The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • 4 vacations in 3 weeks

    I’m back from a 3 week trip to the US and the Bahamas, and with all the stuff we managed to cram into the trip, it feels like we’ve been gone for 3 months. No kidding. One reason is probably, is that we had 4 distinctly different sections of the trip. They were:
    1: 2 days in Manhattan.
    2 days is about as much Manhattan as I can take in one go, and after that we were all New York’ed out. We walked all over midtown, saw two Broadway shows, found a great cheap Sushi place of Bleecker and happened by chance to be on Times Square as they were announcing Michael Jacksons innocence. As for the Broadway shows: Slava’s Snow Show is a wonderful, poetic, funny, touching clown show with some great special effects in a theatre just off Union Sqaure. See it if you get a chance!

    2: The Bahamas
    We flew down on JetBlue for only 99$ a person. Amazing! I attended Roosevelt Finlaysons conference on Festival in the workplace, and Patricia lazed by the pool (a divison of labour that suits us perfectly). The conference rocked and I met some very interesting people there, including Peter Block, the author of two of my favourite books: The answer to how is yes and Freedom and accountability at work.

    3: Washington DC
    Visiting a city is so much nicer, when you know somebody there, and I have the great fortune of having a friend in DC. Traci Fenton lives in a wonderful house on 14th street a few miles outside central DC, and let us stay in the guest room for as long as we wanted. Traci is putting together a conference on democratic organizations in october at which I will speak, and seeing her plans for the event I just know it will be great. We also went tubing on a lake in Manassas and did DC as tourists.

    4: Touring
    I want you to imagine a Roller Coaster that goes like this: You accelerate from 0 to a 190 Kph horizontally in 4 seconds. You go 130 meters straight up. You go over the top and then go 130 meters straight down. The you break, the entire ride having lasted 22 seconds. That’s Top Thrill Dragster, and we did it. 3 times. It rawks! For the last week we rented a car which turned out to be a Ford Mustang – niiiiice. We started by driving down to Williamsburg and seeing Busch Gardens there – which was OK. Then we drove to Cedar Point in Ohio and that seriously rocks. They have some of the tallest and fastest roller coasters on earth, including Top Thrill Dragster. All I can say is, that the extra wait to sit in the front row is totally worth it. We also drove around Pennsylvania and New Jersey for a couple of days, and I startled the people in a small bookstore in Andover NJ by buying 23 business books.

    You can see the best pictures from the trip here.

    It’s great to be getting back into gear in Copenhagen and enjoying the quiet summertime in the Happy at work project, before we hit what I just know will be a very busy and exciting autumn.

    Just to make it more exciting, we’re planning an international conference/forum on happiness at work in september – more news will follow very soon.

  • Jon Stewart for president

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    During my recent vacation in the US it struck me how cool it would be, if Jon Stewart (host of The Today Show) ran for president. Of course I’m not the first one to think of it, so here’s an article explaining why that would be a great thing.

    And here’s a petiton you can sign.

  • Procrastination

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    Sometimes “you really should do X” but you don’t. Here’s some excellent advice from AmbivaBlog for all of us procrastinators:

    According to “archetypal psychologist” James Hillman, who at some point dissolved my own suicidal feelings of frustration and failure into laughter, procrastination is a “disease” only from the point of view of the heroic ego, which believes it can and should control everything — first discipline the self, then save the world. (“Enormous inner strength and will!” “The fight of your life, for the rest of your life!”) Procrastination is one of the signs of the soul at work, undermining and sabotaging the grandiose aspirations of the hero-ego, perhaps so that something real can happen, or not happen, as it, not I, wish. In Hillman’s work procrastination means uncountably many things to the soul. It’s an intrinsic part of the work process, resisting the pen the way the knots in wood resist and redirect the chisel; it’s like the dance of avoidance all animals do on the way to their most primal gratifications, building up the intensity of mating or fighting by postponing it. It’s much like the way we turn red-faced and flee from the very person we’ve fantasized confessing our love to, or the way we eagerly look forward to going “home” and then sink into a ghastly regressive lethargy, binge-eating on our parents’ couch, because what the soul wants is something less literal than we think we want. And one of the things it wants, and loves, is its problems, which Hillman says are like heraldic emblems.

    Read the entire excellent post here.

    I often berate myself for not just getting the stuff done I need to do… but I also find that I can force myself to do it, and it turns out to be difficult, or I can wait until he right moment (whatever that is) and suddenly it’s so easy, it feels as if the work does itself. On the other hand, sometimes I DO force myself to do it and it also turns out to be easy :o)

  • Extreme carving

    When you snowboard, and take a turn at fairly high speed, put all your weight on one edge, and follow that turn through – that’s carving!

    Taken to extremes it can look like this, just about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on snow. This site will tell you how to do it.

  • Skiing

    When we left for our ski-vacation in the french alps (Alpe d’Huez) I was worried. It’s the very end of the season, and according to the website, half the slopes were closed. The temperatures were more like summer than winter, and the forecasts all said that spring was irrevocably coming.

    Fortunately, the skiing turned out great anyway. We got 4 days of wonderful warm skiing, and then we got 2 feet of new, fresh powder to ski on at the end of the week. It just does not get any better! My snowboarding took a quanum leap – I’ve never been better or had more fun on the slopes. And Patricia turned out to be a natural – those swiss genes, I’m sure.

    Here’s what it looked like towards the end of the week when it was snowing (click for full size image):

  • Alps

    This saturday, Patricia and I leave for a week in the french alps. This is very late in the season, but with any luck, all the snow won’t have melted yet, and I’ll get a chance to snowboard, and Patricia can try out skiing for the very first time. With her being swiss I’m sure it’s in her genes, and she’ll pick it up in no time.

  • Conference on change and happiness at work

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    We’re arranging another conference on happiness at work, and this time the focus is on how to be happy during changes. Read more about the conference.

  • New website

    We took a look at our current website for the Happiness at Work Project, and found it to be horribly crowded! There’s information about us, our products and our results. And there’s articles, news, resources, downloads and lots of other stuff. Too confusing!

    So we split out all the resources stuff to a new website which you can find at www.spredarbejdsglaede.dk or at www.happyatworknow.com.

    So far most of the pages are in danish only, BUT soon we will translate most of the site to english, and thus have our first international website (YAAAAY).

    The site is (of course) a 100% open source solution. It’s running on a linux server hosted by Logical and the site itself is running on an excellent, free, open source solution called eGroupWare. Open Source Software ROCKS!

  • Why do we play at war

    Bernie DeKovens Funlog is my favourite source of play ideas (such as no-ball football or junk games). Occasionally even he gets serious, for instance when answering this question:

    Why do people enjoy meeting in cyberspace to engage in simulated warfare, with games like Halo and War Craft? Why do people want to spend their time “killing” each other as a pastime?

    His answer is classic:

    – we play war because we need to play with it – there’s no other way to integrate such an awful reality into our understanding of the world. it is too ugly, too irrational, too stupid for us to grasp in any other way.

    – we know we’re not really hurting anyone or anything, we know that we can’t really die, and without that knowledge, we couldn’t have fun

    – we can trust each other if we all know that we’re trying to kill each other, that the very worst in us is not hidden or subsumed by any other attempts at being human, so when we meet, we can meet above all that

    I enjoy this view because it is appreciative without romanticizing anything. War games of many kinds have been with us for as long as we have been human, and according to Bernie, this is not a bad thing to be avoided or outlawed. There’s more: Read the entire answer here.

  • Snowboarding

    I gave up skiing some years ago in favour of snowboarding, and if you want to know how it feels to start on a snowboard, read this funny, well-written account of a beginners trials:

    We … watched little snooty five-year-old skiers walk by, kids you could tell hadn?t fallen even once that day. Do you have any idea how horrible it is when your ego is handed to you by a five-year-old who can perform a complicated skill better than you can? I can throw temper tantrums better than most five-year-olds, but skiing, those litter fuckers CAN KICK MY ASS. I felt like shouting, ?Yeah, well THERE REALLY IS NO SANTA CLAUS, SO SUCK IT.?

    Yeah!

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