Today I received a notification from Researchgate that my open access articles had reached the milestone of 8000 reads. I am grateful for the people that have trusted me enough to download one or more papers, hopefully for their benefit and inspiration. I have only been active on this platform for little time and it contains only a few papers.

My publishing activities have two purposes. The first is to clarify my own mind by unraveling the complexity of what I am experiencing by challenging existing norms with my own innovative ideas. The second is to share these experiences with the world, hoping that people get inspired to do something with it.

In 1996 I published my first book. It was in Spanish and devoted to the world of information technologies that was in the intense phase of transforming from analogue to digital. Today we can see the effects of the digitization in our homes and handheld telephones. Back then the different media had their own platforms and dedicated organizations behind each. The booklet was small and distributed through a leading national computer science magazine in Spain. 17.000 copies had been printed. It was so in demand that another 3000 were needed afterwards. It had been a voluntary exercise with no money involved, just a lot of time and energy, a goodbye exersize of my job as general manager at a large multinational.

My second book was in Dutch and self published in the Netherlands in 2005. It was about entrepreneurship in the 21st century. About 3000 were sold and distributed through my own efforts of populating the podia of business communities. It opened the doors of a large publisher that asked me to rewrite it into a special and enhanced version. This time over 6000 were sold, allowing me to do consultancy work. It also opened the doors of Nyenrode Business University for guest lectures and intense intellectual discussions about Business and Spirituality. An English version was written but I could not find a publisher for the international market. It has been collecting dust ever since, unfortunately.

It all together had made me aware of the need to develop the society of the 21st century. Subsequently I published a series of ideological books, first in Dutch, that were less successful, simply because they covered topics no-one had ever heard of. They were indeed necessary for me to learn to understand myself and clarify my own inner processes. These limited editions however did open doors again for me to enter a dialogue with a large diversity of people. They became the basis of working on Sustainocracy as a society model and the STIR foundation (2009) to research its introduction and implementation.

When this developed into the AiREAS cooperative for air quality and health; I again agreed with all partners to publish our experiences for worldwide usage. This time I did find a publisher. Both the books together have now reached over 44.000 downloads (17.000 and 27.000 respectively, since 2016). Despite this success there have been little consults from abroad to work out the AiREAS or Sustainocracy methods elsewhere. Actions to do so have still been limited to my own.

This shows that statistics do not say much. Actions that result from them, do. It is nice for my ego maybe to realize that it all starts summing up to about 80.000 reads. But when I look at the state that the world is in today, the toughness of breaking the old comfort zones and difficulty to activate or even inspire others, it all together is only a drop of water on a hot plate. I only can hope that it is seed material that eventually will show a new intellectual, responsible, ethical, action driven mentality prosper around the world for the benefit of humankind, our planet and our future generations.