Once upon a time there was a course about digital business which changed one man's attitudes and visions about life itself by one fell swoop. This course was led by wonderful lecturers Ilkka and Anna (and Kyla of course plus all the amazing guest speakers) who made this spring a memorable one. Gratitude. And also to my fellow group members and student colleagues, a big gratitude. Easily the best course I have taken part in my whole school "career" and will go down in a history as one of the most instructive and eye-opening experiences ever.
I like to believe that when one things comes to its end, it's a beginning for another. Unfortunately, this journey has come to its final stop but when this chapter closes, it's a new beginning, a new chapter for another journey. It's the circle of life, there will always be the next day for a new adventure. Sadly, I was planning to do a LOOOONG blog post with a kick-ass reflection about everything we've had been involved in this course and all the feelings attached to them but I'm heading to airport in just a few hours to wait for a plane to get me to Rome! I've always wanted to go there so I guess this is a one dream turning to reality.
Speaking of dreams turning to reality, we were given one last "task" to review the course by a question "what did you learn about you?". Even though I had some issues with understanding why we talked so much about some positivity, emotions and such things in a DIGITAL BUSINESS course, I certainly realized that those kind of things are completely attached to the digital business world. And the one thing that I learned about myself was that no matter how big of obstacles come in my way, nothing will stop me to achieve my goals and fulfill my dreams if I just want it enough and I'm able to maintain this positive manner of an approach to life which this course gave a huge boost to. I've learned so many valued skills of digital business which will certainly help me to make it big time in the digitalization's transformational times of the field of business. If I listed them, I would miss my flight! If one should be picked, it's the connection with people and building a strong network. And build the network with people sharing the same visions and interests. It will shorten the journey to achieve your goals by many step when you can work with someone/something that you are really into and enthusiastic about.
But most importantly, I've learned to make every day count and enjoy all the little things in life, to live in the moment. And that skill I value high in my list. We've talked in the course that positivity and general happiness will lead to success. I can proudly say that right now, even though I have wistful emotions because of this course coming to its end, I'm a happy guy and have no doubt that success will be waiting for me in the future!
And success will wait for my student colleagues too, no question about that. This group involved so much talent and unique skills that I'm honored to be part of it. So thank you again! Now it's time to wrap it up by saying that these are not goodbyes, it's more like see you again. And what comes to this blog, this will be my last post in this one but do I keep blogging about other things in another blog? Who knows, I certainly do love writing so anything can happen! Thank you for reading my blog, thank you for an opportunity to develop my skills and thank you for changing my vision towards life completely, it's more than I could've ever imagined. See you again!
Greetings my fellow readers! We are so close to the finishing line with this post being the second last one. The final post will review the whole awesome spring and I'm looking forward to write that post because it certainly will be fun to memorize all the fun things and even tough things that have made this course a wonderful experience. But enough of that, let's concentrate on this post first which will be about happiness itself!
On Monday I was on a typical Monday-mood so waking up caused some major difficulties for me and eventually I missed the first ten or fifteen minutes of the week's first lecture. And what I have heard, I apparently missed a big surprise as Kyla Mitsunaga, the TED speaker from some of my previous posts, surprised all of us by attending our lecture and we spent couple of days working WITH (check out that post and I think you get this) this wonderful, HAPPY person. Kyla is so... so... HYPER! SUPER HAPPY! Absolutely lively person who definitely got me as well wake up to that day! We had a "happiness workshop" which included some group work and games. Very nice start to the week and got me to instantly a positive mood.
So what is happiness? We talked about that on the Monday's and Wednesday's lectures and I personally think that you cannot give a specific answer to that question. Everyone builds their own happiness which contains different kinds of elements depending on the person. You can't say that, for example, a rising sun makes everybody happy and spreads happiness because what if a person X lives in a cave and loves darkness from the bottom of his/her heart? We also feel the happiness with very different ways. Most of us smile when we are happy but it's impossible to say that is it like that for all of us. For example, even I have cried with happiness. It's an abstract thing that you cannot categorize or put into a certain mold. You just know, only by yourself, when you are happy and what causes the happiness to fill your head.
For me happiness is ability to live your life at the fullest. All the little things, all the necessary and unnecessary things are included in building happiness and to reach the ultimate happiness, you have to learn live your life the way you want it and know that when the time passes by you, there aren't any regrets considering the lived life. Make every day count, make every single moment count and you'll find happiness. Of course life is not always a bed of roses and some negative and tough obstacles will have to be faced but it's the strength to not let those affect to your happiness. They will only strengthen it. It's like a comparison to professional sports, mistakes have to be made to get to the top of the mountain. You learn from them as you learn from the tough obstacles in your life. You learn how to involve them in the building process of happiness. This kind of mindset works for me and maybe I share the same thoughts with some people or maybe I am alone with those. But sharing happiness is certainly a thing that I will try to keep doing in the future too and hopefully will the others too.
Our "Share Happiness" video made on Wednesday morning with a 20 minutes of preparation and the same time for executing and editing it. Still, it's a pretty nice video and I personally hope that it will get you on a good mood!
We had another lecture on Thursday where we had a guest lecturer from Poland talking about some very current and interesting things that are going on in the fields of economy and business but somehow I just couldn't catch up to it. I usually understand very well English but maybe it was the Eastern Bloc accent or I just wasn't sharp enough for it but the fact unfortunately is, I didn't get anything out from it to write about. So I'll leave it up here and begin to prepare the final blog post of this course! Let's see if I could come up with some unseen and unique things with it. We'll see... At least I'm trying to figure out how to somehow make that final blog post huge and memorable! So until next time, take care and spread the happiness all over the world!
This past week was definitely a fun one. My girlfriend came from the Netherlands for a week-long visit as she is currently on exchange there. It was of course nice to see her again after a while and also hang out with some of our mutual friends who I haven't seen for a long time. We also went to see a football game of my (and soon to be hers too, brainwash you know) favorite Finnish team HIFK but even though it was the home season opening, it was really challenging to enjoy the game because the weather was so COLD! We were freezing! And it should be spring already. These are the few occasions when I could seriously consider moving out from Finland... I tried to take some pictures and videos about the atmosphere in the game but couldn't take my hands off my pockets because they would have probably frozen to necrosis!
School included lots of fun stuff too. On Monday Sani Leino had a lecture about Thinglink, virtual reality and the hottest trends in the digital business today. Very compelling and inspiring lecture, especially considering the fact that those subjects are very current nowadays. One of the hottest trends is content marketing and videos especially are highly connected to it as a powerful and effective tool to have an influence on audience. We have talked a lot about the effectiveness of videos in this course and I could say you cannot talk enough of it. Videos will be, and actually already are the most effective way to reach and trigger up all the possible emotions among the audience.
We also talked about Thinglink which is an interactive platform/image where you can tag pictures, links, videos etc. into a picture chosen or created by you. It sure sounded like a cool tool to be tested and I found it very effective because of the ability to have an influence on people's emotions by the visual effect. But I'm still wondering how it could be utilized more than just a CV or expressing random feelings. Maybe I should start to use it more often and figure it out! I made an image about, hmmm... living life at the fullest? I don't know, just picked a cool photo from my Facebook albums and started to add tags related to things that just happened to pop in my mind at that particular point. :D Check it our here!
On Monday we had also a privilege to hear about emotions and Emotion Tracker from Camilla Tuominen. As our lecturer Ilkka said before the presentation, Camilla is always herself and that was really easy to see from her appearance. Very lovely and down-to-earth lecture but yet again, I was pretty confused at some points that why we talk about emotions in a lecture of digital business course? Okay, emotions and how we act are highly related to business in all of its form and that is how we build our personal brand. But sometimes it has felt like I have learned more about how to live a good life, how to be highly positive and control my emotions in a digital business course, meanwhile what I should have learnt are the recent skills and know-how to be successful and survive in the field of digital business. But for me, it feels like those lectures and conversations about the actual digital business have been buried under these other subjects about positive thinking, emotions and whatever. Of course they are important things to talk about and once again, are highly related to digital business but sometimes I doubt am I a student of a digital business course or a Jedi academy (actually that would be friggin' awesome, who am I kidding)? Just saying... But don't get me wrong, I really liked Camilla's lecture and found it useful!
On Friday every team presented their achievements with the tasks related to Avionboard and Funking. Ours was to create a video about the Funking app and the feedback that we got from Funking's members was really positive! It was nice to see that having such a fun time making a video could eventually transform to a solid video which has reputedly received positive feedback from other directions too. Well what the hell, it sure was a damn cool video! And all the credit goes to Tommi, our team member, who did all the shooting and editing. Just watch it and be amazed!
I have such positive vibes about this on-going spring right now. School term is coming to its very end and it has included so many good moments and experiences that do I even want it to end? Well, I like holidays too so yeah, I guess I do... some way. Let's just make the most out of the rest of the spring, that is pretty much all I'm thinking about in this moment! See you on next Sunday!
Oh boy, where should I start... Well let's get straight away all the negative things off my chest and move towards the positive ones. Very frustrating week to say the least. I've noticed that for some unknown reason I seem to lack motivation in everything I do. I'm pretty positive that this is just some short downturn for me and maybe next week will already be a lot better. But somehow I just can't find a proper drive to do things and give one hundred percent of myself. Sorry to tell you guys but even writing this blog post is very strained right now and I don't have any desire to make the most out of it. It's not like I'm unhappy and depressed but I just lack motivation to do school things, work tasks etc. properly. I know that we all have these periods in our lives, I recognize my situation and I even know the cure for it. These kind of downside periods can last for a day, for a week or even a year but eventually something else will take its place and in this case, I hope it's a motivation burst for the rest of the spring. I just wanted to unveil my feelings because I think hiding your true feelings is very hypocritical, saying it aggravated way, and also deceiving yourself. Don't act happy if you're not, it's not an obligation in any situation and along with cheating yourself, you deceive others surrounding you by expressing wrong feelings and giving false signals. And even so, don't act super-hyper motivated if you're not. Show your true feelings, talk about them and let other people know about the situation for them to help you with it whether it is depression or lost motivation. Even adjusting tiny things in your life, with a help of other people or not, can help you on the right track but don't hesitate to face the problem valiantly. Just acknowledge it and start to clear a new path to success, happiness or whatever the goal is!
Meanwhile I wrote about my lack of motivation, I searched from YouTube some videos about it and bumped into this one. Very inspiring, encouraging and even funny. If you have a good 8 minutes to spare, I highly recommend it.
One thing that sure wasn't helpful to my lack of motivation considering school assignments and other school stuff was that I got sick AGAIN. Can't believe it, two times sick in just couple of months. Last time I have been struck by this kind of flu invasion in army back in 2014. Really frustrating and due to that, I missed Tuesday's lecture. Luckily this flu wasn't that strong as the earlier one so I managed to get myself in shape for rest of the week and I was able to visit NextLevel event which was held by PCAscala in its premises in Vallila, Helsinki. The event sounded very interesting because it was a meeting forum for exercise students such as personal trainer students and people who are already highly connected and involved in this ''fitness world''. In other words, it was an exercise recruiting trade fair. I have worked my ass out in gym from the early days of upper secondary school so from the get-go I was highly interested in this event and our assignment about it but... meh.
First of all, the assignment's instructions were quite unclear to say the least. We were supposed to come up with some ideas to market this event but we had no idea should we also execute those ideas or not. And then the instruction came to start executing the ideas just a week or something like that before the event. Okay cool but how can we execute an idea where we need free entry to the event's and company's social media channels' profiles and we had also a prize involved in our main idea which included personal trainer services for free etc.. I assume we cannot promise to people in Facebook that if they take part to our social media competition, they will win a wonderful prize from PCAscala, can we? Of course we could have asked about this, I admit that but even if we did ask two weeks earlier, there would have not been enough time to execute our campaign properly. So for next year's event and assignment, more time for planning and more time for executing the ideas.
And about the event itself, it was OK but I can see that it was held for the first time. Not much to do, only look around things and talk to people in a relatively small amount of space (it was basically held in a gym). Fine gym and decoration but too small for an event to be held in. Of course there were not that many visitors either (at least when we were there) but something could be done to little bit spice things up in there (maybe more interesting guest speakers, compelling activities etc.) and if the event at some point hits the motherload, it definitely will need a much bigger place to be held in.
Now I'm off to seek for my missing motivation. I hope you guys are full of it for the upcoming week and see you again on next week's post!
Just got back from work and even though we didn't have that much customers today, it was so exhausting because of the boredom. There could have been even an hour with nothing to do, very frustrating I have to say. But as always, I will give you guys the best possible effort for this blog post too so let's stop this whining and review this past week. Oh and speaking of whining, I have a nice and short video for you to show at the end of this blog post so stay tuned!
I was absent from Monday's lecture because as I mentioned in the previous blog post, we had a cruise to Sweden with our fellow student colleagues from every agency of Laurea. I could write a review about the cruise too but come on, this blog is a school assignment so let's skip that, shall we? After a two-day purgatory (yeah it's Easter, what did you expect?) I managed to get to the second lecture of the week on Thursday and I must say, I have never been that pleased to get to the school as I was after that lecture. Antti Haapsaari. This guy was the real deal. An hour just flew by when he talked to us about his architecture firm Kanttia 2 and how he has had projects even in Egypt with very powerful people as co-workers. I went totally speechless by how compelling and inspiring Antti's lecture was. The best guest speaker easily by far and I will probably remember his tips and thoughts after years from now because the way he presented his thoughts gave me a feeling that this guy knows what he's talking about. And addition to that, he's very enthusiastic about what he does and didn't hesitate to share his experiences with us. And working with some very powerful people in Arab world just supported the image of very successful and inspiring person that I got from him. Simply awesome.
Had to borrow a picture taken by my group member (thanks Miikka) because I want you guys to remember this face, a truly franchise player. And look at that shiny blazer, damn...
One thing that really caught my ear was how Antti talked about the importance of relationships in the field of business. And let's not just focus on customer relationships because there are several important relationships in business that have to be taken under consideration. For example when you're applying for a job, you have only one chance to make a good first impression to your possibly future boss. Do you want to express yourself as a trustworthy guy to whom your future boss could easily hand over some important responsibilities or do you want to give an image about a guy who probably fuc... pardon me, lets your boss down with disloyal acts? Not a hard choice I assume. Of course you have to always be yourself and nothing else but building relationships start from the very bottom and proceeds piece by piece to the unbreakable bond (I should be a writer...). The relationships with customers or co-worker or whatever don't have to be some blood bonds, sharing the deepest secrets among each other but simply a relationship where the other part can have the certain trust in you that you will do your best in a reliable way, no matter what it was. Make your boss believe in you, make your customers believe in you but most importantly, believe in yourself first. You can't form good customer relationships or business associations if you don't have the faith in yourself and your skills.
On Thursday we also got another assignment in which we are trying to come up with some innovative ideas for our student colleagues' team Funking. Funking's idea is to provide an ultimate tool for ultimate fanning. It's like a Snapchat style platform but with a lot more content and elements that create a close connection between fans and their idols. I really hope that we can come up with some good ideas to present for them because I think the idea of Funking is actually very cool and of course I'm hoping that they could be able to launch their idea eventually to the big leagues, so to say.
As I mentioned earlier, I bumped into a very cool and inspiring video about the key to being more attractive. In other words, the key to get the above-mentioned relationships. I think this video encapsulates well what it takes to be successful in business and in life in general. And believe me, it's not rocket science. With some little adjusting you can make yourself attractive in a way to build some relationships, achieve your goals and live a happy life. I could say that for most people, all they have to do is just loosen it up a bit. "Don't obsess over things you can't control. Focus on what you can do!"
I think there's enough for this week so see you on next Sunday!
So what's the haps guys? For me this week has been by far one of the most funniest ones in this year. On Monday we presented our videos to NoBot representatives and feedback was really positive and supportive. All groups had made a great job with their videos and these kind of assignments are always fun to execute because of the chance for some creativity and presenting your thoughts in a form of a video. We didn't win any prizes but well, it just left us even more will and desire to succeed in the upcoming assignments! And of course, congratulations to the winning teams. We were also given another assignments by Mazda which was pretty exciting for us considering the fact that Mazda is "quite" a big company to do assignment for! But more about that later on the post.
On Wednesday we went to watch football again. It was the second leg of Champions League bout between Arsenal and barcelona (yeah, I wrote it with a minuscule) but once again the second mentioned came up big and dropped Arsenal off the competition. But next year will be ours... Then we ordered couple more beers and tried to figure out how we would present our presentation to Mazda representatives. The task was about Mazda 2 car and our mission was to make a PP-presentation about some new innovative ways to market the car. Target group was 25-44 years old people so there was a quite of a challenge to execute the assignment well considering the fact that the biggest purchasing power happens to be among the 50+ year old people. But we came up with an idea to focus the marketing to radio because cars are usually the most common place to listen to radio, especially in the mornings. We chose to have Radio SuomiPop as our channel for marketing and particularly their morning show Aamulypsy which is hosted by Jaajo Linnonmaa. The idea was to involve Jaajo also to the marketing by advertising through him the car on Aamulypsy as well as on Jaajo's social media channels. He's probably the funniest man in Finland at this point so it goes hand-in-hand with the Mazda 2's slogan ''one of the funniest cars to drive''. Presentation went pretty well and it was nice to hear some god damn CRITIC too and not only praising comments. Constructive critic is always important to avoid the same mistakes next time.
Unfortunately I couldn't make to the lecture after those presentations because I had to jump on a train with a destination being Tampere. There I was joined by my friend who is living in Pirkkala and we went to see a concert by one of our favorite bands, Hollywood Undead. Such a fun night and it sure felt at work on the next day.
Had a blast
I heard that we were given an assignment by PCA-scala gym on Thursday's lecture. As a hardcore trainer and wannabe bodybuilder I immediately turned out to be really excited about this task. Our mission is to come up with some innovative social media marketing solutions for them to be used in marketing of their upcoming fair day event. We've had so many of these social media marketing related tasks so it should be easy for us to execute it perfectly, shouldn't it? And because of the fact that it is related to gym training makes it even more interesting.
That's about it. Sorry guys but I have nothing else interesting to share with you or reflect my thoughts on something ultimate controversial subject this time but as the title says, this week was a bit of resetting my brain so that I can make the most out of the rest of the spring and all the new challenges and possibilities it hopefully will bring to us. And well the resetting will continue on Sunday when we are going on a cruise, heading towards our lovely neighbor Sweden. Might the a bit moist resetting but well, sometimes a good bunch of fun will help you get through the hard times in the past and ahead! I will end this post with one of my favorite quotes which shows the fact that even sometimes it feels like life is hitting hard straight up to your face, just shake it off and keep moving forward. Nothing is too serious to be harbored in our minds forever, just reset yourself and the next day will come with countless of new possibilities. We'll see again on next weekend!
Hello guys! As I'm writing this I've just finished my eight hour working day and yet another school assignment so apologies in advance if there are some typos, misspellings etc. because I'm very fuzzy at this point. But hard work always pays off, that motivates to get me through all of these school assignments by the deadlines and getting my heavy bum to work every week. And a few prizes for my toil are coming next week in forms of a gig and cruise to the lovely western neighbor Sweden. Work hard, play hard as the crappy song says.
Damn, this is some serious background image stuff.
Digital business course contained a lot of law issues this week. Very crucial stuff but personally my interests and law issues have a quite of a distance between them so paying attention for a whole lecture was once again a bit difficult. Maybe some additional group work or illustrative examples could little bit ''spice up'' the lectures? Traditional lectures are a good way to adduce all the necessary things in detail but something to help students get more involved to the teaching process could help the actual learning process as well.
Speaking of involving, we filmed a video for NoBot Oy which was a task given to us on last Friday when I was in the Netherlands. We had to reflect our thoughts in a form of a video about caring and involving in workplace. Very important issue to deal with in today's work life because I've heard from my fiends about their horrible bosses (good movie by the way) who don't seem to care at all about their employees and that also affects on the general atmosphere in workplace. It's hard to get into the group where everybody are crestfallen and instead of getting praises and credit for their work, they get a shitload of complaints for every single mistake. It pisses me off, even writing about this makes me furious and feel bad for my friends to have that kind of experiences from work life. Everyone make mistakes and it's part of the whole process to eventually learn from them. Do these so called ''leaders'' think that Steve Jobs for example didn't make any mistake in his way to the top? Please... Just noticed by the way that the image I posted on above is quite illustrative what comes to this subject. Good background image stuff indeed, goes with everything.
I can fortunately say that I've always had good bosses and team leaders wherever I have worked in. Maybe the best example to tell you guys about, are my experiences from Celectus Oy. The company is all about selling. Its main agenda is to provide sales know-how services and train the best salesmen in Finland. I was part of a sales team in metropolitan area which provided the best energy solutions for customers and companies. We were competing in Leijonaliiga which was like a regular sports league type platform to compete in selling against other localities. We played ''matches'' against other teams from different localities and the team who had more sales at the end of the day was the winner and earned a certain amount of points that helped them in the league table. After 3 month ''regular season'' came the playoffs which culminated to the finals that were held in some trade fair which happened to be on at that time. In a nutshell, Leijonaliiga made sales job ten times more interesting.
It's self-evident that in that kind of job you have to have a good superior who can lead the team as well as the individuals in it. My two team leaders had such a big impact and influence on me which will probably carry on ahead in the future. They genuinely cared about me, not only as an employee but as a person, as individual human-being. That alone made me feel that okay, these guys really want to get to know me and get the best out of me. Because they knew me as a person even at some level, they knew how to train me individually by concentrating to my strengths and bolster my weaknesses. We also had training as a team and we all got to know each other well and were like old buddies among ourselves. This is what caring and involving is all about. I'll put our NoBot video and Leijonaliiga's video (some free marketing for my old employer company, you're welcome) here in below.
On Thursday we had a second lecture about law issues and also a very compelling presentation about marketing research. But what really stood out for me the most was a brief speech by our lecturer Anna who talked about finding and creating your happiness. Nice thoughts which sure got me thinking about how I've managed to create my happiness and what are the cornerstones in building it. There was also something about the positive thinking leading to positive things which I mentioned in my previous post too but I started to wonder in a little bit deeper level on that and some other things about happiness. Does it work for everyone, thinking positively and positive things just come one after another as an outcome? Though I believe that there is a obvious connection between them, does it even work for me? At least not always. I might wake up to a sunny day and think positively from the very first glance towards the sunlight but then a few minutes later a car drives by and splashes water onto me. Yeah, really positive feeling about that too. Maybe not the best example but maybe you get the point. We have billions of people in this planet and it's quite obvious that some things work better for others. And maybe that is what Anna meant by saying ''you create your happiness''. Only you know what makes you happy, hell, even it's to think negatively about everything then go for it. Better die happy than bitter about not reaching the happiness. Pursuits of happiness, there are many and finding them may take from a few years to a few decades but I believe that when you reach the complete happiness, that will be the most wonderful thing in the world with no comparison. And it might come already on next day, just open your mind to even the smallest things in life and let the flow carry you wherever it will.
So deep... But hey, what can you do? See ya next week with new deep thoughts!
