There isn't just one right answer

Why are people so focused on finding the right answers? I believe there are many. In school the right answer is the answer that a teacher expects. In real life I believe there is many right answers, we just don’t look for them. There isn’t just one right way to do things, look at commercials, products, building, and shoes for an example. They show us that things can be done in a lot of ways. We find more right answers when we don’t satisfy with the first answer that comes up in our mind.

A leader once had a sign on his wall that said “Think for yourself”, and he always pointed to this sign when an employee came in to his office. Beside that sign were another one with the message “Think again”, which he reminded himself to do everyday. Think for yourself and think again could be two keys for finding more rights.

You can change you career in one day

You just have to make a decision. I’m going to hold another lecture tomorrow, and this one is going to be focused on goals in life and how you can reach them. By teaching some of the methods I have learned at Hyper Island and by reading, I’m going to try to make the students learn how to coach themselves. This is going to be a fun challenge!

Our final project here in Oslo is going as planned. We did some minor changes of our concept. We try to work as effective as possible by having some meeteing focused on follow up the group process now and then. I constantly remind myself of all the things I have learned at school. It is fun to practise what I have learned.

How do you communicate about communication?

I held a lecture today about communication. I prepared the lecture the whole evening yesterday. I made a powerpoint and some notes what to speak about. Well, I made all sort of preparations. And then just 10 minutes before the lecture I started to ask myself how do I communicate about communication in the best way? I know that only 10% of verbal communication reaches a receiver. The rest is my voice, tone and body language. So I dropped all my preparations and decided to improvise.

I putted all the chairs in a circle to make an open atmosphere for discussion. I started the lecture by telling them that I was a bank, but instead of deposit money I wanted them to give me questions, thoughts and a discussion. The more they deposited the more knowledge they would receive. By improvising, let them decide what they wanted to learn and keep a discussion, it became a very good lecture I think. And at the end they learned everything I had on my powerpoint but in a different way. I can only hope that more than 10% of my communication about communication reached to them.

Communication and understanding

Communication is so much fun! It is always a challenge to communicate so everybody understands. Our current final project in Norway got me thinking today. Going from teaching for students to educate teachers means you must change your message. And it’s the adaptation that thrills me. What is the message and who is the receiver? How can I make people understand as easy as possible? I believe making people understand a message is more important then people may think and sometimes they tend to forget this.

If I worked at Google

I would develop a complementary search engine for them. I found myself in the need of a new kind of search engine yesterday. I wanted to search for a thing but I didn’t even know the name of the thing. That makes it kind of hard to search, doesn’t it? So why now develop a place where you can find the right names for stuff so you easier can find them when you want to Google them?

In my case I wanted to search for an accessory for aquarium and didn’t know the name of the thing. The search engine that would help me find the right word could work like this: I want to know the name for object X and the only thing I know about the object X is that it has something to do with Aquariums. So I start the search for Aquariums and then I get a lot of words that is related to Aquariums so I can continue to look for the word. Google knows what kind of words that can be related to Aquarium and shows them for me with both words and pictures. I would choose the word suitable for me and get more options related to those two words. By choosing new words connected to my first word I will narrow it down to the word I am looking for. Eventually I would find the right word and then get all the links listed underneath just like Google works today. The difference is only that Google helped me search by finding me the right word.

It would almost be like playing the Guess Who? board game I played as a child.

You are what you buy

I found this commercial on the train station and I felt like take a picture of it. This message is all over Tokyo, in shopping centers, next to big buildings and on stations. Ironically enough the train arrived a couple of seconds after this picture was taken and the message on that train was “Better Job – Better Life”. Get money, spend money. Is that all that life is all about?

Final project

All my focus isn’t on my upcoming internship or at my time here in Tokyo. Because my new course Final Project started two weeks ago. During the project we invent a new and innovative business idea and carry through with the idea. I work together with two classmates and it has been a struggle to work from distance in this phase of the project. But nothing is impossible and I look forward to meet them on the train on Wednesday when we travel together to Oslo. I’m going straight from Tokyo to Oslo. I basically live in two bags right now.

I can’t tell you more at this point except that this also is a sharp project for us. A part of our project will be executed during four weeks in Norway together with 60 students on a media school. Perhaps I will give you an update about this in the future, otherwise I will tell you more when the course is over. The exhibition of the projects in my class will be held at 17^th December and everyone is more than welcome. Read more about the exhibition at our website.

We went to an Oxygen bar yesterday. It’s fantastic that you can sell something that already exists everywhere.