Most of the time during the outward run I spent communicating about a potential new venture. Not planned at all, but I have a weakness for re-prioritizing everything as soon as a new venture appears on the horizon. During the last leg, I shared a compartment with an opera singer who was on her trip to a performance that night. As it went, we were in a very intense conversation about the opera, cultivating a healthy voice, parenting — and — positive effects of periodical nose showers (!). It always fascinates me that it’s possible to talk with strangers about quite intimate stuff if there is some common ground and general sympathy for each other.

On my way back, I missed some trains and without a seat reservation I had to stand or visit the infamous onboard restaurant, which I did. I asked a lady to share a table with her which she approved. A few minutes later, we started one of the best conversations I have had this year. Being a medical research manager responsible for a team of 30 researchers and doctors at a university, she provided me with great insights into today’s world of medical research, especially its challenges regarding budget limitations. From more mundane aspects of how to incentivize top researchers to actually do research work at a university and not follow the money and work for some industry player, to ethical aspects of medical research and different underlying concepts of a man of Europe vs the United States.

A trip of 4 hours became en entertaining pastime with lots of new insights and opportunities to connect the dots for me ( I hope I could return the favor by elaborating on diverse aspects of decentralization). And although I ended up with lots of undone work I had a very pleasant feeling of enrichment, of being rewarded. I was right to prioritize conversations over work. I learned more and added more to my life by talking to interesting, sympathetic people with backgrounds totally different from mine.

Have conversations! Don‘t be shy — try to start talking with the person next to you! Start talking to people who you think could be interesting, who are different from you and who seem to appreciate your approach!

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Think of finishability as an antidote to information overload, as the Economist’s Tom Standage suggests. One of the integral features of the Internet are links between different contents. Linking one content to another provides the reader with more, related, deeper content — a footnote 2.0 if you want. We could not imagine an internet without links, not as consumers or readers, and not as businesses relying on the power of links; e.g. publishers, search engines, etc..

What‘s Behind The Next Link?

We all click on links, lots of them, day by day. And then? After years of having clicked on evermore links, there appears this feeling of being lost, of having wasted too much time surfing, or of having clicked on links just to prevent ourselves from doing other stuff which has to be done — there he is the procrastination demon.

What a relief if there is someone or something who / which tells us to stop clicking once more. Be it our significant other demanding quality time, or a simple search result answering a question in a way that doesn’t need further requesting. And this does not refer to simple minds only, being satisfied with simplified views they get from TV, tabloids or cracker-barrel-talks. Even the most intelligent of my friends cherish some finishability. To know there’s some end to a topic, some answer to a question is reassuring for all of us.

Adding Meaning To Things

For me, finishability has an even broader meaning than as an antidote to information overload. Finishability is giving meaning to things and behaviors. Finishability adds a reassuring element to content, to action, etc.. It helps to go on, to proceed, to reach the next level. People who never get this feeling of finishability will most probably have a feeling that they miss something. And they probably look for the missing thing in the next situation, and the next one.

Finishability means to be satisfied with what I have, with what I bought or with what I just experienced. You might argue that what I bought, saw, or experienced had to entail finishability, otherwise, I could not see it. For me, this is a question of my personal presence: If I “see” finishability in things and actions, I can go on and proceed to the next level. I’m the one who decides about the finishability of things and actions, not somebody else.

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About 300,000 years ago, the fire had become a household means to heat, to cook, and the basis for some other important innovations. For the first time in their millions of years long history, the human species could overcome the lion, slash-and-burn entire forests, and more. The ability to cook alone reduced the mortality rate of mothers and newborns: mothers could give birth to babies years before they developed their enormous heads relative to their remaining body. No other animal needs around 15 years of growing up before being able to care for oneself.

Fire and cooking have proved to be fundamental game-changers for human evolution. And yet, another ability of Homo Sapiens is at least as important: language, oral, written, and other forms of communication have laid the foundation of human evolution of the last 80–100,000 years. Language is the main tool we have been using to become the superior species of the planet.
Language enables us to transport information, to socialize and to bond with or gossip about others, and to communicate what doesn’t even exist; just think of fairy tales, myths, or — much-loved in technology — the future. Studies show that a modern human being can regularly interact with a group of 150 people. Interaction and communication in groups of more than 150 need some tools to structure communication — without that, communication is flawed and brings disastrous results. (Doubt that? Just look at big enterprises.) The ability of making use of a fictional language and to create content and appropriate communication structures that allow us to spread stories, gossip, or beliefs among thousands, a hundred thousand or even millions is what differentiates us from the other animals.

For now, language is our most personal instrument to express ourselves. But what about our actions? Actions speak louder than words. And sometimes, we see differences between a person’s actions and her words, that is, if we actually see her acting. If there are discrepancies between what we do and what we say — or if people just don’t know what we do, or what the reasons are for how we behave — how should there be any understanding between us? How should we really get the meaning of another person’s words or actions?

Imagine, you are bullied away from the left lane of the highway by an aggressive driver. Anger comes up — you start flashing your headlights, you honk, or you even curse him. What if you knew that he just learned about his 5‑year-old’s critical accident and that he was desperately rushing to the hospital? Wouldn’t you perceive a lot more sympathy for him?
We all interpret other people’s actions from time to time. Often, we judge these actions — in most cases on the basis of very limited knowledge of the respective contexts. More information about the people you interact with and more information about the contexts of your interactions would certainly help in understanding each other much better.

Imagine a tool that provides you with every kind of data of your personal behavior and data of your environment, weather data, data of the situation you are in — in short: your contextual data. This tool would help you to know everything about yourself — even things you had not been aware of before. It would act as your personal mirror.  You could use this tool not only to inform yourself but others as well. You could inform your significant other about your actual mood, or you could inform your kids about being late to fetch them from school. You could inform strangers that you are in a hurry — so they could let you pass or would offer you to check-out at the register. Imagine, this tool would do that automatically, effortlessly — without any intervention from your side. You could decide who receives what pieces and quality of your personal behavioral information.

Couldn’t such a tool change your life? And that of people you communicate with? Couldn’t this tool play an integral role in social interactions? Wouldn’t this tool help people to understand each other much better?

This tool is not fiction. This tool will be launched in 2015. It’s an app we are developing at our company Datarella. Its project name is LifeLine. On your smartphone it collects your behavioral data, analyzes and visualizes the data, and sends it back to you in a meaningful feedback loop. You decide which information you share with whom — all information is yours. LifeLine helps you to know yourself and other people better.
It’s very early to assess the implications of LifeLine, but I’m very confident that it will change the way we live, that it will help us to understand each other significantly better. In that way, it could play a role in helping to facilitate the next level of human evolution. That might sound far-stretched, and we will experience a lot of skepticism, indignation, and outright fear when it comes to integrating all that data into our lives.

To accept one’s own data as important, meaningful, and vital, to learn about the advantages of sharing this data with others and to experience the benefits of openness and transparency (you might call it post-privacy), all that takes time. I think, future generations won’t understand why it took their forefathers that long to accept data as an integral and vital element of their lives. Future school kids will laugh at our anxieties and they will ask their teachers how we could afford not to manage our data, how we could have survived without an active personal data management. This claim isn’t difficult to make: the data exist, it will be available for anybody. Shouldn’t you take care of it and make the best possible use of it?

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A small feature, a big effect on communications: now, YiGGers know that they had ben addressed or mentioned in comments without rechecking news entries with own comments or using our spy-called realtime ticker in the appropriate mode.

I am wondering why we sometimes don’t realize what is obvious.

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