What makes Homo Sapiens superior to other animals? We are weaker and slower, but our brains are 3–5 times bigger than those of our nearest species, the Orang Utans. Are the achievements of building the atomic bomb or inventing the internet the main differentiators? Of course not — what makes Homo Sapiens superior is his ability to communicate and to be social — his cultural foundation. About 300,000 years ago,
I am convinced that in the next few years, we will run every aspect of our lives in a fundamentally different way than we have done before. We’re going to do that because .… it’s possible. We will manage every aspect of our lives based on our own data which we will be aware of for the first time in history. In order to maximize our convenience in dealing with our
Often, I hear people say to one another: “Yes, I understand.” This phrase can be heard in private as well as in business conversations and every time I ask myself if people reflect about what they just said. From a neurological perspective, to understand something means to match that with what is already known by a human being. If you tell me that something has happened because the earth moves around the sun, I’ll accept that
Today, I had a quite strange and unpleasant discussion. It was about business strategy and sales, and the both of us differed quite clearly in our views on how to ‘do it right’. I wasn’t in the best mood, and from my perspective, the other guy behaved in an egoistic, slightly arrogant and selfish manner. He used typical killer terms, such as “totally clear” or “as I’ve always been saying” to underline his
There is this person you don’t like. You don’t really know her but she behaves in a way which reminds you of your Latin teacher, she’s this tall, over-dressed, SUV-armed hectic housewife type of a woman and although you cross her paths quite often she does not even to have taken notice of you. We all have at least one or a few individuals we not only ignore but we actively dislike — because
When it comes to New Year’s Resolutions, there generally are two fractions: most of us make their resolutions on December, 31, and stick to them at least for a few days or weeks. Others deny any positive aspects of these resolutions since people don’t stick to them, anyway. There are numerous scientific approaches of setting goals — even data-driven ones — and some of them even suggest that making resolutions could
I’ve just started reading „The Hard Thing About Hard Things“, a book about personal experiences building startups by Ben Horowitz, well-known to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as a partner of Marc Andressen at a16z. It’s the best business-related book I’ve read for a long time. Although on a different level, I have experienced pretty much the same as Ben has: the ups and — even more often and more distinct — the downs of running
Getting-things-done tools, or goal-setting by breaking big goals into smaller, more achievable ones, have been very fashionable in the management field lately. A different perspective, but the same aspect of becoming more productive, is the “Lean” approach, as in Lean Management or Lean Startup. All those approaches are based on one fundamental principle: think small. The flip side of all goal setting techniques is the limited size of the belief someone has
I’m relatively young. Yesterday, I turned 45, and that’s one year younger than the average German in the year 2014. Statistics say that my life expectancy is 90 years; most probably I’ll die on the 13th of April, 2059 — another 45 years to go. And yet, game could be over tomorrow. Who knows? A Meaningful Life However, my personal plan is to say good-bye much later — I love life, I want to
Today is the last day of our very interesting SMILE! program. Over a period of 5 days, participants receive tasks in the explore app. The tasks are simple, but not easy: each day I have to make five people smile. On the first day, it was easy: I could “choose” five people I would meet during the day and try to bring a smile on their facec by simply smiling at them first. That worked. Easy. Tuesday,
In our daily work, we are regularly confronted with privacy issues: since our company Datarella provides data analytics based on external third party data and internal behavioral data gathered via our app explore, we know what it means to comply with national data protection regulations. And since we are based in Munich and most of our projects are executed in Germany, we naturally comply with Germany’s Datenschutzbestimmungen. However, the basic