A.S.D.A.
Instructions for the Chronically Distracted
The mind loves to wander. Sometimes all it takes is a detail: a light on a wall, a word overheard in a café, a fabric, a theoretically possible other life in a city not yet inhabited. Meanwhile, important decisions wait politely in a corner. So when it’s time to come back to the center, launch a project, make a decision, or simply avoid drifting for six hours straight, the system activates: A.S.D.A.
Analysis. Synthesis. Decision. Action. Four words scrawled on a Post-it that has become, with time, slightly mythological. The legacy of Jacky S. Fantastical entrepreneur. Freewheeling genius. Collector of outsized projects and ideas launched at full speed before the rest of the world had finished its coffee. His mantra. Repeated to his children with the gravity of a man handing down either a life philosophy or an invisible samurai sword.
A kind of fixed point. A way of pulling the imagination back to earth before it starts filing tax returns in another dimension.
Analysis: understand what is actually happening.
Synthesis: bring some order to the chaos.
Decision: pick a direction.
Action: stop thinking and move.
J. lived with an absolutely fascinating intensity. A château. A private Formula 1 circuit. A converted barn, floor upon floor of championship cars and one-off racing legends. A 180-foot yacht that looked like a floating amusement park designed by a very wealthy unsupervised child. He traveled the world with his family, a chef, a diving instructor, a tutor for the children, and probably several engines capable of crossing a continent for no valid reason. Swiss watchmaking precision, slightly under adrenaline. I watched all of this from a distance. Fascinated. But with the persistent feeling of being a penguin accidentally invited into a tropical zoo.
He came into my life by chance. We were nothing alike. But something in him felt very familiar. Fantasy. Drive. Intact naivety.
J. followed his desires with a disarming confidence. Moved the way some children run - without looking back, convinced the world will keep appearing under their feet at exactly the right moment. What stayed, in the end, wasn’t the château. Not the yacht. Not the absurd engines. That way of living his adult life with the heart and eyes of a child. And sometimes, when the mind starts heading off in twelve directions at once, that Post-it appears again. A.S.D.A.
A handwritten note control tower in the middle of the mess.
