Ondrej Holzman This year's iCON Prague is based on the idea of Life hacking. According to Jasna Sýkorová, co-founder of iCON, Steve Jobs, for example, was one of the first life hackers. "But today, almost everyone who tries to achieve something creative needs life hacking," he says. The best way is to meet those who know how to do it - like Chris Griffiths, who was with Tony Buzan at the birth of the phenomenon of mind maps.
Photo: Jiří Šiftař
How is this year's iCON Prague different from last year's?
Steve Jobs believed that technology should be subordinated to human creativity. He said it was meant to simplify things, not complicate them. We are advocating for this and this year even more loudly. But last year, we all liked the lectures the most about how technology helped someone realize a dream they wouldn't have otherwise achieved. And also about how to get the most out of the devices that we usually carry in our pockets these days. So this year it will be mainly about this.
How does Apple fit into this?
Of course, this does not only apply to things from Apple. But Apple is the ambassador of this idea - just look at their relatively a new iPad page in life with case studies.
People ask why Life hacking and mind maps. can you explain
Life hacking was invented by the guys from Wired years ago, just to involve various techniques (not only technology) in life in order to implement something that would be too costly in time, money or team. It can be said that Steve Jobs was one of the first life hackers. Mind maps are a proven technique. This year she celebrates 40 years, and during that time she got among people and in corporations.
Here in the Czech Republic it is still underappreciated, people only think of crayons and pictures. But thanks to smart technologies and applications, it becomes a perfect tool for presentations, project management, working in teams of people who do not sit together in the same office, which is great for startups, artists, enthusiast teams. And it is Chris Griffiths, CEO of ThinkBuzan, who is behind the further development of not only mind maps, but also other visualization tools. I saw the beta of some programs that within ThinkBuzan arise. I have to say they impressed me. They are comparable to what they create, for example, in 37 signals, the creators of BaseCamp, who are the absolute best so far.
You arranged for Chris Griffiths, how did it go?
Complicated. He is the closest collaborator of Tony Buzan, who created the phenomenon of mind maps. It is extremely busy and beyond the capabilities of not only our festival. Fortunately, we found a model that could make this happen. It also helped a lot that he was interested in iCON Prague, as well as the program we prepared for him. But for that to happen, I had to go to London to see him and actually talk him out of it. The whole negotiation took four months.
How did he affect you?
As an extremely efficient, practical man with great business acumen. I was a little afraid before the meeting that he would not be very philosophical. Our intention with the other founders of the festival – Petr Mára and Ondřej Sobička – is that people leave iCON Prague having learned something practical. But Chris, unlike Tony Buzan, is a pure practitioner. Tony Buzan can, and he says very charismatically, explain why and how mind maps work, and Chris, on the other hand, how to deal with them in practice, using real examples.
Anyway, Chris Griffiths will be in the Czech Republic for the first time. It is a great opportunity, but also a risk…
We decided to risk it. Of course, it would be possible without him, iCON is built on people in the spirit I have already described. This means that all the iCON speakers, both at iCONference and iCONmania, are able to make people take something away from the festival. And it's not just about the presenters, our partners also think the same way - they are creative and have a lot to offer.
Anyway, it's a risk regardless of Griffiths. We are actually the largest technology festival focused on this area and at the same time perhaps the largest amateur festival, where the entire team works full-time somewhere else in addition to preparing iCON. We owe the fact that this is possible to a number of volunteers, enthusiastic speakers, partners who have decided and will decide to go with us, and especially to the thousands of people who come to NTK to talk, get advice and move somewhere.
Do you think there will be iCON 2015?
It's too soon to say. I think we'll all be exhausted as hell by March. It helps a lot that we are actually organizing this festival for ourselves. We also want to move somewhere. We would like iCON to become a year-round project. But we don't know how to do it yet. Maybe thanks to this year's iCON we will figure out how to "hack" it and bring it to life.
