The second day of Rally Bulgaria started early Saturday, first car getting on tarmac at around 7:30. Unfortunately, we were a bit late and didn’t get to see the first runners. The good part though was that, at one point, we intersected with Kimi Raikkonen on the way to the 5th stage – Sestrimo. Being overtaken by a rally car and Formula 1 champion gives you goose bumps, especially when he starts warming up his tires in front of you. We even got to see Kimi pretty close, since we stopped next to the starting point. To be honest, if I didn’t know Kimi I wouldn’t say he’s a Formula 1 champion – he looked like a boy happy to play with his car that day.

After seeing half of the stage 5 in Sestrimo, we decided to catch stage 7 as well – Lybnitsa. After struggling to get there – closed road, no parking, pretty much sucky organization – the FIA safety delegate decided to cancel the stage on safety grounds because of large indisciplined spectators. I am not going to judge those people yelling “We’re in Bulgaria”, read it like in “We can do whatever we want”, but they should know that pushing a WRC stage to be cancelled is mainly stupid, if not retarded. Nevertheless, this way we got to see the cars driving at a lower pace and managed to take pretty close photos by almost staying in the middle of the road.

Being disappointed by the cancellation, we headed back to Sestrimo where, due to the 27 minute delay, we managed to catch the whole party from a better spot – straight line followed by a narrow curve with plenty of space for spectators. The lightning speed of the cars, the burning smell of the brakes, and the outrageous sound that hits you in the chest make your heart beat faster dreaming of becoming a small Loeb.

A couple of tips for future rallies:

• Spectator tickets were not mandatory. You can easily get to some good spots without having to buy tickets. We used our tickets for 1 stage only, even though we got to see 3.
• Parking tickets were useless. They sell an unlimited number of parking tickets, the parking space being limited and very small. Unless you go 2-3 hours before the start, you don’t get inside the parking. We found places in the village or on the side of the road.
• Be careful where you stay. A good place for you might not look so good in the eyes of the marshals and they might move you somewhere else. Ask some official before you decide to take a spot.

Better and more photos from Rally Bulgaria you can find here and here.

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Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Switch – How To Change Things When Change Is Hard, is all about understanding the mechanics of change. The book is structured on 3 main parts (Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, Shape the Path) which explain the brain’s two independent systems that work at all times: the emotional and rational parts.

The emotional side is that part that makes us be instinctive and feel pain and pleasure. On the other hand, the rational side represents the conscious system  and it’s the part that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future. From this point, the authors take the analogy used by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (University of Viriginia) in his book – The Happiness Hypothesis. Our emotional side is represented by an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider.

Direct the Rider: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.

Motivate the Elephant: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can’t get his way by force for very long. So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side – get their Elephants on the path and cooperative.

Shape the Path: What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. We call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the Path. When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and Elephant.

As Chris Brogan likes to say The book is an absolute perfect prescription on how to understand change! [...] It’s a must. I can’t imagine not having this book and not trying out this sort of formula that it’s in there, and really not burning that formula into how you work with change, how you work with marketing, and how you get a lot of stuff done…

Having these said, while reading the book I extracted a couple of sentences that I found interesting and useful even out of context:

• People eat more when you give them a bigger container.
• Self-control is an exhaustible resource. (refers to the “supervised” like behavior)
• Change is hard because people wear themselves out.
• Decision paralysis: More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan.

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With 5 days left till the start, the 41st Rally of Bulgaria is more than just a regular stage in the internal championship due to the fact that it has been included in the World Rally Championship. This can only mean world wide renown drivers, super powerful and fast world rally cars, beautiful Bulgarian scenery, and a great show for spectators.

The 41st Rally of Bulgaria will take place in the picturesque resort Borovets (it got a great mountain bike park), located in the Rila Mountain, in southern Bulgaria. The total length of the competition is 1068 km, the drivers having to race through 14 Special Stages – 353 km – on asphalt. The shakedown will take place on the 7th of July, the ceremonial start will be given in the evening of the following day, and the first day of competition will be Friday, July 9.

The rally will entertain the spectators for 3 days (9-10-11 July) and tickets are available online and in stores like Office 1 Superstore, Internity, and Piccadily. I already got my pass and I will be there on the 10th trying to spot Sebastian Loeb and former Formula 1 driver Kimi Raikkonen. You can find more information about the competition on Rally Bulgaria’s official site. Hope to see you there!

Update: Sebastian Loeb and Dani Sordo put on a show today in Sofia, part of an event organized by Citroen. You can watch a couple of stunts they performed in the following video:

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High Hopes for Romania’s IT Hub is a FT documentary presenting Cluj-Napoca, a student town in Transylvania which made a name for itself in the fields of IT, software, and services, becoming a hub for outsourcing. FT interviews Sergiu Biris, founder of Trilulilu - the Romanian YouTube replica, and mentions Nokia as one of the important investors in the region. Unfortunately, the Romanian economy is unlikely to grow this year, several posterity measures being announced lately.

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A couple of articles/sites I ran into lately and I considered worth sharing:

1. BBC’s Start-Up Stories: Ten entrepreneurs from around the world talk about how to build businesses: Max Levchin – PayPal/Slide, Dom Sagolla – Twitter/DollarApp, Mike Lynch – Autonomy, Jasmine Montgomery – Seven Brands, Nick Swinmurn – Zappos, Mike Faith – Headsets.com, Glyn Woolley – Coombe Castle International, Emma Bridgewater, Kevin Surace – Serious Materials, and Charles Armstrong – Trampoline Systems.

2. The Web Strategy Pyramid: A Well-balanced Web Strategy: Build a solid foundation of content, usable navigation, and strong SEO for your visitors. Define your Social Media Strategy and make some money out of it.

3. Great Royalty Free Images – Why They Matter, and Where to Get Them: An interesting article talking about the consciousness of posting images on your blog, legal considerations, and finding the right image. A picture is worth a thousand words. Resources of great images around the web are also included.

4. Death by Gadget: A new worldwide issue raised lately refers to “Blood Phones” (like in blood diamonds). The smartphones, laptops, and digital cameras we use today are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. A solution to this war could come from “conflict free”devices which don’t contain conflict minerals, therefore reducing demand. Update: A couple of American actors put together a MAC vs PC clip to show what Apple’s famous ads don’t tell you. More info about this issue on raisehopeforcongo.org.

5. Business Innovation “Made us Human”and Moves Us Forward: Quick interview with Matt Ridley, a British science journalist, who has just launched a new book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. According to Ridley, innovation and free trade made us human and he argues against the imminent downfall of civilization.

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We all knew some things about Iceland before, but lately this small country (around 320,000 people and 103,000 sq. km) has been much discussed due to its volcano eruptions. The country which hosts the volcano we can’t pronounce its name looks like a nice place to visit – wild, beautiful, and pretty much untouched by the humans. After watching the following documentary I think you’ll get the main points that Iceland is all about landscapes and rocks. Oh yeah, and the great waterfall from the beginning of the clip.

Iceland from Adrien Dezalay on Vimeo.

Thanks Besim for sharing this nice documentary.

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Some time ago I was telling you about Linchpin by Seth Godin (which I still recommend you read). One of my favorite parts of the book was the description of the lizard brain and how this small part of our brain actually affects our lives, how it manifests, and what we can do to fight the resistance. It’s not a new concept but Godin wraps his book around it. If you don’t have the book or the time to read it, just take a look at this short clip. It might make you stop and think.

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Ken Robinson pinpoints during his Ted Talk that we have built our education systems on the model of fast food, where everything is standardized. This model of education is impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. And this model is just not good for a couple of reasons. One of them being the fact that human talent is diverse (people have very different aptitudes). Another important factor to take into account is people’s passions. Robinson talks about the fact that people are good at things they don’t really care for: It’s about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you’re doing the thing that you love to do, that you’re good at, time takes a different course entirely. [...] If you’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason why so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn’t feed their spirit, it doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.

Long story short, he wraps up his talk by showing a path on how to revolutionize education: Now, in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. [...] we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That’s where children experience life.

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Great TED talk about how social networks affect our lives and what we can do to take advantage of this fact. Nicholas Christakis argues that many traits can easily spread from person to person and that your location within a network might impact your life in a way you would never think of.

If you don’t have 18 minutes to watch this video, I recommend you start watching from the 13th minute. The conclusion is most important and it comes around the 17th minute:

I think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. [...] The spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain the nourish of a social network. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things like love, and kindness, and happiness, and altruism, and ideas. [...] Social networks are fundamentally related to goodness [...] and what the world needs now is more connections.

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