The year was 2018.

I was between jobs, determined to spend a year learning entrepreneurship by doing. As always, my head was overflowing with ideas and ambitions.

A meeting with Aaron Mashano, a successful entrepreneur from Zambia, was scheduled. It felt special. Like me, he was born and raised in Africa and deeply interested in entrepreneurship.

We sat down, and I started listing my background, ideas, and plans. After a short while he stopped me, looked me straight in the eyes, and said:

“You have to solve your tensions, before pursuing your intentions….”

It hit me hard.

This stranger saw straight through me. Through my eagerness, through my talk. I was opened up, and a knot of tensions became visible. I was sent back to the start. Back to myself.

Why all this tension?

I am a missionary kid who grew up between worlds. Between life as a white shepherd under the African sun, and the attempt to fit into one of the richest and most homogenous countries in the world: Norway. We moved, and moved again. Back and forth, always on the way. At the age of eight, I left home and was sent to boarding school – “adapt or be left behind.”

Beneath the surface I was a sensitive boy, a creative spirit, a young entrepreneur. Before school age I sold candy to my sisters. At boarding school I kept chickens and sold eggs to the teachers. My life was always ambitions running parallel with ongoing tensions.

So – what now?

In recent years I have faced my tensions head-on. I have written them out, drawn them, told them. Slowly I have loosened the knot and the grip they had on me. I have grown, calmed down, and found traces of the road ahead.

What have I found?

Acceptance – and the insight that tensions are teachers in disguise. I have realized that all the years as an outsider, trying to fit in, sharpened my analytical skills. I have realized that religious language, stories, abstract concepts, and the constant cultural shifts taught me to think in images, analogies, and stories.

And I realized that seeing the world through this lens – always trying to connect fragments and visualize to understand the whole – was my way of making sense of things. Maybe this would be useful for others too?

SoundOf.Business was born, as a place to invite other in to discuss thoughts, models, and frameworks for understanding technology, business, and our place in it all.

In a world that keeps accelerating, I hope that my soundtrack can resonate with you. That it might help you understand a bit more clearly where your own road may lead.

That is my intention.