I'm Mitch Olson. I live in Auckland, New Zealand, where I'm designing the future of helping people to build a better life.

Throughout my adult life I have been passionate about 3 things: digital technology, human development, and philosophy.

I first discovered digital technology in my last year of high school. It was love at first sight. I can still remember the first program I wrote. A "bubble sort" algorithm written in BASIC on punch cards. Nothing ages you like a punch card! Ever since then I’ve never been far away from digital technology, working as a software engineer, digital product designer, consultant, digital marketer and entrepreneur.

Early on in my career I had a “rude awakening” when I accidentally discovered my second passion; human development. I had been rejected for a job I was confident I was going to get. This led to the first time I can remember wanting to be a better person. This journey has had the single biggest impact on the quality of my life. Later I started to wonder why this know-how wasn’t more readily available. In my mid-thirties, I took a break from technology, trained as a therapist, and I worked for a few years as a life coach.

My third passion is philosophy, which arose in my forties when I recognized that something was interfering with my progress. I eventually realised this was rooted in my values and beliefs. Many of these I hadn’t consciously chosen. They had been inherited from my family and the culture I had grown up in, and were no longer fit for purpose. This is when I decided I needed to rethink some of my assumptions. From small beginnings, this eventually evolved into a philosophy that I came to call Meaningful Participation. Its core premise is that meaningful participation is what makes for a satisfying life. It makes my life better every day and I have been working on it with increasing intensity ever since.

Eventually, these 3 passions got together and had a baby called IDOJO. Its mission: to build a scalable way of helping people develop their capability to build a better life. A lot of people have tried to do this over the centuries, from religions and therapists, to life coaches and motivational speakers. They are all trying their best to make a positive impact, but each are lacking at least one important ingredient; accessibility, scalability, relevance or effectiveness. The answer to these shortcomings lies at the intersection of [wait for it...] digital technology, human development and philosophy. This is IDOJO, where we are developing scalable technologies to strengthen people’s capability to build a better life. The potential positive impact for humanity and beyond is bigger than anything else I can imagine.