Being a solopreneur can feel quite lonely. So can being a mother, a product person, a highly-sensitive individual… I made it my mission to bridge the gap between my professional and my private life to show up as authentically and whole-heartedly as I can, inviting others to connect with me from human to human. In this section you can check out extracts from my personal newsletter «Tanja’s Butterflies».
To follow my product-related writing, I recommend subscribing to my Substack blog Learning Organisation. Some of my articles can also be found in the section Publications & Templates.
As a kid I used to read the last pages of a book before starting the first chapter. I just had to know how it all ended. As a teenager I dreamed of a magic remote control. One that would teleport me to better times. In fact, two very distinct moments in time: I immediately wanted to turn 18 ...
The other day, I found my husband reading a railway newspaper (yes, they do exist) on our couch. Surrounded by sofa cushions thrown all over the place by our lovely kids, the floor covered in bread crumbs from the last meal, dishes piling up in the sink. It was one of the rare moments the kids happened to play by themselves without killing each other. One of those precious moments...
In the past couple of months, we have digested some deep and sometimes dark topics here. So I felt like it was time for a very different story. And since the majority voted for it in the last newsletter, let's talk about FUN 🙂 13 years ago I broke up with my high-school boyfriend whom I had been living with for a couple of years. "When we'll have kids, I am going to be the fun dad and you are going to be the serious mom.", he said one day. It was meant as a joke, but at the same time it wasn't. It was the most condensed mental model of how he perceived our roles, even without being parents back then. Me doing the dishes,...
A few weeks ago, my former student Antonia reflected on Linkedin about her habit of outing herself in new groups as pet lover and nerd - even in a professional context. So she was asking herself: "Where’s your line between personal and work life? How much of yourself do you show your colleagues? Has it ever backfired? Or have you ever benefited from it?" Unconsciously, this was the starting point of today's post, but it didn't bubble up until after I had published my last "Butterflies" about FILTERS talking about highly sensitive people. Writing it brought back a recent episode where I was asked to fill out an application form for Maya's kindergarden. I reached the comment section where we were supposed to mention any additional...
Back in 2013, I stumbled across a website called Paper.li that invited you to create your personalized topic-based digital newspaper. It would then feature a couple of articles and tweets on the subjects you selected and provide a nice daily morning read. This is an example of curated content, a phenomenon that has been on the rise for more than a decade now. It can take many forms, ranging from "a single room with a single book" (a tiny bookstore in Ginza that sells only one book per week, hand-picked by its owner) to The Browser, a newsletter featuring five outstanding stories per day from thousends of articles. With individual voices trumping established brands more and more in the war for attention, even big social media players like...