Chapter 13 : What is happiness?

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!

Chapter 12 : Positive vibes

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!

Chapter 11 : Searching for lost motivation

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!