So who is this Jon Pedersen guy and why should you care? Well let me tell you.
I’m a quirky Norwegian guy living in Hong Kong, who has an affinity for productivity tools, time management, niche facts and puns, travel, youth empowerment and social entrepreneurship — and I generally seek to make a significant positive impact on the world in any way I can. As such, this blog will mostly navigate between those affinities.
Overall, you don’t really need to care about who Jon Pedersen is. However, what you should care about is some of the self-help content, tips and tricks that will be shared on this website, which hopefully can aid your personal life or your organization. To easily stay up to date and receive exclusive content and giveaways, I’d recommend you subscribe to the blog.
What does Jon Pedersen do?
You are still reading, huh? You know you can just jump to the blog page to jump into the content, yeah? Well okay, since you’re interested, let me give a bit of backstory on me and some of the things that I do.
Ever since I graduated as valedictorian with stellar academic records in 2015 — AND declined all job offers — it’s been an exciting roller coaster with long days, tonnes of hard work, failures, successes, tough and challenging moments, lot’s of travels, lots of fun, money running short, and anything in between.
Admittingly, most people would say I do too much, and should only focus on one or two things, and while there’s definitely some truth to that, that’s simply not how I am put together. I’ve always been a multi-tasker, and always will be — and yes I know that has its pros and cons. Fortunately, I work with great people, so it’s not like I do all these things and pursue all these goals by myself.
I take great pride in being productive though, and people have constantly asked me whether I have more than 24 hours in a day. That’s obviously not the case. But do stay tuned as a lot of my productivity tips will be shared here on this blog.
Also, as you’ll see, I really devote much time and effort to social enterprises and helping others, as that’s what really motivates me. Simply put, no matter how cheesy it may sound; I want to make a difference and make a positive impact on the world around me. And through hard work, I’ll achieve it.
So, here are some of the cool things that I’m working on (in no particular order):
PSST! You would be super kind if you gave a like or a share to whatever startup/project you may care about among those listed here. Also, should you ever be interested in learning more, contributing or whatever, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with me via the contact form.
Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI) | Co-Founder & Director
Together with my colleague, David Bishop, we co-founded the charity Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI) in early 2018. Throughout years of both starting and supporting social impact organizations, we started to see consistent needs and gaps across these organizations.
First, we noticed that many organizations share a similar vision for a better tomorrow, but also share similar challenges that slow their growth and social impact. And that is why FSI is a community builder and gap filler addressing those common problems. By sharing resources across the group, we lift the whole community, helping our partners reach their full potential, and achieving more collective social impact.
And secondly, we recognized that social impact organizations often address problems independently and without effective communication and collaboration. For example, they often see fundraising and operations from a zero-sum mentality, where the success of a seeming competitor somehow diminishes their own impact.
And so, at FSI we believe that systemic problems require solutions with broad collaboration, and that is why we bring people together to share information, share resources, and share knowledge so that goals and operations are synchronized, resources are maximized, and overlap and waste are minimized. Among the things we share at FSI, we share our subject matter experts in communications, technology, education, and law with our social impact partners, and we also share software, technical hardware, and office space, and more.
And so, through this shared-impact model, what we ultimately do is that we educate, we incubate and we scale.
- We educate through running one of the largest social internship programs in Asia, called the Impact Lab, which is designed to nurture the next generation of socially conscious business leaders.
- We incubate through our role as a tax-exempt incubator, where we passionately support social impact partners so they can grow and multiply their impact.
- We scale as our services enable social impact partners to grow and attract collaborators to expand impact exponentially.
And overall, by creating a community that shares knowledge, resources, and network, new social ventures can grow much faster without going through the barriers that they otherwise would have faced. And, they can then also bring assets back to strengthen the community.
At FSI, we stand with any organization that shares our values, and we will do whatever we can to support them in their mission. And over time, what we have done is that we have created a community of social-impact driven organizations from different sectors and backgrounds, including environmental sustainability, migrant worker’s rights, education, mental health, active ageing, charitable gifting, and more.
Community Business Support: One of the main parts at FSI that I spend considerable time toward is our Community Business Support program, where we provide significant hands-on support to entrepreneurs, including ethnic minorities and scalable existing social impact organizations.
The reality is that a lot of social entrepreneurs are so overwhelmed by their day-to-day work that they do not have the time or resources to make their work and their organization more efficient and scalable. Or they may not even know where to begin. And, as an aspiring entrepreneur, you may have a great social impact idea, but it may not take you far if it requires your expertise in all areas of starting and running a business just to get going. And even if you had the time and realization, with a plethora of considerations, approaches and tools out there, it can be so challenging to get started, and also to further enhance and scale your organization as you go along.
And so in regards to such challenges, that’s where we come in to support. Utilizing our own expertise as well as affordable, highly-scalable technology solutions, we help our partners reach their full potential and scale social impact. Amongst our support, we:
- Consult and work with both budding entrepreneurs and existing social impact organizations to help enhance their capacities and capabilities, and building bespoke systems that are tailored for their specific needs and abilities.
- We also identify areas for efficiency improvements through automation, which is especially relevant for resource-strapped social impact partners.
- We provide support on impact assessment and reporting.
- We help build and improve websites.
- And, we help early-stage entrepreneurs with incorporation & company structuring.
Website | Facebook Page | LinkedIn Page | Instagram
Weava | Director
I oversee and manage all of Weava’s operations. Weava is a workspace for digital work and research, with over 500,000+ active installs (as of March 2021) from around the world. Weava enables you to highlight, annotate, organize and collaborate on your work – all in one place. You may consider giving the Weava Chrome Extension a try here: www.weavatools.com.
Digital learning and research processes are generally unnecessary cumbersome and challenging, leading to time-consuming and inefficient practices that does not support effective learning and retention — nor efficient ways to easily organize information in today’s day and age where we are often struggling with information overload. Weava has a proven track record towards addressing these challenges, with 500,000+ active installs, and approximately 2,000,000 highlights being made on a weekly basis.
Instead of having to navigate through numerous browser tabs, and tedious copy-pasting, Weava makes it easy to highlight and save information from the web and PDFs on-the-go, and further organize and refine the information retained through annotations, folders, color categories, citation generator, and more. With Weava, you can also collaborate with your friends and colleagues in real-time, and export your work to other formats, including Microsoft Word and more. On average our users report that Weava helps them save 3.8 hours per week; the equivalent of 5 workweeks over the course of a year.
Moreover, our work has become more important than ever because of two major trends that are posing new challenges and opportunities.
1) Firstly, COVID-19 has brought across challenges to education systems across the world which has led to a sharp and hastened shift towards digital learning and digital classrooms, but with a lack of relevant and affordable tools at teachers’ and students’ disposal. By building additional student-teacher classroom features and capabilities on top of our existing product, we can help facilitate such digital journeys effectively across the world. While we do not have all the features we desire to possess to best support the digital classroom just yet, in an effort to do our part in addressing the challenges brought by COVID-19, we have offered since April 2020 – and continue to offer – free Premium plans of Weava to all schools and school associations in Hong Kong, and numerous schools around the world.
2) Secondly, the vast proliferation of disinformation & hate speech poses big challenges around the world, and many do not know how to critically evaluate online news and sources; unintentionally retaining and sharing stories with negative impacts. As a tool integrated into the browser and at the fingertips of users’ initial retention and sharing of information, there is an important opportunity to provide relevant educational resources and potential technical features that addresses such associated challenges.
Website | Facebook Page | LinkedIn Page | Instagram
The Impact Lab Course at University of Hong Kong
I co-teach a 6-credit experiential course at University of Hong Kong, Impact Lab (formerly called the Social Venture Management Internship course), which enables 70+ students each semester to intern for social impact organizations in Hong Kong. In some cases, the students even create social businesses from scratch. The social businesses included in the program typically addresses human empowerment, the environment, social justice, and other large and pressing issues.
Importantly, the course gives students an opportunity to work directly for social ventures under the guidance of a faculty instructor and professional mentors, while having the opportunities to solve real-life problems, gain hands-on business experience, and attain an appreciation for social causes.
Blog — Jon Pedersen | Author & Founder
Too often we get caught in a daily autonomy or live on “auto-pilot” without any clear direction, goals or wants. So that’s why I seek to make people become truly aware of their purpose in life, as well as accompanying tips and tricks on productivity, doing good and more. Moreover, I want to help young entrepreneurs and budding social entrepreneurs to scale and succeed, and will therefore touch upon such topics as well.
This blog will embark on a dynamic journey and we’ll see what shape and form it will take as time goes by. Stay tuned! 😉
Website (this one!) | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
Other Mentions:
Soap Cycling | Former Director
While I’m no longer active as a director of Soap Cycling, I’d like to share about the organization and its mission. At Soap Cycling we recycle soap from hotels around Asia and distribute these to where it is needed the most. Soap is one of the most efficient and cost-effective lifesaving tools ever invented. Yet every year across Asia millions of life-saving bars of soap are discarded (over 2 million soap bars annually in Hong Kong alone!). And when you consider that it is estimated that a child dies every minute due to diarrheal diseases — easily preventable by proper hand-washing with soap — then it’s truly outrageous.
By recycling hotel soap we also help eliminate thousands of pounds of chemical waste from our landfills each month, and instead use this invaluable — but otherwise wasted — resource to save thousands of children each year. Since its inception, Soap Cycling has distributed more than 2.5 million bars of soap.
Website | Facebook Page | BBC Article
Blog — Bucket List Fanatic (BLF) | Author & Founder
Bucket List Fanatic was my first blog. The ultimate reasoning behind blogging in the first place was to make people excited about exploring life, pushing their own boundaries and setting bold goals and achieving them. It was also to make myself accountable to my own life goals – which is why I created a list of 1,000+ goals that I aim to achieve.
Over time I built up a significant follower-base with 10,000+ monthly visitors. However, I then realized that I generally do not fancy the “hey look at me” type of thing that I felt it was becoming of sharing bucket list experiences. Instead, I rather like writing and sharing self-help content (like this current website), so I decided to close down all such personal adventure experience content.
That was until I started my YouTube channel with my girlfriend Polly in 2022 as that introduced me to a whole different angle and motivation for creating content around my life goals, namely to create everlasting keepsakes together while exploring the world and trying to live our lives to the fullest. But so most of that is covered directly on our YouTube channel itself, but there are also mentions and blog posts about some of our experiences on the Bucket List Fanatic website.
I would aspire to do a lot more with the BLF website, such as moving it away from just being a blog to becoming a website portal where users could easily establish and collaborate on their own life goals with friends and anything in between. But at the moment I do not have the time, nor the technical know-how to do so.
Polly & Jon | YouTube Channel
My girlfriend and I are two quirky adventure seekers who love exploring the world and trying new things together.
We believe that life is short and we must make the most of every moment. Every day is an opportunity to create meaningful memories, explore new places, meet new people, and pursue our dreams. It’s important to embrace every opportunity and live in the present, as life can be unpredictable and change in an instant. We strive to make every day count, laugh often, show kindness to each other and others, and not take our time on this earth for granted.
And so we started our YouTube channel together with the core premise that it would be a fun project where we could create fun everlasting memories; keepsakes that we could treasure and re-watch whenever. But what we also soon discovered is that the channel also brought us closer together. We already were pretty active and had lots of fun and spoiled each other – but with the YouTube channel we have gone to a further extent of showing our love and appreciation of each other and we have pursued some activities that we perhaps may not have otherwise done. And we have grown closer together as it has resulted in a bigger project where we need to properly collaborate and work together, playing on each other strengths, communicating effectively, and so forth.
And overall, we undertake a lot of challenges to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones as we believe doing so can help us grow as individuals and create fulfilling lives. And in this process, we also hope to inspire you to do the same.
Fintech Ethics MOOC | Program Coordinator
We developed the world’s first MOOC on FinTech Ethics, which launched on edX in May 2019. Overall, humanity stands on the edge of a massive shift in technology and productivity that is going to fundamentally alter our lives. Humankind will be (and currently are) facing immense challenges and opportunities in the time ahead. Through this course we explore the vast impact it will have on our lives and consider the tougher questions and dilemmas together.
Final notes
Overall, throughout the last few years, there has also been various failures, of which I’ve learned heaps from. For one, I co-founded and worked on a project to create a shared economy-related tutoring platform for a long while that we called Ademiq, only to realize that we didn’t have the sufficient resources or know-how to properly roll it out. Through this and other experiences, I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t, as well as the importance of proper testing and validation before committing too much time and resources into a project.
Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.
— Jack Canfield
Anyways, let’s say that this is all for this time. Did you really read all that?! Oh well, I hope you found some of my work and projects interesting. As mentioned, should you ever be interested in learning more, contributing or whatever, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with me via the contact form.
PS! I’ll try to keep this up-to-date, but, as things often change at an ever-increasing pace in today’s workplace, to ensure you’ll have the most up-to-date snapshot of what I’m up to, do check my LinkedIn profile and feel free to connect with me there.
Best,
