I took a break from writing daily. It has been a great time of self reflection and spending quality time with my 3 month old baby girl Maya Teresa. It has been rewarding to the core to be able to do this. The whole month of November, I was on Paternity leave wherein for the first time in my life I was actually being paid from the Icelandic State. I have lived in Iceland for almost 10 years now and I have never applied for unemployment or availed any benefit that is part of the social fabric of Iceland. I am extremely grateful that I live in a country that actually allows Parents to do this.
Enough about my paternity leave. I have also got hooked into Tim Ferriss’s blog, podcast and everything else this crazy learning machine does. If you are not a follower but have a deep desire to le
arn and be on the edge of things, Tim is your man. I have bounced from listening to his podcasts about Psychedelic drugs, Nutrition, Strength training, Should you start a startup, interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Robbins, Dr. Peter Diamantes etc I am just blow away with all the new information that has been blasting through my nerve endings. I highly recommend any startup founder or anyone really to get hooked on Tim, he is incredible at kindling your desire to Learn, Improve and make a difference. That sentence is a great segway to get to the topic of this blog post. I finished teaching “How to Start a Startup” class in Reykjavik University. It was extremely rewarding to get back into a classroom to teach, learn, engage and discuss. The reason I decided to teach this class is that I wanted to scale my mentoring. I have been a mentor, investor, startup coach and Chief Influence Officer to founders and I noticed that I am done doing things that did not scale (one of the learnings in my class lecture), which is working with one Founding team at a time. It was time for me to scale the learning and have a broader impact. I think this blog, Startup Iceland etc is built around the same concept, i.e. broaden the learning of the journey of becoming a Startup Founder and/or Entrepreneur (there is a difference, we discussed it extensively in our first lecture) and building sustainable great companies.
The last podcast that I listened to was Tim Ferriss interviews Tony Robbins and Dr. Peter Diamandis, this is an awesome podcast which touched my nerves as I have been thinking about Learning and how to enable learning at all levels. Since we as humans are learning machines, how can we take all the fascinating technology that we have at our disposal and bring learning i.e Reading, Writing, Critical thinking to everyone. I believe that if you want to start a movement or change the world the best way to do it is through a Startup. During the interview, Peter announces the Global Learning XPrize. I have been advising a couple of Learning related Startups in Iceland and I quickly started thinking about how I could get them to get involved then I noticed that the podcast was recorded last year and the deadline to apply is already passed. No worries, I still believe the startups that I am working with in the Learning space should participate and get involved in this initiative. Here is a short video describing what this XPrize is all about:
I am excited about this project and the impact something like this could have on kids all over the world. I think the best legacy that we can leave is the legacy of learning and growth.
The learning startups that I have been advising are Skema and KeyWe. I will write a more detailed startup profiles for each of them.
