A couple of months ago, I re-found a game I had played before: Angry Birds. While wasting some time playing it, I suddenly realised that this game is a brilliant example of something fundamental: learning from failures. In the game, you “shoot” different kinds of birds and try to kill…

Borders have always impacted me significantly because I grew up behind one of the most unpenetrable ones: the iron curtain. …

Change management is a topic in every company and even in private life. How can systems be made to carry out necessary or desired changes as well and with as little disruption as possible? Whole armies of consultants and a huge library of reference books serve this market. Our life…

Last year I did my first interview podcast. This had been one of my ideas for quite some time. I have to admit that I am a latecomer to the whole podcast world. …

This is who I am — Music has always been a crucial part of my life. When I was young, records were precious. We shared them and recorded them on tape cassettes. Now everything is within reach, so I like to try new music. But the old stuff is still resonating with me heavily. Recently, I…

Around the 50th anniversary of the manned moon landing, there was a lot of talk about that. Half a century ago, brave men (unfortunately no women then) were putting their lives on the line to achieve the greatest technological performance mankind has ever made. Some were weighing in on the…

My first visit to the previously forbidden part of our country I was born in East Germany in 1963. When I was growing up, nobody dared to believe that the communist regime would ever cease to exist. So nearly everyone tried to get along with the system and its shortcomings…

For quite some time now I have — more or less desperately — been trying to find a task planning tool that is really working for me. After the usual suspects — Outlook, Reminders (on Mac and iOS) and some other wrong ways — I finally met Omnifocus. …

In the history of mankind, there have been many cultural changes. Old skills have gotten lost while new ones emerged. From a nostalgic standpoint, we tend to regret the loss of old techniques and familiar tradition. But curiosity and development always win in the long run. Recently I was thinking…