Boris Schneider-Johne, self-appointed “Director of Enthusiasm”, has worked as a programmer, producer, translator, PR drone, journalist and more. For many years he was fascinated by technology, computers and code. Now he is even more enchanted by human psychology and how anything but logic rules our daily lives. His interests include frequent visits to Disneyland, stage magic and illusions, reading up on current brain research and psychology, playing anything from board to video games and trying not to be afraid of the looming economic collapse (which might not happen anyway).
His contributions to German culture include the translation of the “Monkey Island” games from Lucasarts, which still gets him free drinks and very odd situations for box signings, as well as running the bestselling PC magazine in Europe in 1996, “PC Player”. He has been hanging out at Microsoft Germany for the past 17 years (they pay rather well), ten of them doing marketing for Xbox. He currently tries to convince media and bloggers that Windows 8 is not as bad as its reputation. Boris is an active member of Mensa Germany (“MinD”).
You can’t predict the future – so try to enjoy it!
Since the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to get a glimpse of the future, asking shamans, soothsayers and scryers about their fate. Nowadays we turn to financial experts, trend researchers and other fortune tellers, who use more systematic methods to still not predict the future effectively. There is a clear coding error in our brains that we can’t process simple statistical facts as a long as we get told a believable story. And believe we do. So let’s take apart some of those predictions. Hindsight is 20/20 and showing where others were wrong can be highly entertaining – until you need to question your own thinking. So I also will ruthlessly show my own mistakes from earlier days and how I deal with “the future” today, both on a private and a professional scale.
