When the clutch of his Ferrari 250 GT failed, Ferruccio Lamborghini had enough. The Italian, rich from building tractors, had already returned four times that same year to the factory in Maranello. With his fifth return, he stepped to the office of the twenty year older Enzo Ferrari, to tell about the woes of the 250 GT and give a few tips on how to improve the clutch. Enzo Ferrari laughed it away, and told Ferruccio to stick with building tractors.

Insulted Ferruccio left, but instead of moaning, he decided to build his own sport cars, yielding a threatening bull on the front, instead of the prancing horse. The creations of Lamborghini where quickly admired, with the fine Miura as pinnacle.

The story of the Italian car-manufacturer is iconic for finding possibilities in displeasure. It’s what Thomas Edison once said: “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”

There’s plenty of other examples. Daniel Ek began Spotify to counter the illegal downloading of music: “Better than piracy”, said the original slogan. Blendle hated paywalls, Kanishk Parashar and Karthik Balakrishnan were tired to carry multiple cards in their wallets, and thus promptly invented ‘Coin’. The team behind Peerby didn’t want to buy several products which they would only use sporadically. And Bitcoin is a form of protest as well, against the might of banks.

Vandebron, where I fondly work, started from discontent, too. The interest of big energy corporations were simply not aligned with customers, producers, or the climate. They answered the rising demand for green energy, not by creating more generating capacity, but simply by buying foreign certificates, thus officially greenwashing grey energy.

Utilities are fundamentally unsuited to providing renewable energy because they have legacy investments in fossil fuels, which they need to recover. They also have an interest in selling more units, which isn’t good from an efficiency point of view.

It’s typical for established companies to conform in maintaining the status quo, whether it’s the energy-market, music- or car-industry. Yet, luckily, there’s plenty of innovations who break that status quo and disrupt multinationals.

Pivotally, to put something in motion, you’ve to make choices,
whether it’s a Ferrari, or green energy.

The past five years I’ve spent a lot of time blogging. Yesterday, during the fourteenth edition of Pancart, I got to share some of the things I’ve learned from that, with an momentous bunch of people, from Switzerland, Namibia, South-Africa, India, Hungary and France. In Amsterdam.

This is my presentation from yesterday, in, obviously, a blog post.

The first thing I’ve learned from blogging is this:

Blogging is a tool to develop yourself

A town called Hattem.

I grew up in Hattem, and for the majority of my youth, this was my world: a tiny town in the east of the Netherlands, where 10.000 people live.

I was average, I wasn’t popular at school, I wasn’t the smartest kid in the class and I generally had little idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Even during my puberty, it felt as if most of my contemporaries were way ahead of me. I had idols, like sportstars, writers, singers, yet not a clear sense of direction for my own. I was good at drawing, though, so after high school I went to a graphic design school, one where I learned little.

Me discussing design with the co-founder of deviantArt, Angelo Sotira.

Then, as a mediocre designer, I went on to do a six-months internship in Australia. That period of life changed me, as it opened my eyes and learned me that Hattem isn’t so big. I got in touch with people very different than me, and pivotally, I started blogging.

First it was a mere travelblog to keep the family at home updated. Even though I wrote very little before my time in Australia, blogging felt really natural to me. I had no plans for it, in terms of career. I mean, I was a mediocre graphic designer. What am I going to do with blogging?

I started to process all the things that where happening to me. As the six months progressed in Australia, I started having new thoughts, opinions, just from writing articles.

The articles I wrote in early 2009 are rather silly, but they’ve been an essential ingredient in my coming of age.

Here’s an article from that time, where I wonder aloud, asking: “To what extent is the pursuit of one’s own happiness about making other people happy too?”. In writing the article I found my answer.

That’s the thing with blogging. Once you put your mind to writing an article, you have to put your thinking on paper. And so, you’re bound to channel your mental confetti, raising your self-awareness and forcing yourself to understand the subject well enough to express it clearly enough to people that don’t.

Blogging became a tool for me, one of self-education.

Einstein once said: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
If Einstein lived today, I’m pretty sure he’d be a blogger. In fact, during his life he published hundreds of books, essays and articles.

When I returned in the Netherlands, I continued blogging, adding several topics like gaming, Formula 1 and advertising. This grew into a habit, yet still I wondered what I would ever do with this, which brings me to my next learning.

The second thing I’ve learned from blogging:

You should never accept the notion you can’t do what you’d like to do (that is, after you find out what that is).

This sounds cheesy, but it’s very meaningful. Maybe you have some hidden dreams like me. I’m not talking about your career goals, like “I really want to sell X more Y in time Z”, or “I want to move up the corporate ladder”, or “In 2015 I want to get a 10% raise”. Those aren’t dreams.

Maybe you want to be a worldclass uncycle-cyclist, or a you want to repair teddybears for a living. Dig deep and you know what you’d like to do if you really had the choice. Following those dreams leads to happiness, as you’ll do what you love, whereas liking what you do is slightly different.

For me it went like this: When I got home from my Australian internship, I continued graphic design and blogging. Then, Jonas Kamber started Lookslikegooddesign.com which we continued together, until I fully took over, to later change the domain to LLGD.NET.

With this blog, I didn’t have any high hopes, yet it opened my eyes. This was the first time I didn’t just blog for myself, but people actually started to read it. Every day, thousands of designers would view what I selected for them. Time went by, and thousands of articles later, I see myself as an experienced blogger with the confidence to see the qualities I can bring.

And so, since 2014, I work as a writer and blogger at Vandebron.
Not bad, from a mediocre designer, right?

Like Steve Jobs said, it’s about connecting the dots. Looking forward you don’t really know how life pans and plans out for you, but you have to trust that looking backwards, the dots connect.
For me they sure did.

This is also a recurring theme with the designblog, where I featured so many oddities, like this one, a French couple with an unusual love for bending paper, yet somehow they made their job from it. If they can make money from making paper flowers, you may want to rethink just how weird your dreams are.

It took me a long time to find out what I really wanted to do, and then it took me another long time to realise that I could actually go and do something with that.

I’ve learned dreams come without expiry date. There’s lots of people who, later in life, found out what they really wanted to do, but the best example is an acorn tree. Some of them don’t produce any acorns, until they’re fifty years old.

The third thing I’ve learned blogging:

If it doesn’t come natural, it probably never comes

I’ve seen many people who, out of nothing, decided to start a blog and frantically start to post poems, recipes or whatever. These people never stick. They start with five posts on the first day, then it drops to three, then they post one blogpost on the third day, until no other post ever comes.

This doesn’t at all apply just to blogging, it applies to all new habits.

There’s a very true saying about diets that sheds light on this:
“The best diet is the one you stick to.”

The fourth thing I’ve learned from blogging:

Creating trumps consuming, especially when it benefits others

While spending my leisure time, I’m always trying to spend 50% on consuming media, the other half on creating it. It’s like the old mantra of writers:
“Writers write lots, but read even more.”

For me, it’s 50-50, but I know some people who spend like 99% consuming media, and 1% (or none) of their time creating. This sounds dramatic, but it’s true: creating gives meaning to my life.

It helps to be conscious about your consuming-creating balance. It’s what caused me to get rid of the television and start new habits (habits that sticked).

Even though I believe that blogging is a mechanism to train myself, the most pride I get from articles that serve to inspire others. That’s what I tried to do with LLGD.NET. I never featured work of mine, but highlighted that of others, and gave them a podium.

Also, with articles like ‘Things to learn in a weekend‘, ‘Write‘ and this one I hope to inspire. From earlier articles, I received get e-mails from people who indeed started something new, slightly nudged by an article by mine, and asked me to check it out and give some feedback and encouragements.

Here’s the thing:
You can be wicked at capturing the flag with some shooter game at the Xbox, but all by itself I doubt it’ll give you a meaningful life (unless you’re the best in the world). You’ll feel a lot better about yourself when you’re creating things that benefit others, especially when you grow older: it gives meaning to your life.

The fifth thing I’ve learned from blogging:

The world is a tiny-tiny place

Even though I learned the world is bigger than Hattem, it’s still freaking small. You don’t need anything, not my advice, not anything, to go and do what you like and then share it with thousands if not millions of people.

There’s so many people out there who want to do things, but never start. “I’m still saving for a professional camera”, or “If I only had more time, then I would really start!” These are just artificial excuses to postpone. The right time never comes. With the internet, a smartphone and a laptop, you have all the tools available to you to reach the whole world.

For instance, I don’t know anyone who plays the ocarina flute, but let’s say you do. With the internet, you can connect with thousands of people who also play this. You can even go blog about it. If you’d like, you could be a top ocarina-blogger. I’m not saying you should, you can also take it to YouTube, Spotify, or anything.

I’ve met many people who do or make amazing work, but never take the effort to share it. The world is at hands reach, so reach out and let everyone know what you do.

The sixth and final thing I’ve learned from blogging (well I’ve learned more things but that’s what I’m sharing with you here):

You can only have half the things you want from life

This concludes this whole blogpost. Last december I decided to stop updating LLGD.NET. The blog started as a hobby, yet over time grew into something that felt like work. Creating around three articles every day took up so much time, while I had so much other plans of what I wanted to do with my life. After years of intensive blogging, it really started to drain my energy.

So what I want to leave you guys with is this:
The bad news, is that in life you can only have half the things you want.
The good news, however, is that you get to choose which half.

Mid­-February this year, I joined the startup Vandebron as a copywriter, two months before its launch. The small team was working at full speed to meet the deadline for launching the world’s first online peer­2­peer energy marketplace. In joining I had little time to learn, so I figured out the things I didn’t fully understand about the energy market as I wrote them.

Upon launching, we were looking for new suppliers to sell their energy via our site.

A foodstore in Amsterdam seemed like a good partner for us, since their target audience matched ours. I
set out to find a farmer that supplied groceries to them, and could potentially supply electricity via us. I took the list from their website and googled all their farmers. Most of the time, it was very difficult to find the addresses, but going through various sites, such as the Chamber of Commerce, I found the location for each of them. Then, in Google Streetview, I virtually walked around the neighbourhood to see if one of them had a roof full of solar panels or a windmill on their land.

This way, I visited some fifty suppliers of food. All of them had big farms, one of them had a windmill too.

I could just see the windmill’s tip above the trees.

Via the Yellow Pages I found their phonenumber and gave them a call. Last month, I finally got to visit them, and now they’ve been added to our website, and they’re selling energy straight to consumers.

Gerard & Monique on Vandebron

Changing the world via Google Streetview
To me, this case is exemplary for working at a startup. Every day forces me to inventive. Nobody before, in the whole world, had to write about an online peer­2­peer energy marketplace and all its assets. There are no standardisations here: strategies and plannings are volatile and my job description is only a hint of what I actually do.

Copywriter aside, I’ve been a graphic designer, social media manager, journalist, photographer, relationship manager and accountant. I’ve folded invitations, lifted crates and decorated the pressroom. The whole team worked outside of their responsibilities in favour of the overal result. We’re not some huge corporate company where for every task, there is an employee.

The thing is, I don’t per se like folding invitations, yet it becomes very rewarding in the context of a startup, especially one where you’re working for a greater good.

Last Sunday I was at the People’s Climate March, in Amsterdam. I really enjoyed the songs, the insights, the jokes, and it was fantastic to see so many people committed for a better climate. I’m committed as well, although I don’t bring banners.

Saving the world should be fun, otherwise it’s not going to happen. Calling what’s wrong isn’t fun: ‘fossil fuels are bad’, ‘sea levels are rising’, ‘the poles are melting’, ‘millions around the world have no clean drinking water’. Sustainable options are more than just alternative to this.

Can’t we look at great things and admire them for what they are? That’s where I get my energy from. I don’t go to work every day, thinking about polluted oceans, rather clean air, clean oceans, more jobs, healthy people and biodiversity. Showing people we can get energy from the sun and the wind, will hopefully leave the other – fossil – energy in the ground.

When a friend, relative or complete stranger asks me about Vandebron, I’m not going to mention the amount of particles CO2 in our atmosphere, neither do I communicate through a megaphone. I’d rather talk about how awesome our farmers are, how I met some of them in person, how I visited their lands, how I went home with potatoes from their land, how I visited their windmill, how I had their homemade cake. How much fun is that?

Improving the world and eating cake, that’s good enough for me.

I’m not religious. I don’t go to clubs. I don’t like patriotism and I don’t like people who are lazy or inconsiderate. I don’t smoke and I think watching television is a waste of time. Yet of all things, most often I need to explain why I don’t eat meat.

There’s a stigma on vegetarianism, as if – like a trojan horse riding into society – it brings a fundamental human right into violation. And so my apparition is often met with peers who feel compelled to tell me of reasons why humans should eat meat, or essentially, why I should eat meat. (On the contrary, eating fastfood is perfectly fine and widely accepted, as in popular culture, bacon is idolised and vegetarians are easily mocked.)

Traditionally the product of hunting, meat symbolises masculinity: it was a man’s job to bring the meat home. And there are reasons plentiful to eat it. Our digestive system, teeth to end, is omnivorous. Humans have always eaten meat. There’s plenty of nutrients in meat, and there’s the argument that it simply tastes very good. Since eating meat is part of culture – at least mine – not eating meat is inconvenient. Friends who prepped a meal including meat – not knowing I’m a vegetarian – have to be politely refused of serving their dish, and not all restaurants serve proper vegetarian dishes, if any at all. Another argument is that, although few practise this, you can also be a conscious eater of meat, buying only from ethical and sustainable sources.

With all this, being a vegetarian seems rather absurd.

However, for everything we do there’s a reason not to. You shouldn’t drink milk – or alcohol. You shouldn’t smoke, you shouldn’t spend that much time on Facebook. You shouldn’t check your phone just before you go to bed and you probably shouldn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, or watch its trailer. Yet we do it anyway.

Many things we do make no sense to others. Yet the larger point I’m trying to make is that, all by itself, life is an oxymoron.

By omitting meat from my diet, I started appreciating all kinds of other foods, such as sprouts, rhubarb and millet. I didn’t know fungus was so good. I didn’t know having no meat can be freeing: I feel satisfied after a meal, not guilty, and I feel healthier than ever before.

In short: it made my life better.
Absurd, right?

If not for the essential difference that it is a lot smarter, strategic lawn would be a lot like normal lawn mowing.

With strategic lawn moving, instead of mindlessly mowing the closest patch of grass available, you would pause for a moment to look over the about-to-be-cut lawn to analyse your battlefield. Think about the path you’re about to follow. Make a plan. See if you can avoid doing some parts twice.
You’ll also want to prevent yourself from trampling the unmowed grass with your feet before you even get to the cutting part, as such a thing can never be strategic, and firmly belongs to normal lawn mowing.

Strategic lawn mowing isn’t a practise known to the public. Unjustified, I insist. Strategic lawn mowing is iconic to the vortex called life.

Many things – lawn mowing included – are found boring by the many people. Yet, would we surrender to our serendipitious whims and vagaries, we would accept the notion of boringness.
I for one, do not.

Life isn’t just about the result. Your lawn will look much the same whether mowed strategically or stupid. But – as often – how and why are more important than what.

Challenge yourself and everything around you, including the lawn.
And while you’re at it; enjoy the chase.

Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.2 billion and Skype for $8.5 billion. Google spent on $3.2 billion on Nest and $12.5 billion on Motorola. Facebook splashed $1 billion on Instagram, $2 billion on Oculus and $19 billion on Whatsapp. 

Brands like Starbucks, Red Bull and Oreo have well beyond 35 million followers on Facebook each, a platform we tend to call social media. Each year, brands spend $450 billion on advertising, while Mark Woerde rightfully mentions that only $6 billion would bring malaria under control.

Cities built 40-story buildings whether their citizens like the view or not, and the world’s richest 85 people have more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion.

Brazilian favelas showing the shrill contrast between wealth and poverty.

Bayern Munich’s president Uli Hoeneß evaded $40 million in taxes. Gareth Bale was sold to Real Madrid for $100 million, while the top Formula 1 drivers earn near $30 million each year.

Meanwhile, fans of F1 are flown in by cattle-class to get a glimpse of the cars from the distance called General Admission. As one reader on Autosport.com mentions:
“You’ve got to be in the aristocracy class to buy an actual seat.”

Arsenal fans protesting against the $1650 dollar price for a seasonal ticket, by far the highest in the English Premier League.

Sport’s key players have become commodities fit for television, detached from the fans. If there ever was a glue, it’s now gone.

The theme here is the lack – or complete absence – of human measure, in the age of social media.

We need to ask ourselves whether we like this financial vandalism.
I know I don’t. We’re all poorer because of it, even if it makes men like Ivan Gazidis richer.

Yesterday was the warmest 8th March ever in the Netherlands, and today the temperature rose even further.

Fluctuation happens every year, but thirteen of the fourteen warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century, and we’re only fourteen years in.

If you want to show your ignorance, there’s no better way to express your love to global warming in a tweet.
So for a livestream of stupidity, click here (Dutch tweets).

Amsterdamsche Courant, January 10, 1840.

Here’s a close-up of the newspaper I found in an antique shop in Leiden. It’s from the Tenth of January, 1840, and printed with movable type, so you can really feel the words pressed into the paper.

A lot of manual labour was put into making this newspaper, without all the eases of publishing we have today. It does make me wonder, whether the things we write today will still be read in 174 years.