For my birthday a couple months ago I received a Garmin Forerunner 50.  It is a watch which comes with a chest strap type heart rate monitor which wirelessly connects to the watch to give you your heart rate.  Over the past two months I have been experimenting with exercise regime to improve my mental performance as recommended in the book Spark! As part of that have been going for a morning run at the running track. The Garmin device is useful as it tracks my heart rate throughout the run and allows me to make sure I am keeping my heart rate in the recommended zone. The best thing though is that when I get back I can upload the data to my laptop and see a graph. This means I can now compare my performance with my past performance and see the improvement which is great. The PC link was a bit unintuitive to figure out at first but now I love this little bit of kit.

On Friday I attended Infocomm Live an event where Matthias Kunze, a serial entrepreneur and now head of Yahoo! Mobile APAC talked about the secrets of his success.

It was an interesting talk and he had a lot in common with similar people I have heard speak or talked to before. It was all good stuff.

What did stand out particularly was his background as a keen athlete and his strong believe that balancing hard work with other interest and a healthy lifestyle was a key factor to maintaining motivation and most importantly avoiding burnout. This seems to be a common view amongst successful people such as him.

I was fortunate to be able to ask him a question after the talk and he reinforced my belief that while exercising is when some of the best ideas or solutions to problems just pop into your head. He said that when he has a problem he finds that if he goes for a long bike ride by the end of it a solution is likely to have appeared in his mind.

He also told an interesting story about how the idea for his second start-up came to him and his colleague while they were sitting in a BA lounge at an airport. This again reinforces another thing I have found; more ideas appear when you are out of you normal context and in terms of what I have read about brain function and creativity in the past I can see why that would be true. I plan to investigate both of these things further.

All in all it was a very good event. I also want to thank Susan for telling some much interesting information about the IDA and Singapore and Ruohan for sharing his interesting product ideas with me, long may his enthusiasm and innovation continue.