January started with some great time in Greece. We said goodbye, knowing that we will meet again soon. Since I was going to get married this year, I would need to return many times before the hot early September wedding day. I got back in New York, and the day after, I got to the Green Card interview. By the 11th, the Green Card has arrived. Incredible news! It means access to all sorts of credit. Most importantly, I regained, now in the US, the privilege of having the option to work or not work, which is great and essential for my self-sovereignty.

Given the wedding plans - I decided to day-dream what awesome music I will create for the wedding. I will have an audience, and I will take advantage of it! That's how my musical instrument buying journey started. This Ableton Push arrived. I plugged it and started exploring the wonderful world of music production that I've abandoned for about 20 years. It has changed a lot. Many more modes and knobs, and the expectations from producers now seem higher than ever. Lots of fun, nevertheless. At the end of January, we went to Harvard for an Executive Course on "Leading Product Innovation." I thought that Harvard was a university, but it was way more. It is a fantastic hotel-like environment where all the distractions of everyday life cease to exist. It enables you to focus on thinking and learning. Most learning comes from teamwork with brilliant executives and entrepreneurs from all over the world. We played with legos, did countless case studies, and learned some magic - from Jason Randal.

I wish I could tell you that, "as soon as I went back to the office, I put all this knowledge to use". Spending time in this dream-world only made me even more frustrated by office politics and the slow pace. But what I learned at Harvard is that there's some method in the creative process madness. The only thing that didn't let us down in 2020 was technology and innovation. Technology saved us!. Brilliant, hard-working scientists covered for incompetent politicians, business leaders, and the disoriented public. They gave us everything, from tremendous improvements in work from home infrastructure to vaccines. Technologists delivered again and again. The innovations we saw, including mRNA vaccines, have been in development for decades. They were stuck waiting for funding, approvals, and bureaucracy. As soon as bureaucrats stopped dragging their feet, technologists turned them to the products humanity desperately needed. Interestingly one of the case studies we did at Harvard was "Flagship Pioneering," the incubator behind Moderna.

At that point of course, they didn't know that this was one of the companies that would save the world and make some of them billionaires within 2020.

That's January. Harvard and Technology Will Save Us