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Allgemein

Tanja Lau / Allgemein (Page 2)

Curiosity

“Don’t be nosy.”“Don’t ask stupid questions.”Curiosity killed the cat – they say. There was a point in my childhood where I shifted from asking lots of questions to expecting myself to figure things out by myself. The Encarta encyclopedia (who still rembers the good old CD-ROM?) turned into one of my best friends. I refused to eat with chopsticks instead of admitting that I had no clue how to use them. When someone asked my if I had read a certain book, I'd rather say yes and hope I'd get through with it than asking what it was about. At that time, I would never have guessed that one day running classes about product discovery would become my bread and butter – let alone that I would...

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1% – Drifting into Failure

A little scratch on the leg, maybe a dry nostril that cracked open just a tiny bit - we will never know what caused my husband’s leg to develop a severe bacterial infection last week. Despite several visits to the doctors and even a check-up at the hospital, the unlucky combination of his symptoms manifesting with delay in his blood results, Tobi’s eagerness to make his ski holidays count and medical practitioners not laying out the possible range of scenarios to pay attention to led to two surgeries and a week at the hospital. I couldn’t help but notice the parallels to a book I am currently reading, called Drift into Failure (see section below for my review). Our bodies are in fact living organisms that represent...

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Poetry

My first true love was ink on paper. Letters lined up neatly on a piece of paper. The smell of a new book. Sentences scribbled into carefully hidden notebooks to caputure a fleeting feeling. I was, am and always will be in love with books. Since I was a kid, I would pour my heart and soul out on paper - just to find it again in someone else's writing. In fact, I got so obsessed with certain books that I would hide them from my sister, afraid that by reading them she might be able to take a sneak peek into the deepest chambers of my soul...

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Home

32 days 52 minutes and 17 seconds - that's how long it took me to get sick. The kids were the first ones, then Tobias started complaining. I thought I'd never be affected. But it turns out: even I can get really sick. I'm not talking about the infamous Bali belly (that one tormented the whole family, too...

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In and Out of Love

I don’t know what’s going on lately and if it is only in my circle, but a lot of people seem to be going through a rough patch in their relationships. This made me think about nothing less than ...

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Good-bye 2022, hello 2023!

Opt in, opt out - this was my mantra for 2022. I started it by deleting my entire newsletter base, giving all subscribers the opportunity to make a deliberate choice of whether or not to re-subscribe (still very thrilled so many of you came back :-) When we look at other people’s lives, we tend to see all the things they accomplished, but are missing most of the context on the price they paid, the opportunities they did not pursue or how they felt about their choices. While I am looking back on a very successful year at Product Academy, I want to shed some light on things I opted out on: at least 7 podcasts and 4 conferences I was invited to speak atcountless coffee chats...

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On My Shelf

Time flies… and there are two more butterfly editions I want to send out this year 😊 This one is all about the books that inspired me in 2022. So in case you are looking for Christmas gifts or holiday reads, here are the books that made it onto my shelf (or that I pulled out again after a while…): Bittersweet by Susan Cain: If you have a melancholic side, rank high on the sensitivity spectrum, or always had a feeling there might be something wrong with you for this deep sense of longing, this book is for you. It talks about sorrow and longing and its connection to creativity, about grief and inherited pain. I will admit it sometimes feels a bit repetitive and could...

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Family OKRs

déformation professionelle is a quite common thing chez Schluer-Lau ;-) Our entrance door is a giant Kanban board. We constantly run experiments on our lives (and the kids...

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Fuse

I am writing to you from a hotel room in Amsterdam where I concluded a week that did not go according to plan. My daughter caught scarlet fever, my son had some weird rash on his belly that we needed to observe for a while - all of this while my husband was on a business trip. My son’s birthday was accompanied by a lot of tantrum and - of course - at work lots of stuff was piling up… My fuse was getting shorter by the minute, and I ended up yelling at the kids way more often than I should have. Now that I am sitting here after a good night’s sleep, a work-out and great talks with my friend Isa, I am back to...

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Circus

One week ago Tobias and me went to see the Cirque du Soleil in Zurich - and seven days later I am still buzzing with joy and excitement about their show. We have been listening to the LUZIA soundtrack non-stop, even the kids requested we play it first thing in the morning...

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