I am fascinated by violence. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a violent person but I find it fascinating to see how easily can violence corrupt my mind. This makes me ponder on the power of violence.
I find that witnessing “unfairness” triggers the feeling of violence in my mind very often. It is enough for me to watch a movie that tells a story about innocent people dying and I already feel violence lurking in my mind. During those moments, my most basic instincts tell me to defend those people, to fight against their atackers. In the same time, I feel that reacting to those instincts will make me unhappy. It is amazing to observe this crazy show in my mind.
I am curious about movies that tell real, tragic stories. They trigger powerful feelings and interesting questions in the same time. Not to mention the fact that through these kind of movies I can acquire a better understanding of the world.
Check out the movies below. I’ve seen them all, they’re all amazing. They tell true (most of them), tragic stories about events happening in various cultures across the world:
Why do you think that violence is so powerful and how should we respond to it? I’d love you to join this conversation. I am looking to explore as many points of view as possible.
Today it’s the 1st of July, 2010. I made my blog public exactly one year ago. I believe that’s a pretty nice milestone so I decided to share something that I love with you.
Freedom, high mountains and flying are all sources of inspiration for me so in the video below you’ll have the chance to see a glider flying above the Swiss Alps. I find it amazing, I hope that you’ll like it!
I see William Blake’s poem as a simple story about attachment: as long as you’re attached to something there is a high chance that you’ll become unhappy.
Everything around us is dynamic: love, desire, pleasure, joy, sadness, technology, nature, they’re all dynamic. When we attach to them we create expectations. We expect that the element that we’re attached to, should not change with the passage of time. When it changes, the sense of attachment is lost - and when it’s lost, we feel disappointed, we suffer, we feel hurt, disoriented: “He who binds himself a joy / Does the winged life destroy”
I personally find it very hard not to be attached to the world around me. That’s why, I’d like to be “awake” whenever I create attachment. With attachment come expectations, ownership and selfishness. Giving up attachment brings freedom, generosity and authenticity: “But he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”
I spend a quite lot of time online so I get to stumble across new technologies often. That’s awesome. What doesn’t happen to me that often is to stumble across jaw-dropping technologies.
A while ago I’ve read about yellowBird, a technology that promised to deliver a product that would create the next revolution in online film and video. Remember the 360 degrees virtual tours such as these ones? Well, the yellowBird team built the same thing but for video - live video.
If you want to see an example, take a look at the video below. Once it loads, place your cursor above the video and drag the image in any direction. You’ll see what I’m talking about.
If at any time, you discover an awesome piece of technology, please share it with me, I would love to learn about it. Also, if you know technologies that impressed you, post a comment below.
Jeff Jarvis might say that the answer has to do with the notion of hyper-connectedness: “In a hyper-connected world, the costs of evil explode”.
Umair Haque goes a few steps further and offers an interesting perspective on why the costs of evil and the benefits of good are amplified in a hyper-connected world. He argues that in a hyper-connected world there are six forces which inherently punish the bad and foster the good. So what are these forces and what are they all about? Here’s how Umair describes them:
Image credits: Octav Druta
The force of Information - When information flows faster and freely it’s easier to identify who’s good and who’s bad.
The force of Discipline - Universal and cheap access to information allows for collective action - which means that punishing the evil or rewarding the good is easier.
The force of Competition - With better collective action comes an enhanced incentive for competitors to provide what incumbents can’t; to do good where there’s evil.
The force of Disruption - Competition increases the probability of high-level innovation - new business models, strategies, and institutions that reinvent the deep economics of an industry, market, or sector.
The force of Rule-making - As new disruptive innovations, proliferate, regulators take a more active interest in assessing the social costs and benefits of each, and selecting the most productive ones. Conversely, visionary organizations make new rules in their own ecosystems that alter the incentives for their buyers and suppliers to do more good, and less evil.
The force of Self-correction - Ultimately, the good should be self-correcting in order to achieve a dynamic equilibrium. When an industry or market’s connected tightly enough, doing good becomes the only game in town - unless, of course, you want to melt down catastrophically, like Wall Street did.
Awesome! How can we all foster the good? A first step would be to strive to create transparency and a free flow of information in our communities. Then, as Umair suggests, we can think of this set of forces as a ladder that people, businesses and communities must climb in today’s economy. There seems to be no way to “shortcut the crap out of this” as Gary Vaynerchuck says - so climb, climb, climb!
DJs select and play music for various types of audiences - they are curators. Each of their live performances is based on a playlist of songs which are mixed and matched with the help of various pieces of electronic equipment.
Armin van Buuren at Global Gathering. Photo Credits: ishootdjs.com
Services such as Spotify, allow anyone to be a music curator. You can easily create a playlist of songs to which anyone can subscribe. For already established DJs this is an amazing tool that they can use to further engage their audiences. Imagine attending an amazing performance of Armin van Buuren - one of the top DJs worldwide - and then listening to his playlist on Spotify. Amazing!
A Spotify playlist
There are other services such as mugasha.com that allow you to listen to DJ sets recorded at various events, but Spotify is simply amazing because it’s easy to move songs to one playlist to another and share them with people from all around the world in an environment that brings benefits to both music fans and artists.
Let’s start a conversation about what tribes you like and why you like them. Do you like surfers? Why? Do you like bikers? Why?
Let me start with a couple examples:
Entrepreneurs. They can offer you a distinct perspective on work, risks and responsibility.
DJs. Imagine travel from a Dj’s perspective. Tiesto, which is one of the world’s most famous Djs, visits around 5 countries per month (sometimes on different continents) with one single purpose: to party.
Surfers. Waves cannot be changed, that’s why surfers know a lot about adaptability. They learn to adapt in order to be in sync with the wave.
To share your favorite tribes and why you like them, submit a comment below.
Entrepreneurs and ideas are similar to crazy cowboys and wild horses. When looking at rodeo or tech entrepreneurship the obvious might not be useful. Why?
Well, here’s why:
you tend to think that holding on to the horse as hard as possible is ok, but it’s not: there is a very high chance that you’re going to fall.
also when you build a startup you tend to think that simply shaping a concept and building it will bring you a lot of money. No, there’s also a very high chance of failure.
So, how can one tame the horse? Build a successful startup? I sincerely don’t know a lot about taming horses but I have a passion for startups.
In the startup world you can use customer development in order to minimize risks and eliminate waste. Customer development is not a recipe for success but rather an interesting and relatively new approach that you can experiment with. It’s awesome and I think each tech entrepreneur should learn about it.
In this presentation I gave a bird’s eye view on customer development. Enjoy!
It might be useful to stop for a few minutes and observe the world around you. How do you see it?
Image Credits: Octav Druta
Ruth Bebermeyer wrote a song about how she sees the world. I’ll share it with you, let me know what you think about it!
I’ve never seen a lazy man
I’ve never seen a lazy man; I’ve seen a man who never ran while I watched him, and I’ve seen a man who sometimes slept between lunch and dinner, and who’d stay at home upon a rainy day, but he was not a lazy man. Before you call me crazy, think, was he a lazy man or did he just do things we label “lazy”?
I’ve never seen a stupid kid; I’ve seen a kid who sometimes did things I didn’t understand or things in ways I hadn’t planned; I’ve seen a kid who hadn’t seen the same places where I had been, but he was not a stupid kid. Before you call him stupid, think, was he a stupid kid or did he just know different things than you did?
I’ve looked as hard as I can look but never ever seen a cook; I saw a person who combined ingredients on which we dined, A person who turned on the heat and watched the stove that cook the meat – I saw those things but not a cook. Tell me when you’re looking, is it a cook you see or is it someone doing things that we call cooking?
What some of us call lazy some call tired or easy-going, what some of us call stupid some just call a different knowing, so I’ve come to the conclusion, it will save us all confusion if we don’t mix up what we can see with what is our opinion. Because you may, I want to say also; I know that’s only my opinion.
