1. Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)

Watch Matt dance with people all across the Globe. The latest of the Where the Hell is Matt videos is showing people of different nationalities and cultures getting together to dance with Matt:

See more of the Where the Hell is Matt videos here.

2. Surprise Wedding Dance

The coolest wedding dance EVER!

3. Evolution of Dance

• Watch Matt Dancing Badly Around The World
• Saving the Planet!
• Microsoft Surface Parody
• Dolphins make underwater bubble rings just for fun!
• Bobby McFerrin Hacks Your Brain with Music

What really motivates us? This is the question the two following great speakers try to answer:

1) Tony Robbins discusses the "invisible forces" that motivate everyone’s actions.

In the first video Tony Robbins discusses why we do what we do and how we can do it better. This is one of the best public presentations you will ever see:

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”

– Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins is one of the most influential self improvement coaches. He has many ideas that help people to become better at what they do.

Some notes from his talk:

• Decision is the ultimate power: Decisions shape destiny; Decisions shape our culture.
• The defining factor is never resources (Time, Money, Technology, Contacts, Experience, Management) – its resourcefulness (Emotion, Creativity, Determination, Love & Caring, Curiosity, Passion)
• If we get the right Emotion, we can get ourselves to do anything. If you’re creative enough, playful enough, fun enough you can get through to anybody.
• Your model of the world is what shapes you long term. Your model of the world is the filter. That’s what’s shaping us. That’s what makes people make decisions.
• 6 Human Needs. Robbins says our 6 human needs are: certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth, contribution. We have a need for certainty until we are certain, and then we need surprise and variety.  We have a need to stand out and be significant and make our mark on the world, but we also have a need to blend in and be part of the crowd.  We have a need to experience growth and to make our contribution and give back to others.

We all have the ability to make a positive impact on the world, and it’s up to us, as individuals, to overcome our fears to reach that potential.

2) The surprising truth about what motivates us

The second video is a RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, that illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace:

Some notes from this talk:

• If you reward something do you get more of the behavior you want?
  
  For simple straight forward tasks incentives (if you do this then you get that) are great (e.g. the higher the pay, the better the performance).

  But when tasks get more complicated and require creative thinking those kind of motivators do not work anymore. In this case higher incentives lead to worse performance.

• Money is a motivator: If you don’t pay enough, people won’t be motivated. Pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table and focus on the following 3 factors:
   
• 3 factors that lead to better performance & personal satisfaction:

  1) Autonomy: The desire to be self directed; to direct our own lives. Traditional management is great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement self direction is better.
  2) Mastery: The urge to get better at stuff.
  3) Purpose: Companies that are flourishing are animated by purpose. We are purpose maximizers not only profit maximizers.

Also see Dan Pink’s TED Talk on the same topic.

• Will Smith About The Key to Life
• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Wear Sunscreen
• Top 3 Inspirational Stories
• The Story of The Pencil

The following essay was written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997. She described it as the commencement speech she would give if she were asked to give one.

When you read the speech below, you will be able to relate to some of the things Mary had written and you will enjoy reading it as much as I did.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘97:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-old I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single "Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", released in 1998, by Baz Luhrmann. This song was a number one hit in several countries.

• Top 3 Inspirational Stories
• The Story of The Pencil
• The Starfish Story: Make a Difference!
• The Penguin Story
• The Inspiring Story of Rick and Dick Hoyt

The number and volume of information resources on the Internet and our corporate intranets is enormous and growing exponentially. People spent a lot of time trying to find information to accomplish their tasks. Improving this process increase the competitive advantage and accelerate the adoption of new and worthy ideas.

Know-how is Know-where. The quality of decisions depends on existing knowledge. The one that use, create and share knowledge efficiently will succeed. It is not possible to keep all relevant knowledge in mind. A big challenge is having the available knowledge where it is required.

To identify relevant content it is necessary to look through many resources for those of specific interest; it will also be necessary to continuously monitor available resources (e.g. blogs, twitter, etc.) to detect new useful sources or to decide that others are no longer of interest.

This means it’s increasingly important for us to create better filters. Having access to information is great, but we need to filter and focus based on what we want to accomplish and what we need.

You can achieve this goal by connecting your team to a knowledge network. Members of each community of interest are expert in their topic and have fun sharing their knowledge and expertise with others. The infrastructure powering the knowledge network will provide straight forward tools to support social interactions, shared creation, information research, collaboration and communication. The integration into daily business is important.

The heart and soul of a Knowledge Network are the people contributing to topics of their interest and improving the quality of these topics.

The infrastructure of a Knowledge Network consists of a number of topic spaces, member profiles and shared tools. A community of interest grows around each topic.

Each Topic Space has a dedicated moderator and you may use any number of Shared Tools like a Dashboard, a News Feed, a Blog, a Microblog, a Wiki, Links, Files and aggregated Feeds. The integration of these tools with an overall news feed is important.

Each Team Member gets its own personal space and can choose to add from all available shared tools like a Blog, a Microblog, Files, Links, etc. The profile can be personalized by your team members. At least it contains a portrait image and a short role description.

Project Spaces are just special topics. The shared tools are the same. They provide a starting point for each project and contain pointers to all the relevant information. Furthermore they can be considered as shared space for ad-hoc collaboration around project specific activities. Traditionally you would do this via email. The problem is that it is locked up in our “inbox silos” and thus not accessible to any other interested team members not part of the distribution list…

To keep up to date with the activities on a certain topic you can visit the web interface of your knowledge network, turn on Email notifications or subscribe to the news feed in your aggregator of choice.

In a follow up post I will show you tools you can use to support Knowledge Sharing in your organization.

• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure
• Will Smith About The Key to Life
• Why We Do What We Do?
• Where Good Ideas Come From

Having a to-do list is an important step towards the goal of getting most out of your time. It is very important to break things down into small steps and to assign priorities to your tasks. But how do you decide what’s getting the highest priority?

Stephen R. Covey suggest a little exercise in the  7 Habits Book to find out:

Write down on a piece of paper what to you are the most important things. The first things in your life. What are your first things? Just list five or six. Now continue this prioritization. What do you think is number one, number two and so forth? One effective way is to just cut out one – what would it be? Then cut out another one until you get down to that which is most important.

Family, health, relationships , financial basis, career, education,…? What are your most important priorities?

Once you have identified what is important in your own frame of reference you can use Stephen’s four-quadrant time management matrix to further categorize your tasks. Tasks fall into one of four quadrants:

• Quadrant  1 contains urgent and important things. This is called the quadrant of necessity, and includes things like crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects, meeting preparations, medical emergencies, etc. The strategy: Do now!
• Quadrant  2 contains the items that are not urgent, but are important things. This is called the leadership quadrant  and includes planning and preparing, prevention, building relationships, renewing yourself, exercising, recreation and empowerment. The strategy: Schedule time
• Quadrant  3 contains urgent but not important things. This is called the quadrant of deception, mostly because things in this quadrant look a lot like Quadrant  1 issues, but really aren’t. These are things like interruptions, unnecessary reports, email, meetings, phone calls, and other peoples minor issues. The strategy: Delegate, say no
• Quadrant  4 contains items that are neither urgent nor important. It is called the quadrant of waste and includes busywork, trivia, irrelevant phone calls/email, various time wasting activities, excessive TV, web surfing etc. The strategy: Eliminate

Many people spend lots of time on Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 tasks. The challenge is to get Quadrant 2 as big as possible. The idea behind putting first things first is to prioritize important things first instead of urgent things. All it takes is realizing that it’s all right to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest priorities. Focus on activities that matter to you and say no to the rest.

Further reading / listening:

• Where Good Ideas Come From
• The Penguin Story
• Gary Vaynerchuk: Do what you love (no excuses!)
• Will Smith About The Key to Life
• Why We Do What We Do?

What would you tell your kids if you knew you are going to die within a small number of month?

Randy Pausch was an professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He gave his "Last Lecture" titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams on September 18, 2007.

The idea of the last lecture is a hypothetical question, “if you knew were going to die, and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students?”  For Randy, it wasn’t hypothetical.  He was fighting pancreatic cancer.

In this moving talk, Randy talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to his kids and students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals:

This video contains more inspiration and wisdom than almost anything else you can watch online. Watch it!

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
- Randy Pausch

• Wear Sunscreen
• Top 3 Inspirational Stories
• The Story of The Pencil
• The Starfish Story: Make a Difference!
• The Penguin Story

The inspiring story of Rick and Dick Hoyt (Team Hoyt) was originally published in Sports Illustrated. After reading this incredibly moving story between a father and his son, don’t miss the video of this amazing love story:

When I am running, my disability seems to disappear. It is the only place where truly I feel as an equal. Due to all the positive feedback, I do not feel handicapped at all. Rather, I feel that I am the intelligent person that I am with no limits. I have a message for the world which is this: To take time to get to know people with disabilities for the individuals they are.

- Rick Hoyt -

What I’m doing is loaning Rick my arms and legs so he can be out there competing like everybody else. There is nothing in the world that the both of us can’t conquer together.

- Dick Hoyt -

Strongest Dad in the World

Rick Reilly for Sports Illustrated

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars – all in the same day.

Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much – except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an institution."

But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "There’s nothing going on in his brain."

"Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!" And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that."

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped," Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks."

That day changed Rick’s life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!"

And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway. Then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?"

How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? "No way," he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 – only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

"No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century."

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn’t been in such great shape," one doctor told him, "you probably would’ve died 15 years ago."

So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. "The thing I’d most like," Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."

Sports Illustrated Issue date: June 20, 2005, p. 88

• Ric Elias: 3 things I learned while my plane crashed
• Nick Vujicic – A Man With No Arms, No Legs And No Limits!
• Amy Purdy: Living beyond Limits
• Wear Sunscreen
• Top 3 Inspirational Stories

The following true story happened to Eckart von Hirschhausen, a German doctor who became a comedian:

Many years ago after an unpleasant engagement on a cruise liner I visited a zoo. I looked at a penguin on a rock and thought to myself: “You are such a poor creature… your wings are too small, you can not fly and worst of all: The creator didn’t even give you knees… My mind was made up: poor design!

After walking down a little stair way I looked through a glass pane into the pool. Suddenly my penguin jumped into the water and now he was flying… Wow! He was in his element…

Later I did a research: Penguins are ten times more streamlined than a Porsche! With the equivalent amount energy of one liter fuel they can swim 2500km. Penguins are excellent swimmer and hunter and they enjoy being in the water. They are more advanced than anything built by humans. And I thought: poor design!

Like the little penguin needs water to be in his element we all need an environment where we can develop our strengths. This story is in a way a metaphor for Eckart von Hirschhausen life itself. He realized that the hospital is not the best environment to develop his personal strengths. He jumped into the cold water and changed his environment from the hospital to the stage. Today he is a very successful comedian, speaker and bestseller author.

Think about your strengths for a moment? Are you in your element right now?

• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Wear Sunscreen
• Top 3 Inspirational Stories
• The Story of The Pencil
• The Starfish Story: Make a Difference!

Visual and Storytelling are powerful ways to create good and interesting content which is fun to read and easy to memorize.

To illustrate this let’s start with a simple experiment: Memorize and repeat the following sentence. You can read it as often as you like:

Two legs sat on three legs eating no legs when along came four legs and stole no legs from two legs. When four legs ran off with no legs, two legs picked up three legs and threw it at four legs until four legs brought no legs back.

If you accomplished this little exercise there are two possible outcomes:

1. You had problems. You had to repeat the sentence more than three times.
2. You memorized the sentence quickly by reading it one or two times.

Most of us are not actively using the right brain hemisphere. After reading the sentence five-, six or even seven times many still have troubles repeating it – and after a week nobody will remember it for sure.

If you memorized the sentence quickly you most likely saw pictures of the story in your mind. I created a visual version in case you didn’t. Click here to see the story. Now you will remember it even years later…

Kathy Sierra, the author of many computer book best-sellers and the primary author of the very popular (but for very sad reasons retired…) Creating Passionate Users blog, explains it like this:

One reason for this effect is that visual images are processed in two parts of the brain rather than just one. A pile of evidence supports that people learn more deeply from words with pictures than from words alone (Mayer, 1989b, Mayer and Gallini, 1990; Mayer, Bove, and others, 1996.), and overall, several studies combined have shown a median percentage gain of 89% effectiveness. Pretty dramatic. Some of the theory behind the gain you get when words and pictures are combined is that we use our brains more fully, processing the content more deeply, because we actively connect the words to the pictures. In other words, our brains work to make sense of the combined pictures and text, and that processing leads to more meaningful and memorable learning.

Those principles can be used in all content centric areas like teaching, writing, advertising, blogging etc. There are different techniques you can use:

Pictures AND Words

According to memory expert Kenneth Higbee, “The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is usually applied to the effectiveness of a picture in understanding what was communicated; it may also apply to the effectiveness of a picture in remembering what was communicated.”

It is much more effective to use pictures and words than just words alone. In her article Kathy point’s out that the placement of text is also very important:

…the text that goes with the images should be integrated with the pictures. In five different tests, one group was exposed to text placed below the illustration, while the second group was exposed to text placed near the illustration. Although both groups saw identical text and graphics (with the only difference being placement of the text), in all five studies the second group performed better on subsequent tests. When a reader has to keep switching between the graphic and its description, he has to work harder… on the wrong things. There’s only so much mental bandwidth in a reader’s brain, and [broken record and dead-obvious here] that bandwidth should be used for making sense of the actual topic, not for making sense of the way the topic is presented.

Comics

Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art how comics tick, how they’re composed, read and understood. The whole book itself is a comic, just amazing, entertaining and fun to read and many lessons to learn! For everyone interested in the arts of comics.

Just look at the Google Chrome Comic book with artwork by Scott McCloud to understand the power of comics to present information.

Charts and Graphs

Use whatever type of chart or graph as long as it helps you to make your point clearer. You all know pie-chart’s, bar-chart’s etc. I won’t go into much details here. But play with annotations or different colors to highlight your message.

Mind Maps

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

A mind map is also very good way to present information and it’s worth mentioning here.

Analograffiti

Vera F. Birkenbihl, a German pioneer of brain-friendly education coined the term Analograffiti. It is a creativity technique to capture associations by using a combination of words and visuals. This is how she explains Analograffiti by using Analograffiti:

You can use Analograffiti to capture your knowledge about any topic. By only looking at this picture I remember all the stories and lessons behind the acronyms and visuals from the book I read many years ago…

Storyboarding

There are many things we can learn from good film makers. They figured out how to keep us entertained. Film makers use a technique called screenwriting to lay out storyboards. Screenwriting is the art of writing scripts for films, television or video games.

Many successful stories and Hollywood blockbusters are based upon a screenwriting template called the hero’s journey. It goes like this: A challenge is given, the challenge is rejected, the challenge is finally embraced. The world is saved!

I just started to explore this topic. One of the next books on my reading list is a screenwriting book called Save the Cat!

One thing we can learn from good filmmakers is the following: Don’t start at the beginning rather jump right into the action and get the audience involved. Think about this the next time you do a presentation. Don’t bore your audience with lengthy introductions and a history about the topic – instead jump right to the interesting parts and draw your audience in!

You can find a good write up about Storyboarding for Non-Fiction on Phil Windley’s blog.

Words alone…

You need to be a very good writer to just use words alone to describe complex topics brain friendly. You somehow need to create pictures in your readers mind just by using words. One way of doing this is by using figurative language, metaphor’s and analogies.

In the follow up post Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content I will show you some tools to create your own visuals, comic strips, photo stories etc. and where to find good images to dress up your content. The article is now available here.

PS: Like everybody else I hate spam and stupid advertising emails. The only advertising newsletters subscription I have for more than 8 years is from a German Cognac store. No, No… what are you thinking? I don’t have a alcohol problem :) Let me explain: Eight yeas ago I was looking for a special gift – a bottle of a very old Armagnac from a special year… That shop was the only one who had it so I ordered from them and everything went well. Since that time I’m receiving a newsletter. Not often. Maybe four time a year not more. What’s so special about this newsletter you may ask? There is always a new story to read. Very funny and intelligent. There are two characters: The easy going but cheeky secretary and the clumsy (from her point of view) boss. Here is a translation of the latest newsletter (In the actual one they use their real names. I changed the names to Boss / Secretary):

Boss: "Oh my god, oh my god, that hurts! Oh dear! Oh dear! Horrible!
Secretary: "?"
Boss: "0,7 percent less in January!"
Secretary:"Your blood alcohol content during working hours?"
Boss: "No! Our revenue!"
Secretary: "Is there still enough to pay my salary?"
Boss(bitter): "THIS is your ONLY CONCERN???"
Secretary: "Hm, yes."
Boss: "I already lost 29 gram because of all this worry!!!"
Secretary: "You better loose 29 Kilo’s – then you would almost reach your ideal weight, hahaha…"
Boss: "But the experts say the CRISIS will become even WORSE!"
Secretary: "Yes, exactly those experts who predicted economic growth not so long ago?"
Boss: "Unfortunately I had stocks from of the DONT.TRUST.ME- bank, *sigh*  …"
Secretary: "You are really an expert…"
Boss: "…now they are only worth 2 Pesos, *cry*"
Secretary: "That’s still enough for a Tequila! Vamos!"
Boss: "…back then they were at 3000$, *whine* *whimper*…"
Secretary: "Back than we also had men and not sissy girls – everything was much better. Look at it like this:  "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." *singing*
Boss: "…and now I am FINISHED!!!"
Secretary: "Finally."
Boss: "And what should we do now in your opinion?"
Secretary: "We do some special offers – that’s called “deflation” and its a sign of crisis."

You see. It’s almost like a comic strip :) Cheers!

• Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content
• Best of Hans Rosling
• Live Labs Pivot: A great way to visualize massive amounts of data
• bSix12 Explorer: Navigate in a way that is powerful, informative & fun
• 7 Billion People: How Did We Get So Big So Fast?

Hello and welcome to bSix12 – my little place on the world wide web. My name is Rainer Falle. I am an Austrian living in the Black Forest (German: Schwarzwald) a wooded mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany.

I don’t like to write another boring about page so I suggest we switch to “interview mode” right now. I will start answering the most obvious questions – however over time I will add more based on your feedback.

What is this site about?

As I explore and learn exciting things I will share my findings by writing articles and post them here. Hopefully you will find some of these articles helpful, relevant or interesting. I am always looking for ways to broaden my horizon and I firmly believe that one way of doing this is to listen to other people’s opinions and viewpoints. In this spirit I am looking forward to your comments and discussions on this site. Your comments are very welcome as long as they’re on topic. The following illustration summarizes my vision for this site. It’s pretty simple:

What type of articles can we expect?

Those of us who use, create and share information efficiently will have a significant advantage in today’s world. I will show you how to master those challenges, show you ways to continuously learn and improve yourself and how to find people with common interests and benefit from their knowledge, experience and advice.

I am interested in technology that makes me more productive. I will write about collaboration and productivity applications and social media.

I am passionate about creating useful computer programs. I like my job as a software engineer and software architect. A lot of my writing will be about software development, software architecture, design and usability.

Last but not least I will write about things I like not covered by the above (e.g. movies, music, books, funny stuff etc.) and share some of my photos.

If you are interested in any of these topics you can subscribe to bSix12 and stay up to date with the latest news.

What’s the meaning of bSix12?

When I was thinking about a name for this site I had quite a few ideas. The most obvious one being my name (e.g. rainerfalle.com). However this site should be more like a meeting place rather than a personal profile. So the name should reflect this as well.

“But what’s a good name for a place?” – I asked myself. I didn’t like to go with an arbitrary name either – it should mean something to me and it should be timeless…

After thinking about this for a while without any notable results it suddenly appeared out of nowhere: One of my favorite books came to my mind. A few minutes later I had a name: bSix12 is a play to Asteroid B612 the home planet of the Little Prince. I love this book. It is a masterpiece written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and has lessons for all of us.

What do you do in your spare time?

I love to do all kinds of sports including squash, soccer, tennis, jogging, skiing and ice skating. Occasionally I participate in running events. I already completed a couple of marathons and half-marathons.

Beside of that I read a lot, watch movies, meet friends and I love to travel and work on interesting online projects like this site.

What’s the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

42

That’s it. That’s all there is.
(If you don’t get it – DON’T PANIC – ask this question on Google and read this book)

How can I contact you?

Twitter: http://twitter.com/RainerFalle
Email: feedback@bSix12.com

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