My close friends know that I love tulips.

Before leaving to Austria one of my Dutch friends brought me 111 tulips. In the end it came to my mother and sister to plant them.

Now those tulips are starting to grow. Still they are quitle small and you can barely see some 6 centimeters of their leaves. I will not get to see them flowered.

My mother is trying to comfort me saying that 'You will get 'notice' of how do they look like once they are flowered'.

I will get notice of them the same how I can get notice of the current change in AIESEC Linz, how I will get notice of the results of the task force's work, of the interviews...
I will be 'noticed'.
I guess in the end what it should comfort me is that the change happened.
I will be 'noticed'.

About concessions

Which of these scenarios would make you happier?
Scenario A:
While walking down the street, you find a $20 bill.

Scenario B:
While walking down the street, you find a $10 bill. The next day, on a different street, you find another $10 bill.


The total amount of money found is the same in each scenario—yet the vast majority of people report that Scenario B would make them happier. More generally, extensive research (beginning with the work of the late Stanford University professor Amos Tversky and the Princeton University professor and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s) demonstrates that while most of us prefer to get bad news all at once, we prefer to get good news in installments.

Installments may also lead you to discover that you don't have to make as large a concession as you thought. When you give away a little at a time, you might get everything you want in return before using up your entire concession-making capacity. Whatever is left over is yours to keep—or to use to induce further reciprocity.

Finally, making multiple, small concessions tells the other party that you are flexible and willing to listen to his needs. Each time you make a concession, you have the opportunity to label it and extract goodwill in return.

This surely is a conclusion that can be used in any filed : may that be economics, relationships, psychology, etc.

Read more about it here.

Tales of discoverings about Japan

Recently I found out that:

1. until the year 400 a.c. Japanese was just a spoken language;
2. Japan is made of 3500 islands
3. 75 % of it's surface is covered by mountains, of which 265 are volcanoes and 20 of these volcanoes are still active
4. 16% of the surface is covered by fields.

The numbers are stunning. This means that 120 million people live on less than 9 % of Japan's surface. (approximately 31.500 square meters)

Yesterday I learned the kanjis for the days of the week. It was surprising to find out that the symbols for the days of the week have the same 'element' as the ones in all the other languages that I know. For example the name for Monday is guetsuyo:bi. where the kanji guetsu means moon (yobi means 'day of the week') ; and it goes the same for all the other days.

What I find again surprisingly is that even if they have a totally different culture and a totally different alphabet, a different religion they still have the same symbols for the days of the week as the rest of us. I wonder where does it come from. After all they did not have the Roman and Greek gods. Either an anthropologist can give me the appropriate answer, either they named their days of the week differently before the Portuguese influence.

Stunned and happy that I can finally read the banners of Toyota and Honda. :)

Reports for international woman's day

I was reading this report to find ou that:

• gender gap still persits when it comes to entrepreneurship activity and surprisingly the gender gap is bigger in high-income countries, regardless the activity.
• men can recognize a business opportunity better than women;
• a woman becomes an entrepreneur more of necessity compared to men in middle-income countries. In the high-income countries the gap does not exist.

See the report for yourself.