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Happiness Can Pay Dividends
Andreea Retea
Why work on something if you can't make money at it?
A generation has grown up since the fall of communism in Romania, and
it often seems that money, or the things it will buy, is the driving
force in most people's lives. But I know I'm not the only one who's not
consumed with consumerism.
I would answer the first question with another question: why work on something if you don't love it? What would the world be like if the only important things were money, power and all the goodies that go with them?
Maybe we still have a hangover from 45 years of state control
- many of us still blame "the system" for things we dislike. It doesn't
matter that the system used to be communist, and now it's capitalist. Many of us forget that we can change a lot of things by what we do.
Whether you blame "the system" or buy into it, personal action matters. We owe our right to free speech and other liberties to a relatively small group who stood up to authority in 1989.
Responsibility doesn't have to mean revolution, however.
Initiatives like the Save Vama Veche campaign and the ICube contest
(see article Innovators Prove that Adaptability Pays, in Many Ways) have higher motives than profit or power -- creativity and
passion, to name a couple.
My newest project is "Overheard in Bucharest" -
www.overheardinbucharest.ro - a website built around bits of street
conversation. I started it with a friend, Flavia Zablau. We update it almost daily. We have several dozen collaborators, we've
gotten advertising proposals and we just won the Best Team Blog award
at the 2006 Communication Olympics.
Because so many people loved the idea, we're extending it nationwide.
On www.overheardin.ro we'll collect postings from similar pages all
over Romania. The number of contributors is growing by the day.
We work on the project in our spare time. We both go to school and have
paying jobs as well. We also volunteer for NGO work and spend time on
other projects that motivate us.
Flavia and I get help from our parents. We aren't forced to work or volunteer. Few people understand our enthusiasm. We began our projects because they sounded like fun. We keep working on
them because they have come to mean something. They're outlets for
passion and creativity.
Some things are more important than money.
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