We are, according to neuroscience, influenced by our environment, our 5 closest friends and our content diet. What we read, listen to and watch. I stopped watching the news and reading newspapers when I moved to the US in 2007 when I realized that most of it was propaganda, focused on negativity, interwoven with advertising prepared by world class teams of psychology PhDs for which I have no defense except avoiding it. In the old newspaper industry, the motto was “if it bleeds, it leads”. Simply because people are three times more sensitive for negative news than for positive news. So, you can influence your sense of happiness and contentment quite significantly by the content that you consume. For me, that means reading, often old, books that have stood the test of time, selectively watching YouTube videos on wholesome topics (with an adblocker engaged) and listening to long form podcasts on topics that interest me. So, what do you consume and is it helping you or hurting you? Daily Reflection #117: Bears sound smart; Bulls are right In the investment world, there is a concept called the perma-bears. These are investors who always make public statements about how the market is going to crash or even collapse. The challenge is that the arguments that these people make often sound incredibly insightful and smart and it’s easy to be swayed by them. Of course, when looking at the data it is obvious that the stock market goes up most of the time. Although there are crashes and people moaning about all the money they lost, anyone who has seen a chart mapping out the Dow or S&P 500 since 1900 knows that enormous wealth has been created by those that simply stayed in the market. One USD invested in the S&P 500 in 1900 would have given you 130K USD today (not corrected for inflation). Although bears sound smart and occasionally are correct, it is more like a clock standing still showing the correct time twice a day. By and large, the bulls tend to be right most of the time. So, rather than letting fear and negativity lead your life, focus on positivity and opportunity! Daily Reflection #118: You also hate Elon Musk? Although I am not a fan of Elon Musk’s endeavour into politics and I hope he goes back to running companies soon, I am totally in awe of his ability to build companies. Tesla was the first serious electric car company and paved the way for the entire automotive industry who otherwise would have just claimed that it was impossible. SpaceX took on the government and the established rocket industry to provide lift into orbit at a fraction of the cost by creating a reusable rocket. Neuralink provides direct brain computer interfaces, starting with quadriplegics. StarLink offers connectivity anywhere on the planet using more than 7000 satellites. Each of these companies is highly mission driven, whether it is the climate, making humankind interplanetary or offering connectivity in rural areas around the world. One of my frustrations with the western world, and especially Europe, is our lack of ambition and willingness to make the world a better place for our children and their offspring. Rather than hating people who get things done, let’s aspire to be one of those people! Daily Reflection #119: What is the best that could happen? Whenever people take a big decision, one of the questions everyone tends to ask themselves is what the worst is that could happen. The idea is that you put a boundary on the worst possible outcome so that you have an idea of what the worst case downside risk is. One lesson from the VC community is that you can only lose your money once. That may seem obvious, but bear with me. When investing, say, 100K€ into an early stage startup, your worst case downside risk is those 100K. However, you should look at the upside of the deal as well. Assuming the startup does well, you may get your money back 10x, 100x or even a 1000x. The worst case is a -1x whereas the upside is, in principle, infinite. Of course, I am human too and every time I fork over money to a startup, I mentally say goodbye to those funds. But I have learned to also look at the upside and ask myself the question what the best is that could happen. That’s not just wishful thinking as I have had nice and successful exits. So, next time when faced with a big decision, ask yourself what is the best that could happen! Daily Reflection #120: Can’t wait to retire? At the risk of sharing too much personal information, I am an avid follower of the FIRE community. FIRE stands for Financial Independence; Retire Early. Whenever work didn’t feel like a lot of fun, I justified it for myself as it allowed me to save money now so that I could retire a little earlier and escape from the rat race. After I became financially more secure, I actually tried to slow down and work less with the intent of sliding into early retirement. The learning: I hated it. I want to work. I want to contribute. I want to have an impact. Not only that, I read a study of university administrators and the effect of their retirement. One year after leaving their jobs, they had lost 13 IQ points! So, whenever you feel that you can’t wait to retire, don’t use it to double down and grind it out, hoping to get out of the rat race a bit sooner. Instead, use it for what it really means: you’re not in the right place and you need to look for where you would be better off. Daily Reflection #121: Ready. Fire. Aim. Currently, I am in the midst of training shooting for my Swedish hunting license. As I am far from a natural talent, I have the kindest, most patient instructor who keeps telling me how to do it: get ready, take aim, fire. The interesting thing is, however, that when shooting with a shotgun, this has to happen really fast and the aiming part needs to be instinctive and not a conscious, deliberate “aiming for the target” process. There is a beautiful parallel to the rest of our life: I meet lots of people that, once I get to know them a bit, express a desire to try other things out, to change jobs, to start a company or make changes in their personal lives. Most never do in that they get ready, take aim, but never pull the trigger. And it’s not like I am not as guilty of that as the next person. The general advice in these situations is ready, fire, aim. Take some action in what is roughly the right direction and course correct once you are in motion. Stop aiming. Start shooting. Daily Reflection #122: You’re really tough, right? One of the podcasts I enjoy listening to is by Tim Ferriss (the author of, among others, the four hour workweek book). A recent episode was with Terry Real, a therapist, who lamented about western culture’s rules about how men and women are supposed to act and behave. Men are supposed to be tough, suppress their feelings and act as if nothing can touch them. The challenge is that in relationships at home or at work, people want to connect which is not a rational act, but an emotional one. And that requires opening up and being vulnerable which is really scary. Especially, in my experience, for men who are taught from an early age to close off. When reaching positions of leadership, it becomes even more difficult as you put even more expectations on yourself on what your people expect from you. The interesting thing is, though, that I have had the best outcomes when I open up to my team, explain what I feel and then ask for help. So, next time you feel the need to close up and put up walls, see if you can do the opposite. Being tough often creates distance when you need the opposite. Daily Reflection #123: Buy gear; not stuff I’m in the midst of “Scarcity Brain” by Michael Easter where he explores how we are naturally wired to want to get more stuff. In prehistory, having more stuff was synonymous with higher likelihood of survival during difficult times. And, at the same time, as we were nomadic, the amount of stuff we could carry was naturally limited. As I have now lived in Sweden for 14 (!!!) years and only moved once during that time (a whole 800 meters), I notice how much stuff I have managed to accumulate over the years. Living in a large house makes it even worse as there always is space for more things to accumulate. And yet, every time I get rid of something by selling it, giving it away or simply throwing it away, I feel relief. I feel lighter and less burdened. As I wrote in an earlier reflection, you do not own stuff, stuff owns you. The recommendation in the book is to only buy gear. Gear are items that you actually use on a somewhat regular basis. Stuff are things you have simply for having them. So, my reminder to myself today is: buy gear; not stuff. Daily Reflection #124: You want to struggle … We are in many ways wired for comfort. We seek to avoid difficulty, stress and hardship. And yet, as humans we only feel good when we struggle. I see this around me all the time. When I go to the gym and do a tough workout, I feel good about myself. I see the same in the groups that I train: the harder I push them, the more satisfied they are. Startup founders have the same pattern: they struggle and experience a great sense of accomplishment when the business gets going. If this was not the case, why would anyone sign up for a marathon, commit to long-distance hiking, climbing mountains, invest incredible amounts of time and energy into a career or anything that is physically and mentally challenging. As the saying goes: in life you will suffer, so you better carefully select who or what you’re suffering for. Daily Reflection #125: How do you debug your life? One of the main activities of software engineers is to debug code. Debugging is surprisingly challenging as you need to understand what the desired behaviour is, under which conditions the system does not exhibit that behaviour and the figure out where the error actually is. As humans, we could apply the same process to our lives, but most rarely do so. We repeat the same behaviors, run the same mental scripts, and expect different results. In some way, we often fail to take a step back, go up a level in abstraction and get to the root cause. In software, we’d never accept such inefficiency. But in life? We tolerate it for years. So, what if you debugged your routines the same way you debugged a failing system? Step through your day. Log your assumptions. Challenge the defaults. Set a breakpoint where things go wrong. Most importantly: test a fix. What’s your life’s bug tracker telling you today? Daily Reflection #126: AI is severely underhyped As more and more of us run into the limitations of LLMs and other large models, many are starting to wonder whether the technology is overhyped and that it will be more of a fluke rather than turning the world upside down. Also, some, myself included actually, believe that it is likely that we’ll see a bursting of the AI bubble in the same way as the internet bubble burst in 2000. However, even if some large companies need to write off tens if not hundreds of billions of investment in AI due to a bursting bubble, the technology progress has been made and the innovations are available to us all. The internet is a huge industry, despite its bubble being burst 25 years ago, and the same thing will be the case with AI. The only difference is that we will pick up after a bursting AI bubble faster as we have enough people that experienced the internet bubble and will see the parallel. And as I write about in my Sunday blog posts, most companies and professionals are in “playtime” mode, using AI to complement or automate some of their tasks, rather than reinventing entire business processes from the ground up in an AI-first fashion. So, assume that AI is severely underhyped and act accordingly! Daily Reflection #127: Missing feedback loops For all the focus on data and AI, I can’t get over the fact that so many feedback loops that could be realized are missing in the companies that I work with. Engineering teams release new versions of their software and only track whether there are significant quality issues. Product managers fight tooth to nail to get a feature prioritized but fail to measure whether the feature indeed accomplishes the intended outcome. Senior leaders pushing reorganizations through on the promise of some benefits but never look back to see if these are realized. And whenever there is data and I or someone else dares to bring it up, especially when it clashes with the beliefs of key decision makers, there is a creative line of reasoning about how the data is wrong or misinterpreted. People hate to adjust their beliefs, even if the data stares them in the face. So, as a reminder to both me and you: look for ways to implement feedback loops that keep you anchored in reality. It’s too easy to start believing your own B.S. Daily Reflection #128: What are the advantages? We all get disappointed at times. We wanted to get something and we didn’t get it. A job that went to someone else. A date that got cancelled and never followed up on. An offer that you expected, but that never came. A publication that, after several review rounds, still gets rejected.  It can be especially painful when you know that the likelihood of you being chosen was very high, like when you’re interviewing as one of the last two for a role. As I have experienced this disappointment many times in my life, I have slowly learned to manage it. The best way to manage it is, in my experience, to force yourself to identify the advantages of not having got what you wanted. When you really want something, you start to become irrational and see only the positives and not the backside. For example, the job may require you to travel extensively, disrupting your life outside of work. By focusing your energy on identifying and visualizing the downsides of what you wanted and didn’t get, you may even end up in a place where you feel you dodged a bullet. Sometimes, not getting what you want may be the best thing that could have happened to you. Daily Reflection #129: The end of software engineering? During soon three decades working as a full professor, I have seen quite a few technology transformations including the introduction of software into embedded systems, the Year 2000 problem, cloud, big data and so on. Every time it led to more work for us as software engineers. This time, with the AI transformation, we are the ones disrupted. I don’t think that software engineering and engineers will disappear, but a significant part of our tasks is most certainly automated to an extent that humans will act as supervisors rather than the ones doing the work. And I believe that there will be new tasks, such as integrating ML models, LLMs and AI agents, into larger systems, that many of us were perhaps not so concerned with earlier. However, the engineers that pretend that nothing will change and that continue as usual will be disrupted and may soon be looking for a new job. Change is the only constant and you either change with it or go the way of the dinosaurs. Daily Reflection #130: Don’t care about business? As I write this, I am on my way back from a conference in Munich where I gave a keynote to a sizable audience working on software quality. One of the parts of my keynote is where I show a calculation of how much revenue each € invested in R&D has to create. This turns out to be 100 divided by the percentage of company revenue allocated to R&D. That means that if your company spends 5% of revenue on R&D, each € invested in R&D has to generate €20 of revenue. Of course, this is sometimes hard to calculate as there is both a time lag between the time of investment and the time of revenue generation and a risk that a prioritized feature does not generate the expected outcome. During the keynote, I realized, and not for the first time, that many, especially European, engineers don’t care about the business side of their efforts. This annoys me to no end as engineers are at the heart of value creation in companies and they need to focus their efforts on what offers the greatest impact. If you work in engineering, you better care about the business. Daily Reflection #131: Still running mainframes? While at the conference I mentioned in the previous post, I learned that one of the big business opportunities in Germany apparently is to move software running AS400 mainframes to the cloud. The reason is that the people who built the software in the 1970s and 1980s and have maintained it since then are retiring and companies are unable to replace them. So, after decades of delaying the inevitable, it finally is time to bite the bullet and transition the software. Mainframe software is far from the only area where I see companies severely underinvest in technology renewal and business opportunities that could be created by transitioning to modern technology. I can’t help wondering to what extent you are putting yourself at risk of disruption by new entrants or more innovative incumbents that use their new technology stack to offer value to customers that are impossible for technology laggards. Of course, many industries are perhaps too small for innovative players to care about, but at some point it will happen also there. So, evaluate your tech stack and prioritize modernization before you reach a point where it isn’t needed anymore. Daily Reflection #132: You have a strong brand? In many of the companies that I work with, the notion of brand comes up regularly and people pride themselves on having a brand that has a strong preference by customers. A brand can indeed be a valuable moat against competition, but only as long as the ecosystem does not change in structure. For instance, when purchasing will be done by AI agents instead of humans, the brand promise will mean very little and the focus will simply be put on the total cost of ownership. And you don’t have to wait for the AI agents for that to happen: simply providing uptime guarantees and agreeing to fines if you fail the uptime SLA is already a first step towards eroding the value of the brand as you’ll be on the hook for lack of reliability anyway. The challenge here is not that a brand cannot be important, but rather that the factors that make you competitive today are likely not the ones that will keep you competitive tomorrow. And if you wait until your (ex-)customer explains the simple facts of life to you, you are for sure not in a good place. Daily Reflection #133: What job is your product hired for? Continuing on the theme of disruption, I recently was reminded of the late Clayton Christensen’s notion of “the job your product is hired for”. Many engineers that I meet are completely wrapped around the product that they are responsible for, the features and capabilities, the competing products, the number of customers and so on. We tend to forget that our product is “hired” to do a job for the customer and that the moment a better alternative comes along, customers will move on. In the middle of the 20th century, many moved from horses and public transport solutions to private car ownership as this provided the best product for personal mobility. However, owning a car is a hassle that I would gladly do without if there was a better solution available. Such as, for instance, autonomous vehicles replacing traditional taxis without drivers that I am forced to talk to. I can’t wait for those to be deployed where I live. So, rather than spending all your time on your product, remind yourself of the job that your customer hired your product for and make sure that your product is still the best alternative for that job. Daily Reflection #134: No more time management When I was young and an eager, ambitious whippersnapper, I could keep running all day long. I easily flitted from project to project and my main challenge was time management and scheduling so that I made sure to get everything done according to the list of priorities that I maintained.  As I keep circling around the sun, I realize that over the years, it has become less about time management and more about energy management. There are things that I could add to the list of items to work on, but I simply don’t prioritize them. One aspect is that I simply have less energy than when I was young, but I believe that the bigger part is that I simply have started to realize that most things I could spend time on are not worth it. I have shifted from a focus on quantity to a focus on quality: I only want to spend time on things that I believe are worth spending time on. I have rigorously cleaned my to-do list to remove things that others want me to do but that I don’t feel are worth my time. That is perhaps the biggest benefit of no longer working in industry: I have much more agency in how I spend my time. So, as a reminder to myself and your, dear reader: are you spending your time on the things that you feel are worth spending time on? And if not, what are you going to do about it? Daily Reflection #135: One day it’s you … As I write this, I just learned about the passing of someone who I worked with for many years, close to two decades actually, and who I considered a friend. One part of me is sad for him and his family. Another part of me reflects about my own mortality. He was only a few years older than me. We all know we’re going to die, but most of the time it’s some abstract, far in the future kind of thing that we don’t need to worry about right now. The risk is that we don’t value our time and fall into a rut where we repeat the same tasks over and over again in a job where we don’t really grow anymore. In the end, we can’t control when we die, but we can control, at least to a larger extent, how we use the time that we have available for ourselves. So, as a reminder to myself and you: am I spending my time on the most important things? What do I want to accomplish before it’s my time to go? Daily Reflection #136: Where do you find your creativity? As I write this, I am on my way back from Louisiana, the Danish modern art museum. I spent the day with the temporary exhibitions and some of the permanent collection. For me, art and especially modern art is a source where I find my creativity. It drags me out of my standard thought patterns and makes me look at the world in a new way. That stays not only with the personal side of my life, but it extends into my professional life as well. It helps me rethink and find new ideas also in my work. It is one of the places where I find my creativity. So, my question to you today is: where do you find yours? Daily Reflection #137: Small steps lead to remarkable progress The region where I live has several amazing long distance hiking trails organized in sections that can be hiked in a day or less. I have the ambition of completing a few of these and for the last few years, whenever there is a chance and the weather is agreeable, I have taken a day to complete another section of one the trails. The result is that I have now completed hundreds of kilometers of trail, even if every hike was only 10 to 20 kilometers. This translates to our professional lives as well: small, consistent investments over time tend to result in remarkable progress. We have a myth in our society about the overnight success achieved in one fell swoop, but that is exactly that: a myth. Virtually all progress by humankind has been the result of consistent, small investments of time, resources and energy that, over time, accumulated to something remarkable. Just keep pushing that boulder up the hill! Daily Reflection #138: Thank you, Sweden! Today is the National Day in Sweden. I have spent now 20 years of my life in this country, i.e. 6 years in the 90s and now 14 years since moving back in 2011. Since leaving the Netherlands in 1994, I have lived here, in Finland, Canada and in California. I have even been back in the Netherlands for a few years in early 2000s. Each of those countries (states) are wonderful in their own right, but for me (and many Swedes are surprised as I say this) Sweden is the best country to live in. Like any country, it has its fair share of challenges and I am not blind to those. Also, the country has changed quite a bit since I moved here in 1994. But in my, view it has managed many of the challenges better than other countries and it is truly a wonderful place to live. So, congratulations and a heartfelt thanks to all the Swedes who make this country happen and who let this Dutch guy live among you! Daily Reflection #139: Like summary videos too? I have a confession to make: I spend too much time on YouTube. Especially watching summary videos where a creator shows a 15 minute summary of, say, a year long construction project. There is something incredibly satisfying about something going up in no-time. Taking shape faster than the eye can follow. Glossing over all the challenges, uncertainties and fears. None of that and none of the boring stuff in between all the highlights. All of the results and none of the struggle. Of course, we find that everywhere. Diets that turn your body into the 6-pack toting model in 3 weeks. Training programs that promise you to gain muscle like Arnold on speed. Meditation practices promising enlightenment in a few measly months. None of this is of course anywhere close to reality. In real life, there is the struggle, there is the process and achieving the actual result is a microscopic moment in an ocean of time. There is nothing wrong with longing for the result, but you better like the process as that’s where you’re spending all your time. Daily Reflection #140: What’s your religion? At the risk of touching a very dangerous topic, religion, it seems to me that we all believe in things that are not backed up by experience, empirical evidence and science. Although I was raised as a strict calvinist protestant, I gave up on organized religion in my teens and early twenties. In many ways, I am a product of the western society I grew up in where religion is largely viewed as fairy tales that have no place in our rational, enlightened culture. The problem is that I think we threw out the baby with the bathwater as few of us tend to think about why we do what we do. For me, this is spirituality: focusing on something larger than yourself and looking to contribute to something larger than ourselves. So, there are two major misconceptions in our culture right now. First, we have lost the ability to put ourselves in service of something larger than ourselves, which in my experience tends to lead to nihilism. Second, we think we are rational beings that sometimes are led astray by our irrationality. We are, of course, highly irrational apes that are largely driven by our instincts, but who are incredibly good at post-rationalizing our behaviors. So, my thought today is to choose your religion, that which is larger than you, with care. Your irrational mind needs one anyway, so you better pick it carefully. Daily Reflection #141: Plan for the worst There is a saying in the English language: Hope for the best, plan for the worst. In many ways, I am always surprised at the total lack of preparation of many. Losing a job totally disrupts people’s lives as if the likelihood of that happening is viewed as non-existent. Having a major health scare is treated in the same way. Losing someone close and dear to you: same thing. However, these things do happen. And we need to be ready for them to be able to stand strong when they do. To be the person that others can rely on when the unfortunate happens. So, make sure to have your financial life in order. Work on your health to minimize the risk of something happening bad to you. Tell the people close to you that you love them often. Use the Stoic principle of premeditatio malorum, imagine the bad things happening and how you would respond. And, finally, feel and express gratitude every day that nothing bad did happen that day. Daily Reflection #142: The “P” in BAPO On a regular basis, I meet companies that use the BAPO model as part of their ways for working and set of conceptual models. Interestingly, I often get asked what the right interpretation of the “P” is. In the original model, it stood for process (covering ways of working, processes and tools). Some companies, however, use the “P” for different purposes. One interpretation is that the “P” stands for people. A more cynical interpretation iss that it stands for politics. I realize that politics is the most effective mechanism we have for distributing resources when it is not feasible to come to a rational, consensus based decision. Still, I encounter too many situations in the companies I work with where different factions fight each other through political means not because they have different ideas about what is best for the company, but rather for personal gains and benefits. Again, I understand that companies work best when the needs of the company and the needs of individuals are optimally aligned. However, I can’t help wonder whether the European software intensive industry would be better off if leaders would focus less on getting their part of the pie and instead focus on growing the pie for all of us. It’s not like we don’t have some serious competition from other regions in the world. Daily Reflection #143: The end of agile? Although I still get a lot of pushback on this, it seems to me that the age of Agile is over. First of all, nobody agrees on what it actually means and most walk around with at least two if not more definitions in their head. Second, especially for companies whose products also include mechanical and electronics parts, agile causes a gap between the atoms and the bits that is hard to overcome. Third, as agile does not address architecture, technology, product management, systems engineering, business models and deployment, among others, it is too narrow as a paradigm for most companies. Instead, we need a new holistic product development paradigm that addresses all aspects of product development and evolution. Last year, I proposed RADICAL as a strawman proposal and thought I had put things in motion. I was wrong, so it’s back to developing the next paradigm. Care to help? Daily Reflection #144: Your experience is a liability According to some organizations doing research on researchers, I am an expert on software architecture. Also, some consider me an expert on software platforms. And on data-driven practices as well as ecosystems. Especially as we grow a bit older and more experienced in our roles, we increasingly view ourselves and are viewed by others as experts. Most of the companies that I work with have a technical career ladder where people become a senior technical expert or fellow in some topic. Here is the challenge: when your industry and field of expertise goes through significant transformation and disruption, what you have learned over all these years becomes in part or completely irrelevant. I notice this now with the emergence of AI in my field. The role of software architecture, platforms, data and ecosystems is changing fundamentally and I realize that many of my old insights, beliefs and research results are no longer relevant. I need to adopt the Zen Buddhism style beginner mindset as I refuse to become a grumpy old man who believes everything was better earlier. As it most certainly was not. So, my question to you today: which areas of your expertise are no longer relevant and should you let go of? Daily Reflection #145: Go rucking! From time to time, I go rucking for a few hours. Rucking simply is putting a heavy backpack on your back (about 25 kg in my case), find some, preferably hilly, nature (Sandsjöbacka for me) and simply walk for a few hours. I have tried to get the people in my local gym to join me, but so far the success is proving to be evasive. And yet, after a few hours climbing and descending and covering quite a bit of ground, I come home with a tired body and a refreshed mind. I used to use long runs for this purpose, but I’ve noticed that rucking is much less injury prone. The point, however, is that the body is built to move and that the head feels much, much better when you have spent some time seriously tiring yourself out. It can’t be just a walk. It has to be something where your entire focus is on the thing that you’re doing without space for your mind to go off on its own. Although we hate suffering in our modern world full of creature comforts, there is meaning in struggling and pushing ourselves to our limits. If nothing else, it cleanses the soul. So, my call to action for today: go rucking! Daily Reflection #146: Don’t be held hostage During most of my weeks, I meet totally amazing and wonderful people that could accomplish outrageous things that really would put a dent in the universe and make life much better for all of humanity. And yet, they don’t. They are held hostage. They work at companies in a specific role that is carefully designed to fit as a cog in a much larger machine and even though they know that the machine could be much better if they could optimize it, they are held hostage by the system and all their energy and good ideas go to waste. In fact, entire companies are held hostage by their business ecosystem with partners and downstream customers threatening to abandon them if they adjust their approach to business in response to new technologies, such as AI, or other forces. In the end, modern companies, industries and society at large is built around the notion of repeatable processes that can be optimized to the point of fragility where the smallest disruption causes the house of cards to come crashing down. My reminder for myself and you today is: don’t be held hostage. Seek freedom! Daily Reflection #147: Too slow! European hierarchical organizations are the worst of both worlds. In some regions in the world, everyone follows the direction of a senior leader or gets fired if they don’t. In some places, individual initiative is highly celebrated and people have the freedom to act. Many European companies require 10 to 20 stakeholders, if not more, to be involved in any change that someone seeks to drive. If there is a single stakeholder objecting, the change is dead in the water. This leads to incredibly slow and late changes in most companies. Only when the need for a change is clear for all stakeholders, including the “rejectors”, can companies implement it. By that time all business benefits that could have been reaped by exploiting the early mover advantage have been captured by others already. Typically, companies can only play defense and use their energy to avoid being disrupted. And for all that I love Sweden, the consensus culture is not exactly causing lightning fast action. We are too slow in this part of the world and have a real need to accelerate. Move fast and break things! Daily Reflection #148: What if it’s not you? One of the questions I walk around with is where my thoughts, ideas and intellectual breakthroughs come from. Many times, I have walked around with a question in my head for days without coming up with an answer until, suddenly, I experience a breakthrough and things become obvious and clear. I think many have experienced this. The question is where that came from. Western society, being focused on the individual, claims that this is us. That it happens inside of us and that ideas come out of our subconsciousness. However, there is another view: imagine that we are more like radio receivers and that our thoughts and ideas come from us tuning to the right frequency? That us walking around with a question in our head is simply opening ourselves to the universe, quieting ourselves down and waiting for the universe to “use” us to bring new things into the world. That rather than me being the director of the orchestra of my life, I am one of the musicians in a much larger orchestra and I am the one being directed? What if it’s not you? Daily Reflection #149: Analysis paralysis There is a beautiful saying that claims that you can have anything in life, you just can’t have everything in life. Any choice that you make for something automatically causes you to deselect other parts of life. A choice is not really a choice unless it limits the set of options that you have available to you. Picking a job automatically causes you to not take any other job that you might have taken. Getting into an exclusive relationship with one person automatically makes everyone else no longer an option. Buying a pet will automatically make travel and visiting people for more than a few hours a challenge. Accepting the downside of a choice is something that I, as well as many others, struggle with and the result may well become a state of analysis paralysis: you keep analysing and evaluating the options, but never bite the bullet and make a choice. Any choice. This is the hardest when the options are very close in terms of benefits they offer. The problem is that time doesn’t stop, so not choosing causes you to just lose time. So, just pick and move forward. Avoid analysis paralysis! Daily Reflection #150: The age of commoditization Ever since the first humanoid picked up a rock to bash the skull of an animal (or fellow humanoid, for that matter), we have been using technology to augment or automate tasks. Since the enlightenment, we have seen a significant acceleration of this process with the industrial revolution, the computer revolution and so on. Now we are entering the age of AI which allows us to augment and automate tasks that were in the realm of humans since the beginning of humanity. Whether it’s writing, speaking, mathematics, coding or any other intellectual task, AI is proving that it can do many of the things that we earlier were doing ourselves. In many ways, we are entering the age of commoditization: that which was hard and difficult is becoming a commodity, in that it is plentiful, easy to access and cheap. This does NOT mean that humans are becoming commoditized. Only some tasks that we thought were uniquely human are. We are free to explore other areas as some or much of our time will be freed up by AI. And as we get more time to explore, I think we should spend a good portion of it on clarifying our purpose and the meaning of our lives. Daily Reflection #151: We are a violent species For most of the history of life, the primary focus of every creature was to procreate. To ensure that its genes were carried into the future in a context of extreme competition. Competition for resources, for safety, for mates. Billions upon billions of creatures failed and their genes were removed from the pool. Only the most competitive, aggressive, violent ones succeeded and are part of the gene pool today. That would be you and me, my dear reader. You are the result of millions of generations of creatures that clawed their way to the top of the reproductive competition. Our society is concerned with creating safety, harmony and peace. Violence has been centralized in the police and violations of these rules are immediately punished by our legal system. It is easy to start to believe that we are a harmonious, peaceful species that wants to sing kumbaya around the campfire. However, it is a veil over our violent nature that is easily ripped off under the right conditions. Look at any war that happens and the atrocities that occur. We are more like chimpanzees than like bonobos. Rather than ignoring our violent nature, I think we need to be aware of it in order to keep it in check. Daily Reflection #152: How do your tools shape you? As I write this, I am in the midst of the reporting workshops that we organize every six months for the research center that I lead. Not surprising, a lot of the talk in these workshops is about AI and many are sharing the AI tools that they use on a frequent basis to augment their work. And to be clear, I am paying for ChatGPT and use it on a very regular basis, so I am no different. But we now see a wide range of professional roles, ranging from software engineers to HR professionals to use these tools on a continuous basis.  It made me think of the saying “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”. Some are concerned about stupidification, professionals losing skills because of most of their work being automated. Others are concerned about juniors never getting a foothold in the workforce as AI is automating the simple jobs that we used to give to juniors. So, while I strongly encourage everyone to use AI tools, I think it makes sense to spend some time on deciding which tools to use so that you get shaped by these in the way that you want. Daily Reflection #153: What is enough? Our human nature is focused on more. We want bigger houses. We want more expensive cars. We want to be paid more. We want to grow the amount of funds in our investment accounts. We want more power. We want more fame. We want more parties. All these are of course part of the four false gods, i.e. wealth, power, fame and pleasure. These gods give us a false promise of fulfillment, but I think that everyone who has managed to acquire some modicum of success in any of these areas rapidly learns that “a lake is never full” to use a Dutch saying. The entrepreneur worth 100M€ doesn’t feel successful and secure and is certain that he would have a network of 1 billion €. Quite a bit of research shows that for every metric used to measure one of the false gods, most people when asked want at least 10% more. We are not so good at determining when we have enough. Even though we all know that happiness is desire - reality: desiring more than we have is the main source of unhappiness. So, my challenge to you and me today is: what is enough? Daily Reflection #154: Did you see it? One of the research findings that never ceases to amaze me is that we ignore well over 99.9% of all information that reaches us through our senses. Our brains are not optimized for accurately representing the reality around us, but rather for detecting threats, ranging from sabertooth tigers to tribe members gossiping about us with the risk of us being kicked out of the tribe. Education and experience only add more filters to our perception of the world, causing us to ignore even more input simply to be able to manage complex problems by focusing on the few essential aspects. The problem is that in a world of rapid transformation, we need to unlearn our way of looking at the world and start from an as clear and unbiased view as possible. We need the Buddhist beginner’s mindset to make sure we don’t keep viewing the world through outdated lenses. So, my question to you today is: did you see it? Or did your brain ignore the important thing once again? Daily Reflection #155: Building the machine For most of my life, I and everyone else in software engineering “built the machine” in that we collected requirements, designed an architecture, conducted detailed design, coded the software, ran the test cases, wrote the documentation and released the system to the customer. With the emergence of Generative AI, we are going through a major shift. Instead of building the machine, we are now increasingly building the machine that builds the machine. The systems we used to build will now be generated based on intent that we expressed and gave to a suite of agents that will build the system for us. In some ways, this is not new as factories and the production line were invented to automate production. But now it’s the design and not the production that is automated. That will change the role of many professionals. So, ask yourself, are you building the machine or are you building the machine that builds the machine? Daily Reflection #156: Hype-as-a-Service While looking through LinkedIn, I stumbled on a term I had not heard before: HaaS (Hype as a Service). In our continuous attempts to get above the noise level and to be noticed, few things are more effective than a hype. A hype is of course a temporary collective belief in something that soon proves to be incorrect, but it’s a very effective way to capture and hold attention in people. The most effective hypes are negative in nature such as AI is going to take all our jobs, climate change is going to kill us all, etc. The media exploits hypes to their fullest as their job is to make every problem your problem. Especially when there is nothing you can do about it as it puts you in a victim role and you can lament about the world going to hell in a handbasket and you don’t need to do anything. Having made a few loops around the sun by now, I have learned that nothing ever is as good or as bad as the hypes and our associated fears make it out to be. So, let’s avoid falling into the HaaS trap! Daily Reflection #157: What is your intent? For quite a few years now, I have worked with companies on improving the effectiveness of their R&D in terms of revenue generated from development efforts. One of the key challenges is that sales and product management talk to R&D teams in terms of a concrete solution, such as a feature, that they want the team to build. The challenge is that the specific feature seldomly leads to the expected outcome. The better approach, which we managed to get in place in some companies, is where R&D teams start to ask the “why” question. Why this feature? What is the expected effect? What are you really looking to accomplish? And is this feature really the best way of doing so? It often turns out that it is not and in the interaction much better solutions are created. So, rather than talking about what to do and how to do it, spend more time ensuring that you are clear on why you’re doing it. What is your intent? Daily Reflection #158: SSDD? Many of the people I meet in the companies that I work with, when I ask them how they’re doing, often give me an answer that is a polite version of SSDD (same sh*t; different day). Now, I am the first to acknowledge that as humans we need routines and recurring activities. I schedule my meetings with my PhD students on Mondays at 13:00 and it’s a model that works well for me, my co-supervisors and the PhD candidates. However, when we get too much in terms of routines and repetition in our life, there is too little novelty, too little learning, too little intellectual stimulation and we become bored. According to the Buddhists, boredom is a form of not paying attention to what is right in front of us, but I find it hard to break through the boredom at times. So, as your vacation is coming up, if you feel that your life is too much SSDD, then spend some time thinking about how to solve it? Daily Reflection #159: No mass extinctions? The traditional view in paleontology is that there were five mass extinctions of species in the history of the earth. Interestingly, there is now a contrarian view, supported by quite a bit of evidence, that the theory of mass extinctions may well be incorrect. This happens in science all the time. Just think of the anti-fat advice in the medical community where it turns out that it’s actually processed carbohydrates and sugars causing heart disease and obesity. Or, in software engineering, the transition from process heavy models like CMMi to agile practices as the “best” way to build software. The challenge is that scientists are humans too and we all seek to interpret the data and explain it based on a paradigm that we believe to be true. Then there is a paradigm revolution and we move on to a new paradigm and use that to explain the date, often leading to very different results. The process of science is to continuously seek better explanations and the history of humanity over the last centuries shows that it works. But we should be careful to not get stuck in old paradigms. So, what paradigm shift are you going through today? Daily Reflection #160: It’s all about incentives! Whenever people I work with get surprised why certain changes, outcomes or goals are not met, I often ask about incentives. The learning that I have encountered many times is that most people do not care about company goals, societal goals or anything else unless there is some personal benefit for them to pursue it. This benefit can, of course, be financial. This is why in sales commissions are incredibly important as a sales person will focus his or her effort where the commissions are earned the easiest. However, we all are subject to incentives, perceived or real, to guide our actions. These incentives can be reputational, increasing someone’s status in a group, or purely driven by acceptance in a group. So, whenever you feel like there is a lack of progress towards a goal or the behavior of an organization or team seems illogical, look for the incentive structures that the organization, team or individual is operating in. However, whenever incentives and what we consider important for ourselves are not aligned with each other, we have the liberty to NOT align with the incentives and act at odds with these.  In the end, it’s all about incentives, but you do have a choice. Daily Reflection #161: You can’t control the outcome My PhD students write and submit research papers based on the work that they conduct. These papers are not always accepted in the first round and sometimes need a few tries before the paper at hand is accepted. The challenge is that the acceptance or rejection of a paper is often interpreted as the paper being a good or bad paper. I disagree with that framing as you associate the outcome you don’t control with the action that you took. Buying a lottery ticket and winning the lottery is a bad decision anyway as buying lottery tickets is simply a losers game. So, even if the outcome was good, the decision was not. Similarly, you can take all the right decisions and still not end up with the outcome that you hoped for. So, rather than focusing on the outcome that you can’t control, focus on the actions that you put into a situation as those you can control. Daily Reflection #162: Now is the only time you have At conferences and long meetings where I am simply part of the audience, I often get a bit restless. I feel I am wasting my time, the speakers are not very interesting and I could have been doing something much better right about now. What happens then is that I start to think about things that happened in the past or things that can or should happen in the future. The problem is that the things that already happened are immutable and the things that might happen in the future have not yet happened and are consequently equally hard to influence. It is hard to internalize this, but the only time we truly have is now. So, rather than being grumpy about the moment and allowing our brains to slide into the past or the future, we are better off keeping our attention on what is happening right now and to enjoy it. It’s not like by being grumpy about a situation, you are going to be able to get your time back. The Buddhists encourage us to live in the now as this is the only moment you own. And I guess they’re right … Daily Reflection #163: When is the right time for change? I always admire people who, after having been in a senior leadership position, decide to step down voluntarily and to move on to something else. Rather than being forced out, they intentionally decide that either they need a change, the company needs a change or both. I notice that many, including myself, easily get stuck in a hamster wheel where we keep going year after year without too much reflection on whether we are still in the best place and giving our best to the organizations that we’re part of. The risk is that we grow stale and stay beyond our expiry date, to the detriment of ourselves and the organization as a whole. So, my challenge to myself and to you today is to reflect on when it is the right time for a change? The vacation is coming up and many of us will spend time reflecting and noodling on how to spend time going forward. In the end, the future is where we spend the rest of our lives. And to keep running in the same hamster wheel may not be the best solution. Daily Reflection #164: Change your context! This summer, I spent two weeks in the US and lived out of a 30 liter backpack that included everything I used including my running gear. It was a quite minimalist setup and I really enjoyed traveling light. However, I did notice that many of the habits that I follow at home were no longer feasible as I didn’t bring things I would need for it, the places I stayed at didn’t support or because I was busy with other things. It felt much easier to break out of my wheel of habits by leaving the context in which I spend a lot of time. I needed to change my context to force a switch in habits and now that I am home again, I notice that I am more reflective and don’t automatically fall back. So, if you feel change is needed, the first step might be to force yourself into a new context that, preferably, is very different from the normal one. Disrupting and changing your system will automatically force changes in habits! Daily Reflection #165: How are you going to help? As many in Sweden are coming back from vacation, I notice that there is a bit of a different mindset evolving. From a more laissez-faire attitude while on vacation, people are gearing up for work and for doing the right thing for themselves. Having been away from the organization and colleagues, it easily becomes about what you want to accomplish. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting a bit older, but I am often changing the perspective from what I want to do to how I can help others accomplish their goals. Especially when their goals are not purely selfish, but rather serve a bigger goal. Now, I am far from a saint, so I still like it when I accomplish things and achieve success and recognition. As a reminder to myself, my reflection today is: how am I going to help? And you? How are you going to help? Daily Reflection #166: Spend time alone This summer, I spent virtually all the time with others. My spouse, my sons, family, friends, acquaintances, etc. We traveled together, spent time in airplanes together, stayed in AirBnBs together, sat in rental cars together, toured cities together, went hiking together, etc. Believe me, I loved it. I love having my kids close, my family close, my friends close. I am a social human being and I need social interaction. However, in the last week of my vacation, I decided to go hiking for a few days. Alone. Simply to be with myself. At the end of a long, hard day of hiking, I got to a vindskydd (shelter), got firewood, made some dinner, got a fire going and simply sat on the side of the vindskydd, looking out over the lake, in the sun, without distractions. Just being with myself. Letting the mind wander. Enjoying being present. I think you would benefit from this too. So, my daily reflection: spend time alone! Daily Reflection #167: Trough of disillusionment Anyone who has seen the McKinsey hype cycles knows that after the peak of inflated expectations, we sink into the trough of disillusionment. Based on the recent news articles, my sense is that we are starting to slide into that one for artificial intelligence. GPT5.0 is broadly viewed to be disappointing, more and more are commenting on the lack of real creativity in LLMs and LMMs and I have heard and read several people commenting those models being “language computers” that are incredibly powerful for certain application areas, but far from the artificial general intelligence (AGI) that many were predicting a few months ago. I see a strong parallel to the internet bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s and I am excited! I think that individual companies are going to be hurting a lot as hundreds of billions of investment will have to be written off without much to show for it. But the infrastructure and technology that has been built and is widely available will be such a boon for humankind! So, rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, when we slide into the trough, make sure to think about how you can make use of all that technology at a cost of pennies on the dollar! Daily Reflection #168: Protecting the Status Quo One of my reflections from this summer is that the entire western world seems to be concerned with protecting the status quo. To do what we can to avoid having to change. New technologies and applications are subject to heavy regulation to slow down their introduction and to ensure minimal impact on existing ways of doing things. Incumbent companies and governments team up to keep the status quo and to avoid these companies being disrupted, causing thousands of tax paying employees to lose their jobs. The European Commission is releasing laws, acts and regulations that increase the cost of compliance enormously. The news reports virtually everything from the perspective of how the news item will change things and how this is bad. In some way, the current state is viewed as the pinnacle of human achievement and any chance will simply result in reduced quality of life. In my view, that view is completely wrong. Over the last century we saw massive improvements in life expectancy (about 40 years since the 1920s!!!), child mortality (from 25% to less than 4%), extreme poverty (from around 70% of the human population to less than 9%), etcetera, etcetera. All these improvements did not come from keeping things as they are, but rather from accepting and encouraging the introduction of new technologies, new products, new tools and new ways of working. We haven’t reached the end of the road, but rather we’ve barely started to scratch the surface! So, as a reminder to all of us: improvement comes from change, not from keeping things the same! Daily Reflection #169: Never eat alone During the last months, I have moved more and more meetings, especially with people I don’t see so often, to a lunch slot. We meet in person, have lunch, talk about more than just work and connect socially as well as talk about work. I noticed that the discussion much more easily flows into dreams, ambitions, purpose and other topics. Although people may easily give the impression that they “do it for the money”, digging a little deeper almost always surfaces a sense of purpose and meaning in people that justifies them spending time and energy on the topic at hand. It helps build a human connection and to go from being “deal friends” to being “real friends”. Of course, this is not a new idea. In his 2005 book with the title “Never eat alone”, Keith Ferrazzi already claimed that shared meals lead to stronger, more authentic professional relationships. As an empty nester who works from home a lot, I still eat plenty of meals by myself, but as a reminder to myself, and perhaps you, try to eat together with others as often as you can. Daily Reflection #170: What game are you playing? Naval Ravikant distinguishes between status games and natural games. Status games are where we compete with others in a zero sum, win-lose situation where it is others that determine the outcome. Natural games are where we compete with ourselves, in a positive sum game where we are the judge of our own performance. The challenge is that status games may feel good, but leave you empty and lonely in the long run. Nobody likes an a-hole who is competing with you all the time and then rubs it in your face when he or she wins. Natural games are much more natural and leave you fulfilled. Working out will make you feel better and your body will tell you whether you “won”. Committing to a complex task and completing it in a way you feel good about is helping you as well as the world. The problem is that status games are addictive and because of that dangerous. Consequently, we should focus our lives on natural games. So, my question to reflect on today is what game are you playing? And who is keeping track of the score board? Daily Reflection #171: Reconceptualize! Yesterday, I spent an entire afternoon writing on a different way to define the software development lifecycle (SDLC). With big data, DevOps and GenAI, we need to think fundamentally differently about how to develop and evolve software. I noticed how stuck I am in the old way of thinking and how easily I fall back into the old concepts. The challenge is that the old conceptualization is the problem. As Einstein famously said, no problem can be solved in the same paradigm that gave rise to it. So, I had to force myself to start from a zero-based thinking approach. To reject any existing concepts. To force myself to come up with new ones to describe what I believe is the right way to look at this challenge. I believe that in times of rapid change, everyone needs to let go of what they used to know. Experience becomes a liability instead of an asset. We need to reconceptualize. So, my challenge to you today is: what thinking framework and set of concepts do you need to let go of? And what is the better lens to look through? Daily Reflection #172: I don’t know … Humanity has spent its entire history explaining the world around us. From Thor being angry to explain thunderstorms to evil spirits causing illnesses in the body, we have come up with a wide range of explanations. Of course, science is all about developing explanations, but we try to do what we can to ensure that we have as objective evidence as feasible to show that the explanation is correct. And despite that, we constantly find that there are better explanations out there and that the old ones were flawed. When it comes to life in general, I notice that we all continuously look for explanations. The stock market, the weather, political movements, etc. Watch 10 minutes of news on television and you’ll have 12 different explanations of why something is as it is. But most of the time the explanation is complete bullocks. Although we should always strive for accurate, grounded and validated explanations, it is much better to accept that we don’t know than to cling to beliefs that clearly are superstitions without any evidence to back it up. My question: what do you believe despite not having any evidence for it? And what are you going to do about it? Daily Reflection #173: Plan your day! In his book When, Daniel Pink describes how our bodies and minds change throughout the day and how we can make use of the different hours in the day to optimize our output. The first hours in the day often are best used for deep, concentrated work where you need to focus for an extended period of time. The time after lunch you often are less focused and more easily distractible and using those hours for administrative tasks is a good idea. Finally, the late hours in the afternoon our creative juices are flowing most freely so brainstorming and exploring new ideas is the best time for that. Whenever I have the chance, I plan my day according to these principles. I often write in the morning on research papers, blog posts or books. I deal with email, booking travel and other practicalities after lunch. Then, towards the end of the day, I try to spend my hours on exploring new ideas and concepts. Finally, I try to close off my working day with a meditation session right before dinner. When I was younger, I did not use this system at all and instead I often procrastinated in the morning and then felt frustrated in the afternoon when I wasn’t getting any deep work done. Planning my day this way has been a huge benefit to my productivity. So, as a reflection, how are you planning out your days? Daily Reflection #175: Use a mirror … I am a volunteer gym instructor in my local gym and one of the sessions I recently introduced is a technique session where people focus on their form while conducting deadlifts, squats and other exercises. Rather than me giving them feedback on their form, I have now started to take videos on my iPad of the participants. After completing a set, one can look back at the way they conducted the exercise. In most cases, I don’t need to say anything as people immediately see what they should change and where they are doing fine. I notice that this is true in many situations in life. Rather than giving feedback, solicited or not, it is much better to provide a mirror where people get to see their own behavior and get to reflect on it. It’s not always easy to find the right mirror, but it’s a heck more effective than telling people what you think of them and their performance. So, as a suggestion, next time you are asked to provide feedback, see if you can use a mirror of some kind. Daily Reflection #176: The phases of a new job This week I had lunch with a friend who started in a new job a few months ago. We also had lunch a month after he started and he was really excited about the opportunity. This time, the discussion was more colored by the frustrations of the position. In my experience, when changing jobs, cities, countries or any other situation, you tend to go through three stages. The first stage is the surprise phase. This is where you learn about the new situation and are surprised about “how things are done around here”. Once you have been in the situation for a while, you enter the irritation phase. This is where you start to complain about the idiots that act in weird, illogical ways. Finally, you enter the adaption phase. This is where your expectations and behaviors are starting to align with the new context in which you find yourself. Over time, the things that used to surprise you and later irritate you become the new normal and you find it hard to imagine doing things in any other way. Especially for new leaders brought in to drive change in an existing organization, this is a particularly challenging pattern as rather than being part of the solution, you rapidly become part of the problem because of this. So, a reflection: which phase are you in? Are you conscious of the natural behaviors associated with this phase? And what can you do to counter some of the negatives? Daily Reflection #177: Know your why As I am slowly recovering from an achilles injury that I have been struggling with for over a year, I am starting to look at longer races and events. Of course, I don’t just read, but also watch videos and listen to podcasts. One of the common themes is that you need to be clear on your why. When the man with the hammer hits during a marathon or even longer run, you need to be very clear on why you are doing this in the first place. It’s the only way that you’re going to be able to push through the pain and discomfort when the going gets tough. Of course, this is not just true for sporting events, but even more so for the rest of our lives. When things at work or at home don’t go as you want and it becomes really tough, stressful and difficult and it becomes unclear how to even move forward, you need to be clear on why you are in this job or relationship in the first place. Otherwise, you’ll just give up and walk away or slide into victim mode and abdicate responsibility for fixing things. So, as my daily reflection, what is your why? Daily Reflection #178: Be kind(er) As many know, I am originally from the Netherlands. The Dutch are widely known as a kind of “in your face” people. The typical Dutchie will not shy away from sharing his or her view about you to the point where I have been in many a situation where I sat with my toes curled as yet another Dutch person went outside the bounds of what is considered to be acceptable behavior in international contexts. The Swedes on the other hand will go out of their way by a mile (and then some) to avoid having to confront you even when they feel your behavior is unacceptable. Instead, you’ll be ignored and given the cold shoulder without you ever knowing what in heaven's name you did wrong. Different behaviours, but the same starting point: we judge the people around us. All the time and using ourselves as the definition of normal. Hence the saying, when in Rome, be like the romans. The problem is that we don’t know what battles the other person is fighting. We have all been in situations where something that didn’t make sense at all was suddenly clarified by us learning about something that we didn’t know about before. So, my ask of myself and you, dear reader, is to simply be kind. Or rather, to be a little kinder than what you would otherwise have been. Daily Reflection #179: Change is the only constant This week I was traveling for several days and visited quite a few companies. I have been at these companies before, but this time there were changes everywhere. Reorganizations, people changing roles, carve outs and joint ventures, etc. My basic reaction was: darn it! It’s going to be so much work to build relationships with the new people. It’s going to be so hard to build relationships with the new organization. But, then I caught myself. Change is the only constant. Nothing ever stays the same and the only things that stay the same are the things that are dead. And who wants that? So, we need to embrace change and engage with it proactively, rather than reluctantly. As humans, we like routines. We like predictability. We like knowing what the day will look like when we wake up. Of course, it gets boring if things are too predictable, but in practice we like predictability more than novelty. And that leads to us resisting change where we can. My encouragement to myself and you today is: embrace change as it is the only thing that will be constant for the rest of your life! Daily Reflection #180: Who judges you? Although academics are spending two days a week or more applying for public funding, I have been lucky enough for the last decade or so to spend very little time on that activity. Instead the research center that I lead is funded directly by the companies and they decide whether we deliver value or not. We have organized our work in 6 month sprints and companies can leave at any point, so the moment we slip and stop delivering value, we are at high risk of losing the organizations that support us. That means we are judged by people that have skin in the game: our promise is that we help them adopt new digital technologies faster and if we fail, we will be “fired” for not adding value. The problem with public funding, in my view, is that the people deciding have no skin in the game. Whether a project that received funding delivers value to society or industry or not does not affect the project officers, their career nor their future. Even better, other academics are brought in to judge project proposals, so everyone can blame bad outcomes on someone else. In my research, I receive quite a bit of pressure to be more academic, focus more on the top journals and conferences and apply for more research funding. But I don’t. Instead, I focus my energy on doing what I can to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies in the European software intensive systems industry as I believe that this is where I can add the most value. So, as a reflection for today: who judges you? And is their judgement in line with your values or at odds with it? Daily Reflection #181: Never pass a cat without petting it I think it was Jordan Petersson who has a rule of life that includes something akin to never passing a cat without petting it. Of course, this advice is not intended to force either you or any cats you happen to meet into unpleasant or unwanted situations. Instead, the idea is that rather than walking around with a clear goal and destination in mind, you should allow yourself to occasionally be distracted by something pleasurable for a few minutes. Like meeting a friendly cat during a walk and petting it. Or finding some ripe berries on a bush and enjoying the taste of these as you pick a few. Or reaching a point with a gorgeous view during a walk and stopping for a bit to take it in and enjoy it. We can’t change the past and we don’t know what the future will bring. All we have is now. Which is why, as the saying goes, it is called the present. And there are many ways to make the present a bit more pleasurable and nice. So, as a reflection, rather than running off to the next thing, allow yourself to be distracted periodically. Remember that this thing that you’re so focused on is not going to matter in a 100 years anyway. Daily Reflection #182: You always did it this way? In the last weeks, I spent time at several companies in the automotive industry. The standing discussion is the fierce competition from especially Asian competitors. It typically takes a European car company 36 to 48 months from the moment it decides to develop a new car to the start of production. Asian competitors go through the process in about a year. There are several reasons for this. For example, European car companies have a lot of legacy and insist that suppliers make all kinds of OEM specific customizations that add no value whatsoever to end customers. But it takes a lot of time and delays. Asian car companies much more carefully distinguish between commodity functions where they select proven, available components, and differentiating functionality, where they invest significant resources. The major part, however, is that they threw out the rulebook on how to build cars, applied zero-based thinking and found that most of the rules in the book are useless or even worse. So, what rules in your rulebook are outdated? How are you changing to stay relevant? Daily Reflection #183: Do you know when to act? There is a famous quote by Lao Tzu: "Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” The idea is that there is a right time for everything and you need to make sure you act at the right time. Not too late. Not too early. This morning I was out for my run in Sandsjöbacka with the intent of extending my run with another 2K or so in order to expand my capacity. But the body was not really there and my calf and achilles started to complain after an hour. Although I could have pushed and extended my run and it might have been OK, I decided to cut my run short and go home. Now, this is really not my preferred way of doing things. I much rather stick to the plan, push through the pain and make it happen. But it easily does more damage than what it is worth. I think this is true in our professional lives as well. It’s easy to enter situations as a bull in a China shop because you know you are right. But what good will it do and how will it damage your relationships with others? So, my question is whether you have the patience to wait for the right time to act? Daily Reflection #184: Don’t feel like it? Last weekend, my wife listed a long list of chores that we really should complete at some point. And I told her that I agreed that these chores needed to be done, but also clearly shared that I didn’t feel like getting going on these during this weekend. Then I managed to convince myself to complete one, small chore. And the dopamine kick of that convinced me to take on the slightly larger second chore. And the process kept going until we had completed the majority of our list. Of course, we all know this: a task or set of tasks may seem like an unsurmountable mountain. But once we take the first, small step in the right direction, we are in motion and it’s much easier to keep going. Instead of focusing on the entire mountain, focus on conducting the first step. So, as my daily reflection, what mountain are you standing in front of and avoiding to take on? And what is the first, small step that you can take? Daily Reflection #185: Don’t tense up! As I have referred to, I have picked the running again now that my achilles tendon is doing better and it allows me to have sessions where I run fast (by my standards). One of the observations is that when I do, I tend to tense up my shoulders and especially the traps. This is not a good idea, because you grow tired much more quickly and  it actually slows you down. Instead, you should try to relax every muscle in your body not needed for the movement, which allows you to go further faster. The reflection I had is that I have noticed I do the same when I am really busy and have lots of things to do. I get stressed, my mind starts spinning and I constantly plan what the next task is that I need to get going on after I finish the thing that I am working on right now. The problem is that all this distracts me from what I am doing at the moment and it’s not like it helps me in any way. It just slows me down and makes me tired. Instead, I need to focus on the here and now, finish what I need to do and only then switch context and move to the next thing. So, as a daily reflection, do you notice yourself tensing up, getting stressed and distracted? And if so, what can you do to stay in the now? Daily Reflection #186: Living up to your potential? As I am closing in on 30 years as a full professor (another 2 years), I have seen most of what academic life has to offer. I have published hundreds of papers, given thousands of presentations, organized lots of events and even helped kick off entirely new research areas. I still enjoy the intellectual challenge of research and the satisfaction that comes from creating order from chaos. I love working with multiple companies, learn about their specific ways of doing things and then generalizing from the different cases. But sometimes I wonder whether I am living up to my full potential. Could I have accomplished more by taking a different path? Have I become complacent and just rolling along the path of least resistance? And if I am, is it too late to change? Am I too old as it’s hard to teach old dogs new tricks? So, as my reflection today, to myself and you, are you living up to your full potential? And, how do you know? Daily Reflection #187: Mixing the what and the how This week I spent a wonderful day at a company that shall remain unnamed. I was asked to talk about platforms, about data, about connectivity, about cloud, about R&D effectiveness and all the topics that I really enjoy sharing. It turns out that the company has tried platform approaches in a variety of different ways without reaping the benefits. During the coffee break, I was questioned by several of the engineers who asked about a variety of platform related topics and I realized that many were mixing the what and the how. For example, many assumed that having a platform requires the organization to have a platform team. You know, one of those teams that slows everything down because the product teams have to wait for the platform team to get around to their functionality requests. That is of course a false assumption as there are many other approaches that one can use, including an inner-source way of working. This confounding of the what and the how is very common and applies to many different situations, in my experience. So, as my reflection today, are you sure you are not mixing the what and the how? Daily Reflection #188: When uncertain, act! One of the key limitations of humans is that we tend to be paralyzed in situations where it is entirely unclear what the right course of action is. I noticed this during the last year as it comes to the role of AI in software. It was, and still is, unclear to me how far we can push the LLMs and agentic AI in terms of generating code, test cases, architectures, requirements, regulatory compliance documentations, etc. At the one end, we might see a situation where we simply give an intent (prompt) to the system and it generates a remarkably complete and complex system. Lovable shows that this works pretty well for website front ends. On the other hand, we might see that AI lets us down and that the promise was overly optimistic and not living up to expectations. The natural response would be to simply wait it out and only take action when it is clear which ways are going. But that is not how protagonists behave. So, I have been taking action. I am talking to several companies looking to figure out how they are incorporating this technology. I am reading and watching a lot of online content, focusing on people that build real systems. I am experimenting myself with different technologies. I am not saying that I have come to definite conclusions, but, if nothing else, taking action feels a lot better than waiting it out. So, as a reflection, where are you in a holding pattern, waiting for things to become clear? And what actions could you take to accelerate? Daily Reflection #189: The power of feedback loops One of the topics that I have observed and noodled on during recent years is the notion of feedback loops. Many companies I work with spend enormous amounts of time designing, building and testing systems before putting them in operation. SaaS companies and many Asian companies take a different approach: deploy as early as possible and build a feedback loop to the systems in the field, the customers and the market. Use that feedback loop to learn as quickly as possible and use those learnings to gain an advantage over competitors. It seems like an obvious idea, but I see so many companies getting stuck in the predeployment phase, waiting and perfecting the concept. The same is true outside of work, of course. Rather than planning the perfect workout, simply start, feel and measure what works and use the feedback loop to improve. When moving to a new place and looking to make friends, simply start saying hi to people you meet and learn from what works. So, as a reflection today, where are you stuck in planning mode? And what could you do to get “in market” and start learning as quickly as possible? Daily Reflection #190: Letting go … This morning I was in a meeting with other investors that all had put money into an early stage startup. The CEO of the company organizes a monthly check-in to keep investors apprised and, of course, to keep them warm for the next investment round that will be coming up in half a year or so. I realized that several of the investors were quite frustrated because the CEO was executing differently from what they would have done if they would have been in the role. And, with the end of the runway of the company looming in front of us, the sense of urgency in the meeting became even stronger than usual as we need to hit some proofpoints before we can convince everyone to be involved in another round. With the rising audio levels, I realized that the others were very much concerned with not losing their investment. My approach is different: when I have moved over the funds to a startup, I mentally say goodbye to the money and realize that there is a significantly higher chance of this being a write off than a positive return. That is just the nature of angel investing and even if I have been lucky a few times, more times than not the company didn’t go anywhere. Of course, I am far from a monk here and I have my fair share of issues that I find difficult to let go off. But attachment in all forms is a form of self-inflicted suffering that we can avoid by letting go. So, as a daily reflection: what are you attached to and find hard to let go? And what would your life look like if you were able to let go? Daily Reflection #191: We always want what we don’t have This spring I did quite little traveling and spent a lot of time at home. Even if I got a lot of work done, I did realize that I missed traveling and wished that I would get invited to visit companies, give talks or for other reasons would need to get on a plane to travel. As I write this, I am in the third week of being on the road, with only the weekends at home, and I realize that I long for a few quiet weeks where I do not travel. The same is true for my job. When I worked in industry, I missed the ability to reflect and write research papers that helped me structure the chaos around me into a neat, structured model. Now that I am in academia, I miss the impact on customers, the excitement of chasing revenue goals and the “realness” of work. The funny thing is that we always want what we don’t have. Of course, I am far from the only one who experiences this and many people talk about the balance. The goldilocks model where we have just enough. Not too much and not too little. Although there is something to be said for that, I think that there is a second aspect: I now increasingly try to appreciate the situation that I am in at the moment. To avoid longing for things that I don’t have right now. So, as my reflection for today: what do you long for today? And what do you have that you could appreciate more? Daily Reflection #192: We always start from where we are As I write this, I am at a conference where the track that I organize focuses on data- and AI driven engineering. The interesting observation is that the authors typically start from their earlier research and do what they can to make the implications of data-driven and AI-driven ways of working fit inside their earlier research. The challenge is of course that the new concepts may require a redefinition of the original concepts and the earlier work may no longer fit the current reality. This is, of course, not only the case in software, but in many aspects of life. Data- and AI-driven practices are also applied in many other areas of life, such as legal, medical, customer support and so on. It is not changing what we already do, but rather starting from a zero-based, AI-first position and figuring out what is possible. This is what I am increasingly spending my time on, but it requires me to unlearn decades of accumulated experiences and knowledge. It’s hard to learn old dogs new tricks, but with the right commitment and focus, it can be done. So, as a daily reflection, where do you need to let go of what you think you already know and instead start from a zero-based position to reinvent yourself and your work? Daily Reflection #193: It’s about risk mitigation, not risk taking During the last weeks, I have been talking to several individuals who are eager to start their company. The discussions had one common thread: people are afraid to leave their safe, cushy job to jump into the deep end of the pool and start their company. To quote Fred Wilson, a VC: the three most addictive things in the world are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly paycheck. The belief seems to be that starting a company requires risk taking which equates to leaving your job and going full hog on the startup. My approach has been to do what I could to disabuse the people I talk to about this being the right approach. Entrepreneurs are no risk takers, but rather risk mitigators. Often this means starting something on the side, while keeping your day job. There is little need to work on the startup full time while you are looking to achieve product-market fit. Of course, if things take off, you may need to increase the amount of time in the startup, but at that point the risk that you’re taking is much lower already. So, as a reflection for today: where are you holding yourself back because of your perception of the risk being unacceptable? Are you using this as an excuse to not do anything or are there ways in which you can move forward while mitigating risk? Daily Reflection #194: Seek discomfort On a bit of a boring flight, having finished most of the urgent things to work on, I started to reread “The Comfort Crisis” by Michael Easter where he makes a very important point. As humans, we have always sought comfort. Comfort gives safety and puts minimal stress on the body in terms of keeping its core temperature, moving and spending energy and mental stress in terms of existential risks. For most of the history of humankind, this was an important and powerful driver as most of our lives were lived in great discomfort. We lived in cold or hot temperatures, walked for many kilometers per day, often loaded with heavy weights and there was the constant fear of being attacked by predators or fellow humans from other tribes. Modern humans, however, live in a state of constant comfort. We live in houses that keep us dry and at 20 celsius at all times. We transport ourselves with cars, trains, buses or planes. We spend most of our working time sitting in comfortable, ergonomic chairs staring at screens at 70 cm from our eyes, typing away at a keyboard. The point Michael Easter makes is that many are suffering from illnesses caused by living in a constant state of comfort. Our bodies need discomfort. We need to be hot and sweat or cold and shiver. We need to move and get our heart rates up. As our bodies are wired to seek comfort, so we need to intentionally seek discomfort. It requires overcoming the resistance that your body will put up and simply seek discomfort. Whether it’s a workout in the gym, sweating in a sauna or a long trail run that leaves you winded, put yourself in a state of discomfort. So, as a daily reflection, when did you last experience discomfort? And what can you do to seek it out more often? Daily Reflection #195: Can you do something about it? Recently I have had quite a few meetings with people that expressed very strong opinions about why the world “as it is” is really bad and how the world should be instead. When pressure testing their statements, I was met with very heated responses and implicit questioning of my moral compass. My challenge is that getting riled up about things that you can’t do anything about is akin to putting yourself in the role of a victim. In my view, that is a complete and utter waste of your energy and time. Instead, focus your energy on topics that you actually can do something about. Of course, it is always easier to get angry about something you can’t do anything about, as it allows you to keep doing what you’ve always been doing. For example, I have been a pescetarian since 1997 because I disagree with how we manage livestock in many countries. I can’t change how farms do their work, but I can decide to not eat meat. That is in my circle of control. So, as my reflection today is to ask you where you are spending your energy and time? Is it on topics that you can do something about? Daily Reflection #196: Make it specific Since the summer, I have met with several entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. When discussing their business ideas, the concern that I saw is that each expressed a very broad and wide idea which more described the overall scope rather than a specific business idea that is testable and can be explored with potential customers. When meeting with researchers, I often run into the same situation where there is an overall area but not a specific research idea to write a paper around. I think that although it is important to have a broad area of interest, until you make it specific and concrete, you have not done your job. Rather than going in with a broad idea, make sure that you enter a meeting with something as concrete and tangible as feasible. It’s much easier for the audience to generalize from a specific idea or concept than the other way around. Also, it helps you move on from an idea that you might believe in but don’t know how to take forward to other ideas as you realize that the idea wasn’t such a good one to begin with. So, as my reflection for today: where are you keeping things too high level and non-actionable? What can you do to move forward? Daily Reflection #197: Will they pay? Continuing on the startup and business development track for another post: One of the topics that comes up a lot is whether customers should pay for using the early stage solution offered by a startup or whether it should be offered for free and have customers pay with their time. Although the latter is exciting and sounds reasonable as it is significantly easier to engage people in that way, my experience is that there is a very, very deep and long gorge between free and non-free. People don’t want to start paying for something that they first got for free. Also, a customer is, by definition, someone who pays you for your product, service on consulting engagement. If this person does not pay you, he or she might be a collaborator, a partner or volunteer and consequently you don’t have a customer. People will often provide socially desirable behavior and when asked about your product, by you or by others, won’t tell you that your product simply sucks and doesn’t solve anything for them. However, the moment you ask them to pay, you get the real signal on the perceived value of the offered solution. This principle does not only apply for startups but for any situation where you are looking to convince someone to do something. So, as my reflection for today: do you really have a “paying customer” for your idea or do you only think you have one? Daily Reflection #198: You don’t want it bad enough Recently I came across a YouTube video by David Goggins with the title “you don’t want it bad enough” and I realized that there is a lot of truth in that. I want a six pack and look shredded, but I am not willing to go through the diet and training discipline that is required to achieve that state. I want to have a large pool of friends, but I am not willing to put in the hours to stay in touch with everyone who I could be friends with. I want to have tangible impact in an industrial role while maintaining my academic output, but I don’t want to work 100 hours per week and not have a life outside of work. In my experience, many people I meet have desires about what they want to do or accomplish in life, but they are unwilling to put in the work or pay the price required for them to achieve it. In the worst case, we end up in purgatory between longing and unwillingness to pay the price. So, for today’s reflection: where do you want something, but you’re not willing to put in the work? And what are you going to do about it? Daily Reflection #199: How do we turn Europe around? Going against all my principles, I decided to share one reflection about Europe. I watched a speech by Mario Draghi, one year after his famous “Draghi report”. The conclusion is that around 10% of the recommendations have been implemented and that things have become even more dire for Europe in the last year. The fact is that different regions in the world are in conflict with each other. This conflict expresses itself, of course, trade wars, cold wars and hot wars. But at the heart of it, it is a technology war. In the end, the region that wins the technology war will, by definition, win all the other ones. At this point, Europe is significantly behind the US and China in terms of technology development. The saying goes that the US innovates, China replicates and Europe regulates. But that is no longer true, if it ever was. The US and China are engaged in a technology war that will leave Europe a backwater to be ruled over by the winner of the technology war. We have many strong technology positions, industrial automation to mention only one, but we fail to bring new technologies to these areas, such as AI, to reap the benefits. I am director for Software Center with the expressed intent of helping companies change faster than what they would do without our help. And I know of many people that want nothing else but for our companies to change faster, including politicians. But we seem to have a culture, a way of organizing and a mindset that makes change unbelievably hard and painful. To make it actionable, my daily reflection to all of us is: what can you do to accelerate the pace of change in Europe so that we at least become a combatant, rather than a victim, in the ongoing technology war? Daily Reflection #200: When does one stop? I was about to write about something else and then I realized that this will be the 200th daily reflection. I can’t believe that there have been so many and I am incredibly grateful for all the comments, thoughtful reflections, carefully phrased disagreeing viewpoints as well as encouragement. Some of the questions I get from the people close to me are why I write these and when I will stop writing. The interesting thing is that I actually write these for myself. These short posts help me reflect on and formulate thoughts that are bouncing around in my head and that would never crystallize if I didn’t write these down. In that sense, the writing of these is an integral part of my mental health practices that also include journaling and meditation. So, that means that I will most likely not stop writing these reflections, but I do not necessarily need to share these with all of you, my dearest readers. For now, the principle that I follow is that if every post gives at least one individual some food for thought, provides something positive in at least one person’s life, helps a person stop for a second to reflect, then that is good enough. Even if nobody comments. In that sense, my hope is that this gives a little bit to the community around me, while it gives something to me. So, as a daily reflection: please consider how you can give back a little bit to the community around you while helping yourself as well. Daily Reflection #201: Live your own life! Another week, another set of interactions with people that I really enjoy talking to, but where I often wonder whether they do what they do because they want to or because they have, in some way, been forced into it. One of the sayings is that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. This is critical to understand and organize your life around as poor choices on that front will lead to you living a life defined by the norms and values of the people around you, rather than by your own. I am as sensitive to this as the next person and my tactic has been to surround myself with people from different backgrounds and with different priorities. So, I work with researchers and academics that want to do nothing else than think and do research. I work with entrepreneurs that want to build companies and put a dent in the universe. I work with fitness enthusiasts that like challenging themselves on physical challenges. In this way, I have a smörgåsbord of choices and can pick and choose based on what I believe is best in line with my interests and passions. So, as a reflection: why do you do the things you do? Did you choose these out of a genuine interest or because of people around you influencing you? Daily Reflection #202: Are you data-driven? During a podcast that I participated in this week, I was asked why I keep referring to the importance of data and experimentation. The main reason is that in all the work I do with companies, the most common pattern around data is that it is either ignored or incorrectly interpreted to help people to avoid having to change their mind. We all walk around with strong conceptions about the real world and when there is data that conflicts with our views, we rather change our interpretation of the data than our views. This is why I stress the importance of experimentation. In an experiment we start by admitting that we don’t know and need to try something out in terms of a test. Simply starting from that position allows us to be much more open to whatever the data provides in terms of insights. That opens up for a much more open mindset to accepting the consequences of what the data is providing you. So, especially if you are claiming to be data-driven, where do you ignore the data or reinterpret it? And where could you be more honest about it? Daily Reflection #203: You don’t know what you don’t know This morning, I gave a guest lecture on software architecture to a group of 2nd year bachelor students. Several times I ran into the situation where I was using concepts that they had not yet had as part of their program. Even examples from industry that I used fell sometimes flat as the students lacked the context needed to understand the point of the examples. During the break I reflected on how much they don’t know and how much they don’t even know that they don’t know. But, this is the case for all of us. Especially when you get a bit less young, you might easily believe that you know a lot. But that is of course wrong. There is much, much more to know than what any of us will ever know. We are all operating based on a sliver of knowledge about the world around us. It’s just because we don’t know what we don’t know that we feel that we are on top of things. But we are deceiving ourselves. We simply don’t like to feel ignorant, but that is what we are. All of us. All the time. So, as my daily reflection: where are you acting as if you know what you need to know? And what if you’re wrong? What don’t you know and how would it affect you when you learned it? Daily Reflection #204: Are you solving the right problem? When I worked for Intuit, our CEO often told the story about his time at Pepsi and how he was battling Coca Cola for shelf space in the supermarkets they were serving. Only to find out a few years later that people were buying more and more bottled water instead of coke. He found out he was solving the wrong problem. I have done the same many times, ranging from how I structure my workouts in the gym without seeing progress to trying to sell services to customers only to find out that the way I was selling was exactly the opposite of the pitch I should have used. In business, one of the differences between managers and leaders is often described as doing the job right versus doing the right job. Or, in other words, cutting down a tree as effectively as possible versus identifying that we are cutting down the wrong tree. So, as a reflection for today: what problem are you focusing on today? Are you certain it is the right problem to solve? Daily Reflection #205: Who are you? I work with quite a few software R&D teams and departments in a variety of companies and one of the common themes is that people try to understand the implications of LLMs and agentic AI on software development. And the key topic is what the role of humans is when AI agents take over part or all of the work. The key concern seems to be less about having a job and more about the identity of the people that I talk to is deeply connected to their role as a software engineer or architect. Similarly, at a recent conference, many, especially senior, researchers called for human-in-the-loop approaches rather than allowing for AI agents to act fully autonomously. And, becoming more personal, having been a professor of software engineering for close to 30 decades, I struggle with the question what the reinvention of the field means for me and whether the research I have done during these decades has now become irrelevant. The problem is that we tend to associate our identity with our professional role and, as I age, I work hard on defining my identity in other terms than my job. So, as a reflection for today: who are you? Daily Reflection #206: What is the best place to live and work? One of the discussions that I surprisingly often end up in these days is where people should move to live and work. For many in Europe and Asia, it used to be that many wanted to move to the US as the perception was that both work and life would both improve that way. With the political turmoil on that side of the pond, that location is now less attractive for many, which tends to lead to the question: if not the US, then where? I have three sons that are young adults and that are pondering this question continuously. I have raised my concerns with the state of Europe and also other regions in the world have their own advantages and disadvantages. The question is what you focus on in order to live your best life. According to Ray Dalio, a good life is a function of interesting, intellectually stimulating work and the quality of the relationships in your life. However, the question of course remains what the best place to live and work is and also I don’t think I have a clear answer. So, my question for you to reflect on today is what you think is the best place to live and work? Feel free to share your answer in the comments! Daily Reflection #207: How to pull the trigger? In one of the companies that I am involved in, we have reached this tricky point where we move from seeking for product market fit to having (sufficient) market fit. Traditional wisdom says to be frugal while seeking to extend your runway as long as you can and then putting the pedal to the metal when you hit product market fit. Of course, nothing is ever as crystal clear as this and also here the CEO sees lots of weaknesses with the product and is not ready to pull the trigger and go full hog on marketing spending, even if our conversion numbers show that it would make sense. Instead, we agreed to double our marketing budget every month as long as the numbers of free trial and paying users follow the same conversion percentages. It allows us to slowly press the accelerator while managing risk in case the conversion would suddenly drop. In many situations, I have seen people struggle with what in their mind is a binary decision and they get stuck in analysis paralysis or the planning stage and never pull the trigger. Instead of going binary, almost every situation allows for a gradual change in increasing risk and investment. So, as a daily reflection, where are you stuck and would you benefit from a gradual change? Daily Reflection #208: Who is your sounding board? Today I had lunch with a friend who I have known for well over a decade and worked with on and off in a number of different settings. Although we don’t see each other that often, the lunch rapidly evolved towards ideas we are excited about, innovations we are interested in exploring and startups that would be cool to do something about. Most of our ideas never leave the idea stage, but I reflected on how important it is to have people that you can use as a sounding board or sparring partner. It is way too easy to get spinning in your own head and never get any further as you get stuck in your thinking. You need another brain to elevate your thinking and pull you out of a local optimum. Of course, using a LLM such as ChatGPT or Perplexity can also work, but there still is value in the human connection, in my experience. So, as today’s reflection: who is your sounding board or sparring partner? Daily Reflection #209: Are you playing offense or defense? Especially in my age group (50+), I notice that many of my peers are very much concerned with protecting what they have built during their life. This can be their job and career, their reputation, their relationships or their habits. In many ways, there is nothing wrong with that, but it does put one easily in a holding pattern where there is little in terms of progress and development. Often, the patterns have been in place for decades and breaking these is hard. The challenge is that progress comes from taking intentional risks and making proactive moves towards doing new things, rather than waiting to react when forced. In American English this is often referred to as playing defense or playing offense. During recent years, I have taken on several challenges that are completely new to me (like getting my hunting license) and that I initially completely suck at (think shooting clay pigeons with a shotgun). But it forces me to grow and develop new skills. So, to reflect on today: are you playing offense? And if you’re not, what are you going to do about it? Daily Reflection #210: What are you grateful for? As I have mentioned earlier, most mornings I journal to reflect on my life and to plan the day. One of the elements of my daily entry is to write down three things that I am grateful for. There is ample research that shows that expressing gratitude leads to better mental and physical health, better relationships and a more positive outlook on life. It is so easy to focus on all the things in your life that you feel you are missing and striving for. Or all the things happening in the world that you can’t do anything about, but that still make you feel bad. The media is a master at this as its goal is to make every problem your problem. The best way to counteract this is to ignore the news and to focus on things that you are grateful for. As the Swedes from the north of the country allegedly say: it could have been worse. So far, in my life, there have been very few days where I didn’t feel there was anything to be grateful for. So, as my challenge to you today: write down three things you’re grateful for! And make them real. Things you actually feel gratitude for. Daily Reflection #211: Simplify, simplify, simplify Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, stresses the importance of making one’s life as simple as possible. He stresses the importance of simple living, of being self-sufficient, of being out in nature, of avoiding materialism. Most of us tend to organize our lives in exactly the opposite way. We cram in more activities into the day than what fits. We try to offload work and chores on others and find ourselves in complicated dependencies where we rely on others that may let us down, rather than deciding that simply doing it ourselves takes as much time but removes all the stress. We feel we’re too busy to get ourselves out in nature, despite all research showing that it reduces stress, improves immune function, lowers blood pressure and heart rate, improves mental clarity and creativity as well as mental well being. We keep falling into the trap of believing that once we get the next “thing”, our life is going to be perfect. Many of our behaviours tend to have the opposite effect of what we thought it would. So, as my challenge to you today: what can you do to simplify your life? And why haven’t you done so already? Daily Reflection #212: Also a dopamine junkie? One of my weaknesses is that I am addicted to dopamine. Every morning, I make a task list for the day and every time I can tick a box, I get a little dopamine boost that makes me feel good for a while. Do that every hour or two and you get through the day feeling pretty good about yourself and about life. The problem is that even though I am ticking boxes, these actions do not necessarily get me closer to my long term and life goals. Some of it is just busywork that makes me feel good, but doesn’t really get me any closer to what I hope to accomplish in my life. The solution is, of course, obvious: spend enough time thinking about my goals and about how to operationalize these. But while I am doing that open-ended thinking, I won’t be collecting any dopamine kicks. And my experience is that I really need to go deep for several hours before I start to get real, relevant results. It’s of course much easier to instead pick up an urgent, but unimportant, task, complete it and bask in the dopamine for a bit. So, as I keep challenging you this week: are you a dopamine junkie? Or are all your actions directly supporting your long term and life goals? Daily Reflection #213: Did you buy a lottery ticket? There is a story that I read about a pious, poor Italian man who every morning goes to church to pray to God and ask if you could please win the lottery. This goes on for years until, one day, God finally talks to him and tells him to buy a lottery ticket. In my experience, many of us want things or outcomes without “buying a ticket”. You can’t get the exciting role at a company if you don’t apply for the job. You don’t experience exciting visits to remote places if you don’t book the trip. You don’t build a following on social media if you don’t publish stuff that people can see. In order to get what you want, you need to take the necessary steps to even creating the possibility of getting it. It often goes wrong in two places: lack of specificity in the goal setting and a lack of willingness to put in the work, i.e. buy the ticket. So, as a reflection for today: what is your big goal that you long to accomplish? And once you are clear on that, did you buy a ticket? Daily Reflection #214: You know how AI works? One of the topics in the public discourse that annoys me to no end is the general assumption that any AI agent will act like an evil human and seek to exterminate humanity. I watched an interview with Ben Horowitz from A16Z where he suggests it might be better to call AI probabilistic computing as it is much closer to what is going on. The reason I get annoyed by the general discourse is that everyone seems to assume that we even know what intelligence or cognition is. Which is completely false. There are no working theories of intelligence and cognition that even describe human behavior in a holistic fashion. We have no idea where consciousness comes from or what it even is. AI is simply the next tool in our tool box that simply happens to work in certain contexts and for certain purposes, even if we have no clue how or why it works. But also this is nothing new. When we started to use fire, we didn’t know how it worked, just that it worked. The first theories about electricity were ridiculously wrong, but we used the technology anyway. It is the same with AI. It will be a great tool to explore intelligence, cognition and consciousness, but it will be a long journey before we get there. For now, we don’t even know how a model with hundreds of billions of parameters and trained on a set of data that is smaller than that doesn’t overfit as classical statistics says it should. We need to admit the limitations of our knowledge. So, as a reflection today: do you know how AI works? Daily Reflection #215: The binary AI outcome Continuing on the AI theme, another topic that I read about is the notion of a binary AI outcome. Either it replaces all human roles in companies and organizations and becomes smarter than all of us combined or it fails to do so and the outrageous investments and valuations (Open AI at half a TRILLION USD!!!) are basically wasted. I think that that view is completely wrong. Just like any technology that we have employed in the history of humankind, AI gives us tools. Tools with strengths and weaknesses and limitations. These tools will do certain things well and other things poorly. And it will be humans wielding the tools in service of the benefit of humanity. Initially the tools will be barely useful, but as we learn to improve the tools, these will get better and more aligned with the use cases for which we want to apply them. There is no binary outcome for AI. Just a slow expansion of the “ODD” (operational design domain) where the technology can be used effectively. That said, I still expect a similar bursting of the AI bubble as the internet bubble in 2000, but the technology will still be there and useful. And, for Pete’s sake, when that happens, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, but keep investing in the technology as general purpose technologies are few and far between and lead to enormous benefit for humankind. So, as my challenge to you today: where should you start using AI today? And why didn’t you do it yesterday? Daily Reflection #216: Letting go of your identity During a conference this week, I gave a talk on the impact of AI on the business of the attendees. Most of these were mechanical engineers who saw that the skill set that they built over the last decades had stopped being relevant. I encouraged them to take a Zen Buddhism beginner mindset and to use their innate skills to reinvent themselves and their role in their companies. This is what I feel I am in the midst of myself as several of the research topics that I have worked on for decades are no longer relevant or need to be fundamentally reinvented. The challenge is that we tend to identify quite strongly with our professional identity and letting go is hard. So, as today’s reflection: where are you unhealthily bound to part of your identity? And how will you let go? Daily Reflection #217: Start with the end in mind During a workshop at a company, the team presented the functionality that they were working on. I started to probe what the intended outcome of the effort was intended to be. All I got was high level, hand wavy answers, which bothered me. So, I started to push for more clarity and asked for quantitative KPIs that would justify the development efforts. At that point, it became clear that the team had significant differences in opinion that they were not aware of until the workshop. The challenge is of course that a team that has no clear goal or destination will have a really hard time delivering a significant contribution. How would you even determine whether you were successful? Of course, this is not true in teams at companies, but is quite common in our own lives as well. Many times, I got going on something without necessarily being clear what the goal actually looks like. Many moons ago, Stephen Covey published a book with the title “The 7 habits of highly effective people “ where one of the habits is: start with the end in mind. So, my question to you, dear reader, is whether you do? Daily Reflection #218: What can you imagine? In this age of fake news, many are concerned with checking sources to ensure that what we are told is actually accurate. And that is of course important. At least as important is to be able to imagine things that don’t exist yet. Everything that we use as humans started in the imagination of someone. You first need to create it in your mind before you can create it in the real world. And especially in times when we are experiencing amazing and disruptive technologies, it becomes even more important to imagine what the world could be like. Not as dark, dystopian futures, but as new things that improve life in some way. Similar to the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland who claims to have believed six impossible things before breakfast! So, as a challenge to you: what can you imagine that doesn’t exist yet? And how can you make it real? Daily Reflection #219: It’s just pain A few days ago, I ran a marathon. It was my seventh one, but it came after 18 months of recovering from an achilles injury and to be honest, I had not really trained for it. A few 2 hour runs and one 25K and I decided to just give a go to test things a bit. What I did know is that it was going to hurt as I had not trained up the endurance and stamina required to make the last third of the marathon less unpleasant. The day before, I talked to my youngest about this and he responded with the typical wisdom of the young: remember, dad, it’s just pain. And that’s exactly what happened: the last 10K hurt, but according to my watch I kept a virtually flat pace throughout the race. I pushed through the pain, finished and am already thinking about the next challenge to take on. This of course translates to many aspects of life: there are times when things suck. They suck royally. And all we want to do is give up and do something else. But it often helps to remind yourself that it’s just pain. And if you want bad enough what is at the other side of it, it’s better to just push through. So, as my challenge to you today: Does it hurt? Is the result worth it? Can you suffer through it? In the end, it’s just pain. Daily Reflection #220: Increase your capacity As I am a bit of a gym rat (too), I read quite a bit about training. It turns out that the latest research shows that the best way to build muscle is to push yourself to failure in every set. So, do as many repetitions until you simply know that the next rep is not in the cards. By doing that, you force the muscle to grow and you increase your capacity. I notice this in many parts of my life. When I return from a solid, relaxing vacation and go back to work, I get irritated or stressed about things that would not even register before I went on vacation. I would just deal with them without getting upset or even noticing any irritation. Research shows that our brains simply take the status quo as the normal and anything outside of it becomes a source of frustration, stress and annoyance. There is a wonderful study where people are asked to rank human faces as threatening or friendly. As the study goes on, fewer and fewer angry, threatening faces are shown, but the study participants start to rate more of the friendly faces as threatening as we recalibrate. So, as a reflection for today: if there is something in your life you are really upset or stressed about, is it because it is a genuine problem or do you simply have to increase your capacity? Daily Reflection #221: Be weird! This week I had a chat with a recruiter (it happens sometimes and never goes anywhere as I am a spoiled brat). The fun part of the discussion was where he tried to pigeonhole me in a specific box in terms of my work and research. It turns out that the way I work as a professor is quite eclectic and broad and it’s hard to classify me into one type. In addition to that, I am also a research center director, angel investor and board member. And outside of work, I am a husband, father, cat owner, gym instructor, marathon runner, gym rat, and so on. As humans, we always try to put the people we meet in a box. We classify them and describe them as a school teacher, a car mechanic, a personal trainer, a manager and so on. Interestingly, AI does the same. It is trained on vast amounts of data and then tries to classify you into one of the boxes that it learned during its training. In our upbringing and education, we are trained to conform, to fit in these boxes and to not stick out in any way. But in the age of AI, I think we need to do the opposite. We need to be unclassifiable and, as a consequence, we need to be weird. AI focuses on classification and prediction based on that, so as humans we need to be weird, unpredictable and creative. So, as my challenge to you today: in what way are you weird? And how can you become even more so? Daily Reflection #222: If you don’t know, move! Yesterday I listened to a podcast where Jocko Willink was interviewed. One example that he used in the conversation was that if you find yourself in the forest and have no idea where you are or where to go, most people have a tendency to hesitate. To stop, wait and reflect. His point is that this is exactly the opposite of what you need to do. Whenever you feel yourself hesitating, you start moving. In any direction. It doesn’t matter which direction because even finding out after a while that you’re going in the wrong direction is information you didn’t have before. I notice this a lot in the companies that I work with. There is a lot of economic uncertainty due to the trade war between the US and China, the tariffs, the role AI may play and the general economic and societal uncertainty. It causes people to stop and tread water for a while as they hope that things will calm down and it becomes clear how to move forward. If you want to have impact and move things forward for your company, yourself and even society as a whole, that is exactly the opposite of what you should do. You need to take action based on the limited information that you have. So, as a challenge for today: where in your life are you treading water and waiting for clarity? What action can you take to move things forward? Daily Reflection #223: It’s good if it’s hard … Continuing on the Jocko Willink theme, there are a number of internet personalities who stress the importance of doing hard things. There are two reasons for this. First, everything. Literally everything in life that has any meaning or relevance to you is hard. Not a little hard. Just effing hard. Running a marathon when you’ve been a couch potato for years is simply hard. Passing an advanced math course in university is hard. The second reason is that if something is really, really hard, you will have much less competition. Most people stay away from hard things and focus on the easy path. So, the more you are willing to take on hard things, the less you have to worry about others eating your cake. Many things in life are set up in such a way that you have to show a certain amount of grit to make it through. University education is a good example of that. The degree that you get at the end shows to potential employers that you managed to show up for years in a row, do the work and not give up. To be honest, very often the actual courses you took matter very little. It’s simply your ability to show up and do the work that matters more. So, as my challenge to you today: where are you shying away from doing hard things? And can you find it in yourself to do these anyway and outcompete others that shy away from it? Daily Reflection #224: Do you get enough “me time”? During the last weeks, I have been in a period where I was traveling a lot, had lots of things scheduled during the weekends and had to be in office more than usual. The result was that outside of sleeping and a quick workout, I had very little time for myself. I don’t do well when that happens as I have built up a set of habits around journaling, meditation and sports that give me the bandwidth to reflect on myself, my goals, ambitions, plans and desires. I realized that many people live the busy way. Between a job, children, spouse, hobbies, friends and family, very little free time is left. I know of people that intentionally organize their lives that way as they don’t want to spend time alone, in solitude, by themselves because they don’t like what they experience when they do. Socrates already warned us of the barrenness of a busy life. Our culture values busyness. Our managers reward us for looking busy as it is used as a proxy for productivity. But I think we have it completely wrong. I do my best work when I have time to think and reflect. I have creative breakthroughs when I allow my subconsciousness to marinate for a long time in a problem that I am trying to solve. For me, busyness is the opposite of being productive. So, as a reflection: do you get enough time in solitude and for yourself? And if not, how do you create more of that in your life? Daily Reflection #225: How to make it real? Last week I participated in a virtual kitchen table discussion with some other “middle-aged white men” where we shared our views on the state of the software-intensive systems industry in Europe. As you may guess from such a group, we were not impressed and quite concerned about the competitiveness of our industries as compared to other regions in the world. Each of us had ideas about what to do about it, but each of us struggled with making these real. I also joined a truly wonderful dinner party where, as is typical, the state of politics in Sweden was brought up, resulting in all of us expressing our concerns with the system going to hell in a handbasket. Again, all of us had (different) ideas on how to fix the system. When reflecting on it, I realized that I had fallen into the trap that the Stoics time and again warn us about: focus your energy on what you can control and leave the rest to the gods. So, as the reflection for today: where do you struggle with realizing some change that you deeply care about? If it is outside your scope of control, maybe you’re better off focusing on what you can control? Daily Reflection #226: Heard of Jovan’s paradox? Many people working in software are deeply worried about their job and future livelihood because of AI. I do agree that the nature of software development is in the midst of the most fundamental change since its inception. Entire agile teams can now be replaced by a single engineer and a set of AI agents. However, there is something called Jovan’s paradox which states that when something becomes cheaper, it leads to much higher demand. To the point of overshooting the original usage of the resource. With software becoming much cheaper to create going forward, I believe we are going to see an enormous boost in the amount of software requested by stakeholders. Simply think of all the crappy software solutions out there that people are suffering from but where it was economically unreasonable to improve. Or all the tasks conducted manually as the cost of automating these was too high. Now it becomes feasible to build and improve all these solutions as software is so much cheaper. And this is not unprecedented. When the ATMs were introduced, everyone predicted the end of bank tellers. But especially the first years after the ATM, the number of bank tellers actually went up. They were doing more relationship and sales tasks instead of simple transactional tasks, but the jobs did not disappear. So, as a reflection for today: rather than worrying about your job, look to identify all those opportunities that cheaper software would allow for! Daily Reflection #227: Like swimming in red oceans? One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how often humans exhibit lemming-like behavior. Someone figures out a new way of doing things. A new technology appears. A new class of research papers appears. A new type of company proves to be successful. Within a few days or weeks, everyone dives on this new opportunity and starts to compete with everyone else. In my experience, by the time you hear about it, everyone has heard about it and it’s too late. To quote Mark Twain: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” In their book Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors make exactly this point: most companies and individuals operate in the red ocean where there is blood in the water because of all the sharks that are trying to kill each other. Most companies live in a highly competitive market and basically duke it out continuously to very little effect. I think that this is a humongous waste of everyone’s time and life energy. In the words of Peter Thiel, competition is for losers. Instead you want to find a creative monopoly, at least temporarily, by focusing your energy on new innovations, approaches or ways of working that give you benefit. So, as my challenge to you today: where are you swimming in a red ocean? And how do you get out? Daily Reflection #228: Who cares? We tend to live a large part of our lives worrying about what other people will think of us, our actions, the way we look, the way we behave and so on. When you’ve been around the sun a couple dozen times, you slowly start to realize something really important. Nobody cares about you and your weird antics. They are way too busy thinking about themselves. We may think that people think about us because of the way they interact with us. But I have noticed many times that when someone I am talking to acts out of the ordinary, it seldom is about me and virtually always about what they happen to think about, worry about or what happened to them earlier in the day. And even if people express opinions about me, I noticed that it often says more about them than about me. So, I have stopped caring about what other people think about me. Except for a very small group including my spouse, kids, family and a select group of friends, I pay very little attention. So, as a reflection for the day: where you do worry about the opinion of others where you really don’t benefit from or are affected by? And how can you stop caring so much? Daily Reflection #229: What is your next achievement? For many years, I was constantly striving for the next step. Get a MSc. Get a PhD. Become an assistant professor. An associate professor. A full professor. A vice-president in industry. And so on. And my main driver was, I think, to a large extent to garner external validation. Validation that I was smart, relevant, adding value and part of the in-crowd. The tribe. At some point, after turning 50 or so, I realized that I had accomplished most of what I had set out to do. I was financially secure, professionally successful, had lived in multiple countries and had done things that some people can only dream of. So, I let go of the “achievement thing” and my goal was to enjoy living in the moment and to stop wanting to always achieve things. A few years in, I realize that I have picked up the desire to achieve things again. The last years, I have climbed Kilimanjaro in Africa and Lobuchu East Peak in Nepal. I have run two marathons. Together with amazing colleagues, I have published quite a few strong papers I am proud of. I am active in startups as angel investor, board member and even co-founder. But the drive is different: it is no longer to impress others, but rather to use my time on this planet to self-actualize. To be all I can be, to paraphrase the US military’s motto. And to contribute to humankind what I can, even if others don’t think it’s that important. In the end, it is good to set goals, to strive to accomplish hard things and to celebrate when you achieve them. But I think the reasons why you do that matter even more. So, my dearest hard-driving, type-1, goal -oriented reader: why do you do it? And do you do it for the right reasons? Daily Reflection #230: Are you building endurance? Over the last two years or so, I have picked up endurance sports again, mostly running, swimming and biking. The interesting thing is that the best way to get good at something is to do it. So, if you want to run far, the only solution is to train by going for long runs. Also in the pool I have been extending the distance I swim in training as, in my view, the only way to build endurance is by doing the work. When out on the interwebs, it is clear that everyone is looking for shortcuts and ways to avoid to do the work. The problem is that talking about the work is not doing the work. Planning the work is not doing the work. Talking to your friends about the work is not doing the work. Dreaming on the couch about doing the work is not doing the work. Buying the gear you need for doing the work is not doing the work. Going to bed early to do the work the next day is not doing the work. The only way to do the work is to do the work. There is a beautiful story about, I think, Stephen King, visiting the literature program at a university and being asked by students how to become such a successful writer as he is. His response: the secret to a successful writer is the application of one’s behind to the chair. Meaning that in order to be a writer, you have to write. A lot. All the time. So, as a reflection for today: What do you desire to become good or even better at? And are you putting in the work to build the endurance you need? Daily Reflection #231: Don’t waste time! Last weekend, we had planned to hang out with friends on Saturday afternoon. Last minute they cancelled as one of them had gotten ill, so suddenly I had a whole afternoon that was unscheduled. The easy way is to simply decide to laze about and not do anything, but instead I managed to change the plans on a dime and got some high-priority shopping in (my first running vest!) and a pretty tiring rucking session. As I get less young, I feel this constant sense of urgency because of all the things I still want to do and experience before I get too old. When I was younger, I didn’t mind at all wasting a day, week or even an entire summer. I felt I was going to live forever, so why the rush? In the words of George Bernard Shaw, youth is wasted on the young! Interestingly, after an intense and tiring week, my natural tendency is to lie on the couch and watch something on my tablet. But I know from experience that the best way to regain energy is to do things that I enjoy and to simply move. Life is so short, I often feel, and wasting time is … a waste! So, as a daily reflection: where are you wasting time that you could bring to better use? Daily Reflection #232: What is your immortality project? In this book “The denial of death”, Ernest Becker claims that many of us seek a form of symbolic immortality by engaging in projects and activities that will continue to exist after one's death. There is a saying that all humans die twice. First, when one’s physical body dies. Second, when the last person that remembers them and their work passes away. Initially, I thought it was a bit grandiose to try to have an impact beyond your own lifespan. But reflecting on the many people living nihilistic, hedonistic lives and who contribute very little to humankind, I believe that it’s better to put your life in service of something that you really believe in and want to contribute to. Of course, we don’t start there. As Terry Gou (founder of Foxconn) says, life can be viewed as consisting of three phases. In the first phase, you become as proficient in your chosen discipline and profession as you can. In the second phase, you work hard to garner as much career progression, material success and achievements. Then, in the third phase, you focus on legacy and giving back to society. That is where your immortality project comes in. So, as my challenge to you today: what is your immortality project? Daily Reflection #233: What is your backup plan? As I write this, I am also chatting with one of my sons who is on a biking adventure in Germany. The valve on the innertube on his back tire broke and it turns out that the spare innertube that he has doesn’t fit. And of course this happened in the middle of absolutely nowhere and the nearest bike shop is many, many miles away. So he is, as the saying goes, screwed. This is the challenge in many cases in our lives: things have worked well for a long time and there really is no reason to assume that it won’t work this time around. Until it suddenly does not. And then we need to solve it, if we are at all able to do anything at all. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to go through life worrying constantly. But it does make sense to reflect on the things that could go wrong and what you would do if this low risk, but high impact thing would happen. The Stoics use the practice of “premeditatio malorum” where you imagine the worst things that could go wrong in your life with the intent of mentally preparing for it and becoming more resilient. It has two advantages. First, it helps you to prepare for when misfortune hits. Second, it helps you to be grateful when bad things don’t happen, which luckily still is the most likely outcome. So, as my challenge to you today: what are the misfortunes that might affect you? And what is your backup plan? Daily Reflection #234: Who do you blame? As I work with different organizations, I often notice a pattern in the conversation where an unwanted outcome that repeats itself regularly is explained as immutable and “that’s just how it is”. For example, in tech focused organizations, often sales is not performing as well as it should, assuming it performs at all. The sales team then has an explanation along the lines of being early in the market and the customers not being ready for our product. Or something regional along the lines of things that work elsewhere do not work here. This is then used as a way to blame an external, immutable factor and to abdicate responsibility. Of course, this is a fallacy as the outcome is simply unacceptable. A sales team needs to close sales. That’s their entire function and failing to do so turns the team into dead weight for the organization. Of course, many of us have a tendency to do the same in our personal lives: we blame an external factor for why something in our lives is as it is without doing something about it. But rather than accepting it and “being reasonable”, we need to unreasonable and insist on changing it. In the words of George Bernard Shaw: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. So, as my challenge to you today: where in your life do you need to be unreasonable? Daily Reflection #235: Shiny bumper syndrome? Some of the researchers that I work with read a lot, which I encourage and admire, but also have a tendency to be swept up by whatever trend appears and want to follow that trend and start to conduct research in that area. The latter is something that I am very wary of for three reasons. The primary one is that jumping into a “hot” field tends to lead to swimming in a red ocean as everyone and their brother is doing the same. So, the competition will be fierce and it’s hard to have real, tangible contributions that stand out. The second is that by the time you have heard of it, the “in-crowd” has been working on the topic for a long time already and what looks like new, fresh and exciting is already old, chewed through and established. The third and most important reason is that it tends to lead to the shiny bumper syndrome. The syndrome was defined in the 1950s when cars had chrome bumpers and some dogs got agitated by the sunlight reflecting off moving cars and chased them. Of course, the moment the car took a turn, the reflection disappeared and the dog would find another car to chase. Jumping on trends will easily cause a situation where you jump on the next one the moment you become aware of it. And that means you never get real work done as you never go deep enough and stay with it long enough. As my reflection for today: do you have any shiny bumper syndromes in your life? Daily Reflection #236: It worked earlier? Last week, I was forced to take a late flight home, causing me to be in bed well after midnight. When I was younger, I wouldn’t necessarily like it, but it didn’t really bother me. One short night would not really affect me and I’d shake it off during my morning workout. With me being a bit less young, I realize that disruptions to my sleep schedule affect me much more and I can feel the lack of sleep the entire day after the short night. People change and as we age, some things that worked earlier simply don’t work equally well anymore. We need to be careful to classify these things into those where we need to push ourselves, like long distance running, and things we should just accept and avoid. The long distance running I can still do, but it requires more effort to maintain the same capacity and I need to be more careful about rest and recovery. Short nights, on the other hand, I struggle with and should simply seek to avoid whenever possible. As a daily reflection: where should you change something that used to work earlier? Daily Reflection #237: How do you regain? There is an older woman in the gym that I frequent who disappeared for a while. It turns out she had an operation and was now back and hellbent on regaining the strength and fitness she had lost while she was away. During the year where I struggled with recovering from an achilles injury, I lost a significant amount of speed while running because of my VO2Max dropping like a brick. Now I am struggling (hard) to get back to the same fitness level that I had before the injury. Of course, the same is true for our mental state. We may be quite grounded and stable when something throws us off. This can be a relationship issue, illness of a loved one or something at work that causes us to break our habits, lose our grounding and cause a lot of stress. We then need to work on regaining our mental grounding. The risk is that we fall into victim mode where we accept a far from optimal situation even if we are able to change it. We need to, in the words of Michael Easter, embrace short-term discomfort to find long term benefit. So, as something to reflect on today, what have you accepted that you should really address and change? Daily Reflection #238: Are you going retro? As someone who has ridden motorcycles since the 1980s, there have been some motorcycles that I always admired. One of these is the original Yamaha XT500. A simple, one cylinder workhorse of a motorcycle that worked equally well offroad as it did on the road. Color me surprised when Yamaha announced a new version of the XT500 this year that is a retro of the original one. And not only Yamaha, but also Kawasaki came out with a retro inspired version of their famous Z650 model from the same period. And it doesn’t stop there! Polaroid cameras are back. Vinyl record players. Casio digital watches. Tamagochis. And so on. Although I am the first to give people their freedom to explore what they find fun, I am afraid that part of the reason is that many feel that things were better before. That our current times suck and that things are only getting worse. Although I can list many things that I worry about today, I am fully aware of all the progress that we have made since the 1970s and 80s. Anyone who wants the Cold War back? Or the AIDS epidemic? My concern is that when we start to look back, we stop looking forward and working to improve things even further. So, as my challenge to you today is look forward, not backward! Daily Reflection #239: Anything surprising happened recently? Especially when we have circled around the sun a few more times, it is easy to fall into a routine that you follow on a continuous basis. Wake up, journal, work out, shower, work, lunch, work, meditate, dinner, read something, watch something, go to bed. Again and again. Routines are good as they help us structure our day and limit the amount of mental energy we spend on making mundane decisions. But it is also easy to become blind to what is happening around us as our mental filters just cut it out. Our biases simply cut out anything novel, interesting and exciting and we focus on exploiting what we already know. Instead, we need to be like the white queen in Lewis Caroll’s book who believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. I notice that I need to work hard at keeping an open, whimsical and imaginative mindset. As you are probably reading this after breakfast, my challenge to you today is to imagine at least three creative ideas before lunch! Daily Reflection #240: What if you were limitless? One of the results of many generations of humanoids living in scarcity, we have built a scarcity mindset. One where either I get something or you get something, but we can’t both have it. We see this in all kinds of contexts. At work, we struggle to get promoted and feel upset if a colleague is selected before us because we view it as a zero-sum game. In the dating scene, if your friend gets the girl, you feel like a loser because you didn’t get her. In competitions, there is a winner and then everyone who didn’t win. Our entire society is organized around win-lose, zero sum games. The surprising thing is that almost anything that matters in life is win-win and non-zero-sum games. When a startup succeeds, it actually creates value that is added to the economy. It created new value and didn’t take value away from someone else. Although we live in an anti-globalist society right now, international trade has been a net positive for virtually everyone involved because of the increased efficiencies. Rather than living in scarcity, we now live in a world of abundance but thousands of years of genetic and memetic selection work against us. So, as a reflection for today: where are you acting out of a scarcity mindset where you really should use an abundance mindset? Daily Reflection #241: What new skill are you learning? One of the intentional behaviours I have tried to adopt is to always be learning a new skill of some kind. Over the last years, I have taken the education to become a gym instructor in my gym. I have passed the theory exam for my hunting license. I sleep outside once per month throughout the year to deal with the challenges of camping in various weather conditions. I am working on my shooting skills (shotgun is OK; rifle I am working on). There is a chance that I may run my first ultramarathon next year. And so on. Also in my work I am looking to continuously explore new research areas and to reinvent existing research areas as, at least for now, AI is having an outsized impact on software engineering. The consequence is that this also means letting go of activities that I have been doing for a long time in order to create space for the new activities. As the saying goes, the people that don’t change are dead. Unfortunately, as Benjamin Franklin said, many people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75. As a reflection and challenge: what new skill are you learning? And what are you letting go of? Daily Reflection #242: Do you believe in God? Especially in Sweden, my home country for, in total, 20 years now, religion is a taboo concept. As I was raised as a strict Calvinist protestant in the Netherlands and had to work hard to break out of that world view, I am OK with that. But I can’t help wonder whether we threw out the baby with the bathwater. That by letting go of anything religious, we also removed all spirituality from our lives. A life without spirituality is focused on me, myself and I. In my view, and this is backed up by lots of psychology research, we do best if we put our lives in service of something larger than ourselves. Last century, we looked to replace religion with some “-isms”, such as communism (resulting in about 100 million deaths because it does not work) and fascism (20 million deaths because it doesn’t work either). This century, my feeling is that as a society we’re still trying to figure out how to develop a common belief system that works and doesn’t result in millions of people dying unnecessary deaths. However, as an individual, you get to choose your own religion or to find your own spirituality. And it’s better to be intentional about it as you are operating on a belief system no matter what and rather than being a knee-jerking automaton, it’s better to be aware of your beliefs and to pressure test these frequently to see if anything needs to change. So, as you’re reading this at the beginning of the weekend, what are you putting your life in service of? Daily Reflection #243: Didn’t go as planned? Good! There is this beautiful story by Jocko Willink about his time as a Seal commander. Whenever one of his people came to him with a problem, he would proclaim “Good!”. The reason for this was threefold. First, rather than getting into victim mode, this caused everyone to step up and focus on addressing the less than optimal situation. Second, he viewed it as an opportunity for people to show their resilience and adaptability and treat it as a learing opportunity. Third, as a leader, one of the key roles to play is to be undisturbed by problems and this showed him as leaning into the problem rather than shying away from it. None of us reading (or writing) this are Seal commanders, I assume, but I still think we can embrace the same principles. Rather than bemoaning situations that we didn’t expect, we can lean into the problem and proactively and positively meet the challenge and make the best of it. This goes one step beyond the Swedish “gilla läget” in my view as it isn’t just about accepting, but also positively addressing things. So, as my challenge today: what did not go as planned in your life? And how can you make that a good thing? Daily Reflection #244: What is your call to action? One of the things I have been very poor at is that I often fail to combine a blog post, presentation at a company or any other opportunity to be in front with an audience with a call to action. I have a captive audience, spend maybe an hour to make them see the world through my eyes, give them new insights, models and frameworks to apply in their work and generate a lot of energy. And rather than doing something with that energy and positivity, I thank people for their attention and leave. Instead, I should ask for a follow up that allows me to continue on the journey that I have started with my audience. At least with some of them. This aligns perfectly with the late Stephen Covey’s principle of starting with the end in mind. My challenge is that I am of the mistaken belief that if I do a great job in presenting some research, insights, models or frameworks and people like it enough to want to use it, they’ll come to me. I don’t have to go to them. That is obviously wrong. It is my job to make the friction of engaging with me as limited as possibile. It should be easy and almost automatic to engage with me. So, as a reflection: what is your call to action and how does your audience know? Daily Reflection #245: Activity is not the same as progress One of my managers, a long time ago, often reminded me and the rest of his team that activity, being busy, is not the same as progress. I notice this in my own professional life. As I wrote about earlier, I am as much of a dopamine addict as the next person and simply ticking the box on a completed action item gives me a little kick that makes me feel good. In that sense, a full agenda and lots of things to do feels good, up to a point, as every meeting, action item and task completed gives the little kick that we need to maintain the dopamine level in our brain. There are also things like scrolling YouTube shorts or something similar that have the same effect and cause you to pass the time without actually getting anything done. Of course, what we are looking for is progress, not just activity. For that we need to know what progress looks like and what the necessary next steps are. And then execute on these instead of mindlessly keeping busy. So, as a reflection for today, are you making progress or are you simply busy spinning your wheels? Daily Reflection #246: Where is the bottleneck? One of the topics that I spend a lot of time on is working with the companies in the center that I lead is trying to accelerate the adoption of new technologies and approaches. I used to think that the key limitation was a lack of awareness, so I spent a lot of time on presentations and workshops. Then, I realized that it was not so much the lack of awareness, but, I thought, the lack of experiments and trials. So then, the attention shifted more to working with companies on trials, experiments and prototypes. However, more recently, my experience is that engineers like technology and experiment with it, both at work and outside of it. The key challenge is translating the new technology and approach to concrete product development of “sharp” products. At that point, many stakeholders come involved, the cost go up drastically and the implications of failures start to really hurt. This is where the risk averseness really kicks in and people prefer to continue to do things as they have always done them. And this is even more the case if there are implications for the business model. Although I may be wrong, it seems that I have finally found the real bottleneck. Of course, many of us struggle with spending large amounts of energy on things that, in the end, are not the real bottleneck. So, for today’s reflection: are you sure you’re working on the real bottleneck? Or is it just a symptom and you need to dig deeper for the root cause? Daily Reflection #247: Sustaining versus radical innovation During a recent panel, a topic surfaced that many companies struggle with: the difference in return on investment (RoI) between sustaining and radical innovation. Sustaining innovation is concerned with adding functions and features to existing products and new versions of products to existing product categories. The RoI for these investments tends to follow a Gaussian curve in terms of RoI. Some initiatives do a little better; some do a little worse but by and large most initiatives tends to have a positive RoI. Radical innovation, on the other hand, is concerned with completely new products where there is no promise of success. In this case, the RoI tends to follow a power function, meaning that most initiatives will have a negative RoI and only a few will have a positive outcome. The few that are successful, however, are so positive that the return will pay back the total cost of the investment of all initiatives many times over. This is how venture capital investors work: they know that most companies that they invest in will lose their investment. But the one our of every 10 delivers the dough and pays for all the failures. Many leaders in companies pride themselves on successful initiatives, but in my view having a too high success rate means that you’re taking too little risk in your innovation initiatives. This of course applies to our personal lives just as well. So, as my daily reflection: what is the success rate of your personal innovation portfolio? And are you taking enough risk? Daily Reflection #248: Stop planning already One of the main differences between SaaS companies and traditional embedded systems companies is their primary focus. Traditional companies tend to focus on the predeployment phase, so before the product is put in the hands of customers. SaaS companies focus on the post-deployment phase, measuring how customers use the product and then using DevOps, A/B testing and other techniques seeking to improve the product continuously. This means that traditional companies focus excessive amounts on planning and often look at SaaS companies as unprofessional “lucky go happy”. The problem is that all planning takes place in a bubble of unvalidated assumptions and guesses that tend to become strongly held beliefs in the company, even if there is no evidence whatsoever that the customers and markets actually behave in the way that we assume. The same is often true in our personal life. We want to achieve a certain outcome, but rather than simply doing, we start planning. And never get out of that phase. Rather than “ready-aim-fire”, it’s sometimes better to just “ready-fire-aim”, assuming that you can shoot again. At least you now know where the first shot landed. So, to reflect on over the weekend: where in your life should you stop planning and start acting? Daily Reflection #249: What is your system? One of the ways of structuring my life has increasingly become to focus on systems. Especially when I was younger, my main focus was on setting goals. Implicitly I believed that by setting goals, I would magically achieve them simply by sheer willpower. When my goals became larger, more effort consuming and taking longer, I started to see that my progress to my goals was much slower than what I anticipated or what I had experienced when I was younger. I realized that I needed to find ways in which I continuously chip away at my goals. For example, when I decided that I wanted to get my hunting license, the first step is to pass the theory test. The material for this test is quite elaborate and includes well over a dozen different parts, ranging from the ecology of a forest to the laws and regulations associated with hunting and owning weapons. It is hundreds upon hundreds of pages of text. The system that I used is to use a few hours every Saturday and Sunday to simply study. Related to work, I supervise 10+ PhD candidates. Rather than randomly responding to requests from them and booking meetings whenever I feel the need, we have a system. Every Monday afternoon at 13:00 we have our group meeting, followed by individual meetings with everyone who needs it. It’s very efficient and yet very effective. Because it’s a system. So, as a reflection for today: where do you have a chaotic, stressful situation in your life for which you could introduce a system to systematically work on it? Daily Reflection #250: The system trying to hold you back? This week I spent two days in different workshops on regulatory compliance. This is becoming a more and more painful issue for the software intensive systems industry, especially with the joyful tidings coming out of Brussels. For example, violation of the AI Act can lead to fines of up to 10% of global turnover which is a major, major red flag for many companies. The natural behavior is to stay far, far away from where this could become an issue and the safest is to not use any AI in our products and any internal systems. Which of course results in us not reaping the productivity benefits that AI offers and reducing our competitive position vis-a-vis the competition from other parts of the world. In the workshops, I am glad to share, there were several people who took a different approach: rather than shying away, they were looking to understand the details of the regulation, translate it to the specific situation in which they operate and figure out what extra work they need to do to remain compliant while adopting new technology. Of course, we run into the same situation in our personal lives where, for instance, a health issue makes working out more difficult and the doctor advises us to take complete rest. The better approach in that case is to figure out what you can do to keep moving and how to avoid aggravating the issue. Especially when it comes to exercise, complete rest actually reduces recovery speed, causes muscle atrophy and makes us more injury prone when we get back to training. So, as my challenge to you today: where in your life is “the system” trying to hold you back? And how can you make progress despite of the resistance? Daily Reflection #251: What do you do when nobody is watching? Being the social animals that we are, we spend vast amounts of our lives behaving in ways that we believe lead to positive outcomes in the context in which we find ourselves. We look busy and motivated to our boss to make sure he feels we are putting in the work. We buy products to impress our neighbors and friends, rather than us caring about it ourselves. In the gym, we push hard, make funny noises and look sweaty to show to the others that we are putting in the effort. We compete in completely meaningless competitions just to “show them who’s boss”. To paraphrase Fight Club, we work in jobs we don’t like to earn money to spend on things we don’t want to impress people we don’t like. This can so easily lead to a situation where you spend all your energy on looking good to others that you no longer know what you yourself actually want. So, the question becomes, what would you do when you know nobody is watching? What would you still spend time on even if there would be nobody to admire the result. What are the things you do that you only do for intrinsic reasons of meaning and joy? So, my challenge to you is to plan some time this week just by yourself to spend on something that is completely irrelevant to anyone but you. Revel in the joy of it and find out where in your life you need more of that! Daily Reflection #252: Be careful what you want! Recently, I have been reflecting on the things that are important to me. The realization that I have is that we tend to confuse things that are hard to get with things that are worthwhile to have. When I was young, I always looked up to people that had senior leadership roles in companies with large organizations reporting to them. Then, when I finally grew into a role with 200+ people in my organization, I realized that managing such organizations is extremely time and energy consuming and that, although I can do it and believe to be reasonably good at it, it is not really what I want to do with my life. Similarly, I aspired to own a large house, an expensive car and fun toys. Now that I have at least some of those things, I realize that a large house comes with a lot of effort to keep it clean, maintained and decorated. I owned a motorcycle for a while and realized that the effort associated with it outweighs the joy of riding it. And even if I could easily buy a quite expensive car right now, I know that it won’t be worth it. Instead, I focus now much more on experiences and very often those of the mundane kind. For example, I am already now looking forward to my kids coming home for Christmas and us having time together. So, as a reflection for today: what do you want and how do you know that it is worth having? Daily Reflection #253: What are your life goals? As we’re moving toward the end of November as I write this, I have started to reflect on the year and to work on my goals for 2026. The challenge is that it is very easy to plan goals from your current place and context. For example, if we published N papers this year, the goal for next year is to publish N+1 papers. Or, I ran a marathon this year, so next year I want to run an ultramarathon. The challenge is that this does not necessarily get you where you want your life to end up. There is the somewhat dramatic challenge where you are asked to imagine what you want to not regret while lying on your deathbed. Or what you want people to say at your funeral. Although that is fine as a starting point, I think we should avoid focusing our energy on what we want others to say about us. And also, life requires making choices, causing us to get certain things and having to give up others. The approach that I am currently taking is to work my way back from my life goals that I organized around me, my family, my professional role and my role as a citizen and human. I will not bore you with the details of my goals, but I do encourage you to reflect on your own life goals and to start planning 2026 in service of those! Daily Reflection #254: The problem of bounded rationality As human beings, we have quite severe information processing limits. According to psychology research, we can keep 7 +/- 2 concepts in our head at the same time as we think about something. This is why we build abstractions, which is what you learn in school, so that we can refer to something complex with one word or concept. That allows us to think about even bigger ideas. The challenge is that, as life unfolds, we do not have the concepts available to explain what is happening in the world as we lack good explanations and concepts to refer to. As I post this, NVIDIA just posted much better numbers for the quarter than what was expected. Suddenly the entire media switches on a dime from “we’re in an AI bubble” to “AI is real and not a bubble”. Although I think that there is a fair bit of hyperbole in the discussion around AI, the statements about not seeing AI in productivity improvements in industry as some of the larger consulting houses shared are, in my experience, simply wrong. In software, AI is used everywhere and is allowing for major productivity improvements for engineers. And the same is true in many other disciplines. The challenge is that our rationality is bounded. We lack the ability to take in the whole system and consequently build explanations based on a sliver of the reality we’re looking to understand. Some systems, including our economic system, simply are too complex to be explained. That is why nobody can predict the stock market a day, a week or a month from now. However, we hate that and consequently come up with explanations that make us feel good (reduced cognitive dissonance), but that don’t help us as the explanation is not connected to reality. Sometimes, we simply have to accept that we don’t know. So, as my challenge to you today is: where are you clinging to a simplistic explanation that is wrong, but gives you emotional support. And how do you move on from it? Daily Reflection #255: How is your data space today? As I am attending a conference in Germany, one topic that came up a few times is is the notion of data spaces. A data space is a decentralized and federated infrastructure or ecosystem that enables secure, trustworthy, and governed data sharing and exchange among multiple organizations or participants without centralizing the data. It is one of those concepts that looks great in theory as it would allow for easy data sharing between companies without all the risks that potentially come with sharing. The problem is that my discussions with researchers on the topic reveal that there are very few data spaces that are not funded and kept alive by public funding, such as EU project funding and national funding. This is always a red flag for me as it indicates a lack of industrial relevance and interest and the topic easily becomes a case of wishful thinking. Although I do believe that we will find good ways to share data between companies, I am not sure if the current data spaces concept will be the winner. This translates to many areas of life so my challenge for you today is: where in your life do you exhibit wishful thinking? And how do you know that this is a realistic view and approach? Daily Reflection #256: How do we reignite Europe? This week I was at a conference on automotive where the lack of radical innovations and market breakthroughs in the automotive industry in Europe was raised as the key problem. On the one hand, we have international competitors that bring cars with comparable features to the market at a fraction of the price. On the other hand, we have international competitors that offer vehicles with feature sets and approaches to delivering value that European players have not mastered yet. The industry seems to be stuck in a fundamentally uncompetitive place due to lack of innovation. We are stuck in a rulebook that should have been thrown away years ago. The question was how we break out of this vicious circle and several people mentioned that it is actually hot wars that drive a lot of innovation, as we’re seeing in Ukraine, among others. I just would really like to avoid having to enter a war just to drive our pace of innovation up again. But the current situation is on course to bring Europe to an economic backwater that ends up kowtowing to whoever wins the current technology war on the world scale. So, as a reflection, challenge and call for help for today: how do we reignite Europe? Daily Reflection #257: Where is the customer? Continuing on yesterday’s reflection, the automotive conference that I attended had lots of demos and cars with fabulous features. Anything from vehicle to infrastructure communication to synthetic data generation for training AI models. The topic that was missing in action, though, was customer driven innovation. There was a complete lack of focus on the features, functions and capabilities from a customer’s perspective. And, consequently, a lack of evidence that all the fabulous technical solutions were things that customers actually want and would be willing to pay for. The motto was very much in terms of the old adage of “build it and they will come.” Perhaps it is because engineers love technology more than they appreciate talking to humans, but where I come from, you first prove that there is customer interest and a business case. And you do this using the cheapest, scrappiest minimal viable product demo that is put together with chewing gum, bailing wire and duct tape. Only when you have proven that there is a market will you invest in more engineering. Of course, automotive is far from the only industry approaching innovation (or rather, invention) this way. So, as my challenge today: how do you know that what you’re building is adding value? And if you don’t have a clear market signal, what can you do to fix it? Daily Reflection #258: Where is your learning loop? The primary difference I have experienced between traditional European product companies and the newer SaaS companies is where they focus their energy. Traditional product companies focus on the process before the start of production (SoP). SaaS companies focus their energy on the phase post delivery. It is then that you can get a learning loop going with the market, your customers and your systems deployed in the field. Up to the point that you are in market, all you’re doing is guessing what customers might appreciate. After that, you can start measuring and make data-driven decisions. Also, once you have a learning loop going, you can often grow the business as you are delivering more value than any other player as you have quantitative data to back up your decisions. In most digital industries, a player that gets its learning loop first and manages to scale is virtually impossible to catch by competitors. So, as a reflection for today: where is your learning loop and are you using it to the best of your abilities? Daily Reflection #259: How to move faster? Keeping on the automotive conference that I attended this week, I was told a story of how the automotive companies are lobbying for funding from the EU to collaboratively drive innovation to meet the increasing pressures from international competitors. Apparently, there was a meeting in 2024 that gave a bit of funding for preparing a proposal for funding a large project to be submitted in 2026. If approved, the project can start in 2028. We are talking about FOUR YEARS between raising the concern and a reaction in the European innovation system. Whatever the project is going to be working on in 2028, based on what they talked about in 2024 and 2025 will be most likely be irrelevant or at least a lot less relevant than what it is today. I wish I only had this example, but in many of the companies that I am involved with, change only happens when everyone and their brother supports the change or at least will not block it. By that time, whatever we were planning to do is already so obvious to everyone involved that all business opportunities associated with a fast first mover strategy are gone and all one can do is play defense. Even in the startups that I work with, firing a person that is not working out is always done way past the point where it should have happened. In my experience, when your gut tells you it’s not going to work, it’s almost always right and you need to take action. So, something to reflect on today: what does your gut tell you? And what are you going to do about it NOW? Daily Reflection #260: Who is accountable? One of the things that annoys me to no end is the lack of accountability in large organizations, be it public or private. As a customer of an organization, I have at various times tried to figure out who is responsible and accountable for the decisions that the organization makes that affect me. Similarly, in companies that I work with, it is unclear who is accountable for not taking action in response to things are obviously are going to affect the company and where not taking action a really bad idea. Reflecting on this, I realize that systems are intentionally designed to avoid personal accountability and everyone can blame “the system”. Having worked in industry both in the US and in Europe, I realize that this is a fundamental difference between both systems. In the US it often is clearly defined who is accountable for particular outcome and failing to deliver or operating out of bounds will simply result in demotion or getting fired. When visiting a large European company this week that is really struggling with poor financial results, the general attitude that was shared by the people that I met was to wait and hope that things would become better. It often ends up as learned selfhelplessness. Now, you, my dear reader, are a protagonist and take action where it is required. Or? As a reflection: where are you not taking action, even if you know you should? In the end, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission! Daily Reflection #261: You think you can’t? There is a quote by Henry T. Ford along the lines of “if you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right”. The point is that we align our behavior to what we think we can and cannot do. I notice this myself in the gym on a regular basis. I go into a set with the belief that I can only do 5 reps, but then it turns out that I can actually do 7. A colleague of mine believes that she can’t do sales, even if she has a track record of decades showing how she has managed to convince people around her to do what she is looking for. Especially in our Western world, we have virtually infinite opportunities and most of us are constraining ourselves by our beliefs as to what we can and cannot do. The result is of course that we keep doing what we have always done and consequently stop growing. So, my challenge to you today is: what is a belief in your life about what you can’t do that you deep down know is not accurate? And how will you prove to yourself that you can? Daily Reflection #262: Make it simple! Recently, I have talked to several people that are non-committing and fuzzy in their interactions. When asked for a clear yes or no, what I get is a half-assed “maybe” that doesn’t help me and clearly causes them discomfort. My analysis is that we often fail to give clear statements to avoid upsetting others, to keep options open and delay uncomfortable situations. The problem is that the lack of clarity tends to build up, cause dependencies across the board and make life very complicated. The very intent of finding the easy way out causes us to end up in a much more complex and messy situation. Instead, I would much more appreciate a clear yes or a clear no. Then I know where I stand and I can move forward accordingly. I try to act based on the same principle. When I am very busy, my default answer is no unless my gut reaction to a request is “Hell, yes!”. When I am less busy, my response can be positive for those requests where I feel that I can learn, explore or develop in some way that I consider good for me. So, as my encouragement for today: keep it simple! Daily Reflection #263: You can have anything in life David Allen, the author of the book Getting Things Done, frequently says that you can have anything in life, but not everything in life. Although I rationally recognize the truth in the statement, I am one of those maximizers who hates giving up on options and choosing one thing with the implicit understanding that I will not get the other things. The risk that I then struggle with is that I am more bothered by what I didn’t get than what I enjoy what I did. Another aspect is that I have a tendency to commit to many different things, rather than focusing all my energy on one or a very small number of things. The consequence is several small results, but an absence of “knocking the ball out of the park” results. In many ways, I feel it is my implicit tactic to minimize risk. Putting all eggs in one basket and then dropping it causes me to end up emptyhanded, but dividing my energy over many baskets will at least bring some eggs to the market. Still, the challenge I am working on is to place bigger bets, focus my energy more so that I can have bigger “wins”. So, as a reflection for today, what is the thing that you want out of life the most and are you putting all your energy towards that or are you hedging? Daily Reflection #264: Want to keep things as they are? When things are pretty good, as they are in our Western World, we easily fall into the trap of not wanting anything to change. As I am getting a little less young every day and I can notice where my body is no longer like a 21 year old, I very much am in that camp at different times. However, as I wrote in earlier posts, change is the only constant and all the longing in the world for things to not change won’t help you. In my view, the entire European culture is currently in this place where we want to keep things as they are. That is why we have the strong anti-technology sentiment and heavy regulation approach across society. All this is intended to slow down the introduction of new technologies, new ways of working, new innovations, etc. And it’s working, but to our detriment. My challenge is that I am trying to embrace the changes that I can’t influence. As the swedes say, “gilla läget”. Of course, if I can influence or change, I will definitely put the work in. Hence all the time in the gym, the hours outdoors and my journaling and meditation. But we have to accept that many of the changes that come our way we have no control over whatsoever, so we might as well accept, embrace and engage. So, as a reflection for today: where are you resisting a change that you have no control over? Daily Reflection #265: One day, it was the last time When I ran San Francisco marathon (a long time ago), there was a group of older runners wearing t-shirts that said on the front “one day I will no longer be able to do this” and on the back it said “today is not that day”. The idea was to motivate themselves and the others that they were going to finish this marathon, come hell or high water, as the saying goes. However, the fact remains that for everything we do, there will be a time when you will have done that thing for the last time. It doesn’t mean that you die, but it can be a child moving out of the house or moving to another country. The Buddhists have a term “Annica” which means impermanence. The idea is that everything that exists is impermanent. We are. Our children are. The house we live in is. Even our planet and our solar system are. However, we tend to treat everything as if it is going to last forever. And consequently we often do not value the people, relationships and experiences around us to the extent they deserve. Because we implicitly believe that everything is going to be there next time we look for it. So, as a reflection today: remember that everything is temporary and that we will have to say goodbye to everything we know and own at some point. How does that affect your behavior? Daily Reflection #266: Remember the floppy disk? Especially among younger people, occasionally the floppy disk is brought up. Of course, many know the 3.5 inch one, but the 5 ¼ inch was used for a long time as well. The floppy disk is often treated as a joke and a poor example of how to store data. And in today’s viewpoint, that is entirely correct. The interesting thing is however that nobody seems to think that a few decades from now, people will talk in the same way about today’s technology. The USB sticks. The poorly organized and at times insecure cloud storage solutions. The way in which data ownership and usage is often poorly managed. The lack of multi-sensory interfaces and, even worse, the lack of direct brain interfaces. We have a tendency to make fun of people, technologies and society in the past without realizing that we are going to be in the same place a few years from now. Rather than focusing on the specific technology, product or behavioral pattern, I believe it behooves us to focus on the patterns that are constant. What is it that did not change over the years, decades and centuries? Rationally, we all know that genetically we are not different from our cave-dwelling ancestors 10.000 years ago. But we have difficulty accepting that the instinctive behaviors that kept our ancestors alive still control a lot of our behavior, even if it often is counterproductive in today’s world. So, as my challenge to you today, what do you do today that people will make fun of a few decades from now? And does it help you to take your life a bit less serious? Daily Reflection #267: What is your bias? Recently, I have been reading about training and food and I realized what an enormous amount of pseudoscience, partial truths and plainly false information is out there. For instance, many diets have some positive effect on people, but not because of the type of food (paleo, vegan or whatever), but because virtually all diets limit caloric intake and advise against eating processed food. I noticed I easily fall into the same trap. I have been a pescetarian since 1997 and every time there is an article on red meat being bad for you, I tend to be positively inclined to the article without having looked into the science behind it. Rationally I know that meat is just fine as a food and that the biggest health factor is your caloric intake. Of course, we all have biases and we tend to seek out information that we agree with and we tend to ignore information that we disagree with. Social media is of course a master at feeding you what you have shown a preference for in the past and is in no small part contributing to the divisions we see happen in society. So, as my challenge to you today: read something that you passionately disagree with and find three positive aspects about it! Daily Reflection #268: Busy before the holidays? During the last weeks, I have noticed that I am falling into the trap that I have for the longest time aimed to avoid: I am wrapping up before the holidays and looking forward to having a few weeks of downtime. It annoys me because I feel I have managed to organize my worklife in such a way that I do very few things that I don’t enjoy and love most of what I do. I realize that even if you like your job and the things that come with it, there are still times when you need to take some downtime and gain some perspective. Our society and companies appreciate busyness. Creating the illusion of being busy is one of the best strategies to be promoted in many companies. Unfortunately even more important than delivering great results as both successes and failures can often be attributed to many factors. So, if you hope to be promoted next year or be picked for that role you’ve been eying, make sure to look really busy and work all the way up to Christmas Eve! It might pay off in 2026! Or, perhaps, wrap things up a bit early and take a few weeks of a break and see if starting 2026 with fully charged batteries and a clear set of goals is the better approach? Daily Reflection #269: 99% of success is showing up As I am a volunteer gym instructor in my local gym, I noticed that the gym is a bit empty the weeks before the new year, but I also know that come January, it will be packed again with people that are looking to deliver on their New Year’s resolutions. That is great and all, but history shows that come February, the gym is back to normal again with the regulars strolling in at 06:30 in the morning and not many others. The excuses of the people that stop going to the gym vary widely, but the common theme is that they prioritize something else over the gym. That is of course true for almost everything in life: to achieve any success in any field, the key factor is to simply show up. To be there. It matters a little less what you do once you get there as you’ll typically get sucked into doing the work anyway. The key to success often is simply, boring consistency. To put in the effort day after day. To grind away at it also on the days when you don’t feel like it. To be a professional rather than an amateur. As the saying goes: amateurs do what they like; professionals like what they do. As we are soon entering the holiday season and we’ll be reflecting on life and on next steps, my challenge to you is to decide whether you are an amateur or a professional. That doesn’t mean that you can’t change things up, but you have to do it for the right reasons. Daily Reflection #270: Got the perfect plan? Currently, I am in the process of starting a company together with a co-founder (who will do most of the work, to be honest). What I noticed is that we are spending a lot of time planning as we’ll be kicking things off a few months into the new year. The challenge is that our plans include a ton of uncertainties and we simply have no idea how things will play out until we start to put the company in motion. Although I understand that failing to plan is planning to fail, I also know, from ample experience, that it is very easy to fall into the planning trap that you never get out of. Where planning turns into analysis paralysis. In all cases where I have been in this situation, the times when planning never turned into action vastly outnumber the number of times when taking action without a plan resulted in failure. So, if you’re hoping to finally make that big transition to something new in 2026 and intend to use the Christmas break to create the perfect plan, my challenge to you is to use the break instead to get going. The rule is ready, fire, aim as your aiming may never cause you to pull the trigger. Daily Reflection #271: Are you happy? You can’t open a social media app, read a newspaper or watch something on YouTube or it’s about how to get happy. Influencers show off how happy they are. Advertisers show how happy you’ll be when you buy their product. Apparently we all want to be happy and the approach seems to be to engage in hedonistic behaviors, like drinking and partying, or to aspire to some societal ideals like the perfect family Christmas. Once we achieve that, we’ll be happy. The challenge is that happiness is a fleeting emotion. A temporary high after reaching some challenge or accomplishment. And the more we grasp for it and try to hold on to it, the more rapidly it disappears again and we return to our baseline that seems to mostly be driven by genetics. Instead, I think we would benefit from living meaningful lives. Lives that are driven by purpose and intentionality. A life that you don’t want to escape from but where you get out of bed every morning to work on something that you have decided gives meaning to your life. This doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be something others recognise or appreciate. It has to be what gives meaning and purpose to your life. So, instead of trying to be happy, use the upcoming holiday season to reflect on what makes your life meaningful and what you can do to add more of that to it. Daily Reflection #272: One year of reflections … Early January of this year, I posted the first reflection, titled “Things are going faster”. From that point on, six days per week, except during the summer vacation, I have posted daily reflections. The seventh day, Sunday, was reserved for my weekly blog post. When you read this, I have already left for my Christmas break (in Malaga, catching some sun) as this is the last reflection for the year 2025 that I will post. When reflecting on the year, I realize that a lot of good things happened this year that I am grateful for. But I keep being amazed with how fast time goes by. As I age, the days become longer and the years become shorter, even if I try to create as many memorable moments as possible. I have shared reflections on technical topics, including of course AI, philosophical topics, such as stoicism and buddhism, controversial topics, such as the one about God, and reflections on the techno-pessimist state of Europe and how to turn it to techno-optimism. In many ways, I feel I have shared my life philosophy in many small puzzle pieces, 272 to be exact. It has helped me reflect on what I believe in and find important. I hope it has helped you and provided something of value to you as well. The one reflection I am not yet clear on is whether I continue with this next year. If you have thoughts or want to share your opinion, please do leave a comment or send me a message. Before I sign off for the year though (there is a blog post coming out tomorrow as well), I wanted to thank you all for reading and commenting and would like to wish you a wonderful holiday season! Daily Reflection #: 271 656 4811 502 95 90