There is some sense in this, as it relates to the way great inventors such as Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Edison thought about creativity. In their journals they kept detailed logs of their sleeping, eating and work patterns to find out what made then most effective. Rather than waking up at the same time each day, they would have periods in which they woke up one hour later each day (for the full 24 hours until the cycle repeated). By always triggering their minds in a different way, opening it up to new impulses by traveling to new locations they were able to think in new ways and this to them was a sign of increased creativity.

However, these influential historical figures also both surmised that in order to be productive, the opposite was true. Waking up, eating, working, exercising and leisurely activities every day at a fixed time, would lead to in increased output. If they would need to finish work that required a lot of physical or routine work (including the elements of research that required repetitive calculations and writing), it would be better to not be distracted by any new external triggers.

Currently I am following the below routine, which works fantastically for me:
07:00 – Wake up
07:10 – 5km run
08:00 – 25 minutes of meditation (by this point I’m fully awake and I’m ready for work)
08:30 – Breakfast and travel to work
09:00 – Working hours (including a 30 minute lunch break)
07:00 – Dinner
07:30 – Programming lessons/blog writing/additional working hours
09:00 – 1 hour gym session
10:30 – Reading
11:00 – Sleep for 8 hours (sleep is key in maintaining such a routine for more than 1 week; also make sure to turn your phone on airplane mode so you aren’t browsing while in bed and don’t turn it back on until after your breakfast, when you are ready to accept all those external impulses that you have often not directly asked for)

I do this from Monday to Friday, and on the weekend I allow myself a later wake-up as meeting friends usually happens later in the evening and I need to shift the routine up by 3 hours.

Although their output level was maximized, the output was not always the most effective. It was and still is possible to work for many hours towards the wrong goal or strategy. Similarly, I feel that when I am in my routine I can lose oversight of what is truly important to me and developing plans, for instance, where I want to be personally or with my company a few months from now.

For this reason, I will allow myself a week or two (luckily the timing works out now that I am traveling) to not follow as strict of a schedule and strategically prepare myself for the 2-3 weeks of productivity after that.

If you feel as though you go through phases whereby you (for example) stick to a strict routine for 2-3 weeks and then have 2-3 weeks whereby you struggle to follow the same routine, there is no need to worry. It doesn’t mean that you are unable to commit to goals you set for yourself, but rather following the cues that your mind is giving you to be the most effective in achieving your goals. It is important to take rest, and if you can harness the inner power to stay motivated and disciplined, you will soon after be back in your routine getting work done.

By this I of course don’t mean that anyone should use this as an excuse to slack off, but that by finding a naturally balanced rhythm between productive and creative time, it is the most effective and sustainable approach for achieving your goals. By planning your life you will not only be more effective, but also happier.

In his series he covers how transistors work, how logic gates function and how these can be added together in a series of steps until an actual computer is built. This computer has an arithmetic logic unit and a random access memory, meaning it can do calculations and store the results.

If you are a fan of technology and have always wondered how computers convert electricity into meaningful information, I can really suggest watching this series:

Back in January I was speaking to my cousin about meditation and how although it had given me much benefit, I never fully managed to integrate it into my daily schedule. Little did I know, I was actually using a relax-meditation technique called Pranayama, as taught by Deepak Chopra. So passionate about the way meditation became engaging by using mantras, background music and controlled breathing, I started sharing this valuable knowledge with those around me. Then, without the slightest intention to instill a change in me, my cousin introduced me to a form of meditation that turned my view of meditation on its head. 6 months later I would learn that the purest and most effective form of meditation requires you to take the first steps on the path to enlightenment. Siddarth Gottama, the Buddha most people think is the original and only Buddha, developed a technique for such meditation and it has been preserved in it purity in Myanmar ever since. Something I never knew was that there have been many Buddhas in history, and that the title of ‘Buddha’ is given to anyone who has been enlightened and then devotes their life to teaching others to take a step on the same path. This way the technique was passed down from Buddha to Buddha (no pun intended), and I had the pleasure of learning it from S.N. Goenka and his assistant teachers in Dilsen-Stokkum, Belgium. In S.N. Goenka’s words:

“Vipassana, which means to see things as they really are, is one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation. It was taught in India more than 2500 years ago as a universal remedy for universal ills, i.e., an Art of Living.” (Dhamma.org).

In order to learn this technique, students must abstain from killing all living things, intoxicants, sexual activity, communication and must follow a strict schedule that includes waking up at 4:00am each morning, fixed eating times and 10+ hours of meditation every day during the course. After day 2 it already started to feel like I was torturing myself by being there, but seeing the determination of all the other students around me convinced me to stay until the end of the course. After day 3 or 4 I really started understanding the technique and experiencing the calm and concentrated state of mind that the daily lectures kept talking about, and this newfound skill motivated me to continue with devotion. Although I never stopped wanting to quit and go home, to stop the agony of having to sit still and meditate for even one more minute, I started to realize that when I was meditating I actually felt very good, and that the aversion toward it was fabricated in my mind and only existed just before entering another meditation session.

The Technique

1. Focus on your regular breathing as it is (don’t alter it like in Pranayama meditation)
2. Feel the touch of your breath in and around the nose (this is called Anapana meditation)
3. Feel the sensations on the top of your head and move down to your toes, then back to top of your head, scanning the entire surface of the body for either tingling, pressure, pain, cold, warmth or any other sensation, however subtle (this is called Vipassana meditation)
4. Feel the sensations on the inside of the body and conduct a similar scan, until you can feel sensations everywhere
5. End the meditation with 5 minutes of Metta Meditation: sharing your calmness, positive spirit and enlightenment with all living beings (the assistant teacher was projecting us with Metta during our meditation as well)

The meditation should take one hour or more and each scan can take over 20 minutes. Steps 1-2 were taught to us from day 1 until day 3, step 3 from day 4 until day 8, step 4 on day 9 and step 5 on day 10.

The Science Behind the Technique

As I’m not one to immediately believe whatever I see or hear, I could really appreciate that this technique was oriented around students experiencing sensations and calmness of mind themselves. During the long hours of meditation and the explanations during the lectures I began formulating my own justification for why this technique of separating mind from matter and experiencing egolessness would enable us to gain more control over our thoughts and reactions. See the below diagram for a visual representation.

At the core, our bodies are made up of cells, which in turn are made up of molecules. When we experience something that happens the physical world, we are essentially sensing our environment through one of our 6 senses, recognizing it, and then reacting to it. This reaction manifests itself in a changed respiration rate as well as a sensation in or on the body. This is the way that our brain stores the feelings or emotions we experience, as well as triggers the memories linked to an occurrence in our environment.

Looking deeper, science tells us that the physical sensations we feel are generated by our nerve endings, which are the links both transmitting and receiving information from our cells. So how is it possible that we don’t always feel the same sensation from the same cell? On a molecular level, our cells are constantly changing, particles being created and dissolved. As the particles are constantly changing, so are the cells and thus our body is never exactly the same from one moment in time to the next.

Every external experience has an internal reaction, which manifests itself as a physical change (sensation). This sensation is then sensed as an experience, which triggers another reaction and so on and so forth. This means that the sensations we feel are fueling the continuous process of thought and sensations and we lose control over our thoughts and emotions. I’m sure you have found yourself completely lost in thought, or daydreaming. People who often ‘overthink’, like myself, for example about occurrences in relationships or things we said generate either craving or aversion towards the external experience they are thinking about. This craving or aversion eats away at our mind and becomes a source of misery.

If we could stop the process of reacting to these sensations, we would be able to stop the continuous train of thought and regain control over our mind. Vipassana meditation teaches you to focus on the sensations in the body, but to merely observe them as they are, rather than react to them. By seeing the sensations as impermanent and seeing ourselves as a bundle of changing molecules (equanimity), we are able to objectively observe sensations and pause the train of thought. For me, this experience was liberating and changed my perception of the way our minds work. However, this is not something that can be understood by reading about it, it is something that you must experience first hand to understand.

The Philosophy

In many ways, Vipassana meditation has similarities to modern ‘mindfulness’ techniques. Reminding yourself about the concepts of equanimity and impermanence helps you to overcome stress of feeling like a slave of your mind, of the society we live in and of time. By looking objectively at sensations inside rather than occurrences outside shows us what is truly important. It helps us to realize that the way we feel is never the fault of an external event, but it is the fault of the way we react to that event.

Seeing the body as an ever-changing (impermanent) structure of molecules, one allows the mind to view matter from an external perspective. Realizing that all thoughts are the result of sensations evoking past feelings by generating craving or aversion towards them, one can stop fueling thoughts by disassociating mind from matter. The mind can be purified as it is merely aware sensations and not reacting by suppressing or expressing them. This stops the perpetuation of misery, and allows you to merely observe pleasant and unpleasant events rather than to react to them. Of course you shouldn’t become lethargic and never react to anything, but by first observing, you can make a clear decision about how you should react.

Besides stopping the generation of new sensations by being aware of your breath, when intensively meditating during a Vipassana course the body also releases uncomfortable sensations that have manifested themselves in the body for a long time.

Key Experiences During the Course

Going Forward: What Comes After the Course?

My Reflection 2 Weeks Later
Participating in the course has helped me in every aspect of life. I’m much more effective with finishing tasks at work, I don’t take external events too seriously and dare to take more risk. Especially in social situations, knowing that negative repercussions can only influence the image I have of myself, I can take risks by disassociating my self image from my happiness and peace of mind. I can proudly say that I look forward even more to the remaining days, weeks, months and years of my life.

Pros:

1. You are always guaranteed a job without the need to put effort into finding one – if your parent permits that.
2. You will be driven to think like an entrepreneur from a young age, meaning that you are and should always be the best at everything.
3. In conflicts, your parent will stand up for you like nobody else and make sure that you get your way (especially at a young age).
4. Your parent teaches you to have an immense amount of self-confidence, and that even when you are not confident it is important that you seem confident to those around you.
5. There is never a moment where you can’t ask for help. If you don’t understand something that they might, there is no bigger ego boost for your parent (yes, some entrepreneurs have HUGE egos) than that they can solve the problem that you can’t.

Cons:

1. You aren’t motivated to seek employment somewhere else, thus decreasing the breadth of your experience.
2. This one may only count for me, since my father is an eternal optimist, but your perspective on the startup life always being great is flawed and you will undoubtedly face more challenges than you could ever imagine.
3. Since entrepreneurs have a vision and are required to push that vision on to others on a daily basis, everything you do and everything about you also is part of a vision. If you don’t go along in that vision you get an immense amount of resistance.
4. Entrepreneurs tend to see themselves in others, claiming that people believe what they believe without even asking. It is not uncommon to have to hear a lecture about how you definitely should make a certain decision because your parent thinks they know what you are thinking.
5. Whether or not you like it, you start to become similar to your parent, also trying to impose your beliefs on others and trying to improve the people around you as if they are your employees rather than your friends and family.

Not sures:

1. You don’t have much choice but to become an entrepreneur yourself: As you are constantly seeing what it can be like to own a business and your parent serves as your greatest role model, you are likely to succumb to that inner pressure that makes you want to build your own dream.
2. The time and attention you get is very sporadic and extreme. If a subject matter interests your parent they will become overly involved, to the extent that they take over what you were trying to do. When the subject matter is not of interest you have to force your parent to listen or watch what you are doing. Although the latter seems like a Con, it does serve as a form of entrepreneurial training for yourself as it teaches you how to sell.

Although it is not always easy, there is a way to make the most of the pros and it has helped me a lot to realize how my behavior is being influenced. This way I am able to recognize my habits and to eliminate them. I hope that this article provides some more insight into how it really is to have an entrepreneurial parent and I’m sure that those who have such parents can relate.

As a young entrepreneur there are many challenges; both the challenges that an experienced entrepreneur has, and the challenges that you face as a young businessperson in a world where seniority still dominates as a property required to be respected.

Yesterday, I was told: “If you think this way, you are selling yourself short”. Well, that may be the way it seems to outsiders, but seniority and experience are often not characteristics that you can make up for with skills and wit. When sitting at a table with potential customers, investors or partners, I have noticed that these individuals are more at ease listening to- and accepting things from someone who shares their level of experience and seniority.

Out of this learning, my co-founder and I decided that it would be a great idea to search for someone who was much more experienced than ourselves, to lead the fundraising process, the strategy and the expansion of the business. We thought that especially in an industry whereby the success of the company depends a lot on the relations it has with African governments and large corporations that firmly depend on hierarchical structures, it is of the essence that the person handling these relations has done so extensively in the past. Not only is it difficult to establish a powerful position between all the giants, it is even harder to do so when the cause you are doing it for is completely new and has barely proven itself.

So far we have been proven right!

It was an ambitious plan, as we could not be sure that anyone with the required experience would be interested in our business. However, as true believers in our idea, we started asking around in our networks. As with any search, what you are looking for is often in the place where you weren’t looking and it appears as more of a coincidence than anything else.

We had been working remotely with a skilled English language expert to convert our mediocre proposal writing into masterpieces. She has helped us to recently win two grants, totaling over $200,000 in funding. These grants will be used to study the best practices in sharing weather data with smallholder farmers, and will focus on ways in which we can increase yields through mobile communication, including other agricultural data sources.

While we were close to giving up our search for a CEO, her husband had been reading over our proposals. He had been working for Japanese Tobacco International in the Democratic Republic of Congo, leading the setup of their aviation business and a few perishable goods factories as part of an expansion strategy. (Un)fortunately, due to the uprising and unrest in the Congo the markets became too insecure, and he left his position at the company. He moved to Sudan where his wife received a job offer, and he was looking for a new opportunity which would require all his experience and enable him to learn even more.

It was all a huge coincidence, you may say we were lucky.

“Luck is with the foolish”

In Dutch we have a great expression which reads “het geluk is met de dommen”. I personally believe that outside of war, poverty, and disease, people all are blessed with a similar amount of luck, both good and bad. However, those that are successful are the ones that trust that when they are unlucky, they will soon be lucky again, and therefore keep working hard on their goals.

Setting yourself up for success:

While many have questioned our decision to bring someone into the company so early on to take the lead, we have thought deeply about the consequences and how we can mitigate the negative while ensuring the positive. These were the steps we made sure to follow:

1. The ambition to make our company successful had to be apparent immediately
2. Accepting that the goals of the company were set up by others, and that the candidate would understand that it was the dream of the founders that he/she would be working towards (I had myself also not come up with the idea so I knew it was possible)
3. Analyse the candidate to ensure we will continue to have the level of freedom in our roles, respects our skills and history within the company, and be humble (my co-founder taught me to appreciate this trait in people)
4. Set up the relationship such that the power of the founders and the board of directors remains intact
5. Make it clear that our primary goal is to have impact and that while revenue drives growth and keeps investors happy, it is only a means to achieve the impact

So far, things have been going excellently, as our selected candidate met all our requirements. Our strategy for expansion has been fully developed and will become apparent to the public sooner than later. We are still on schedule with our fundraising and should be opening up an office in Nairobi, Kenya in early 2017.

1. Getting to my location: Finding your way to a village that is more than 500km away from the commercial capital of Dar es Salaam isn’t easy. The best thing to do is to hire a driver and a car, who will know the best shortcuts and, since there aren’t many great places to eat along the way, enable you to sit back and have your lunch while on the go. A final even more crucial point; the roads are extremely dangerous to the unfamiliar, the main highway through the country only has two lanes and you have to know how to deal with the situation when there are three buses on a two lane road coming towards you.
2. Dealing with local authorities: Everyone knows that business involves money, especially the authorities in Tanzania. Firstly, in order to get a shipment of weather stations to Tanzania make sure to let a locally oriented company handle the import duties, as it can take weeks (and unnecessary cash) before you get it to you location when you are unfamiliar with the procedures. Secondly, only 100km out of the city you will find the first policemen stopping you because you drove faster than the speed limit of 50km/h on a segment of the road where they pulled the signs with the speed limit out of the ground so you wouldn’t know you would be stopped. We solved this issue by working with a local company that had a lot of experience in this.
3. Asking for something: Even though you may expect a response the first time you ask for something, it is almost never the case. Whether you want to know the price for something, or simply need help plugging a cable into a socket, you always have to ask at least twice! Don’t worry about potentially being rude, because nobody here will judge you for it. Almost nothing is considered rude for the people outside of the high class, and something that shocks outsiders is the way people call waiters: by hissing as them.
4. For young adults: If you are a young adult, they see you as a kid, but talk to you like an adult. They can be blunt and undermining at the same time, how confusing! A piece of advice here: call people before you meet with them in a business setting, they will have no idea about your age. If you can impress them on the phone and get them to commit to a meeting, they will treat you like more of an adult.
5. Greeting before getting: Always greet in a friendly way, don’t just ask for something immediately. This will get you a lot further and will make you well liked. The greeting doesn’t have to be formal, a simple ‘mambo’ (the equivalent of ‘what’s up’) will suffice. I was asking someone for directions when I was with some friends, and when I didn’t greet the person before my question, everyone was quite shocked. Of course I tend to forget these things when I’m away from Tanzania for a while.
6. Everything takes ages: A notorious local expression is; ‘haraka haraka, haina baraka’. This means ‘hurrying is not a blessing’ and people take it all too serious. If you want to meet someone at around noon (don’t expect an exact time), they understand it as between one and two in the afternoon. In Zanzibar they even have the concept of ‘Zanzibar Time’, an extremer version of the punctuality found on the mainland. No worries (Hakuna Matata) though – as long as everyone is late, nobody is.

But most of all; enjoy yourself if you are ever lucky enough to visit this country. There are many beautiful sites, so having to wait for something doesn’t seem so bad. Also, the weather is amazing every day, and the air conditioning in your home or workspace will keep you cool if you need to sit down and work.

As the internet gives us the tools to disrupt any market, even the toughest markets are now risking to be disrupted by young companies. However, as these markets are so tough, Case states that founders need to remember three things; Perseverance, Partnerships, and Policy. Perseverance because tough markets take longer to shake apart, partnerships because a team of founders is not enough to change industries, and policy because many rules must be followed in markets such as banking, shipping, construction, mining, energy generation, space exploration, insurance, and agriculture.

My personal story focuses on a combination of two tough industries, and I will explain how I am tackling all three of the things Case wants us to remember; agriculture and insurance. These may not seem like the most interesting markets to disrupt in a country such as the Netherlands, but in Tanzania, where I am now, it can change lives.

To begin at the core of my solution, I have to explain the technological innovation. For many years electronics have continued to reduce in size and price, and the growth in popularity of the Maker Movement and Arduino led me to connect weather sensors to microelectronics. This has enabled me to produce a weather station at less than a tenth of a competing product, making it more accessible for the masses: a great tool for disrupting classical markets. In order to adhere to local policy, our weather sensors are WMO compliant.

The next step would not have been possible without the ingenuity of the business model that my co-founder Tom Vanneste developed. With his colleagues at MBA he thought of ways in which these weather stations could be used for a social cause in the country of Tanzania where we grew up together. Currently, our social enterprise plan is to provide weather information to farmers, by placing a weather monitoring station on their land for free and charging a monthly fee for the data. We import these stations into the country together with our local partners such as the International Insitute of Tropical Agriculture, in order to be compliant with local Policies. We also partner with FORECA, the weather forecasting firm for Microsoft Bing, who enable us to provide our farmers with predictions of the weather. Why is this suddenly important? Because of climate change weather patterns that have been around for hundreds of years have become obsolete and only localized ground-based information is relevant.

By Partnering with local telecom providers, we will be able to place our weather information in the menu of mobile telephones (even non-smart) so that even the poorest of farmers are able to access our information. In today’s sharing economy, even data can be shared, and in this case it is subsidized by the commercial farmers and other corporations. Lastly, by partnering with international development organizations such as SNV, we will be able to develop personalized recommendations for every farmer based on the type of crop and the amount when exactly they should plant or harvest.

Having grown up in Tanzania, we know that perseverance is key to doing business as local norms will have to be worked around in the way mPesa, the local mobile payment system has done. Tom has previously worked at CCBRT, the largest disability hospital in the country, where he collaborated with a large telecom company to enable medical bill payments to be done over the mPesa system. These implementations require many iterations, and therefore we are currently building up to a large scale pilot with all of the necessary partners.

In the longer run, insurance will come into play; we will partner with a large insurance company (already in talks), to provide local farmers with the opportunity to insure their crops. Currently, the policy for insurance companies is that they need proof that the failure of a system is based on a certain cause that the customer is insured for. With weather in rural regions this has never been possible, but by having a weather station 30km away any farmer will be able to insure their crops so that they survive even the worst seasons.

By providing farmers with tailored recommendations we will be able to help them increase their yields, while our crop insurance will secure them of financial stability when they experience extreme drought. We believe that as Tanzania’s economy is primarily agriculture, this will help to improve the country’s foundation and allow it to grow in other sectors such as education, transport and construction after that.

Our most recent success has been our enrollment into an accelerator program funded by the European Union, which has provided us with grant funding as well as mentoring. With this funding we will be able to scale up to 150 stations in Tanzania in the next 6 months, enough to attract international attention as well as provide the critical mass of users. We will place all the important updates on the Kukua website.

Find the Steve Case’ original article on the Washington Post.

I don’t tend to believe that the launching of a new platform directly means that a market will be disrupted, because the word ‘platform’ is overused and misunderstood. However, with a financial backing of $775,000 by the VC firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Metamorphic Ventures, Mode is able to leverage the expertise of VC’s that have been in the tech space since the beginning of the internet. Especially KPCB caught my attention due to their previous investments in Google Inc., Twitter and many other very successful firms.

More on the technical side, Mode promises to ¨serve as a backend for IoT companies¨. Furthermore, ¨By handling all of the backend services, such as user and device management and secure real-time access control, companies that use MODE can focus on the things that matter the most to their users, like hardware manufacturing and mobile user experience.¨ This quote directly from the Mode website shows that it is a perfect fit for projects that customers at SODAQ engage in, enabling us to support their data management while we focus on creating the best devices for custom and autonomous IoT deploment.

They have created an API in which the majority of the communication between the device and their platform is standardised, which will hopefully create a technology shift between the larger corporates such as Philips and Bosch. Their API can be used in smaller private environments too, which is perfect for corporates who still have fears in opening up their data.

In terms of timing, I don’t think mode could have done any better as the Maker Faire in the Bay Area as well as the Internet of Things World in San Francisco are both this week. They will have direct access to all the customers they need, and hopefully they will continue to grow. With SODAQ I am going to contact them, to see if we can promote the platform to our customers and gain some visibility through them too.

Here is the link for the platform: http://www.tinkermode.com/

Building communities is easier than ever. Introducing the #Tagboard app for @Hootsuite. More: http://t.co/yfsXvjF323 pic.twitter.com/IWMjR3KMri

— Tagboard (@tagboard) April 14, 2015

In the tweet above you see the most recent use of the wonderful API economy, to empower the hashtag even more. Hootsuite is a planning tool that can be used to plan social media campaigns, which is pre-hashtag, whereas #tagboard is post-hashtag. Lastly, if you haven’t done so yet, I suggest you take a look at either Periscope or Meerkat (no, I’m not entering the debate of which one is better). You will find that they utilize the hashtag as their primary search function, enabling users to find the right live video streams on Twitter.

Whether it was the executive from Cisco during the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum in London in October 2013 or the hardworking teams at the Maker Faire Newcastle in April 2015, everyone seems to have a different name, ambition, and prediction about the future of the internet.

The most recent trend I have noticed while traveling to different conferences and events is that big corporations tend to make up the fancy words to seem like they know what they are talking about, while the smaller companies are lost between the endless types of technology they can use  for the creations that they don’t even want. I have heard terms such as ¨The Internet of Everything¨ replacing just ¨The Internet of Things¨ and even rediculous creations such as ¨The Fog¨ being a layer between our devices and ¨The Cloud¨.

In all 3 years the progress has continued in off-the-shelf devices and components have continued to shrink. However, for the makers the progress has not occured fast enough yet. Cisco claims that there will be 20 Billion devices in the world by 2020, but currently the technology for developers often lacks quality and doesn’t convince the masses. Arduino has been the standard board for development for the last years, and requires a range of shields in order to actually be used in the field. As seen in the picture on the right, modified shields must be used to connect devices to the GPRS network, which is very costly, unreliable, and power-inefficient. Thankfully, along with a group of developers, I have had the pleasure to be at the frontier of IoT device development.