elsewhere. "They said so on television," said a woman in a blue headscarf, not addressing anyone in particular. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/the-northern-marathon-botoshine.md) ## The Bumblebee Who Does Not Know He Is Beautiful **The light that never dies. A journey through the spring hills.** --- [![The Bumblebee Who Does Not Know He Is Beautiful](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_Bondarul_care_nu_tie_c_e_frumos.jpg "The Bumblebee Who Does Not Know He Is Beautiful")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=430:the-bumblebee-who-does-not&catid=39:personal-development&Itemid=503)Every morning, Vicențiu Moga set out from Iași, his camera slung across his chest like an old talisman, a second heart beating in rhythm with his footsteps on the red-clay roads of the Moldavian hills. To him, the spring album was more than a mere collection of images: it was a confession, a visual liturgy he had carried in his soul for years—though he kept postponing it, for he understood, with the painful clarity of the true photographer, that spring does not give itself up easily. It yields only to those who know how to wait. He had risen before dawn, when the sky above Iași still held that indecisive hue—neither night nor day—a faded blue-grey velvet in which the stars were extinguishing one by one, like vigil candles at the end of a wake. He had packed his satchel with a volume of Nichita Stănescu’s poetry—an old edition, its spine frayed and its page edges yellowed by many fingers—along with a few pieces of bread and a thermos of tea. He never forgot the tea. It was a habit inherited from his father, a quiet man who believed the world looked different when viewed over a steaming cup. The evening before, he had read: *“Of course, spring has burst from my temples,”* and that line had not released him all night long. --- He knew the road to Repedea Hill with every bend and pothole. Over the years, he had photographed these places in every season, but spring was different. In spring, the hills around Iași took on an almost unreal transparency, as if the light came not from the sky but from within the earth itself, from a slow, gentle fire smouldering beneath the roots of grass and trees. In his journal, Vicențiu called this *light from below*, and he sought it with the same patience and emotion with which a pilgrim seeks a miracle-working icon. The Fathers of the Philokalia wrote that pure prayer is that which springs from the heart without effort, like a spring that does not know it is springing. Vicențiu believed that true photography worked the same way—not as a violent capture of the world, but as a reception. You let the light enter you, and only then, in the moment when heart and eye align in silence, do you press the button. You do not take the photograph. You are photographed by what you love. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/the-bumblebee-who-does-not.md) ## A Letter to the Parents of Teenagers: What Is Really Going On in Your Child's Mind **"I know this is hard"** Dear parent, There is a particular kind of pain in watching your child become a stranger under your own roof. I know you sometimes find yourself searching your teenager's eyes for that child who once looked at you as though you were the centre of the universe – and finding instead a gaze that avoids contact, that seeks validation anywhere but from you. You are not alone in this confusion. Thousands of parents navigate this same disconcerting experience every day: the feeling that everything has suddenly changed, that all the familiar rules no longer apply, that the relationship you built so carefully is unravelling before your helpless eyes. But let me offer you a perspective that might change everything: this metamorphosis you are witnessing – however unsettling, however painful – is not a malfunction. It is exactly what is supposed to happen. And more than that, it is a process you are going through too, not just your teenager. You are both transforming, both learning a new way of being with one another. The promise of this letter is simple: clarity about what is really happening in your teenager's mind and body, and scientifically grounded hope that this stage – however turbulent – can bring you closer, not further apart. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/parents-of-teenagers.md) ## How to Live, Love, and Learn — Notes for a Parent *Inspired by the pedagogy of Maria Montessori, and informed by current research into adolescent development* --- I. My Own Fifteen Years Before I can begin to understand how an adolescent matures, I must go back to my own fifteen years. Not to the pleasant memories, but to the murky ones — that age when my body was transforming faster than I could process my identity, when I woke each morning feeling I was someone different from who I had been the evening before. My father looked at me with a deep bewilderment, as though I had become an enigma he could no longer decipher. That look made me feel lonely in a way I could not articulate then, and which I understand only now, standing in the kitchen at dawn, a cup of coffee cooling in my hands. Maria Montessori spoke of "planes of development" — periods during which the child reconstitutes itself entirely. I did not know, at fifteen, that I was reconstituting myself. I thought I was falling apart. My father did not know what to do with me. Neither did I. That should have brought us closer. It did not. Now I have a son. I stand in the same kitchen, with the same cooling coffee, and try not to repeat my father's silence. I do not know whether I succeed. --- II. The Death of the Child I Knew The little boy who ran to embrace me when I came home from work has disappeared. He disappeared gradually, without announcement, without a clear moment of rupture. In his place stands someone who closes the bedroom door. Who communicates in monosyllables. Who sometimes looks at me with barely concealed exasperation when I offer unsolicited advice. I must accept this death in order to greet the young adult being born. That is easier to write than to live. The loss of the certainty that I know what is best for him. The loss of the role of absolute protector. The loss of the illusion that I can control who he becomes. These are not abstractions — they are things I feel physically, as a pressure in the chest, on the days he walks out the door without looking back. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/how-to-learn-parent.md) ## Big Tech's Margins Are Our Opportunity: The Letter on Jailbreaking, Digital Sovereignty, and the Devices That Could Be Bricked Tomorrow > *"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes."* — Morpheus, *The Matrix* (1999) --- **A Letter Before We Begin** My son, You will not read this today. You are probably scrolling. I know, because I can hear it — that particular silence you produce when the phone has you, the silence that is not rest but something more like suspension. The cat, Gri, hears it too. She curls up on the chair beside you and pretends not to notice, which is perhaps wiser than what I am about to attempt. I am not angry. I am trying to understand something, and I think you might actually enjoy it if you give it half a chance. Last week, I sat in front of my screen — as I do every day, because this is where my work lives — and I read something that made me laugh out loud. Cory Doctorow, an author and digital rights activist, described sitting on a panel in Toronto where the moderator called jailbreaking a smartphone "rampant theft of IP." Doctorow's jaw dropped. Mine very nearly did too, though I was alone in the room and there was only Gri to witness it. I want to explain to you why that moment matters. Not because it is complicated, but because it is actually quite simple — and the simple things are the ones they prefer you never to figure out. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/jailbreaking-sovereignty.md) ## The Brave Citizen Gogonete and the Matter of Snap Elections **Being a faithful and impartial account of the political anxieties of a country that had voted, forgotten it had voted, and was now being asked to vote again — with references to prior events and to devices that glow in the dark**[![The Brave Citizen Gogonete and the Matter of Snap Elections](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/resized_chestiunea-anticipatelor.jpg "The Brave Citizen Gogonete and the Matter of Snap Elections")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=452:the-matter-of-snap-elections&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) --- > **Note.** This text is an intentional fiction engaging with ideological and political concerns.Although it affects detachment, the tone is unmistakable: contempt for the current political class, for the "news" channels, for the "all-caps group chats," for the algorithms. The critique is partially warranted, but delivered in a manner that aspires to universality and ends up sounding rather like a disappointed grandfather holding forth — one who has, as he will tell you, *seen it all before.* --- The citizen Gogonete Fănică, formerly a ticket inspector on the urban bus routes of Botoșani, retired on a second-grade locomotor disability pension acquired not in the line of duty but at a wedding in Cătămărești-Deal where he had danced too long and fallen into a ditch, was a man of exceptional goodwill and a profound understanding of public affairs, cultivated over the twenty-two years he had spent aboard the buses, where citizens speak freely because nobody of importance is watching. On Gogonete Fănică's bedside table stood three objects: a glass of water, an agricultural almanac from 1987 which he had never read but kept out of respect for continuity, and a smartphone purchased for him by his son Cosmin from Italy, where Cosmin worked as a welder and sent money home with the regularity of a man who feels that filial duty can be discharged from a distance — perhaps more reliably than from close quarters. The smartphone was black, thin, and glowed in the dark with notifications about matters Gogonete Fănică had not requested and did not know how to stop. --- Gogonete Fănică's grandfather, one Gogonete Haralambie, had lived in the same town forty years before his grandson and had possessed neither smartphone, agricultural almanac, nor glass of water on his bedside table, because the bedside table itself had been confiscated in 1940 along with the rest of the furniture by an administration whose reasons had never been fully explained, but which had produced the correct paperwork and two men in uniforms that looked official. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development/the-matter-of-snap-elections.md)