I started with Web 1.0, an online travel agency, a pure e‑commerce play. Then I moved into Web 2.0, building a social news aggregator. After that, it was time for mobile, and building an app agency. Today, I‘ve arrived in Web 3.0, by building an enterprise blockchain solutions provider and by offering a blockchain-based operating system for different industries, such as real estate, supply chain, and sustainable cities. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

All my companies have been quite different outfits, although all of them had software and innovation aspects in common. Of course, selling pre-packaged trips over the Web is different from enabling fee-less, autonomous, automated transactions on a Blockchain. However, when creating and developing various (software) businesses you need similar skills and abilities.

Ideas Are Everywhere — As Are Fascinating, Inspiring People

From time to time, I‘m asked how I get all these different ideas from and why I dedicate years of my time to build totally different companies. People say, they would not be able to do it in the same way. I doubt that. Au contraire, I think that everybody could act in the same way, by creating and developing different companies or moving forward on totally different career paths in one or more companies. It‘s only a question of confidence in oneself.

I have dubbed my strategy „connecting the dots“. In pure Platonist tradition, I believe that people aren‘t inventors, but explorers. We don‘t invent or originally create stuff, but we explore the world with our senses and connect different dots we have experienced. In recent years, I have learned to trust in this process of connecting the dots. If I‘m curious and open-minded, I‘ll meet interesting people and I have fascinating conversations and other experiences. Then I read something that fits into our last brainstorming meeting. Or, during our team meetings, all at once it becomes clear that we could combine different projects we are working on to a new one. However, if you spend enough time thinking something through, on your own, you will create your own idea about it.

Synchronicity

It‘s like life feels easier when I am fully aware of all things happening in my environment, listen to existing and new conversational, partners, change my perspective from time to time, and find solutions for my businesses by putting numerous jigsaw puzzle pieces together. You’ll experience coincidences, situations that fit others, people you need contact you, development flow into each other, unexpectedly. Analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung called that state of mind synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle.

Turning The Curiosity Radar On

Connecting the Dots happens in the details: I often meet highly interesting people by chance. I then try to foster contact with them since I love learning from other people and interacting for mutual benefit. Often, I know immediately if there are synergetic effects with another person — then I try to build on that without hesitation. Some people might view this spontaneously created familiarity — or intimacy — as inappropriate or strange — but I don‘t mind that. Not everybody is or is required to be spontaneous.

However, I encourage you to try the Connecting the Dots, the Synchronicity Strategy. Turn your curiosity radar on, be fully aware of your environment, act spontaneously, and with high intensity. That‘s what life is about, isn’t it?

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Mostly, a few hours strolling around a lake (what a great experience at Lake Starnberg today — just look at the featured image) are enough to get things straight in my mind, be it business-related or private stuff. While some of my friends and peers come up with personal ‘themes’ that provide the framework and guidance for their activities in the new year — here is a nice example by Maria Sipka — some time ago, I chose a different strategy for myself: I try to connect the dots.

Perhaps ‘strategy’ is not the appropriate term; it has rather become a way of life for me. Inspired by some great philosophical and spiritual minds, I started to look out for situations, events, people, and feelings that somehow fit together. With fitting together, I mean a certain connection between these otherwise completely independent elements of my environment. Sometimes, this connection is laid out quite clearly; sometimes, I need some more time to see it. When looking out for these connections, I’m aware of the very human confirmation bias; i.e., connected elements do not necessarily represent desired outcomes. It’s more about perceiving correlations if you want the data perspective.

Mathematical Platonism — Connecting The Dots

When I started to look for dots to be connected, my goal was to use that for my personal life. How amazed I was when I realized that this also works in business. Instead of pondering on business strategies and models, the answers to questions such as: How to define this business vertical or build this product? With whom to partner?  Or how to frame this proposal? comes quite naturally by being aware of the environment and doing what seems to make the most sense in a given situation. Sometimes, these answers don’t appear on the spot, e.g. in a meeting. Then, it’s a good idea not to decide on that topic but let it go and switch to a different topic, and to move this question to the next day or week. Often, the needed information or answers come up shortly afterward, in situations totally unrelated to the original topic, such as lying in bed, showering, or running in the forest.

Connecting The Dots — The Intuition Of An Explorative Mind

As easy or almost magical as all this might sound, there’s a catch. You, or at least I myself, won’t see dots to be connected without being intensely connected to my environment and being mindful, respectively. I know that for sure since I have tried it out. In times, I tried to do the trick by being lazy and waiting for things to happen, but nothing happened. Or, in other words, I wasn’t able to see any dots I could connect. On the other hand, as soon as I focus on each moment, getting the most out of each situation, and add whatever I can to the situation, the dots appear again. Being mindful sometimes doesn’t come easy — there are situations when body and soul just want to go the easy way. But little is more rewarding than realizing the rewards of being attentive and sensitive.

Intuition in Action — Connecting The Dots

The funny aspect of connecting the dots is this: nobody will believe you that you might base all of your business (or private) decisions on that kind of seemingly esoteric stuff, such as waiting for things to happen. Most people would assume that you use other strategies or techniques since they themselves would never trust in an intuitive or gut behavior like that. But that doesn’t matter at all. If you connect the dots, you will feel the ease of that way of life, and you won’t lose it again. That’s at least what happened to me. For me, there’s no other theme for this year than to connect the dots — the intuition of an explorative mind.

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