Hi we are Jacob and Hendrik and this is our first Blog post ever. WOW.

Why we do this?

We both had the urge to but our experiences and ideas out in the world. Both of us went through different experiences in our lives and both of us have very different journeys behind us. One German and one US American.

Both of us discovered a passion for helping people and traveling and that is how we both ended up in the same student organization, where we then met one day at a conference in Portugal.

Both of us love to share our knowledge and train others the skills we acquired on our journey.

Both of us wanted to start a blog at the same time but just did not get going on our own.

So after some amazing conversations, we arrived at the conclusion that is might be the right idea to start a blog together. So the idea evolved and then had several brainstorming meetings since the beginning of 2017.

Different ideas influenced the focus for this blog and we see it like a sandbox: to play and enjoy creating content and learning more about the world and ourselves.

The quote that influences the name was a quote by Steve Jobs from his famous commencement speech at Stanford:

“…You can only connect the dots looking backward…”

The dots we make create our journey and we only see the journey by looking forward. We want to learn from other journeys, ideas, and our own lives. We want to share the learnings to help you and ourselves to make the decisions about the next dot to make. So the “Why” for dotxdot we arrived at in one simple sentence is:

In our increasingly complex world, The only thing we truly have power over is our choices. Let’s make them count.

Since we are going to share our ideas and insights we would also give a quick introduction to ourselves so you have an idea who is writing these posts in the upcoming days, weeks, months and maybe years to come:

Hendrik

I am a young graduate from Germany who is currently working for his Student Organisation in Oman. I have a passion for people development and education, which led me to become a trainer and getting into coaching.

I want to travel every country on the globe and before I am 30. I want to visit every continent. I am a very positive. I push myself to my limits (which I love to do), to learn new things about myself and yes, there are the moments where I can get a little grumpy. Meditation and exercise help me to avoid those stages of grumpiness (to the best of my current abilities).

I believe every person is good in his/her core, but through their belief systems, they have to make harmful or bad decisions which create negative actions.

I know a lot and I have to learn a lot. I love to learn new things. I love to dance and music makes me happy no matter what.

I hope that I learn from you and from this experience of writing this blog and everything that has to do with it.

Please challenge my thoughts and ideas. Do not hesitate to contact us for questions, inputs or cooperations.

Jacob 

Growing up in the Southern US, I have always had a strong desire to help other people reach their goals and dreams. That path took me down several different career paths and has now landed me in the consulting industry, working towards reaching the maximum efficacy for the people within client organizations, both public and private. My personal calling is to bring out the best in everyone around me.

Like Hendrik, I have a strong inclination towards travel – mostly, I think, as a result of a deep-seated desire to learn and understand all of the experiences and all of the paths to joy around the world. This concept leads me to explore different religions, cultures, and businesses all around the world to cherry pick from all of my learnings to share with everyone else as more or less pro tips on how to train your mind and have the right world frame to achieve your goals. As a people person, I’m always down for a great coffee (or the local drink of choice) and great conversation. However, you should know that I believe it’s more fun to have opinions so more often than not I’m not afraid to share and debate them. So be forewarned, but don’t hesitate to engage me in some intellectual sparring.

Moving forward

So how do we do this? How do we help the most people make the most of their choices? We decided to create a space where people can see and hear stories and ideas that enable them to live intentionally and choose greatly. So welcome to dotxdot. To us, this is a choice to share our own personal experiences, publishing our (hopefully) digestible understandings of books, individuals that inspire us, movies, or from whatever our dots take us. And this is not just an individual effort on our parts, we aim to create a community where like-minded people can come together to work together to help create more intentional choices.