Week 2023#21: talk about what you do
This helps people find points of connection and you to help others.
I keep seeing this around Tallinn: on a board next to the tourist info in the Old Town, this door beneath Pikk Hermann, and also on the wall at Uus Laine.
It looks like calligraphy in the Arabic script, but apparently, there’s no tool on the internet to help with identifying this.
Who can help?
What I’ve learned
Always talk about what you are up to and help friends do the same
Thanks to Latitude59 I managed to reconnect with an old friend (we last saw each other in 2019), Kota.
He’s Japanese, spends half the year in Estonia, and the other half in Japan, and identified his unique business advantage: being the bridge between Estonia and Japan.
Now he’s exporting saunas from Estonia to Japan, even taking Tokyo’s limited space into account.
Catching up after such a long time was a lot of fun, and after the topic of COVID times and its effect on social life came up, we moved from Fika to Fotografiska to meet my brother and Andreas - a chance to introduce new people to Kota.
And then the most random thing happened: after Kota told them what he is up to with this sauna business, Andreas mentioned that he knows somebody building smart saunas. That was an instant connection, possible only because of talking openly about what you do.
And this is just one example.
The same thing worked for me talking about the Estonian courses.
Or for my flatmate, Steffi, talking about coaching and mentoring.
This reminds me of a book, which I started reading, but haven’t finished yet: To Sell Is Human.
Every time you are talking to somebody else, you are essentially selling ideas.
Direction vs Movement
Directions for Week 21:
Identity for the garden: Garaažistan (گاراژستان) is taking shape, but there’s not much new related to this oriental identity. Yet.
Alignment: create more alignment at work and develop a deeper understanding of all the things I’m involved in - this worked out really well with cross-team check-ins now, making sure we’re all aligned on where we’re headed and what still needs to be done.
Spontaneity: yes. More than ever before. I don’t think I made it home before 01:00 this week.
Directions for Week 22:
Adventure: identify and take more risks in Week 22
Acting like an owner: I’ve never taken so much care of a place before as I’m doing with Garaažistan right now - I want to see more of that in Week 22.
What happened
Highlights of last week:
Two Latitude59 after-parties were a great way of connecting with people I haven’t seen in a long while.
Carrying rocks from the garage into the garden was a great bonding activity with a friend.
I finally distributed most of the keys to interested parties who want access to the garage.
I hosted a meeting with over 100 participants (most of them remotely) on an actual stage at the office and it was a lot of fun. It actually recharged my energy levels and didn’t drain me. Didn’t see that one coming!
Another short encounter with Mete at Fika on Sunday. On his screen was an article about philosophy, with a nice illustration, and one term highlighted in yellow. “He’s reading interesting things,” I thought until I learned a few minutes later that he wrote the article 🤯
Finally took the effort to polish my LinkedIn profile and use LinkedIn more actively - a prerequisite for the coming sales effort for Decode Estonian.