July 29th, 2021 | Dreamers Gonna Dream. On Personal Goals Baked During the Pandemic.

The Pendulum Scheme.

Anyways, I finally had time to daydream and think about what I really wanted to do with my life. Of course, I already thought about this before. I had some vision, yet, it was not crystalized up to this point. Namely, as I mentioned in the podcast episode for the PhD Career Stories, I had a vision of working and living in a “pendulum” scheme of sorts . 

Namely, spending the first two weeks at home, resting, chilling, and creating new content, and the last two weeks away: giving workshops, teaching, attending meetups and conferences, and travelling. I imagined home as some wooden house at the end of a forest in some quiet place. And everything would be fine about that vision. if not the thing that was missing from the picture. People.

Personal Goals That Our Culture Conditions.

And then, one thought hit me hard. I was culturally conditioned to think that a semi-detached house with a husband, two kids, a dog, and a decent car in the garage is what I should be building my life around. Just because it is what everybody else does. 

In our culture, even multi-millionaires like Mark Cuban who have all the resources to do whatever they want, choose to lock themselves behind the tall fences of their mansions and cultivate this traditional lifestyle. No one really seems to question this default lifestyle. No one wonders if this choice is even optimal for them.

So, at some point, it became obvious to me that I need to break out of this thought scheme. And, start looking for my optimal lifestyle. If the outcome is the usual path that most people take, fine. If not, fine too. 

And after long deliberation, it came to my mind that for some reason, I don’t seem to age the way most people do. Namely, I’m not in a need of a quiet, secluded place to age at all. Rather the opposite. I’m looking for inspiration, namely for people who can teach me something, and preferably people in large amounts. And then, my vision for what I actually wanted to achieve started to finally clarified. 

The Memories From Grad School.

I started thinking of creating a place where creativity can foster without any limits. It brought me memories of a summer school I had been to in the summer of 2012. The school took place in the small village of Będlewo close to Poznań. We were locked there for four weeks in a group of thirty students, together with circa ten faculty members. 

For the whole month, we attended lectures, enjoyed group sports, and late night conversations about life. And, we worked on our individual projects in the scope of Computational Neuroscience. We had all meals together in one large dormitory. And, despite the fact that we had access to the Internet, we didn’t need to worry about anything in the outer world.

It felt a bit like the Hogwarts of today. You just lock yourself with other passionates like you, dive into your work, and enjoy the adventure. No wonder that many projects initiated at this summer school were later developed into full-fledged publications. And, many of the faculty members present at the school hired some of the students in their own labs. 

Well, there were some downsides as well… According to my calculations, more than 1/3 of the summer school participants split from their partners during these four weeks. But that’s yet another story.

How Creativity Happens.

Anyways, this concept of stimulating creativity by putting creative people together and limiting the influence of all the worries from the outer world stuck in my mind. And especially today, when all business and social life are moving online, people become isolated and lonely more than ever. And even when they meet in person, they lurk on their phones every two minutes and consume news (or rather, trashy snippets of news) all day long.

The Distance That Blocks Creativity.

Plus, the distance works against creativity. In 2017, I visited my sister in Silicon Valley and I spent a month there. Instead of going to museums or to the beach, I was going to startup meetups and observing the working culture in the Bay Area. One thing that stroke me was that the distances between the towns were cruel. I couldn’t even get to more than one meetup a day. To get from one meetup in Palo Alto to another one in Sunnyvale or Mountain View, I had to spend an hour (or more) in transit.

For the same reason, people could not work for hand in hand; every startup had an office in yet another “garage” or a startup accelerator in another town. Founders were mostly bumping into each other at meetups and conferences. How much creativity and collaboration can you foster if you have to make so much active effort every time you want to meet?

Enjoy The Silence.

It also became obvious to me that creativity requires silence, at least to a certain extent. In the past few years, almost all the creative ideas I’ve got, happened at a sauna in a secluded place in the woods. I was going there to rest and to completely disconnect myself from the outer world for a few hours. To spend time in the green and switch off my brain. 

Paradoxically, this is where my brain worked best, and that’s not an accident. It was proven by many studies that disconnecting from the outer world and practices such as mindfulness, significantly increase the capacity of your working memory and your overall brain power after just a few days of practice.

Not Just Another House in the Suburbs.

So, eventually, it came to my mind that living in a semi-detached house in a good quarter of the city, behind a tall fence, is not what I could really call home. If I could choose any way of living, I would rather build a huge house, or rather, a facility, where there is enough room for 40-50 people to stay around so that startups can come over and crush for a few weeks in the early phases of their development, and where individuals can come to launch their careers.

A place where the startup culture of Silicon Valley meets the East, and self-development meets business development. Some green place, where you’ve got anything that you need, including the garden, and the wood, a sports pitch, a sauna, a gym, a movie lounge, a catering. And, where you can focus on what you actually do. And, on the people around you. And, build, build, build new solutions.

The Evergreen.

And, I see this house as the most chilled but at the same time, the most vibrant [private] house of all time. A house with glass walls and a lot of sunshine. And, people who want to do something with their lives, and build projects that kick ass (whatever that means). I gave this house the working name “The Evergreen” as I would like it to be green, both in terms of the surroundings and the functionalities.

I actually wanted to be an architect as a kid; as a 14-year-old I learned how to create architectonic projects of buildings for one of the classes at school, and I was quite good at that. I was helping out with construction work when my parents were building a house in 1996. Plus, I did a lot of construction work around my own house in recent years. It was a ruin when I bought it a few years ago. 

Since then, every summer I have been spending a week or two working around the house to make it livable. So, the thought that I could design and build some facility like this, and do it all on budget, didn’t scare me at all. If someone can pull this off, it is me.

How To Build a Successful Accelerator.

To put it bluntly: I don’t know! Of course, you want to see other people’s success, but I think my priority would be to foster success without putting pressure on projects. If I had the freedom to do it my way, I would do the following.

I’d choose the right projects proposed by people who think big and who know what they are doing (rather than just talking) and why they are doing it – so that they will make things happen. Then, I’d like for the attendees to forget about everyday stresses and enjoy the experience of working in a group on something they believe in, hand in hand with other startups in more of a Hackathon-style rather than scrum-style fashion. After all, it’s always about finding the right people with ideas that hold water and giving them the ground to grow. And sometimes, the best you can do is to let them do what they are best at.

What Is This All For?

And, I’d like them to remember these few weeks spent in the Evergreen as the crazy yet great times that they will vividly remember 10 or 20, or even 30 years later just as I remember my summer school from 2012. 

To stimulate collaboration between projects and limit the pressure of getting the MVP on day one. To make them feel at home rather than at work or in a competition. Arrange a bonfire sometimes. Or go to a Tiësto concert in a group. Or even jump on a plane to Ibiza for a weekend (it is literally 20 Euro per seat) I’d like the participants to still call each other after many years and call each other a friend. 

To use some tricks that I learned while doing neuroscience for 8 years and teaching people about careers for 4 years to help them better determine what they are (individually) good at, and stimulate their creativity. To pull the very best out of them. 

To support them. To invite smart people from various disciplines to help build projects, build brands and communities, and promote them (for this reason, a driving distance to a large city like Amsterdam and to the Schiphol airport would be a plus)

To start a Youtube channel shot/streamed from the very place. To show the progress and the teams – with their struggles, mutual support, wins, losses, laughter, and tears. To inspire other fresh founders overseas. 

I feel that all together, this might lead to really groundbreaking results. I have a gut feeling that such an accelerator would sustain itself even if it was only based on voluntary donations (in company shares) from the participating startups.

Mum Will Always Be a Mum.

Of course, I didn’t hesitate to talk to my Mum about all this. She first yelled at me and said that I was outrageous, especially given my age. She laughed and scoffed at me. She asked, “Why aren’t you just normal? Why don’t you want to settle somewhere, establish a family, and just be happy?” I said, “I didn’t say I don’t want to. But I can only plan what I have an influence on.” I don’t have any influence on whether someone loves me or not. I can only influence how I live and what type of infrastructure I build around myself.

And frankly speaking, building such an infrastructure is a win-win. I cannot even imagine a better environment to raise a kid than a place where everyone builds something night and day. And if I have no family, then I won’t even have time to worry about it, as there will be way too many things to take care of on a daily basis, and too many people around to ever feel alone. So, I will sort of win my life regardless of the circumstances. What to even worry about?

My Mum sounded shocked and disgruntled. But the very next day, she called me saying, “You know that you will need to hire a chef and a cleaning person, right?” Now we are talking.

Why To Even Talk About Your Personal Development Plans?

I was wondering what would be the consequences of openly speaking about my personal development and my goals for the future. We are conditioned to think that other people are evil wolves who will steal or squash our dreams. And yet, as it turns out, it works quite the opposite way. 

Namely, when you tell people what your purpose is, instead of throwing logs to your feet, they will push you forward. They will be more inclined to buy into your products and services as they can see a tangible goal that they would like to support. They start thinking with you and share contacts and solutions. Things start happening.

Your Dreams Can Be Cheaper Than You Think.

Plus, I made a few discoveries ever since. Initially, I thought that my dream would be completely unrealistic, as, financially, I would need an unrealistic amount of 5+ million EUR to even pull it off. But I browsed a little and discovered that in fact, I “only” need 1.5 million for the start. In the Netherlands, there is a high disproportion between the prices in square meters in the city and in the countryside. People fight for good spots in the city centres of major cities. They are willing to pay 500k+ EUR for a 3-room apartment in Amsterdam, or 1 million+ EUR for a 100 m2 house with a microscopic plot. 

But to my astonishment, despite the fact that the Netherlands is a small country and that you can get from the countryside to the city in 20 minutes by car, the houses in the countryside are disproportionally cheap, see, for example, this one – beautiful mansion, 700m2, 1,400,000 EUR. And now, I can put a more realistic price tag on my dreams. I know I would need to raise 2-2.5 million for the property itself and a bankroll for the maintenance/building of new facilities. And that’s much more realistic in the scope of the next few years.