Welcome to Millennial Of The Week! This is an interview series conducted by Millennial Community – an online space to learn life skills no one else teaches us and support each other to live on our own terms – in a genuine, non-judgmental and authentic way.
This week’s interview guest is Matti Halonen. A happiness- and new experience-seeker by heart, he is someone who always seeks to develop himself in all aspects possible – be it behavioural biases, transhumanism, meditation practices, classical studies or other ways to improve. On paper he is a mechanical engineer with a master of science within product development.
Are you a member of any online communities? If so, what made you join?
Facebook, reddit, whatnot? Curiosity and new ways of interacting gets me to join. Some persist in time while others fall through and are never to be spoken of again.
What are – in your opinion – the most important skills a millennial needs to cultivate, and why?
Most problems are solvable with searching the internet and resources found online. Which I believe leads me believe that it is more important to improve one’s methods of problem solving (as opposed to learn all technical details in advance before it is known which tools are to be used). Further I believe that we all need to understand that communication is mega hard, and that misunderstandings are way more occurring than we believe. I cannot pinpoint to a specific way of how we all should improve our communication skills, but I do believe that it is one of the top contenders of improving ourselves. I will end this rant with: I believe that we have lot of potential in becoming better within being kind and understanding whilst always having a goal of reaching the combined best answer/result/product instead of – as many of us do today – defending a solution/political party/phone brand in its whole instead of rejecting the aspects that have improvement potential.
How are you practicing those skills in your own life?
That’s a really good and hard question. I have tried to come up with a somewhat nice/trustworthy answer, but I believe that my own ways of trying to improve changes a lot. It does so daily, but what about yearly, or even decennially? During my studies I was focused on learning a wide set of tools (calculus, thermodynamics, etc.), during my first years of work one example is that I was focused on trying to improve communication skills in order to break down barriers within the department where I worked (I didn’t possess all skills needed to solve my problems so I needed to be good at getting the people who could closely around me). Today I am trying to learn something new every day, I am trying to not react with emotions and understand when my primate brain tries to take over. I am trying to find out when I give automated replies to questions being asked and digging deeper into why I hold the belief I do since we have so many well rooted beliefs in our society that bypasses our own internal decision/belief making process.
What is your personal definition of success?
Being happy. Be it by spending your days with loved ones, exploring the world or building the work of your life – but being open to along the way revisit what happiness means for you and update your goals accordingly.
What are YOU seeking help in at the moment?
Finding an interesting job when I move back to Sweden in the beginning of 2017.
What excites you about being a millennial?
That we are on an exponential growth curve of technological advancements. We are not able to grasp what our futures will look like, at the same time we are all contributing to where we are headed. If we don’t know how to be open-minded and discuss what lies ahead of us, we are letting auto-pilot take us to a destination that we might or might not like.
Quick Fire Questions
Your current passion project
NA/secret
Most grateful for
Being a strange, constantly changing collection of atoms and molecules in this universe, which happens to be able to somehow work as an individual with his own thoughts, wants and needs.
Your role models (and why)
Elon Musk for kick-starting our urge for technological advancements within so many areas.
Eliezer Yudkowsky for awesome insights about my own irrational thinking.
Marshall Rosenberg as a “could be role-model” (haven’t researched enough of his work yet) for giving insight to how we complicate communication and how to (hopefully) solve the problem.
Best advice you ever received
Something as simple as: It is ok to not know everything. Followed up by a quote by Eliezer: “Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change”
Your biggest challenge
To find a way walking through life that allows me to not regret not doing this or that when it is too late.
Being resourceful means ___
Someone online (we can call this person “the word master”) has decided that the meaning is: “ingenious, capable, full of initiative, especially in dealing with difficult situations”.
I am not going to make a claim about the definition being wrong, but if someone here has a different opinion I am totally open of updating my own database of the words meaning (if it would impose an improvement).
