Stand for what  you believe in.
Everybody can be a vanilla ice cream, and everybody will eat a vanilla ice cream mostly because all vanilla ice cream tastes the same. Having an opinion is about having your own flavour. It’s about becoming recognized for what you are, not part of a much larger herd, but an individual with it’s own morals, ideas and thoughts.

Become bitter chocolate, or pistachios with strawberries, or even napolitana carbonara ice cream, but be yourself. Do not be afraid of change. As you grow and move into this world you assimilate new knowledge on a daily basis. Your opinions shape your personal identity; without it you will never become someone you will always be one-of-those.

People follow people that have something to say, sometimes not even because it’s right but because it’s something that can give them guidance, and a goal. Find your goals, write them down, push yourself to make them reality.

Learn to be analytical of the information you receive and filter them, don’t be a passive receiver.

Everybody must have an opinion. Respect it, but you don’t have to accept it.

And finally,
Do not follow, lead by example.

This is just a small piece of my new year’s resolution. I believe it’s mostly targeted towards me but I thought that it can be useful to everybody. So here it is.

Do you have anything to add to the above, regarding the matter of identity and opinion?

I haven’t reached any final decision but my thoughts right now lead me to believe that the actual value of a person
is never higher than the value that each of the people around him bestow to him and that this value is not commulative or global but unique for each of the “buyers”.

That said, the average value of a human being is the average value of the values awarded to him within a variance. This average value represents the way that people that know the individual think of him, the way that his image is engraved into their mind, for luck of a better phrase we can call it a person’s “face value”.

Packaging

Modern society and the western world as I know it have done an amazing work on clearly separating the value of a product from the way that the product is demonstrated. What I am trying to say is that in many cases first impressions do not actually count against the “face value” of a certain individual because as a commodity the first evaluation is made on the account of “packaging”. The packaging can be a series of properties ranging from  appearance, the individuals ability to converse, or the culture/subculture he belongs to in contrast with the theoretical or not placement of the receiver in this this cultural group.

In lamest terms, I believe that in many occasions the way you look changes your value radically, and due to the fact that the time that is being awarded to each piece of information in modern society has fallen immensely this might also be the final value of the individual.

Where does this leave us? Well truth is that simply put, people rarely now days give to other people the time needed to really get to know someone except if the first impression they have of them is a really really good one.

If you do not belong in this “category” of people with nice packaging well, tough luck. It might not be the end of the world but be prepared for a hard ride. Try to make yourself unique in other ways, and learn how to impress people in other more subtle and less profound ways.

What do you think about packaging and the value of an individual?
Do you have any ideas about things that make someone unique and can be applied to a first encounter?
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P.S. Thank you Alex for the corrections, it’s really appreciated.

Today I had a minor argument with Eleni, my colleague, about what I should  post in my new blog here. Two days ago I have developed a nice navigation menu with fading mouseover effects using jquery and some very simple XHTML and CSS. I know that there are hundreads of examples of navigation menus out there and that some of them implement the same techniques I used to create mine, there is a good chance that the same menu might actually exist somewhere else as well.

My argument was that even if the same menu exists somewhere else the way that you demonstrate the idea is also a very important factor on how will the reader, or the developer on this occassion, perceive it. I came across many examples of jquery/html/css effects and I can tell from my experience that some of them were just “all greek” to me.

So that is my question! To post or not to post something that might already exist somewhere else but I have designed from scratch using ideas that came from somewhere else. ?

What do you think?