East Eats West

My new free personal trainer: Zuzana from Poland!

Picture: A homework out that truly rocks and inspires (including eye-candy)! Picture courtesy of www.bodyrock.tv. 

I have been lifting weights in gyms most of my life. During my recent travel though I only managed to visit gyms every now and then (including a brand-new gym in Vientiane, Laos). However traveling and eating constantly resulted in some extra flab and I started to look for some travel-friendly routines (meaning no equipment needed). Luckily I came across amazing Zuzana's website www.BodyRock.tv. She (and her steely abs) is kind of a Youtube phenomena as she gets many hits every month. On her website she demonstrates simple high-intensity body-weight exercises that can be devilishly difficult to complete. Every week she posts new exercises and demonstrates them on short videos (shot from 'interesting' angles by her husband). Check her and her abs out and start sweating! With her I managed to shed over six kilos, not bad!

The internet changes our thinking!

Have you ever thought of how the internet might be changing your thinking or how you process information? In the most recent 'Du', a Swiss cultural publication, this was exactly the topic and the findings are surprising. According to the author Nicolas Carr, using the internet makes us constant information seekers or scanners. We do not read a whole article anymore. On the contrary, we scan books and magazine articles like we scan websites. Our eyes quickly zigzag the article and our brain tries to filter interesting words or pieces of information. The result is that many people have stopped reading whole books or articles. They only cross-read them in order to scan for interesting information. At the same time we have become better and better at multi-tasking. While we are talking to our parents on Skype we answer emails and check out our favorite blogs. We have become experts in processing lots of data. It is all about speed. We have become novelty-junkies who can quickly discard non-interesting information (a bit like surfing the TV channels). Nicholas Carr thinks that this quick-scanning and multi-tasking behavior helps in processing lots of information and signals but it hinders us from being creative. We can't concentrate long-enough anymore as we have become novelty-junkies. One could say that we have forgotten to sit back and ruminate things.

Useless tea

Picture: Tea sampling at my friend Menglin's absolutely lovely tea shop Shui Tang in Zurich. 

I recently went for a presentation by my dear friend Menglin Chou who runs the tea shop Shui Tang in Zurich. During her presentation she pointed out that tea is revered in her home-country Taiwan for its uselessness. Tea is useless but exactly because it is useless, it becomes interesting. According to Chinese philosophy useless things make life worthwhile. A beautiful thought!

MBA forever?

Picture: The IMD building in Lausanne (courtesy of www.imd.org)

 The Swiss business school IMD has come up with a new slogan: 'lifelong learning'. Before you think it is only another marketing slogan, think again. IMD copied the age-old Japanese teacher-student relationship where a student pays the teacher a lifelong fee for being, well, the teacher's student. IMD basically is slowly moving into the direction where one not only does a one-off MBA but has to go back again and again, for a fee that is. This will create a life-long income for an MBA school. Cleverly copied from the Japanese!