Jorg's Brain Log

And another Shark Sports event in the pocket! Do I love organizing! Today was our first freediving competition of 2010 with some amazing results. Eric van Riet Paap did a 200 meter, Daan a 175 and Nanja a 155 .

For people who don’t know what freediving is all about, it is sometimes hard to understand how amazing the performance in the video below is.

More about the competition here.

Today we had another Shark Sports event planned. This time it was a Zumba New Year Party. 3 hours with 3 different Zumba instructors and around 100 people joining the party. It was a nice event which screams for a part 2, so who knows.

My girlfriends demo team, Zumba Chicka’s gave a nice demonstration about how fun Zumba can be as an aerobic fitness workout.

While Zumba is not a sport I practice, it is still fun to organize an event which has their own niche group of people who are interested in it. In the end it is more about the fun of putting something together and getting things done, then the niche itself.

And now back to work, because we have some more events coming up soon!

Lesson Learned in 2009:

Many people want to get to the top

It’s crowded at the top

BUT…

Everybody want to get to the top of the same mountain

So there is a lot of competition

There is a simple solution…

Find a new mountain!

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

Anatole France

We are humans and not just cogs. Cogs don’t have emotion. When you give a cog the same input you always get the same output. Don’t expect the same to happen with humans as well. 1+1 is not always 2!

Humans have emotions, the need to have a passion for the things they do. The companies that grow and survive know this and embrace the fact that not everything can be planned and change is inevitable to survive. They know that the most valuable assets are their people that give the company a soul.

If we want to accomplish something big and we make the perfect plan it ‘could’ work. When we have a plan and the people involved have passion and believe that it’s going to work, you will succeed!

Starting with a new job means that you’re going to get a whole lot of new information to process. Through the years I’ve developed my own way of handling with these warehouses of information that need to be stored in my head.

Probably the most important thing to do is to carefully plan the information injections so that you don’t OD in the first few weeks. One of the things I use is having a maximum of 3 interviews a day with at least 1 hour of rest in between to process what I’ve learned and heard.

A typical day at work would look something like this:

08:00-09:00 process news/email/other incoming information
09:00-11:00 create
11:00-12:00 interview 1
12:00-13:00 process
13:00-13:30 lunch
13:30-14:30 interview 2
14:30-15:30 process
15:30-16:30 interview 3
16:30-17:30 process

Today is the start of my third week on the job. After getting to know my team in the first two weeks I’m amazed about how much skill, dedication and commitment can be found in one team. It’s great to work with these kind of people, from which I already know we can do great things together.

Now I know the team and some of the biggest priorities I will focus this week on the culture of the company. Culture is that thing that is hard to describe but what makes a company tick. Culture can make or break a company, so it’s good to focus on it separately.

I don’t expect to understand it completely after 3 weeks already, but to get a general idea what drives people, how people work with each other and the atmosphere that hangs around is very important to me.

It’s clear that if you want to improve something, you have to change stuff. If you want to change stuff, you run into emotions. Emotions bring people and if you understand people you can make change a much easier action then just doing it without adapting.

The big trend at the moment on the internet is ’social’. Everything has to be social:  social networks, social applications, social games, etc. It seems like if something is not social then it’s not important at the moment. I must say I really like all these new tools and services that can connect me to all my friends, friends of friends, acquaintances and trusted sources like twitter, facebook, friendfeed, youtube, linkedin and many many more.

For some people it seems the most important thing to have as many friends as possible on these social websites. Thus showing everybody else that they are very much liked by people and also confirming this to themselves. It really seems like an ego booster to many people to have many friends.

 I don’t really care about this kind of behavior and I’m probably as much guilty to this trend as well. The thing is that I see a very big difference in the number of people that are social on the web and social in real life. Online everybody seems to be socially available and ready to say what needs to be said. But in real life…

Real life is so much different. For the last week I did an experiment where I would look everybody in the eyes when I walked by and if they gave me as little as a glimpse I would say ‘hi!’ and smile. A very simple gesture of social decency. I counted and kept track:

• I looked 76 people in the eye, smiled and said hi
• 17 people looked away immediately when they noticed I contacted them
• 38 people looked at me and just nodded and sometime mumbled something.
• Only 21 people really looked, noticed me and said hi

Just to take a way some critics: I wish to believe that I’m not a scary person and that I look very ‘open’ to start a conversation with. I also believe I don’t possess such ugly physical characteristics that people can’t bare to look at me.

All in all I was really amazed at the small number of people who are social enough to at least say hi back. I wonder if some of the people who looked away from me are the same people who have hundreds of online friends.

What is your experience?