Tom Pöysti - How to be a success by making mistakes.

Tom Pöysti is the son of Lasse Pöysti. It is strange that he has an anglisised name. He was called to give a talk at a CSC seminar. The rough title of his talk was "How to be a success by making mistakes" It was like a two hour comedy show. He was very entertaining ananalyzed the Finnish psyche. Why is Nokia a success?

At a seminar you expect power-point presentations, but he talked for 2 hours without any visual aids. All that he had to express himself was his body, face and language. He talked about shouting at your boss... something the bosses at CSC might not have been too comfortable with. He swore alot. I think it was more theatre than a seminar presentation. At the end of the session he was sweeting with his exertions. He had given something of himself.

At the dinner table people went over the things he had said. Most of them thought he had been funny and entertaining. He told jokes and used stereotypes to illustrate his points. All of the male voices that he used belonged to Finnish men who were drunk or violent, and usually both at the same time. The women's voices were like twittering little birds, and their hands and eyelashes fluttered in synch with their nervous chatter.

He told the story of men going to a cabin by a lake in the early spring, of how men take their clothes off in a strange way. Undo the buckle, unzip the trousers, thumbs in the underpants or longjohns, and in one swift movement from the hips to the ankles, trousers, underpants and socks and removed and left in a neat crumpled pile on the floor.

The same is true when they remove their tops. Both hands are raised above their heads then lowered to grab the back of the jacket, pullover, shirt, and vest, and with a mighty heave all of the garments are removed at once, and are place on top to the crumpled trousers,underpants and socks. They form small concertina like packages on the floor

Women on the other hand are able to remove a polo necked sweater without messing up their hair. Their arms are removed from the sweater one by one, so both arms are inside the sweater. They then move their hands to either side of their neck and stretch the polo neck so that the sweeter can be removed without displacing a single hair on their heads.

When it comes to going into the cold sea for a swim the men though none of them want to do it grit their teeth and jump in. The women see what they think is a dead fish, and refuse to go in, or complain about blue green algea in the water, or they have strained their muscles in an aerobics session and don't want to go in

The men laughed and the women laughed when he performed the different ways of removing clothing because we were all responding to the fact that we see little of ourselves in the stereotype. The men see the hero who braves the icey water the woman see the heroine who waits to be rescued. Both of them are untrue.

In a drunken angry voice he proclaimed that the Finns have a compulsion to succeeed but not by conventional means. Hot shit this year Finland is going to win the Eurovision song contest, and we will do it by sending a homo to sing a song about angels and demons having sex and of course they do not succeed and they slope off into the forest once again to get drunk and lick their wounds about being rejected and being no good.

He talked about many things. Ski lifts in lapland, gutting fish in Norway, of coming to the end of his tether, when he could not face acting anymore. That life did not have any taste for him anymore. It was just day after day of monotonous meaningless repetition, and then he ask himself the simple question.

Does the work I am doing really satisfy me, and if not what can I do to change it?

The talk was alot of froth... funny froth that made people laugh, and at dinner people were asking the question what was the take-home message from the talk. Some people said we had to be adventurous. Some people said we had to believe in our own convictions and have the courage to express our own ideas and carry our dreams through to completion. We should shout at our bosses. We should commune with nature and take a break from the stress of work.

For me the message was that a man with energy and wit and talent can hold an audience captive for two hours without a computer in sight, and that we are more open to learning through theatrical performances, where words roar out like the surge of the sea, and ideas are like the waves hitting a rock and throwing spay heavenwards.

He ended on a serious note. He talked about the 200 people killed in Madrid, and how the Finns felt that it might have happened at Pasila. He talked of 20 young people being killed when their bus was hit by a truck. He mentioned that he had talked to a priest from the Orthodox church who had said that he had been surprised by the outpouring for grief at a National level. That Finns were expressing empathy for the suffering of others.

To care for others is about the best you can do in this life. That is how firms succeed. That is how families survive. That is how nations are just and righteous. Those are the thoughts you get from laughing for two hours at an actor, who dredges up stereotypes, and politically incorrect ideas, and swears like a angry drunk Finn.