What is mine is yours

“What’s Mine Is Yours” is a book that reveals a powerful socioeconomic groundswell called "Collaborative Consumption" — traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities — that is transforming business, consumerism, and the way we live.

If the 20th century was defined by hyper consumption, the 21st century will be defined by collaborative consumption, according to Rachel Botsman. She defines collaborative consumption as being about "reputation, community and shared access" as opposed to "credit, advertising and individual ownership". It is about connecting to each other and sharing and exchanging all kinds of assets, including cars, skills and money.

One of the most important parts of collaborative consumption is trust between strangers. Social, mobile and location technologies are coming together to make efficiency and trust. Technology creates the social glue for trust to form between strangers. Sometimes the author mentions Collaborative Revolution, as a turning point where we use technology to reinvent entire sectors, and find a healthy balance of needs of individuals, needs of companies and the greater good of the society. This idea emerges the need to be “human again”, which means to lend/borrow real money to real people; to stay in real homes with real people. This kind of investment provides not only with the required service but also with a social connection, and this way man is back from virtual to real world. At the same time, they enable people to save money, time, and space; build closer relationships; and move from passive consumers to active collaborators.

Collaborative consumption has the power to revolutionize how we manage idling capacity, and by doing so change the way we view and become a part of communities in unique and meaningful ways.

Little Bets

What this book written by Peter Sims covers and tells us based on about 200 interviews with successful peoples, creators and innovators is that the biggest ideas, successes starts from small discoveries (he names this little bets) reworked than to achieve great results. It explain us how highly successful innovators like Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos etc. had started with brilliant ideas and discovered them and succeeded pretty well.

Peter Sims defined “little bets” as a low-risk action taken to discover, develop, and test an idea.

New, creative and original ideas - that’s little bets is all about.

Peter Sims puts in readers mind the idea on how to start small and anyway if you fail you just lose less than start with big ideas and investments and in this way you also learn from this, but if you succeed than develop further your idea further, test it to have better and great results.

There are also many companies in Albania that have used let say the same method as starting with little bets and becoming very successful but I just wanted to mention one and very beautiful idea of the owner of “Arlecchino” factory Edmond Angoni who produces carnival masks in Shkodra (I just wanted to share this with students who didn't know about this factory).

A little known fact for movie buffs is that the masks worn by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in their 1999 movie “Eyes Wide Shut” were created by the Albanian artist Edmond Angoni. They are particularly in demand in Venice because they are handmade masks, a tradition which is gradually disappearing in the Venetian mask market.

In 1991, he immigrated to Italy to try his luck, as did many of his countrymen. He found himself in many cities of Italy doing all kinds of jobs until he reached Venice, where masks caught his attention. Angoni set on creating his own mask designs, even though he faced stiff competition in Venice with over 500 years of tradition. Undaunted, Angoni began his business in 1996 after returning to Albania.

Edmond Angoni with one of his handmade masks

In Shkodra, he established a mask factory called Venice Art, which initially produced 3-4 simple types of masks at a low price. Initially he designed all the models on order as well as all the characters of "commedia del arte." He gathered people around him who now make up the factory laboratory, called “Arlecchino,” after the hero of Italian carnivals.  

From the beginning Angoni had the goal to sell his masks on the international market including Venice. With this well-defined goal into his mind, he threw himself in this adventure. Venetian shops were invaded by plastic Chinese products and this helped Angoni’s masks produced with paper-mache technique to stand out. The masks ended up in the hands of Venetian wholesalers, who supplied the local market and distributed them all over the world.

“Venice was the first market I chose because I had lived there and knew its customs. Moreover, I had nothing to risk. The investment was minimal, no machinery needed, just a mould,” the artist said.  Bit by bit Angoni was able to build up his business in Venice to six shops and later on expand to Las Vegas and Dubai, in effect supplying the world with masks and carnival costumes.  

“I can’t forget that it was in 2004 when I joined Swarovski, the leading supplier of crystals. We used the crystals to create a new line of masks, which were more expensive, of course. This line became successful in Dubai,” Angoni explains.

Read more: http://www.southeast-europe.eu/index.php?id=1989

Finally we need to try, observe, and practice a lot in order to turn our little bets into big successes.

Borrowing brilliance (S.K.)

There's this theory that every successful model in the Universe is produced through trial and error. Translated differently it says that there's no revelation, no perfect idea from the genesis. Instead every idea, no matter how genuine it is,  has started as an imperfect thing and then has been continuously improved through trial and error. 

The same is told in this book as well. One cannot make a perfect plan and hope for it to work efficiently from day one. History has told us it will not. The part of enhancing and improving one system is as important as creating it in the first place.
I wanna conclude with a quote from Albert Einstein.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Why? Because if you don't, others will borrow/steal them and be at least as creative as you.

S.K.
Saimir Kamberi

The How of Happiness

“The How of Happiness” explains how to assess what makes us happy and then design a happiness program that fits with our personality, lifestyle, and individual needs. According to the research on happiness the author introduces the concept of happiness as: set point – 50% genetically determined, life circumstances -10% and intentional activity – 40%.
Except the detailed explanation of the difference happiness level, the book part related to some possible activities that helps us to attain satisfactory happiness level is very interesting and useful. I agree with the 12 possible Happiness Activities: 1. Expressing gratitude, 2. Cultivating Optimism, 3. Avoiding over thinking and social comparison, 4. Practicing Acts of kindness, 5. Nurturing social relation ships, 6. Developing Strategies for Coping,7. Learning to forgive, 8. Increasing Flow experiences, 9. Savoring Life’s joys, 10. Committing to your goals, 11. Practicing Religion and Spirituality, 12. Taking Care of your body and The Five How’s of Happiness: Positive Emotions, Optimal Timing and Variety, Social Support, Measurement, Effort and Commitment, Habit and strategies to be happy. I also think that no matter where you fall on the happiness and depression , everybody can learn how to apply to his/her own strengths and weaknesses the happiness enhancing strategies, in order to make yourself happier and more fulfilled. Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to hunt for happiness (William E. Gladstone).

Flogerta Difaj

The Time Paradox

Nothing that we do in our life cannot be redone (the same moments exactly cannot come). We cannot regain misspent time or well spent time (doing better).  This is the key on which this book is based. 

I can remember many persons and also myself saying: “Oh I wish I could have more time for this and that”, and also remember the moments when sometimes we hear: “I am in the right time, in the right place in the right moment exactly” etc.

The first six chapters explain mainly how time works; the second part of the book tells us how he/her can make time work for him- or herself.

The most important thing is to know the time value. The same hour can be spent differently: working, reading, playing, navigating online, coffee etc. but you need to differentiate the pleasure, the benefits, the costs, the learning’s  each hour gives you and not misspent it in order not to regret later.

I like popular saying such as:

Today’s works not leave for tomorrow.

Three things cannot turn back: given word, issued darts, time spent.

You always have enough time if used properly.

What I liked most also was the six time perspectives/orientations. These orientations have lot of influence on how we react to the world around us, because on how we spend our time it determines our time perspective (past-negative, past-positive, present-fatalistic, present-hedonistic, future, and transcendental-future).

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people. - Philip Zimbardo.

The How of Happiness (S.K.)

I liked the and I couldn't agree more with the picture above. It gave me a mere realization that I cannot choose to be happy. I had heard it previously from Nietzsche but when graphically explained, things gain more verity and sanctity.
The word happiness has a very broad meaning and to analyse and quantify is obviously very difficult, perhaps impossible. The ones who have made progress in doing so either have collected large samples of data, or have truncated Happiness into many components and have analysed them separately.
However there are two simple quotes about happiness which describe it best in my opinion.
1- Happiness is the ratio of what you achieve over what you expect. To be happy all you have to do is lower the expectations. You can keep high expectations and try to maximize achievements but history has told us it almost never works.
2- We are born to reproduce/pray God, not to be happy. Getting the target of happiness off the table might actually provide helpful in increasing it in the first place. As an analogy: If you wanna be a good public speaker you should get the YOU issue off the table. The moment you realize that it is not about you but about what you deliver, you start making significant improvements in that area.

S.K.
Saimir Kamberi

WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS

WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS - Now Collaborative Consumption is changing the way we live...is a fantastic book that includes many stories of how businesses are innovating Collaborative Consumption. 

This reminds me also the time when I worked at Albanian Mobile Communication (AMC) and I remember that Vodafone Albania and AMC used to share Base Station resources such as Electric Power, Generator and Land (places, rents) in order to minimize business costs.

We used to share also many things in our everyday life. For example I reminded times in High School when student of an higher class gave us their books as they have finished that course.

Another example is the renting bicycles point near Taiwan (you can go everywhere near Tirana area faster than by your car :).

Another example: I and 12 friends of me wanted to go last year for SKI Montenegro (Kolasin) and for 13 peoples we needed 3 cars (4+4+5) – our personal cars, but we still consume fuel, energy (the drivers will drive 5 hours or also we can share driving time J) and also we are not all together so we used to get a Minibus and a driver and we paid less than our costs with 3 cars, we were all together having more fun and not caring about driving.

In this book is described how new technologies and collaborative innovation are shaking up traditional business models and transforming consumer behavior. 

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities.

What I like most is that not only physical goods can be shared because people with same interests can share also time, space, skills with each other.