Skip to content

The value of micro-adventures

Many aspire to be adventurers, travel the world, or undergo great experiences that stick with us for the rest of our lives. However, we rarely have time, money or motivation to act on these ambitions. In our ordinary, daily lives we rarely experience extreme highs, which is why it is important to enjoy the small moments. 

One way to do so is to embrace small adventures and foster curiosity in your daily life. Some examples include driving a new route on daily commutes, familiarising yourself with habits from different cultures or learning a new skill. 

Stimulating curiosity in our daily lives leads to a multitude of life-fulfilling benefits, according to ‘the Well-Being Lab’, an incubator of scientific knowledge on how people can live better and reach their potential. These benefits include (1) an advantage in managing anxiety, (2) it provides an antidote to defensiveness reactions when threatened, (3) it functions as a precursor to innovation in the workplace (far more than mindfulness), and finally (4) it serves as a protective factor by boosting resilience when exposed to negative life events and stressors. 

Besides, curiosity is one of the most important conditions for a ‘psychologically rich’ life, which in turn, is one of the three ways to achieve a good life (besides happiness and meaning).

So, how can you stimulate yourself, your colleagues or your customers to step a little bit out of their comfort zone from time to time?

Picture of Author

Author

Kim Pillen

Share the signal.

More Signals

Stay relevant.
Sign up for our
bi-weekly Signals.

A bi-weekly newsletter in which we keep track of what’s going on in the world and translate based on our sociocultural knowledge, what this means to brands.

Kim Pillen

Consultant

Before Kim Pillen started as a trend consultant at TrendsActive, she worked for four years as a creative strategist at Dept. For brands such as Philips, bol.com, Beiersdorf, JBL, and the Consumers’ Association, she built (online) campaign, brand, and social media strategies. After four years, she decided that she wanted to better understand people and society in order to advise brands more effectively. That’s how she ended up at TrendsActive. Here, she can do what she loves most: digging into people’s needs and then working with brands to see how and where they can be relevant and meaningful.

Douwe Knijff

Researcher

Douwe is fascinated by how people work. With a background in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (Bachelor) and Psychology (Master) and an analytical mind he tries figure out how societal shifts manifest themselves through social culture and human behaviour.

Aljan De Boer

Keynote speaker

Aljan has been widely recognized as an inspiring professional speaker on the critical trends that will shape society in the decades to come. He works as the Head of Inspiration at TrendsActive, a trend consultancy from the Netherlands using social science to human-proof business decision for brands like

  • Disney
  • Vodafone
  • Hugo Boss
  • ASR
  • Rabobank

Next to his role at TrendsActive he is the Community Director at the Institute for Real Growth where he inspires and connects a global community of +400 CMOs.  

He has been on the board of the Dutch Platform of Innovative Marketing for almost a decade. Regular speaker and moderator for the Dutch Marketing Awards and 3 times winner of the best of MIE. 

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees his purpose is to help ambitious leaders and brands to human-proof their business. In 2003 he founded TrendsActive, a trend consultancy enabling brands to become more human centric.

Kees consults global brands like

  • Disney
  • The Coca-Cola Company
  • Asics
  • Discovery Channel
  • Swiss Life
  • Vodafone

and many more.

Next to being the founder of TrendsActive, he is also initiator of the first academic trend master for executives at the University of Utrecht and is initiator of various trend studies and white papers on subjects like trust, meaning, visual culture & generations.

Trendsactive_blau

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist