An important debate..

Brock pulled my attention to this article, and I must say: it is important! Bwha! :) (click it to read it)

Middle of the night

That's right now. The middle of the night. On a Thursday. No, it's Friday already. 

I'm listening to Eefje de Visser and her great debut album. While sitting on the couch in a huge apartment that's been given to me - all for myself alone - for two weeks. Just like that. 

That's the type of thing that happens to me now. It's weird!

I also now live in Amsterdam. Yes, I have a room, it's tiny -only 4 m2- but in a huge house with a great shared livingroom and kitchen and (YES!) roof terrace! The girls I share the house with are wonderful, so no complaints whatsoever.
My apartment in Geldrop has been rented out, so no worries there either.

Drop-In is still going strong. Mike is a bit preoccupied with other stuff, but he's still very motivated to keep going! We've very recently started with talks with dropouts to see what we can do with them.

My parttime job is interesting enough, I get to learn about marketing and B2B communication.
With the Knowmads Cooperatief UA I've still got stuff to do. I'm still taking on the financial administration and tax filing. Very interesting, since I get to test all this stuff without much risk and an official bookkeeper backing me up! Good to know this shit for when I have to do it for Drop-In!

Okay, it's really time for bed now. Weird, but good times.

I don't understand... :)

Really. Really? Really!! I've had one hell of an amazing week. 

Incredible, the amount of things happening in a row. It feels like everything is falling into place and I just can't understand what is going on! On Friday evening, when I was staying over with my dear friend Chantal, I couldn't stop saying 'I don't understand! I just don't get it!' with the biggest smile on my face you can imagine.

Last Monday it started. After getting a tip from Selma that a friend of her was going to quit her job at a real estate agency and the suggestion I could possibly be the right person to fill the vacancy, I created an (in my opinion at least) incredibly cool CV and emailed it to the company at the end of the day, just before 5PM.

On Tuesday 10.30AM (so basically 1,5 working hours after receiving my mail) I got a phonecall. "Loved your CV, very creative! Your profile doesn't really match with the job vacancy, but could you come in for an interview anyway?" We made an appointment for Friday...

On Wednesday a very straightforward project job just fell into my lap and of course I accepted it. If there's easy money to be made, especially when I'm low on the stuff, I'm in!

Then, that same evening, the possibility of a potentially interested renter for my apartment came up. Yay!

The next day on Thursday, I had a great lunch with Natasha & Doug in Utrecht. A lot of fun catching up and discussing Social Media tactics for our respective start-up businesses.

That afternoon Mike & I met for a meeting with the Dean of the International Business School of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Bert Schollema. The conversation went really well. Bert is willing to think with us on furthering our concept and link us to people from his network! Awesome guy and truly interested!

Like it wasn't enough, the job interview was a piece of cake. The guy I met with is the owner of the agency and he was immediately convinced of my potential to contribute to his company! I got hired right away! The 3 best things about this are: 

- The company is located 200 meters from the Chocolate Bar, so it will be very easy to work with Mike on Drop-In!

- I get to create my own job description! Since my profile didn't fit... I'll be doing daily administrative stuff and the online marketing of the company!!

- With these tasks I will learn SO MUCH for my own company! It's going to further us massively.

On Saturday I went to a slightly different networking event called 'Realize Your Dream', organized by Edwin de Bree and Fran. It was a lot of fun! Getting to talk to so many people with dreams, finding ways for bringing these to life and picking the brains of many specialists... I will be in contact with several people for follow-up meetings!

Today is Sunday. And even now it's not going to be a quiet day. My mom and dad are celebrating their respective birthdays together. So I'm going there this afternoon. Probably a lot of explaining to family about my year at Knowmads and my new company and job!

I can't call it my weirdest nor busiest week ever, because I've dealt with some crazy weird shit the past year. But, MAN! It was one intense and mind-boggling week! Keep 'em coming!!!

Knowmads is dead, long live Knowmads!

I've finished my year at Knowmads. It's over. It's done. I can't believe it.

The last few weeks of us together felt like one long goodbye. In the last week of January we held our final presentations. In total 10 Knowmads presented their experiences and lessons of the past year. Corni refused to present, I don't know nor want to understand why. Oh well.

Maartje started the presentations with a brilliant video about our year. After that Mike and I presented. We decided to present partly together. He started his personal part, then I did mine and after that we presented our plans for our company together! I was very anxious before. Not so much nervous as it was anticipation. I wanted to tell my story! I just hoped I would be able to do it the way I intended. 

The idea was to talk without the support of a computer presentation or paper in my hand. I did it! It worked perfectly! I never felt so good about a presentation I gave. Also Mike and I did well together. Both mine and his parents and his brother and stepmother were present. It was nice to have everyone meet each other! 

The best thing was that we went on the first day! The rest of the week all I had to do was enjoy and listen to the other presentations. Some were as expected, some really surprising. All were truly representing the person. The final check-out on Friday was extremely emotional, with Maartje's song. I've basically been crying my eyes out the whole week... :)

The week after the presentations we went away for one week to Speuld on the Veluwe. That was fun! Unfortunately Mike didn't come, he had the stomach flu. But everyone else was there.

We received our personal letters from the council and the top-sheets from and for everyone. The ceremony was hysterical! Walking over the table, getting our right foot shaken by all... with a red dot on our foreheads... Hahaha!

And then it was over. It felt really liberated to have all this time to start implementing all our plans! We'll all stay in touch, keep meeting each other. But it will be different. 

Om February 24th, Mike and I met again for the first time in 3 weeks. I had prepared a list of topics to discuss and dummy website to show what is possible. And it was enough! Mike finally thought it was concrete enough to register as a company at the Chamber of Commerce. And we DID!! That afternoon we really founded our company Drop-In and claimed the domain www.thisistalent.nl.

Since then, the site is online (www.thisistalent.weebly.com), a mailbox has been arranged and the social media strategy has started to be implemented and a meeting with the dean from the HvA has been arranged.

When Mike gets back from his wintersport we are going to fly!

F*%#ck Yeah...

It's been a while again. I've been very busy with all sorts of things. 

My workload now mainly consists of projects of my own initiative. The company with Mike is finally taking of! We're both very enthusiastic about the concept, are writing the basics down and researching and talking with as many people about it as possible to get feedback. Good times!

The Social Innovation Journey is also getting there. We've done the first testrun with a pilot at Knowmads HQ. The invitees didn't know each other, but that didn't stop us in creating a very good atmosphere in which everyone was willing to share and participate. In February we will do another pilot for ING, to see if they like the concept! 

Yesterday evening I went to a WTF lecture/workshop at Knowmads HQ about 'the Silent Revolution of Visual Communication'. It was supposed to be given by Floris Koot, but during the day it became obvious that wouldn't be possible, he got sick... Oscar of ModelMinds and a Knowmads student, the organizer of the event, sort of panicked! He wanted to cancel the lecture/workshop because now there was no 'expert'. Maartje, Naomi and I convinced him to not cancel. HE was the expert! In the end I helped him in organizing the whole evening, from helping conceiving a program, preparing the space and doing the groceries to peptalking him and letting him use my notebook for the presentation. He did great! The participants loved the discussion and drawing exercises.

I've also just confirmed an appointment at the TU Delft. We're going to participate in a lecture/ workshop of JAM, in which we present our business to 100 Uni-students (!) and they start working on this idea! It's a business visualization attempt, to make the story visual and clear for the listeners. Awesome!! Mike is not sure yet if he can be there, but if not, I'll present our businessidea on my own. 

So much is happening, I would almost say it's hard to keep up. But, surprisingly, it is not! As long as I'm having fun and am not doing things I don't like, it's practically impossible to have too much on my plate. Everything gives me energy, instead of it taking energy away!

New blogpost on the Knowmads Blog

I wrote something for the Knowmads Blog. Here it is! Enjoy.

Okay, sometimes I just want to share stuff

We've had some really interesting times at Knowmads recently. With the 'finding your inner intuition and creativity' workshop from Gil Alon for 7 (!) days in a row. Breaking through barriers is the understatement of the year on this subject...

We've (literally) behaved as 3-year olds, been re-born, hugged each other silly, danced blindfolded, given 1 minute impromptu presentations on random subjects, talked gibberish, gotten really angry, made each other feel really special with personal compliments and done a shitload of other creative exercises that I can't even all remember at this point. The ultimate point got made on the 7th day, when we did our personal presentations of the song that makes us cry, fly or die. It meant showing yourself in the most raw, pure and honest form to your friends and family. Not by talking to them, but by reacting to the music, whether it was dancing, singing, moving, lying on the floor, or everything at once...

I invited my parents and they came. My mom got so overwhelmed with the purity of what was shown, she sometimes had to cry or look away. Both told me they felt privileged that they were allowed to see this.

On Tuesday we had our weekly shared Knowmads breakfast, since we had the Monday off. I sat next to Tsi-La, who is back in the country(!), and she whispered to me "Something has changed in you, I don't know what it is, but somehow your energy is more open since the workshop."
I have no idea what she feels, or even if she is right. All I can say is that I do feel different. I don't exactly know what is different, it's just a general feeling.

We've all definitely crossed a line, and there's no turning back! If this workshop had been anywhere more near the beginning of the year I think most, if not all, of us would have walked out and maybe even quit Knowmads. It was that crazy... But now, all -and I really mean ALL- of us completed the workshop and found tremendous value in it. It's insane to think of this workshop in relation to me... or basically any of us. And still, I wouldn't want to have missed it for the world! Not all the exercises worked for me, but what didn't work for me, did work for someone else and vice versa. 
One exercise had a huge impact on me, the personal compliments. I felt sooo scared, I actually had the urge to disappear. I've never been confronted with compliments of this magnitude by someone else than my family. And I had to return the favor! Speaking my mind about this person and really not holding back or making it a joke, was harder than anything else I've done at Knowmads so far.
In the end it was amazing, but -wow- that took a lot from me!

What I've taken from this intense week is this: 
We usually put a lot of effort into getting attention from others any way we can think of, and that attention only lasts for a few seconds. Anybody is creative, as long as you are genuinely vulnerable and use everything that pops into your mind. It takes effort to break down all the barriers of so called civilization and not feel ashamed to play and imagine as children do. Once you do, you feel liberated. Genuine interest of others can only be held (not retained) with a honest and pure display of the person bringing a real message. The message itself of course is of value, but the way something is brought is much more important. Even if you're only showing yourself, you can still move others to the core.


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To counterbalance some of this heavy stuff, I now want to share an awesome comic from Hyperbole and a Half. Which is probably the best blog. EVER. (click on it to make it bigger)