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Friday Retrospective

As a habit  I take my time and sit down every Friday and reflect on the past week. For this task I have a journal where I take some notes. I am not a hundred percent consequential to be honest even though the effects it had on my life are severe. As a standard scheme I ask myself five questions. 1. What was the most important change? For me it was my inoculation, which I had today. It wasn't the event itself, but more the perspective it triggered. The hope to see and meet friends and family, clients and colleagues again some day soon overwhelmed me. I am absolutely convinced that I belong to the lucky ones who benefited tremendously from the pandemic with all its ups and downs, so I don't want to sound self pitying. But like everyone I have been hurting. Hurting to see my kids not being able to visit their Granny, hurting not being able to meet with loved ones far away once in a while. Compared to that the restrictions at work felt miniscule. And now for the first time in 18 mo...

Why I prefer to write in English (and not in German)

The Power of Inclusion My first post on this blog was in German. At the time it was a spontaneous idea to share a unique experience that I knew would mark a significant moment in my life. I shared it foremost with my friends and the members of my sports club. Later I started to write posts in English just to test how it feels. As a German native speaker I only speak English as a second language, so why would I write in English? A simple and obvious explanation is that English is spoken by a lot more people than German. I do not intend this blog exclusively for a German speaking audience. In order to grant access to this content for as many people as possible is of course a very obvious, however not my most important reason. More Eloquence is More Potential for Clutter During my professional experience on multiple international projects and assignments I have realized that English native speakers can sometimes fall into a squabble where they talk a lot but say very little. Especially Am...

Lessons Learned from Ninjago

Masters of the Multiverse One of the highest privileges in life is to relive childhood with your own offspring. The experience of being a parent is by far the most intense and life changing transformation that any person might go through. Being accountable not only for your own, but also for another person's actions and life is a tremendous responsibility. As overwhelming as this might sound, there are definitely also some perks to the job: you get to watch Ninjago. As a kid I was seriously into Lego. Short disclaimer: I am -sadly- not affiliated with Lego in any way. The following statements regarding Lego are only my own opinion and not advice of any kind. It's perfectly ok if you're not the Lego type of person. A life without Lego is entirely ok, though meaningless ;-) Lego is just cool. My brothers and I used to throw together all the different sets and construct entirely new structures. At one point we rebuild robots from Transformers that could change into different m...

Failure Culture

The Default State of Society The other day I read a post on my company's intranet that stuck with me and made me think. I'll try to give it in my own words: A teacher entered the class room and started to write equations on the board. 1x9 = 9 2x9=18 3x9=27 The class watched and there was only the usual murmur while the teacher proceeded. 4x9=36 5x9=45 6x9=54 7x9=63 8x9=72 9x9=81 10x9=91 On finishing the teacher turned to the class and noticed some murmurs and giggles. He paused for a moment and the giggles increased. Some pupils started to laugh and after a while others joined in until a majority of pupils found amusement in the teacher's mistake and joined the laughter. After a while, when the laughter dampened down, the teacher said: "I made this mistake on purpose in order to demonstrate a point. I wrote ten equations on the board, of which nine were absolutely correct. Most of you however decided to focus on the one equation that was false. None of you gave me any ...