He never got on with the banks. Capitalism is abhorrent to him. He sees their exploitative wrongdoings personally in regular trips to Africa. For example, cobalt mining and the accompanying degradation of rivers and lakes in Congo, in his opinion one of the most beautiful regions of the world.

We’re visiting Heini Staudinger, 62. In the small nest of Schrems, Lower Austria, near the Czech border, a man with a huge grin approaches us. “Hi, I’m Heini, a warm welcome to Schrems.” We’re standing in the courtyard of the Waldviertler shoe factory, which doubles up as Heini’s garden. He has lived in a former storage room in the factory since 1991. It is around noon. The atmosphere at the table as we eat lunch is delightfully familiar. The boss’ smile seems to affect his whole staff, who always say hello and are ready to talk with you for hours.

Heini grew up as the son of a greengrocer in Schwanenstadt in Upper Austria. After finishing school he went on his first trip to Africa; a 12,000km journey on a 50cc Puch moped with his best friend. From Austria, through the Sahara to Tanzania. The impressions he got on this journey would deeply influence his life. He was fascinated by the humility and generosity of the people there. Nobody has anything and yet everybody has so much.

He spreads these values until today in his company. Firstly they made him study medicine and then later, completely on a whim, become a shoe salesman. He packed his sleeping bag and hitchhiked up to Denmark to buy his first batch of shoes. He borrowed the money from friends and never once entertained the idea of going to a bank. Some years later he founded the Waldviertler shoe factory and independently manages every area of the business, from the production right through to distribution to the customer.

Over the years Heini has invented a new way of advertising, concentrated on content marketing, a term that hadn’t even been invented at the time and has financed new warehouses at the factory by borrowing money from friends, long before crowd funding was even a thing. By doing this he has also dumfounded the Austrian financial authorities, who prosecuted him for illegal banking procedures. Heini battled it until the highest court in the land. He lost the case but played a huge role in the formation of the Austrian crowdfunding law.

The story of a rebel who lives his life with humility and sustainability and who started the process of change while others were merely crying out for it.

INTERVIEW

Please tell me a bit about your background.

I grew up in the small town of Schwanenstadt. My parents were greengrocers and I’m the oldest of five siblings. My family’s living environment was pretty much the grocers itself, it was totally mixed up with the shop. There was a door from the living room to the kitchen and another door that led to the shop. Everyone in the family had to work, that’s still the backbone of my entrepreneurship today. I learned to greet people when I was two and at only three years old I learned how to serve and attend. At the age of six, we were all able to do some mental arithmetic. But what I think is the most important thing is that I learned humility. The greengrocer business suffered from the time I was born. And as it got worse and worse, my parents said, “As long as we can make a living, there’s nothing to complain about.” I heard the same thing later on in school, expressed a little bit more elegantly, in a quote from Seneca; “Never is too little which is sufficient.” This attitude still helps me today in running the Waldviertler Schuhfabrik.

Young Heini Staudinger and his sister in front of their parents grocery shop.

During your schooldays, you broke out of Schwanenstadt for the first time.

Exactly. I went to a Catholic college in Linz. When I got there in 1963, it was essentially a penitentiary. Interestingly, in the seven years I went there, it underwent a complete process of change. The reason was that the spirit of ’68 was infused into the college. We had a prefect who was employed as an educator by the bishop, though he hadn’t been an educator. And he thought about how the perfect educator would act. He was a Catholic preacher who thought, “The perfect educator must be God”. And then he thought about which tools God would use as an educator, the most important of which was trust. So from then on, trust was his most important tool. In practice, this meant that we enjoyed total freedom in the 7^th and 8^th grade. That was a significant event in my life. At the same time, this experiment led to the biggest educational success in the history of the school, 14 out of 24 boys started to study theology, one of them was me.

Your enthusiasm did not last long.

One semester, to be exact. For me, no one was excited and believed enough. I studied science of communications and politics for another semester in Salzburg, when a friend wrote me a letter where he informed me that he would stop his studies, planned to travel to Africa and asked whether I wanted to join him. I wrote back a card that had only one word: Yes.

Heini Staudinger saying farewell to his mum before his trip to Africa.

How did you manage to finance this trip being just 19 years old?

1972 was the year of the Olympic Games in Munich. We earned 3,000 German Marks (around 1,500 Euros) for dumb work – night watchmen. With that money, we bought two mopeds and traveled to Africa. 12,000 kilometers in six months. We started off on December 12, 1972, in the middle of the winter.

That sounds like a huge adventure.

It was indeed! We first went to Palermo, then moved on to Tunis by ferry and from there crossed the Sahara desert, first to Western and then to Central and Eastern Africa. It was an unbelievable time in my life. In Nigeria, for example, we went to the area where Boko Haram is now so active, which makes me really sad. Another example is East Congo. During my life I had been asked several times what I found was the most beautiful landscape in the world and I always answered, East Congo. The 5,000-meter-high Ruwenzori mountains in the East and the steaming jungle in the West. Rivers, lakes, woods – blossom in unbelievable glory, fruits in all colours. The soil is so fertile it’s jaw-dropping! Five potato harvests a year. And exactly in that paradise, people had bad luck, as the soil contains the coltan that we need for the production of smartphones. Through that coveted mineral, an economical war started that killed six million people. And the rivers and lakes are now so polluted that no animal would ever drink out of it. I find that enormously tragic, as we enjoyed unbelievable hospitality there, such that we Europeans should feel embarrassed, as we will never reach such a level of magnanimity. After six months we reached our goal in Tanzania. These times will always be in my memory.

What did your parents say when you told them your plans?

When we told our parents that we wanted to go to Africa, they said, “You’re crazy, finish your studies first and then you can still go afterwards”. Then they realised somehow, that logical arguments weren’t going to work here so my mum played the emotional card and said, “If you go, I’ll die!” On the day we left I said to her, “See you, I’m going so I guess you’re going to die!” We both cried. She didn’t die but we did leave. Even that was an important thing to go through, to not buckle under that emotional pressure. Willy Reich would say that I followed my own sense of longing – that is the key moment where life opens up in front of you.

What’s the story behind you starting a shoe company?

Upon getting back from Africa we realised that we had never actually talked about what we were going to do once we got home. We both started studying medicine because of the awful illnesses and desperation we had seen in Africa and I increasingly became aware that the problems in the third world were clearly linked to the craziness we have at home. I was studying for an important pathology exam with my friend Peter, who passed while I failed. He had a rich father who gave him 10,000 Austrian Schilling with which he went shopping in Munich.

We met later in Café Merkur on Florianigasse and he showed me what he had bought. He was completely made up with the shoes he had bought, which you couldn’t get anywhere in Austria. I looked under the table at these shoes and he’s still going on about them and so I lifted my head and said, “You know what Peter? I’m going to stop studying medicine and become a shoes salesman”.

You changed your life plans from one minute to the next?

Indeed! I hadn’t been interested in shoes for a day in my life but in that moment everything fell into place and I’m still astounded, 35 years on, that it all happened like this.

What were the first steps into your new life then?

I hitchhiked up to Denmark and hid my sleeping bag in a park so that they wouldn’t realise that I was poor and travelling like a homeless person. I went into the company’s office and said, “I’d like to sell your shoes in Austria”. They said, “Super!” I told them that I didn’t have any experience in selling shoes and that they should help me put in a first order. They wrote out an order for 300,000 Austrian Schilling. I had no money, so to hide it from them I signed with a smile and hitchhiked back home!

I rung my friends up and asked if they could lend me money as I had bought 300,000 Schilling’s worth of shoes and within two days I had the money I needed to start. I didn’t consider for a moment that I could have gone to a bank to ask for the money; doing it among friends was much more personal for me.

When I came back to Vienna, I cycled through the streets for an hour and found an empty shop that I liked because the sun was shining into the shop window. I rang the landlord, we went to a tobacco shop to buy a lease contract and five minutes later everything was fixed. The contract is still effective today! Sometimes I think that in many areas it would be good to go back to the simplicity of those times.

How did your first years as an entrepreneur work out?

Shortly after the first shop opened, friends of mine opened shops across Austria. After the rebranding, the company was renamed to GEA in 1984, the Waldviertler shoe factory was established. I was totally unsatisfied with the reliability of my Danish suppliers and by happy coincidence, a friend who was shoemaking teacher made a suggestion to found a shoe factory in Schrems (a 3,000 person village in lower Austria). There, the textile industry had just fallen apart and many people were unemployed, so our initiative was supported from different sides.

Heini Staudinger in his new home Schrems, 1991.

You became CEO of the shoe factory a few years later. Why did you move to Schrems from Vienna?

The company has never really been completely been economically sound. So as the debts continued to grow, the shoemakers got scared that they would have to pay back the 8,000 Schilling’s worth of loans that they had taken out and started searching around in panic for someone to give the company to. Then Gerhard Benkö, who was  a business manager at the time, and I took over the firm in 1991. And because the company didn’t have any money and we couldn’t afford a business manager who would have had an idea about how to get out of debt, I couldn’t think of anyone who could have done the work for free apart from myself. I had been able to live off the shoe business so it was a piece of cake to roll my sleeves up and get going. I didn’t think for a second that I should have looked for an apartment in Schrems, I just put a bed in a sort of garage and slept there. I worked in the staff room and about ten years ago I got a wooden floor and heating so I’m pretty much living like a king!

Heini’s new home in Schrems, an empty storage room located in the factory.

From then on, you had a double burden…

I was in the Waldviertel region of Austria trying to get the company there healthy and up and running again and while that was happening, my own company GEA was slipping into crisis. I wasn’t able to see it for a long time and when I did finally catch on, it was nearly too late. When we had no money left in 1997, I had the thought that helping each other, saving and working hard was the way out of this mess.

What were some practical steps out of the crisis?

As I thought about saving, I thought that it’s most effective where we’ve got the most expensive people on the books, which in our case was the advertising specialists. I had a friend who was an unemployed architect and I said to him, “Didi, let’s try and put an advert together”. Advertising is actually shit; they bother us on TV, on the radio, as we’re driving along looking at scenery and now on the internet. So since we’re having to advertise, I wanted to gift a little bit of fuel for the heart and mind as a thank you for looking in the first place. That’s how we got onto the idea of these advertising brochures where every second is a full-page photo with a poem or philosophical or literary text.

I think that we’re doing these brochures right when they answer one fundamental question: What are doing here in the world? This here is a favourite passage of mine, which I found in a book from Dorothee Sölle, ‘Mystik and Widerstand’. It says, ‘Boundlessly happy, completely fearless, always in difficulty. This is all part of the potential of our life’.

Content marketing of the first hour.

Indeed. Funnily enough with these brochures that Didi and I had created, we had our first advertisements where we could measure their impact in turnover afterwards. And we had some unbelievable success with them. The company grew 40% in 1999 and we were lifted out of the debt and losses of 1997 in quick fashion. In 1999 I was invited to a meeting with the bank where I was told that our credit limit was being reduced from 12 million Schilling to 7 million Schilling, something that made me livid when I first heard it but something that I am thankful for now as I was then able to say, “Being independent of any kind of group is the most important thing for my company”.

This led to your crowdfunding activities later on. Do you feel a higher sort of obligation to your private investors than you would to a bank?

You can definitely say that. All in all, it’s now 350 people who lent us almost five million Euros. If the money had come from a bank, I obviously wouldn’t wish for us to go bankrupt but when I imagine that we could cause any sort of damage to people who were kind enough to lend us money because we made a mistake, I would really hate it. These people have not only lent us their money, they have also wished us the best for the development of our company. They wish that we act sustainably with their money. On the one side, I feel that we have a strong moral obligation, on the other hand it’s a warm and positive connection following the principle of not letting each other down. Now we invite our investors once a year to our factory. We show them what we do with their money and our tax accountant answers all of their questions. This gives me a very special feeling – economics can be that beautiful. If only a small part of our economy worked like this, it would have an enormous educational potential where people could gain a huge range of competences.

Your economical approach was not exactly well received by everyone. When did you start putting your moral sense over the common laws?

Through our approach we came into conflict with the Austrian Financial Market Authority, who accused us of running illegal bank businesses. And what they demanded from me was essentially impossible. They wanted us to pay back the money we had borrowed from private people within a few weeks. You could ruin almost any company in Austria if loans are terminated in a very short time frame but the problem was that I had no choice. I couldn’t just go to the bank and say, “I need a loan because I need to pay back the money I received from private investors”. The banker would have felt it’s absurd.

Where did you find the confidence to take the case to the supreme court?

My disobedience towards the FMA was ultimately obedience towards my colleagues and the work we are doing here. When I realised afterwards that the whole community was behind me, being brave was a piece of cake. Now I think that just like there are contagious illnesses there is contagious health, and just like fear can be contagious, so can courage. D und I have seen some crazy things – like walking through Vienna, having cars stop in front of us and people shouting at us, “Don’t let them bring you down!” Somehow with this wind at my back, being courageous isn’t very hard. I think that we should share this courageous wind with as many people as possible as there are so many things that are screaming out for change and that won’t happen unless we tackle the issues at hand. It’s all there in what we want for the world. We want to put the things that we see and hope for back into motion.

How do you approach things that you want to tackle? Do you have any advice?

I think I have a strange talent for perseverance. I often find myself playing around with thoughts in my head and I can’t leave it, though I sometimes wish I could – wish I could not permanently think about something! But if things that are important to me capture me, I permanently need to think about them. Perseverance. Somebody once said it was stubbornness, to which I say, “No, in ‘I Ging’, the Chinese book, there are many encouraging phrases concerning our lives. And the last sentence always reads, ‘And if you want to succeed, be persistent’.”

Heini on his Puch MC 50.

What do you still want to achieve in your life?

My goal is to find a model of how to run a business that is communal and as compatible with people and nature as possible. If I could do that and it were copied a hundred times by other people, I would be very happy. The way economics is set up now is destroying the planet and leaving at least a billion people behind. Gregor Gyzi said it nicely when he said, “If we don’t take responsibility for the third world, they’ll come to us”. It’s also noticeable how we are already at the maximum point of this way of living and that we’re barely able to hold the lid on it all. And so I believe that something big is coming. If we are able to see it as a challenge to our humanity, one which we are ready to take on, it could be a major success. The egomania that has been dominant in the last few decades cannot be the way forward. It’s tragic that in this way of life, even the ‘winners’ aren’t winning. I don’t know anyone who has been able to live in these consumeristic times where I would say, “He’s got it all together. I want to be like him”. Not even a little.

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During his civil service, Matthias Hombauer found an interest in the human body that led him to study molecular biology and later go on to a PhD in immunology. After seven years of studying and working as a researcher, he found himself reflecting on whether this really was his true passion. He realised that the romantic picture he had when thinking about life as a researcher just wasn’t true.

One day, he was sitting on a bicycle, riding to work when his thoughts turned to that which he had been passionate about throughout his life: music and photography. Arriving at work, he googled the term concert photographer – a term that would change his life.

He started shooting concerts at local clubs, built up a portfolio and saved money from his job as a researcher to invest in professional photo equipment. After finishing his PhD he decided to jump in at the deep end and dedicate his life to music photography. He started out shooting jobs for magazines to make a living and went on shooting concerts in the evening, where he found his true passion. A passion he shares with many people around the globe. That’s what has lead him to share his experiences in a blo, which helps newcomers face the challenges he faced himself.

On How to become a Rockstar Photographer, Matthias shares his experience of working with artists like Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy, Shantel and even the Rolling Stones. The online platform helps him finance his life and may soon help fulfil his next dream: shooting portraits of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.

INTERVIEW

Tell me a bit about your background. What did you do before you became a music photographer?

I grew up in Austria, finished high school with a focus on electrical engineering and then, during my civil service, found my passion for the human body. I wanted to find out how our bodies work in detail, I think that’s something we learn way too little about as human beings. This interest made me attend a 3-year academy for medical technology and then led me on to study molecular biology. At that time I dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize as a researcher, went on to do my PhD in the field of immunology and started working on basic research, the foundation for any further studies. During my PhD I lost this love for research and started reflecting on whether it was really the right thing for me.

When did you figure out that being a researcher wasn’t the right thing for you?

Actually it was when I really started working as a researcher. I totally loved my studies even though molecular biology is everything but an easy subject and the masters alone took me more than five years. Then I started my PhD which meant working as a researcher and I went into the field of basic research, working on a mouse model, observing cells. It was really fun in the beginning but after two years of basically doing the same thing everyday, I started doubting that I wanted to spend the rest of my life like it. I couldn’t handle it long term – hard work that doesn’t even guarantee an outcome. I missed something that could give me a quick outcome and satisfaction.

“THE FIRST THING I DID WHEN I CAME TO THE LAB WAS OPEN GOOGLE AND SEARCH FOR ‘CONCERT PHOTOGRAPHER’. IT TURNED OUT THAT THIS SIMPLE SEARCH QUERY WOULD CHANGE MY LIFE.”.

That’s when you thought about photography?

Well, I did some photography when I was around 20. Back then I went to Hong Kong and Taiwan with a Lomo (an LCA Kompakt Automat, to be specific). There was a big hype around analogue photography and Lomo back then, and I met local lomographers there and had fun shooting some random stuff. During my teenage years, I played in a black metal band and I always had a great passion for music. At the beginning of my PhD, I started taking photos again as a hobby and two years later, one day on the way to work, I was sitting on my bike and thought: „Why not combine my passion for music and photography and become a music photographer?“. The first thing I did when I came to the lab was open Google and search for „Concert photographer“. It turned out that this simple search query would change my life.

You still went on for two years and finished your PhD. Why?

The main reason for that was that I had spent more than seven years studying already and thought that it wouldn’t be bad for me to have a PhD. The other reason might have been that I’m quite a risk-conscious person. I thought about getting a job as a lecturer, work for thirty hours a week and spending the rest of my time with photography but the closer I got to the end of my studies, the clearer it was that I needed to put all my energy in this one goal. In the last two years of my studies, I went out to shoot concerts three days a week, building up my portfolio as well as my equipment. I got deeper and deeper into photography and also learned about online marketing and sales in my spare time. When I eventually finished my PhD, I already had an offer to work for a magazine as well as a portfolio of concert pictures and everything I needed to start my second career path.

Being a photographer is a quite unstable job, it’s not easy to make a business out of it. How much money did you save from your work as a researcher? How much time did you buy yourself?

That’s a great question. I had enough money to survive half a year, but more importantly I had already bought proper equipment and had started to build up a portfolio of my first clients while I still had a steady income. This may not be the kickass way to do things, but I think especially in a field like photography it is good to have a safety net and it makes no sense to start out and then be forced to sell your camera because you run out of money and you need to start over again.

“DURING THE CONCERT, THE SINGER GAVE ME A SIGN TO COME SHOOT IN FRONT OF HIM AND SO I WAS STANDING BETWEEN HIM AND 50,000 PEOPLE. THERE I WAS, A BOY FROM A VILLAGE IN AUSTRIA, SHARING A STAGE WITH MY IDOLS.”.

How did you move on from there?

I shot loads of concerts and then one day saw that Fatboy Slim was in town. I thought, I’ve got nothing to lose and so I contacted the management. They got back to me and invited me to shoot the show. And not only that, I got the chance to do a 30 minute portrait shoot as well! I was extremely nervous on the way to the venue but everything worked out fine and he even invited me on stage. Suddenly I was standing in front of 30,000 people and it was just the most incredible thing I had done so far in my life.

Then The Prodigy, who have been my idols since I was 15, came to town. Same thing, only this time 50.000 people! During the concert, the singer gave me a sign to come shoot in front of him and so I was standing between him and 50,000 people. There I was, a boy from a village in Austria sharing a stage with my idols. I had never had so much adrenaline pumping through me. From then on I knew that I was heading in the right direction and did everything to continue on with my journey. Shooting concerts and bands, that’s where I’m in my element. Shooting stuff for money is fine with me, weddings, family portraits, editorial work, but concert photography is where my real passion lies.

And so you did…

Yeah, it went on. Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello and then the world tour with Shantel.

How did it come to you going on a world tour with Shantel?

Shantel plays in Vienna three or four times a year and sells out every show. I shot some of his shows, then my first portrait session with him and then one day, they called me and asked me to shoot his tour photo, which would be on posters around the world. That’s how we kept in contact over the years. And one day I went on a small tour in Austria and Germany with him, we got quite close and he asked me if I would join him on his world tour, first stop: Mexico. Of course I said yes, it was like a dream come true. He played as a DJ in Mexico city in front of 200 people and the crowd went totally nuts. The other stops were Brooklyn and Canada, where he played two shows in front of 50,000 people and several shows around Europe. That was really a dream come true for me.

What would you consider the most special experiences in your career so far?

First definitely shooting The Prodigy. I mean, they were my idols and they trusted me to come on stage. A show of the Prodigy mainly consists of strobe and haze and if you run over an amp or unplug a cable, you’re in serious trouble. So that was really an honour for me.

Secondly I met a band called Vintage trouble at a festival in the middle of nowhere in Canada. They played after Shantel, were really well dressed and asked if I could do some portraits. Two years later, AC/DC played a show in front of 120,000 people in Austria and well, this band called Vintage Trouble played the warm-up show. So after two years, I got in contact with them again via Facebook and asked if they wanted to collaborate. That was two days before the actual concert! They agreed but I didn’t have any official accreditation and when I got there, the network was down due to the huge amount of people there. In the end, everything worked out for the best and I found myself in front of 120,000 people. It was the biggest single concert in Austria ever, and as Vintage Trouble was playing right before AC/DC, the whole crowd was already there. Unbelieveable. I really got the feeling of what it must be like to be a rockstar.

How did you come up with the idea of starting your online business?

I started out writing guest articles about my work quite early on in my career. I got featured on Digital Photography School which was founded by Darren Rowse, a very famous blogger and one of the founding members of Problogger. That’s when I first got in touch with the world of blogging. I then started out with my project How to become a rockstar photographer. At first, it was all about my camera settings and technical stuff,  but then I recognized that the things people really struggle with are more related to how they even get to work with artists and bands. How do I get to photograph bigger bands? How do I make a living out of it? We all face the same challenges. So that’s where I set the focus of my blog and my upcoming video course. On top of that I wrote my e-book Guide to Rockstar Concert Photography, a 170-page pdf that helped me build up an international community and helped with the monetization of my blog. I have now sold more than 300 e-books.

How did you start with online marketing as a total newbie?

The same way I taught myself guitar and photography: I’m self-taught.

What do you enjoy more – a band telling you that they like your photos or somebody who thanks you for sharing your knowledge?

Good question. I’d say both in equal measure. Of course it’s the biggest appreciation I can get when artists I admire tell me that they like my photos or even feature it in their album booklet. That was the case with the new album by The Prodigy, The Day is my Enemy. At the same time, I get several emails a day where people tell me that I have helped them in becoming better photographers. There was one artist who told me that she’s been doing the job for ten years but she’s never been as satisfied with her work as she is now, as she has got so much better through the knowledge I shared. Of course, that’s a huge honour for me and it motivates me to go on.

“I GOT AN EMAIL FROM INSTAGRAM FRANCE AND MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT IT HAD TO BE SPAM. BUT THE LADY WHO WROTE THE EMAIL ASKED FOR A PHONE CALL, SO I THOUGHT, WHY NOT JUST GIVE IT A TRY. AND YES, IT WAS INSTAGRAM.”.

Your online presence led Instagram to invite you to shoot a festival in France. What’s the story behind that?

Yeah, that’s also a crazy story. I got an email from Instagram France and my first thought was that it had to be spam. But the lady who wrote the email asked for a phone call, so I thought, why not just give it a try. And yes, it was Instagram. What I didn’t know is that the company has a branch in France as well as their headquarters in the U.S. They were searching for a photographer who would take over the official Instagram feed for a festival called Frankofolies Festival in La Rochelle on the western side of France. 5 days, 10 stages and 90 bands almost exclusively from France. What was funny was that there were already around 100 photographers there, all of whom were wondering why that had invited this foreigner! I was wondering it myself, actually. But in the end I see it as further appreciation for my work and it was great fun.

Has photography brought you closer to music again?

I would say it gives me the opportunity to look behind the scenes. If you’re at a concert as a fan you often only see the video wall and everything seems so surreal. There’s these stars on stage and they seem so untouchable. If you’re on tour with a band, you get to see what it really means to be an artist. They tour over the course of weeks, many people in a very small space and then they have a small number of days off before they go on touring again. And you can’t allow yourself to lose your voice or get sick or anything so it needs lots of discipline and hard work. That definitely gave me a different view of what it means to be a rockstar.

What’s the aim for your blog?

I want to definitely reach more people with the blog, as well as with the upcoming video course. And naturally I want to earn my income with it, which would allow me to go on with the work I truly love and respect. Surviving as a concert photographer alone is almost impossible, so instead you do normal photojobs like portrait photography or editorial shoots or you have a second income stream. There’s some money to earn if you work directly with bands and shoot their promotional photos but no chance with concert photography alone. I talked to people who have been in the business for 40 years and none of them could name even one photographer who earns his money with concert photography alone. That’s what I also teach in my course. Concert photography will not be your main job, so find another way of earning some money and enjoy being close to your idols, I mean that’s the reason so many people want to get into shooting concerts.

Did you face any serious downs over the years?

In the beginning I had a down every month! (laughs) In the meantime, I’d say I’m quite stable, as I work for magazines like Forbes here in Austria and also have a good client base. But at the beginning it was hard for sure. You shoot a wedding once in a while as well as stuff for magazines but you only see expenses and almost no income! So you get frustrated. But that’s the same with every person who runs their own business, there’s days when you’re totally down and don’t know how to go on and the next day you get this email and you’re flying high again. In that moment you know that it is what you’re supposed to do. Every major goal in life needs dedication over years. A painter once told me that if you stay in the business for long enough, it will work out one day and that’s how I see it. At the moment, I’d say I’m living my dream life and I want to encourage everyone to go for their goals, no matter how far away they might seem.

Check out some of Matthias’ Photos:

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Matthias’ official Website

Portrait photography: Jure Vukadin

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A boy whose only decision in life was whether to take over the family farm or not, Florian Gschwandtner decided against it. He made his own way. This took him to Upper Austrian building sites, a Ukrainian steel mill and lastly, unpaid 16-hour days as the head of one of the most important apps in the world. This is the story of Runtastic CEO Florian Gschwandtner.

In a small corner of Lower Austria, in the 2000-inhabitant village Strengberg to be precise, lies the family farm, a wonderful complex at the end of a country lane. This is where the founder of Runtastic spent his childhood. He got his first moped at seven and had lots of space to play and run riot.

The entrepreneur’s career began back in 2006 with a little black box, the M-Box, which was able to track sailing ships and rally cars via GPS. The four founders of Runtastic came up with the idea during a heavy night out on the town: the main function would stay the same but instead of tracking boats and cars, they would track people jogging. Their initial approach was to use solar-powered tracking stations which would measure jogging routes via chips in people’s running shoes. Although painstakingly crafted by hand, the idea of the chips quickly proved to be a failure. After selling only one unit, the team focused instead on a running app called Runtastic. It was at this time that GPS in smartphones was starting to appear. Only seven months after being hired as an international project manager, Florian quit his job to concentrate fully on the development of the idea. He financed the project himself, developing apps for customers during the daytime and developing his own app at night. The rest is history.

 Today the fitness app has more than 70 million users and just a short time ago Adidas bought the company for 220 million euros. Stories about Florian Gschwandtner have appeared in the New York Times, der Spiegel and in Wired. It was from this tranquil paradise that Gschwandtner started running in the only direction he could: up. All the way to the heights of the management floors of Google and Apple. When he speaks about his experiences, he embodies everything that he learnt on this farm.

INTERVIEW

Flo, you live and work at an enormous pace and have meetings with famous media managers and investors. Is there anything of this country life left in you?

I think that has a lot to do with the people you surround yourself with in daily life and the friends you choose. All four founders are like this. Anyone who knows us knows how down to earth we are and that has never changed.

“I TRY TO TAKE SETBACKS AS MOTIVATION AND NOT SIMPLY CHOOSE TO DO SOEMTHING ELSE STRAIGHT AWAY. IF THE CAR’S NOT WORKING, RIDE YOUR BIKE, EVEN IF IT PUTS YOU ON YOUR BACK.”

Was there ever a moment on your journey where you thought to yourself that you didn’t want to carry on? That you were exhausted and burnt out?

No, I never doubted myself for a second. There was only one situation that I can remember; it was a cold morning in the first year after founding Runtastic and I had just quit my job. My car was having engine problems and I couldn’t afford to get it fixed, so I was riding my bike to work at six in the morning. The front wheel skidded on some ice and I got properly thrown off the bike. I lay in the snow, cursed and thought to myself, ‘Flo, why are you doing this to yourself? You have two masters and aren’t stupid’. It was a short moment of reflection, but I try to take setbacks as motivation and not simply choose to do something else straight away. If the car’s not working, ride your bike, even if it puts you on your back. In life there’s not always an elevator – you have to take the stairs. If you can see things in this way, then there are no setbacks.

How did you survive the start-up phase of Runtastic when you were doing everything by yourself and were funding the company from your own pockets? How did you afford to live and eat?

We were always focused on how we could earn money with the project but until it got that far I always earned a bit on the side. That was a constant in my life. During my studies I worked as a labourer on building sites and I earned the money to start our company while working at a steel mill in Ukraine – that was a hard summer. When we were starting up, I also began to work at universities as a teacher. With a life like that you learn to live without a lot of money. In the first few years, I considered long and hard whether I should buy myself a new monitor and the 40 euro headset that I bought, which didn’t work, I sent back. Being grounded in this way helped us keep our entrepreneurial spirit, even when the money then started rolling in.

What was that like? Do the first investors in the project make everything a bit easier as you no longer have that fear waiting for the whir of banknotes to come out at an ATM?

That was a bit different in our situation. Right from the start we had Stefan Kalteis, Bernhard Lehner and Alexander Egelsböck on board. They’re three business angels and good friends of ours. They hustled for us in exchange for shares in the company. Gabriel Grabner was the first person to give us money for shares. At that time, the investor Hansi Hansmann had heard about us and was practically begging to be allowed on board, but we always said that we already had a good turnover and didn’t need any external capital. We stayed in contact with each other from that point on and regularly went to lunch, however, and then somehow the chemistry seemed to sort itself out.

Hansmann eventually did come on board and played an essential role in the handling of the deals with Axel Springer and the Adidas Group. Why did you decide on him?

Hansi has quite a unique level of experience and a quality about him when meeting people face to face, which I really like. At that time, there were several media companies that came knocking and we had a set of terms already printed out waiting for them. Hansi heard this and said, “From now on I’ll be doing all negotiating face to face” and came up with a seven-digit sum straight away. In retrospect, this was a great decision and we are extremely happy that he helped us with the negotiations.

How did your relationship to your parents change during this time? They originally wanted you to take over the family farm and get into farming like them.

My parents are farmers, down-to-earth, fundamentally good people from the countryside. They quickly came round to the fact that I wasn’t going to take over the family farm and were only concerned for me, especially when I told them that I wasn’t enjoying my job as an international project manager with a fancy company car and good salary and had therefore quit! My mom sighed and said, “What’s with all this again!” It was difficult for her to understand how I was working every weekend without earning a single cent. When we eventually did have 20 or 30 employees and even my sister started working for us, my parents asked, “What exactly does everyone do all day?” They hadn’t really understood how much work was behind a little colourful logo on a mobile phone screen. They always accepted the fact that I was walking my own path, however, and although they didn’t quite understand what I was doing, they were happy to trust me. Even today they still worry about me because I work so much. At least they’re not worrying about my empty fridge anymore.

“NOTHING HINDERS YOU MORE THAN BEING CONTENT WITH YOURSELF.”

You’re now the boss of 140 people, how do you deal with the responsibility that brings?

The most important lesson to learn is how to lead people. In interviews, I always trust my gut feeling – I have to feel as though I can trust the person sitting in front of me, be able to delegate them important work and that they will reach targets by themselves. I’m now convinced that that is fundamental when building up a company. I also have never stopped and stood still. I’m a self-educator and through training and the people close to me who challenge me, I’m still managing some huge leaps forward. Nothing hinders you more than being content with yourself.

What does a good employee at Runtastic have to do?

They have to be quick and flexible and be part of the business. For example, if Apple suddenly contacts us to say they have a huge opportunity for us and that they need everything by tomorrow to put us on the homepage of the iTunes Store, several people’s schedules for the next few days will have to be thrown out: meetings have to be rescheduled, dinners cancelled and other tasks put on the back burner. In order to manage this, you need to have a certain flexibility in life and in my experience, people over 40 usually find this very difficult.

How do you make decisions?

I’m at my most creative when I’m travelling. In my office, I’m able to organise things well but can’t really develop ideas; for that I have to be somewhere else, have to meet new people, take a break from everyday life and simply catch my breath. I leave a lot to chance when I travel and this means new ideas usually come to me, rather than the other way round. I make organizational decisions at our regular meetings where I sit in my office from 8am until 6pm and reach about 200 decisions. They’re not always right, but it is always important that they’re made. My most important tool when making a decision is my gut feeling.

You talk about decisions with Apple and Google. When hearing this, it’s easy to think that everything has fallen into your lap…

The Play Store and the iTunes Store were always my goals. That was our market. We have to get as high up on their lists as physically possible and that was extremely difficult. I spent two and a half years building up a relationship with the two companies. Often I flew to the USA only to come back empty-handed. We then employed someone in the US just to have an address there, which helped somewhat, and made sure that we always delivered not only on time but with 20-30% more than what was asked for whenever anyone from Apple or Google sent through an enquiry or request. Through all this, slowly we built up a good relationship with them.

At the moment, we are one of only 12 other companies worldwide that have access to a few special Google projects and features. That means we really are super connected. There was no personal relationship that came to our aid here; it was simply hard work and being ready to do things that might not make any money. The Google Glass app wasn’t worth it at all, but we learned from it and now a Google employee can go to someone else and say, “Wow, look how Runtastic solved this problem”. That’s what it’s all about, being recognized and being taken seriously.

How were the few days ahead of the big deal with Adidas?

We did the deal ‘on top’ which meant that no employees or business angels knew about it. Shortly before our presentation, we were still in Sicily celebrating our deal with Axel Springer with our business angels and as you can imagine, it was extremely difficult to keep the news of the Adidas deal secret. Two days before the deal, I worked out as usual and then had a BBQ with a friend. It was quite surprising how relaxed we were actually.

“RUNTASTIC IS STILL MY BABY BECAUSE I NEVER REALLY THOUGHT ABOUT THE MONEY AND EVERYTHING ELSE SURROUNDING IT ANYWAY.”

After the Adidas deal, the company no longer belongs to you. Will it be more difficult to motivate yourself in the future?

We will see. So far I have had no problem motivating myself, quite the opposite in fact. Until the deal we always had to manage the next step by ourselves but now we have a partner in Adidas that can open up a whole world of possibilities. We can now produce trainers with Adidas, learn a lot more at the management level and we now have the chance to create a billion dollar company. And Runtastic is still my baby because I never really thought about the money and everything else surrounding it anyway.

What is that big vision that drives you?

We built Runtastic because we want to make people more active and lead them to a more conscious lifestyle. We believe in a world where people live longer, healthier lives. And sports and fitness are an integral part of a healthy lifestyle. With Runtastic, we have the chance to motivate people on a day to day basis and by that create global impact.

Speaking of global impact, how does it feel to walk into the New York Times to give an interview?

It was actually my second time there, so not that exciting but still quite a cool feeling. We had a red-eye flight that should have landed in New York at 7am but due to a delay we found no time to shower, so we really did go into the building with extremely bloodshot eyes! Cool. The whole PR trip was exciting; it was an awesome feeling to sit in the New World Trade Center and give a product presentation. It quickly becomes routine though and I’ve already told myself that I don’t want to fly everywhere now, as I want to save a little bit of excitement for the rest of my life.

What’s your secret to success?

Ambition and hard work. They’re the most important things. I always say that if you get up an hour earlier and work an hour longer than everyone else then you’ll get further in life. One of the most important things in developing a product is understanding the common man though. I was lucky in that I was always around lots of down-to-earth people and I could always talk well with people. I could talk to a car mechanic for an hour about a cylinder just as easily as I could talk to an optician about eye-laser technology. I don’t know a lot about one thing but I do know a little bit about everything and that’s important. I think I know how to build a product. Whenever I go to a bar, I always think, ‘How can I improve this, optimise it?’ It’s a blessing and a curse at the same time as I immediately start to draw things up. And the third thing is that I can excite people. I often get that feedback. It happens a lot that people leave our meetings and want to go and tear the world up all by themselves. You have to learn that about leadership as well.

Do you have goals in life outside of Runtastic? What do you want to do with the money that you now have?

I do have one goal; I would like everyone in Austria to be able to speak perfect English. I want to invest in education. I don’t yet know how I can do it but it’s something I’d really like to do.

Additional Information

Florian considers Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh as the most important book he ever read.

Interview & Text: Manuel Gruber, Bastian Kellhofer.

Translation: Steven Mew.

Photography: Jure Vukadin.

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Peter Hackmair sits before me at complete ease with himself. The man is a complete world away from the boy dealing with the pressure of being a professional footballer and with his whole career planned out before him. At the age of only 25, he found the courage to turn his back on the pathway that had been laid out for him to pursue his real dreams in life.

He spent the majority of his career at SV Ried (an Austrian Major League team) and was a regular in the Austrian national team at every age group growing up, his crowning glory coming in the semi-final appearance of the u20 team at the World Cup in Canada. A series of serious injuries meant a lot of time on the sidelines for Peter, however, giving him the time to really reflect on his life. After deciding that he didn’t like what he saw, he turned his back on the lucrative world of football to do what he wanted in life.

Having travelled round the world for 15 months, he has made lots of breakthroughs in his life in the last two years. He now lives in Vienna as the successful author of two books and an online blog about freedom and chasing your dreams. The method of selling his second book is also challenging traditional capitalistic views and inspiring more trust between people. He has even found his way back to football but in two roles that allow him to truly be who he is.

It is fair to say that he has made a complete U-turn in life. At once trapped in the small-minded world of professional football, he has now broadened his horizons and considers himself truly happy. Through his writing and his experiences in life, he hopes to inspire in others the courage that helped him change his life.

INTERVIEW

Who are you, what’s been your story in life until this point?

I’m Peter Alexander, 28. I grew up in probably the nicest place in the world – Salzkammergut (after 15 months of world travel I’m allowed to say that now). I used to be obsessed with football and started at the tender age of 5. At 6 I was playing in a team and it was obvious that it was my dream to turn professional. At the start it was all very fun but when the county teams were selected at the ages of 10 and 11 it was clear to me that I wanted to be the best. Even then I was very ambitious. Then at 11 and 12 I was told that SV Ried were interested in signing me which influenced and directed me in life and I spent 20 years in football.

Peter at age 6 (© private archives).

What inspired you to become a footballer? Was it a relatively normal dream like with most boys?

Football was my main hobby but I played and trained tennis quite intensively as well. It was quite an important moment when I decided to focus on football and not tennis. With football and SV Ried I quickly had to leave home and in retrospect the fact that I was searching for a football family was clearly important for my ambition. My parents were divorced, my dad left home when I was four and I was clearly looking for attention in football. I think that was a deciding factor as to why I was able to make it in football at all, as only through this was I able to stay consistent enough.

How did this need for attention influence you in later life?

I suppose in as much as my ego was always being tested. I turned professional at 17 or 18 and was very sensitive at that age. Suddenly you find yourself in the newspaper, on TV and you get more and more pats on the back. I guess I was a product of my environment; everything was focussed on football. That influenced me and I became very egotistical. I managed to notice this in my last two or three years as a professional and worked on it. I now realise it’s a part of me to be in the centre of things and in public but I now enjoy letting my ego go a little bit and being part of something bigger than myself.

“TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, I WAS SHITTING MYSELF FOR THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES.”

You played your first Bundesliga match at 18, what was that like?

To tell you the truth, I was shitting myself for the first five minutes. I was so nervous and tense but it was something that I had been working towards for years. After 5 minutes I simply enjoyed it and it was a huge weight of my shoulders. I clearly remember that feeling of ‘Yes, you can do this’. I had shown it for years in training that I was one of the best young talents in Austria but I wanted to see it in a match. Until that point there had been a huge question mark in my head as to whether I really could be a Bundesliga player. Ten minutes into the game were enough for me to know that I could be. I’d won my first tackle, played my first pass, done my first trick. Then I could start to relax and enjoy the feeling of having the world, quite literally, at my feet.

How did the call-ups to the junior national teams influence you?

Hugely. I was able to see at the age of 15 that I could run with the best of them. At the u17 World Cup I played against Fabregas, Pique and lots more that are now world class. That gave me the confidence in myself to know I could become a professional in Austria but I always dreamt of making the leap to a big team in a foreign league.

Peter Hackmair with the Austrian U17 national team (© private archives).

Why didn’t you move to a foreign club right away? Did the situation in Austrian football at the time have anything to do with your decision?

Yeah that was certainly a factor. I felt that it probably wasn’t such a bad idea to establish myself in Austria for two or three years first, before making a move to a foreign club. The problem was that after only two years my first real injury came, just before the 2008 European Championships in Austria, for which I was in the initial squad. I don’t want to say I had to start again because of this but it put me back a long way. Then came the six-month therapy where you’re reduced to fighting by yourself, which is actually very interesting, but where you lose a lot of ground in a sporting sense. I made my comeback and everything went well for 6 months but then I got injured again. My sporting development then just wasn’t what it had seemed three years previously because my body wasn’t able to cope. Because of this the transfer to a foreign club never really came off.

Do you now think that it was destiny?

Yes. One of my mottos in life is that everything in life has its purpose. I didn’t really understand that back then, it was only with my third major injury that I started to entertain thoughts of quitting and it woke something up in me. I’m now 28, freer than ever and have more responsibility for my life and for my surroundings than ever before. For that I’m hugely thankful. Now when I look at my knee with all its scars from the various ligament tears, I’m actually thankful. Firstly for the fact that I’m generally fit enough to do most sports and secondly for everything that I was able to experience. Maybe I would have quit even without the injuries but I doubt I would have had the courage to give up something that had been my dream for so long.

And then came your third major injury. Can you tell us how it felt to lay in hospital and for the first time really think about gathering up the courage to quit football?

The injury didn’t look that bad at the beginning, it seemed like I had just irritated my meniscus, but then I had it checked out and the doctor said that my cruciate ligament was far too loose and that he wouldn’t send me back out into professional sports with it as it was. I had ripped part of my cartilage and they had to take it out. Even before I knew that I needed another operation I was thinking about quitting. I thought about it overnight and had lots of thoughts of, ‘You can’t quit at 25, you’ve worked so hard for this’, but when I heard that I was facing another operation and 6 months therapy, I felt as though it was time to call time on my career. I decided to give myself those 6 months to really test how I was feeling and did the therapy as though I was still going to come back but after 3 months I kind of knew that that world wasn’t for me anymore.

“I’M TERRIBLY LOGICAL AND HAD THOUGHT THROUGH AND PLANNED MY ENTIRE LIFE BUT IN THAT MOMENT WITH MY INJURY, I SIMPLY FELT THAT IT WASN’T MY WORLD ANYMORE.”

What was going through your mind? Was it more than just an injury?

I think I managed to listen to my gut feeling for the first time in my life. I’m terribly logical and had thought through and planned my entire life but in that moment with my injury, I simply felt that it wasn’t my world anymore. I can’t really explain what it was; I just knew how the therapy was going to go and which world waited for me when I made my comeback and that didn’t feel right for me. I knew that I didn’t want to go back to the same colleagues and the same conversations and that I wanted more from life. I had found myself in a sort of tunnel – which was good as in professional football you need that focus – but I felt that there was more to life that I was missing. I didn’t know exactly what I was missing but I felt that if I made room for it, it would certainly come. Of course I had my doubts and I thought for a long time whether it wasn’t careless just to throw away the career I had worked so hard for but somehow I knew that it would work out for me.

Was it also partly being afraid of losing your status?

I think that might have been my biggest fear of them all. At the time I defined myself by my possessions: I drove a nice car, went shopping every week and concentrated a lot on how I looked and I knew that that would completely stop overnight because I wouldn’t be able to earn the money that I had been earning.

What made you want to go on a world trip?

I had seen a few people in the years previous who had simply given up and lost their drive in life and I wanted to avoid that at any cost. It was for this reason that I wrote my first book and went on a world trip with my wife so quickly after quitting football. It was her decision really, as it’s completely her thing to travel. I’ve always enjoyed travelling but never to the extent that I wanted to take off without a return trip! With writing it was something else; I quickly realised that I had discovered a new talent and a new passion in myself but travelling wasn’t really my thing at the start. I had planned to simply go along for a bit and try it and it wasn’t until during the trip that I got so obsessed with it!

Peter with his adopted godson Sonu in India (© private archives).

First stop: India…

After three days there I thought, ‘That’s it, I’m going home!’ but the stop was planned for us to visit our adopted godson at the social project where he goes to school and so it was very important. I think it was good for me to start there as I had something to do straight away; meeting the kids, sharing my experience and being a teacher all bridged the gap between being on career plan 24 hours a day to suddenly being on a world trip. We stayed in the school for two weeks and then travelled around the Andaman Islands, which are as close to paradise as you’ll find. The best thing about our time there was that I was living in the moment – something I had never done before.

How did that affect you as a person?

It completely changed me. I always try to remember two things from the trip: Number one, be open. I had always felt ok being the centre of attention but only among my own friends, I could never openly go up to other people. Since I’ve been doing this, I have noticed just how many positive reactions I get from other people. Number two, be thankful. This is definitely the most important thing I learnt. When you’ve lived in India and Colombia you learn to be so thankful for the most basic things in Austria; we get clean water from the tap, we always have something to eat and we can survive even when we have no work. I’ve definitely become more tolerant as well, it’s like I’ve suddenly noticed other religions, cultures and points of view.

You then started your blog about being free. What does freedom mean to you?

I think that after being healthy it means everything. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I think it’s so important to me as it is the basis for my whole life. Everything that is happening to me at the moment, be it cool new jobs or cool new people, is happening because I’m not tied down to one place or one job. I can stop doing everything at any time and can decide what I want to do nearly every day. So I guess freedom means being able to decide things for yourself. A reader of my blog once wrote me, ‘Decide yourself to define yourself’, which I think sums it up brilliantly.

Peter Hackmair – The author (© private archives).

Was it also an aim of your second book to give that freedom to other people?

Two things: freedom and courage. They are the two things I would like people to most take away from my writing. Maybe even ‘courage to be free’ if you want to connect the two. It takes a lot of courage to quit a job and go on a world trip where you’re not going to be earning anything. For this reason it’s such a nice thing to receive when people write me hand-written letters or emails to say that they’ve been inspired by me and are now considering giving up their job to travel the world for a while. It’s great to think that other people are recognising this freedom in their lives too. I think that’s the best thing I could ever have left behind in the world.

Towards the end of last year you had a major breakthrough in life in that you brought out your second book. How did that happen and how has it been since then?

It completely turned my life on its head. After the world trip, my small town of Ried im Innkreis quickly became too small for me so I moved to Vienna with my ex-wife. It has opened some interesting paths for me and now when I look out over the horizon, there’s a lively, two-million-person city there before me. Both the city and the social network that I now find myself in have inspired me hugely and have meant that I’m now an ORF expert on Austrian football on TV, that I’ve had some wonderful success with the book and that I’m part of Teco 7, a greatly promising football academy that wants to revolutionise football coaching. That all this has happened in one year is simply unbelievable. It has taught me that you shouldn’t live by the boundaries you create in your head, as anything is possible.

You started an experiment with your book, how is that going?

Yes with the second book I’m running an experiment where people can decide themselves what they think the book is worth and otherwise don’t pay a cent. The reason for this is that when I was on my world trip so many people helped us out without wanting anything in return which really inspired me. In this time I also got to know Hermann Gams and Harald Katzenschläger who help people make their dreams reality without handing out an invoice afterwards. Another thing was that I wanted to make the book accessible for as many people as possible and this meant doing it in this way, as I saw on the world trip just how much €20 or €25 is for someone in India or Colombia. I didn’t want to limit anyone from reading it through the price.

How has it all gone?

Some people can’t deal with it and almost need a concrete price from me before they take the book and some people think it’s the coolest thing in the world and love how much trust is given to the reader. Some people are even already transferring the policy to their lives! Somebody wrote to me the other day and said that they’re opening a restaurant and would like to use the same policy for the first month there, which I think is fantastic. Of course, some people haven’t yet paid but some have given €100 for it. It’s nice to know that they appreciate the path I’ve chosen for the book.

You were also recently in New York with Christian Fuchs to expand the football academy Teco 7. How did that come about and why exactly New York?

In winter I was talking with one of my mentors about rolling Teco 7 out across the world and New York came up as my dream destination to start. I also knew that if we could make it there, we could use Teco 7 anywhere in the world. A month later I saw Christian Fuchs giving an interview where he was talking about his planned football camp in New York. I got in touch and he was very enthusiastic. After a few weeks of back and forth, it was clear that we were going to do it together. He was extremely motivated but lacked a bit of know-how, as he’s not a coach and had never organised a camp before so it was the perfect union. That was a great moment as I found out that you only have to show a bit of courage and tell people about your dreams and they can come true in a flash. Now when I have doubts about anything in life, I think back to New York and how anything is possible if you go at it with passion.

“SUDDENLY UNDER THOSE SORTS OF CONDITIONS YOU BEGIN TO DOUBT AND QUESTION EVERYTHING.”

That sounds extremely positive. Are there any phases in life where nothing seems to work? What happens to you then?

Yes of course. I had probably the worst phase of my life only this year; it seemed like in winter everything came together to make me extremely depressed for two months. I had just separated from my wife, I was living in a small apartment where I wasn’t happy and it was getting dark every day at 4pm. Suddenly under those sorts of conditions you begin to doubt and question everything. I wasn’t selling many books at the time either, although the launch was quickly approaching, which made me question my work and the experiment with ‘You pay what you want’.

It was no huge step to make myself happy again, I just made sure that I was meeting up with people who were important to me and slowly but surely I made it out. Now I see how great it feels to come out of a phase like that and be happy again. I grew up a lot in that time and worked through a lot of feelings with regards to the separation. Generally I realised that I could be happy in life with who I am. I learnt from a book that a lot of relationships, regardless whether it is family, friends or partners, are simply there for you to get to know yourself, as they show you a facet of yourself that you might not have considered.

New York happened as it did then, what do you put it all down to?

I put it down to the fact that I’m no longer dependent on anything in life and that I’ve managed to preserve the freedom that I had on the world trip. I think this gives me an easy-going character which also makes me very strong. I really do think that freedom is the basis for my whole good fortune in life. I can choose when to really throw myself into something and when to hold back and say no.

What values do you think are important in your life?

I generally just try to be a good person. I used to be in a world where only status, money and appearances are important but then I saw on the world trip what it’s like to be outside of the paradise that is Austria. It’s crazy to think that we live in the top 1% of the world, not in terms of money but in terms of being able to survive and being able to do things like follow our dreams. So many people don’t have this opportunity. I don’t think I can change the world on my own but I do think I can be part of a community that affects a bigger change. Part of this is values like being honest to myself, being true to myself and simply being myself. I have grown up to realise that I don’t need to change the world all by myself, I just have to be me. If I offend anyone doing this then it’s ok, I’ll say what I think and move on with my life. I like not having to pretend to be someone I’m not.

What are the next things on your list of dreams?

I really think that the Teco 7 vision is something that will change football training. We already work very professionally with the kids and it is very important for us that the people are the focus of the training. I want to teach kids values through training so that one day they might be able to live in the dog-eat-dog world of football and be comfortable in their own skin. Lots of footballers have to put on a mask to survive with the enormous pressure of professional sport. I don’t think we’re going to turn professional football on its head anytime soon but I think that if we can transmit these positive values to our small team and develop a community spirit, the whole world will see that Teco 7 players stick together and the coaches do what makes them happy. To put it more simply, the people and not the system are the centre of things.

You’ve said in a lot of interviews that you think footballers earn far too much money. How would you change the system if you could?

I think there’s only one solution and that’s a salary cap that’s regulated by the sporting body, like Major League Soccer in the USA. I would do that in a heartbeat but it’s not really a long-term solution as it can be easily ignored; you would have to really change the values and responsibilities in football in order to change anything. For this you have to start with kids’ football as there you can actually change the future. If they grow up in a positive system then they won’t define themselves later by how much money they earn. That’s what we’re trying to do at Teco 7 and I hope that one day the whole world will come to think like it too. I think it’s possible that in ten years we can have a professional team where everyone earns the same thing, from the players to the manager to the kit man. Every cog in the wheel is equally as appreciated for the job they do.

Do you have any wishes?

I wish that the freedom I have discovered and enjoy stays with me, even when I’m grown up and have a family. I definitely want to have kids but hear more and more from parents that it extremely limits the freedom you have in life. I wish that I can keep up this feeling and make my family a part of it.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Peter considers Talent Code by Daniel Coyle the most important book in his life.

Portrait Photography: Jure Vukadin

The post Peter A. Hackmair: The professional footballer who quit to live his dreams appeared first on DREAMA TV.

(Note: This story is an evergreen produced in 2012.)

Christmas time is the time to make resolutions for the upcoming year. But why? Why aren’t we asking ourselves each and every day what we want to do in life? What our purpose is? I had the honour to talk about this with my long time friend and mentor Harald Katzenschläger, self-acclaimed dream developer and co-founder of DreamAcademia. 10 years ago he quit his dream job and started to change his life. In 2007 he founded DreamAcademia together with Hermann Gams, with the aim of inspiring people to go for their biggest dreams and the vision of a society in which everybody does exactly what he/she loves to do.

Around christmas time, chances are high to find Harald dressed up as Santa, sharing out sweets and asking people for their dreams. I met up with him at Sektor 5 Coworking-Spaces in Vienna to talk about dream development techniques, how to stay consistent during the process and about what it means to leave all securities behind just to help other people follow their heart and intution.

INTERVIEW

We’re at the end of the year. Time for resolutions. What is your advice when it comes to resolutions?

End of the year? End of what? When I look at my life, there’s two points of view. It has a beginning when I’m born and an end when I pass away. In between I can do whatever I want in life. Do you need an end of the year to start something new? I don’t think so. I feel that everything has a start and an end. It depends only on yourself. Let’s be honest: The majority of resolutions will never be  implemented. It’s just a nice ritual. Like saying “How are you?” – “Thank’s I’m fine”. That’s nice. But it has no meaning at all.

What is your advice then?

The book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” from Bronnie Ware was a bestseller in 2011. Imagine yourself in the moment before you pass away and think about what would be your top five regrets. Luckily you still have time to change the course of your life, so start to do things that will let you look back with a feeling of contentment and peace. It’s a great exercise to find out what has true meaning in your life.

Another advice would be to take a look around and find happy people. When you see happy people, ask them what they do. For me this would be the most logical thing to orient myself. But this classic resolutions like 5kg less or 1000 Euros more, if you’re really honest and ask yourself, if that makes you happier I think you will come to the result that it’s maybe just the carrot in front of the donkey, that we always run after and think that we will be happier when we’re there.

If somebody decides to find his inner dreams or to start with the dream development process, which techniques would you recommend?

One practical advice would be: Take a white book. An empty white book. Imagine that this is your life. Start by writing down things that are important for you. Start with the craziest vision you could think of. Imagine you have all supporters in the world. All resources in the world. What if you had your personal Santa Claus and can ask him for whatever you want? No matter if it’s realistic. That’s hard enough for a start. We didn’t drink that in with our mother’s milk. It’s the opposite. We grew up in a situation of shortage. “That isn’t. That can’t be. That doesn’t work”. In all areas. And suddenly you turn the switch. That’s a huge challenge, believe me.

Another technique I suggest is to write down 39 dreams. Make a list of dreams and you will see that it will carry you away your whole life. You must learn to question the things on this list. Keep asking yourself if you just made it to impress the neighbours or if your true dreams and wishes are written on there. No matter what, it will help you question yourself. By writing down 39 dreams you guarantee a certain amount of detail that will afford thinking deep. Start drawing pictures in your head, start to visualize your dreams by cutting or printing out pictures. Glue them on your wall. Start smelling, tasting and touching the things in your mind.

Talk about it. But be careful to whom you talk about it. Because when you start this process, you will always find people who will tell you that things are not possible. And soon your surrounding environment starts to hold you back. That’s normal. If you develop yourself further, you will start developing a new environment. You need people around you, who believe in you. For people who are not in that process, it’s better to hold you back because it’s easier to hold you back than to start questioning their own lives and dreams. That’s why it’s hard to start this process out of your normal environment, you will start asking yourself: “Why am I doing that? Why am I asking myself these questions?”. This can be painful . Because you leave things out without really knowing what will be the benefit.

Also be careful of the words you use. These words can become reality way faster than you prefer. So be careful to use positive pictures and take care of each and every little word that you use. You will realize that it’s very important to think about your dream in all details. How do you feel when you get up in the morning? Who surrounds you? How does the air smell? Don’t just scratch the surface.

Do you have an example for that?

Yes. It was new year’s eve 2005/06 when I sat down and thought: I want to thank all people that are important in my life. So I wrote 100 postcards in the first part of the night and just wrote down thank you, no matter if I knew the people personally or not. Some of them didn’t even know that they had an impact on my life. In the second part of the night I wrote down what I want to do in the future and with whom I want to do it. And I remember reading it, I thought: Where are those people? I know none of them. How should I do those things? How should I earn money with those things? I had no clue.

When I look at my life today, I’m doing exactly what I wrote down on this piece of paper. Everyday, I meet people that are like the ones that I imagined back then. And once you realize that this really works, you realize what your real power is. That you can have an impact. That you can do anything. And then again it’s of big importance to find out which things are really important for you. And once you found them, my biggest advice is: START.

I remember at the end of that new year’s eve, at 7:30 in the morning, I went to the garden, cleaned it up and burned everything I thought I wouldn’t need anymore. My wife looked out of the window and asked me, if I’m crazy. But for me that was symbolic. It meant: “Do something. Don’t wait. Start now.”.

“DO SOMETHING. DON’T WAIT. START NOW.”

What advice do you have on keeping up the consistency?

Keeping up the consistency? Puhh. I think that has much to do with the fact that what you do is not in your comfort zone. You must bring to your mind that developing dreams never happens inside your comfort zone. There simply is no comfort zone. And if you want to develop yourself, you will quickly realize that there are things that are not always warm, always nice, always good. You will enter a completely different state of mind. But that’s exactly the point on which you learn to develop yourself. The point where you learn to know yourself and others better. The biggest challenge might be to say “No” to many things, just to say “Yes” to that one bigger thing. In this process you will often be confronted with a lack of understanding by the people surrounding you. When I was in that situation back then, I tried to find arguments and evidence for what I was doing. I soon realized that it’s better to focus on the goal. The closer you get to your goal the more exciting it gets to those people and there will be a time when they get back to you and start asking questions on how you achieved things. A very interesting process.

In general consider surrounding yourself with people who already did some steps along the way and gained experience. Don’t surround yourself with people who share your insecurity. It’s better to meet up with one experienced mentor than with 10 insecure and unexperienced people. Experienced people will ask you the right questions. Frederic Pistono shortly said in a talk: “You need to surround yourself only with people who believe in you. It’s not for the fact that they believe in you, but for the fact that you start believing in yourself.”

Do you have any rituals that help you keeping up your own consistency?

I like getting up early in the morning to remind myself that I can make a decision each and every day. That I can make a decision to change something, that I can do something or simply do nothing. I have two healthy hands and feet and a passport that takes me wherever I want to go. Who else has such privilegues? I think to make us aware of this is one of the most important things in life. I can go for whatever I want to go, every single day of my life. Even if the price might be high. For me that’s an immense quality of freedom. When I feel this freedom to create, to reflect, to develop, to listen, that’s just incredible. So incredible, that sometimes I need to force myself to do something normal, like cooking and then concentrate on not cutting my fingers off because my thoughts wander away.

What is the “Why?” behind your work?

It’s funny, it was exactly 8 years from now when I had a real down, I’d say a deep mid-life crisis. I had just quit my dream job, traveled around the world with my wife and my two daughters (1 1/2 and 3 at that time) and then I came back to reality. Into a reality that I felt I can’t go on anymore. In this phase it progressed so far that I imagined what it would be like being ill, just for the reason that being ill means that one doesn’t need to function in our system. What helped me at that time was to think about some important questions: What would I love to do? How does my life ideally look like without thinking of anything that was told me before?

And I felt how those feelings challenged me, because normally, nobody challenges you to aks yourself these questions. And then you ask them to yourself and you realize how difficult it is to start this process. Because in this process, after every 2-3 steps you take, your mind comes back and says: You can’t do that, it’s not realistic. And then you overcome those thoughts, and after a while you realize, that whatever you ever imagined, chances are high that some years later you look at your life from a bird’s view and you realize that many of the things you do are exactly the things that your mind once told you are totally unrealistic. The art behind that is having the attentiveness to realize: This is exactly what I dreamed some time ago. Once you realize that, you will feel a deep thankfulness. And you get better in it every day. And of course there are bad days involved in this process, days of doubts, but the feeling of luck that you can do what your heart tells you to do will help you overcome the bad days.

For me, the next step was that I found out: If I can do that, everybody can do that. That’s what I truly believe in. It’s deep inside of each and everyone of us and once you realize it, you will realize that you can take the messages of the ad industry of what we need to give to each other, what lists we need to write, what goals we need to set and so on, you realize that you can take these messages and throw them into the garbage.

And that’s why I do what I do – help people develop their inner dreams.

What is your wish from Santa?

I think it’s that wish to even more delete the things that are on the list, deep inside my brain. And to get even more confidence to do what I’m here for. I can’t really describe this. It’s like a flock of birds. You can say it just flies. But it’s way more than that. And altough you know that you’re on the right path, you think you’re crazy. You have the feeling of not fitting in. What we do is so far away from everything normal. It doesn’t fit into any format. In our society we learn to measure things, things are bigger, more beautiful etc.

But what we do is far away from normal. And often I start asking myself why I’m doing that. It leads to downs that you can’t even imagine (tears in his eyes). Why can’t I be a little bit more normal. Why can’t I just adapt a little bit to the norm? But in the moment when these questions come to my mind, I know that I don’t want to do that. What for? I feel that there’s a completely different way of doing things. And then I remind myself of the positive sides of my work. Because when you go through the downs, you go through even higher ups. That way, you experience the entire spectrum of life. It’s not mainstream boredom, a life without real emotions, it’s much much more. It needs just a little confidence. No matter if I’m sharing cookies as Santa or just stand at the river and stare onto the water, it needs so less. But in our performance-oriented society, it’s different values that count. Most of the time, those things that are important in life are the things that you can’t sell that well. And if they don’t bring any profit, why should you do them? In such situations you find yourself thinking: Why do I do what I do if it doesn’t bring me any profit?

But isn’t that what makes a real dreamer? To follow your dream, no matter which obstacles appear along the way?

Definately. But at the same time it’s a huge challenge. Because you often find yourself in a situation of failure. But you need to stand up again and keep on going. And make yourself aware of the fact that you are in a very privileged situation. Make yourself aware of the fact that you drink clean water, wear clothes and people don’t wear weapons on the street. That’s the challenge.

When I look around me, for example in a supermarket, I rarely see happy faces, though we apparently have everything we need. And when I see that, it motivates me to never be satisfied with the status quo. That would feel as if I would deny myself.

Another risk is that people will think: He’s always happy, he must have a great life. They don’t see the downsides, the hard work, the bad moments. Then you hear things like: “It must be great to live your life”. And you think to yourself: I doubt that. The problem is, that we tend to hide the negative sides in our society. So if somebody feels really bad, he just sees the people who are seemingly happy and thinks everyone is happy while he’s the only person who has a down. We need to develop that confidence that it’s OK to have bad moments during the development of our dreams. Think about how Jeff Bezos must have felt when he was cooking Burgers at Mc Donald’s. Do you think he had the awareness he has today back then? I think this fear of such moments comes from how we were raised. Most of us were not taught to take much risk in life.

How do you recognize that somebody is really bent on achieving his dream?

What I find very exciting is, that the dreams of people who come to us often break within a few moments, after you ask a few in-depth questions. After that, the process of questioning begins. What do I really want to do in life? Is this dream really what I want to do or only a thing I wanted to do to get love and respect? And then the magic happens. They feel the clearliness. Because when you start thinking about what you really want to do in life, you often start to feel fear. Because it means to take a big step in life. But once they take this step, you can see it in their eyes. You can simply see it. You can feel if somebody is really dying for his dream.

Often people tend to use money as an excuse for not fully commiting to their dreams…

My advice for that is to reflect about the thoughts that are linked with money in your brain. How did you learn to know the energy of money? Which situations did you experience around money? When I thought about this 10 years ago, I would have been happy to make it for one, maybe 1-1/2 years. If somebody would have told me that at the end of the year 2013 I would only just make it. That I’d quit my building loan, my life insurance and finally give my house in pawn. I would have never believed him. But I feel that this basic trust in life nurtures. It’s like releasing from everything that seemed to give you security. And if you then see what can happen without much money. What you think how much money you need at the beginning and how much you really need at the end. For people who work on their dreams with full passion and commitment, money is never an issue. It’s just an excuse that you sometimes use when times are not so good. It’s an excellent excuse in our modern society. What would Mandela have said? Or Gandhi? Did they say: I can’t do it, I don’t have a budget?

“INNOVATION OFTEN STARTS WITH A LACK OF RESOURCES.”

It’s just our rational thinking that tells us that money is the issue when times are not easy. Innovation often starts with a lack of resources. It makes you find new ways that need way less effort. You learn to save resources, make more sustainable decisions and act more efficient. And that is actually very positive, it will help you later on. If you managed to reach your goals with less resources, you will be able to achieve big things if you once have the resources. And you will still make sustainable decisions and be efficient. I see this pattern of behaviour often with people who have dreams that impact on many more people than just themselves. When I see their shining eyes and how they take one step after another and stand up again each and every time. Such people never give up. That’s pure energy.

When I ask myself what keeps me going, it’s the question: “What will I tell my children in 20 years if I don’t start acting now?”. “What are we all waiting for?”. Are we waiting for politics to come up with the solutions? That’s an illusion. To hand this planet over to my children with the knowledge that I did everything I could to make it a better place for them, that’s what drives me.

And it shows me the importance of great mentors that challenge you to go for big. And there are some of them in my life, my wife, my partners, all people that believe in me, maybe my children being the greatest. They teach me to look at things like a child. To think without limits. An ability that has mostly been killed by our system. For me, to know that they believe in what I do is worth more than any money in the world. When I think about that, I am just thankful for what I got to do. And for that feeling, you are ready to accept things that are far outside your comfort zone.

Thanks for the interview.

Your dream works.

Additional information:

DreamAcademia was founded in 2007 by Harald Katzenschläger and Hermann Gams. Their first project was to help a 12 year old ice hockey player with his dream of attending an international hockey school in Canada. Until today they helped to develop a big number of dreamas, one supporting the leading members of 2013  Solar Decathlon winners Gregor Pils and Andreas Claus Schnetzer from Team Austria. In 2009 they organized the first TEDx-Conference in Austria, TEDxPannonia which will occur for the 4th time in 2014. Currently they work on their vision “Dreamicon Valley”.

The post Harald Katzenschläger quit his job to become a dream developer appeared first on DREAMA TV.