‘I forgot. In our comfortable, soft bubble, where we drink overpriced coffee and run frantically to work to make money, we had forgotten the reality around us’, says Ana Velea, Head of Operations @ Minio Studio. ‘And yes, we didn’t need a pandemic to remind us, there was enough conflict and hurt around. But the scale mattered. The fact that everyone on the planet was experiencing the same fears and suffering at the same time was a wake-up call’.

The pandemic has left deep scars, ultimately negatively marking the year 2020. I will not conclude that “for me it was a good year” as if I can quietly go on with my life, denying the reality “next door”. The truth is that 2020 was mostly “bad” and far too much “ugly”.

On how she coped with 2020, what the adjustment meant and what her hopes are for 2021, Ana shares below.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of 2020

I’ll look back on 2020 with gratitude for everything I learned.

However, I don’t think humanity needed such an event for all of us to evolve, reset, wake up and react responsibly to ourselves and the Universe that hosts us. We had enough bloody conflicts before Covid-19, we just forgot about them in our perfect bubble, preoccupied with social media. We sipped overpriced coffee and ran frantically to work to make money, feeding consumerist capitalism, inevitably waiting to end up suffocated in plastic.

For anyone unaware of this reality before 2020, the pandemic probably came as a “surprise” with dramatic overtones and stark realities, expressed “sensationally” in bold numbers on TV screens, which we watched in awe, reminding ourselves that we are…mortal.

Before long, we had to break out of our routines, which forced everyone to change. Except, not all people embrace change, in the same way, it’s not for nothing that so many personal development books are written on the subject. Change and new rules generally create anxiety and a phenomenon of resistance, so many of us have gone through stages of anger, denial, and even rebellion. In short order, we split into anti-maskers, on one side, and anti-vaxxers, on the other. Online became a battleground, mined by hate and propaganda.

In conclusion, I don’t want to cosmeticize the situation. The pandemic has left deep scars, ultimately marking the year 2020 in a negative sense. I will not conclude that “for me it was a good year” as if I can go on quietly with my life, denying the reality “next door”. The truth is that 2020 was mostly “bad” and far too much “ugly”.

TV shows & movies

I generally consume too many TV shows and movies. Even before the pandemic, I was aware of a latent addiction to Netflix as a form of escapism from the hectic, overcrowded urban life I had grown tired of. I complained too much about traffic, I was outraged by pollution indicators, I believed that people crammed me too hard in hypermarkets and that “personal space” was no longer respected. I was running madly home to watch a show on Netflix, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Well, in 2020 I would have given time back any day to regain the pleasure of moving freely, going to work, traveling, taking in the air, and life of all that the human-nature communion offers. I paid it forward with the promise of never complaining about sitting in traffic again, and I feel like I’ll cherish the urban “hustle and bustle” more. Do you know the noisy people in movie theaters? I miss them.

I’ve been scouring my memory for series and movies in 2020, some of them leave you with a particular emotion, others I appreciate as art, and a few I consume purely for entertainment.

I enjoyed The Crown, too, like many others; I find it a well-researched production with an interesting plot. To the tv shows category, I would add Fauda because I want to give an example of Israeli productions, which I think are getting better and better. The next title is Messiah, for the thriller genre. I like their conceptual approach to messianism. My guilty pleasures are Working Moms & Breeders, for the humor they use in dealing with a subject as serious as parenting. Let’s not forget an important category and that is sitcoms. Here the winner is The Ranch because “OMG Samuel Pack Elliott” (not Ashton Kutcher as you would expect) because they are old school :).

I re-watched The Young Pope and The Two Popes in one breath and I suspect not for the last time. I’ve also started to enjoy watching war movies, which I kept avoiding in the past, the latest recommendation I received and enjoyed is Hacksaw Ridge. It reminded me of the Oscar-winning 1917, which impressed me as well.

Not a year goes by without me watching something from Quentin Tarantino, in 2020 it was The Hateful Eight‘s turn, possibly others, you get the idea.

In the documentary department, I had a greater appetite for historical ones like Roman Empire and The Last Czars, that’s also because I can’t convince myself to read historical books.

Books

Ha! How nice that I can share with you my discovery in terms of apps in 2020, namely Blinkist. Yes, I know, it’s not the same as reading a book traditionally, but sometimes books tackle repetitive topics, at least business or personal development ones. The app helps me select books that add value. Therefore, I read books on business, organizational culture, and entrepreneurial development. To simplify everything into a genre recommendation for everyone, I’d say a book that can change mindsets is Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week. By the same author, I also recommend The 4-Hour Body. I’ll leave it to you to research the topic.

Another book I recommend, for emotional hygiene, with an extremely simple and effective approach, is How to Reinvent Your Life – a book by Janet S. Klosko and Jeffrey E. Young. This book saves a few good hours of therapy. Yes, I know, a more clichéd title couldn’t be more clichéd, but you could use an opaque cover or print one with Irvin D. Yalom on it, since he’s still very much in vogue now, even more so than Paulo Coelho in his heyday. Just kidding, Yalom’s good, a must-read if you want relevant opinions, because, in my bubble, he was the most discussed author of 2020. Have some Freudian psychoanalysis as well, it’s still trending.

To change the genre, a discovery in 2020, via Netflix, is author Margaret Atwood. The genre itself is a read that had me hooked, and I’m aiming to tackle it more in the future.

How much have you embraced the online

I can’t say I’ve embraced the online willingly, for me it’s a toxic relationship. I haven’t made the switch of activities from offline to online. Rather, I tried to do an increasing amount of outdoor activities as soon as the lockdown was over. Granted, I’ve had my share of online business meetings and even hosted the Christmas party on Zoom, but I’ve treated them as a necessity rather than a real alternative to consider in the future. I strongly assert that I could never live online. I look forward to hugging people, kissing each other formally on arrival and departure, and shaking hands long and firmly in a consensus, whatever that may be, business, friendship, or sporting fair play.

Shopping

I’m not the leader when it comes to shopping either, I’ve narrowed everything down to strictly necessities, mostly consumables: water cup filters, a new laptop battery, and such. I also had a few failed attempts at buying an aromatherapy diffuser, until I found one I liked. This aromatherapy thing is new, so trendy in 2020 and I admit it’s got me hooked too. I feel it has influenced my mood at key moments, I’ve circled the device many times, looking for a ritual to ease my minor anxieties. I’d add to the benefits that it covers up the smell of cooking pretty well and the house always feels like a scene of “A Thousand and One Nights”.

New passions

I associate passions with emotional health. In 2020 I gave a lot of mental space to develop new habits in line with what I like to do. I have set concrete goals for assimilating a healthier lifestyle. I stopped chaotically ordering food and started planning my menu, out of the need to better control the ingredients. I’ve been exercising more than in other years. I continued to go to the gym as soon as it was allowed. I saw my trainer more often than I saw my mother and friends. It was an exercise in responsibility and trust on both our parts and calculated risk in the end. I believe you don’t build immunity through isolation, so I chose to do something.

Following on from the gym workouts, I took up hiking, so it became a weekend hobby that was extremely useful to me. This sense of progress that exercising gives you and the self-exceeding of physical limits works as a catalyst, regardless of the context I’m in and the challenges I face. If I have doubts or moments of despair, I immediately get moving. The mountain is sensational therapy. When I reach the top and look down, I know exactly what I have to do. Then I start the descent, more confident and with my batteries fully charged.

Also during last year, I took up a hobby, a completely new field for me, that of hand-made products. With such a product I surprised my Christmas colleagues.  I designed and crafted a wooden box, made from scratch in the workshop, a space I was shying away from, for fear of breaking a nail. I learned to use different tools, and new techniques and I discovered a new and fascinating world. I decorated the box in the holiday spirit, cooked my famous nut and orange granola, and was proud of the result.

I worked on my patience, I had to plan my time differently and make room for this new entry. Sometimes I worked late into the night, but I loved that feeling of bringing things to life with my own hands. It’s an extremely satisfying, healthy, and stimulating activity for the brain. Speaking of which, the end of year shopping was done under the motto “You can always find something to do”, a headline that amused me terribly and which I found extremely on point.

From work

From my position as Head of Operations, I can say that the negative impact of the pandemic was felt very strongly. The most important project for me in 2020 was transitioning to work from home and adapting to new work processes, and I was tasked with maintaining a calm, balanced and efficient working environment at the same time. I have been involved in difficult decision-making processes, with a focus on financial optimization, in an industry that has effectively frozen over in many business sectors. It has been a year of strategic reconfigurations and these processes take time. The corporate environment we work with is not exactly agile, so the industry has gone through an extremely difficult period, operating for a good chunk of time on inertia. The lack of predictability affects us the most and I still can’t correctly estimate that moment that marks the time when we return to “normal”.

However, I take pride in mine and I want to tell you that in 2020 Minio won 14 industry awards: 2 Effie Awards, 5 PR Awards, 1 Marketplace Award, 3 Webstock Awards, and 3 Festival of Media Awards. These results were a breath of fresh air in all the tension created by so many changes. Advertising is and will remain an industry that will survive any crisis and has significant resources to reinvent and reshape the socio-economic context. I like to think that we shape the world we live in, crisis or not, with a lot of creativity, but also with responsibility.

And since we’ve been talking about TV shows, I was reminded of a good contextual one that made me smile amid a lockdown.

Inspirational ending

I feel there is great truth behind the motivational “Your thinking creates your world“. I’ve juggled with this concept over the years, but I’ve never had a better-formulated set of actions to help me correctly decode the world in the spirit of the values I believe in. I’ve made it my goal to be a positive person, apply a constructive perspective to challenges, and spend less time and energy on events I can’t influence. It’s an exercise that requires conscious effort, especially since we live in a culture that promotes conformity.

I reminded myself there is joy in small things such as laughing in the sun, enjoying the first snow, and facing the strong wind as an exercise in stoicism, a kind of physical and emotional hardening that is extremely natural. I think, for many people, 2020 meant a reassessment of the human-nature relationship and what the privilege of being free and exploring means.

I want to meet new people, I want to know their stories, and I can’t wait to roll my eyes involuntarily at all that is new and incomprehensible to me. I want group energy, I’m not a fan of being lonely, and I believe our place is among people, no matter what state we’re in.

I want to visit my loved ones without the feeling of imminent danger and for all this, a collective effort is needed in 2021, regardless of one’s religious affiliation, musical genre, political party, or color. In 2021 I would like us to put aside the manufactured crises and take control of this pandemic phenomenon because we have a real chance of progress in this regard and for that, I am grateful for the times I live in.