Bio

I was born in Heinävesi, into a traditional Savonian safe haven. The value system was strongly shaped by traditional Eastern Finnish culture, both in my family and in my surroundings. Modesty and normality were held in high regard, and I experienced them as somewhat foreign. I’ve always done things my own way. Already in kindergarten, I saw and interpreted “continue the drawing” tasks quite differently from others. In a way, I’ve wanted to do things my own—sometimes absurd—way, rather than better than others. As a child, I admired explorers like Phileas Fogg and Marco Polo, as well as trickster-like show characters like Jim Carrey.

In my environment growing up, strength, masculinity, and athleticism were highly valued, and the main sports in Heinävesi were basketball and judo. I was physically smaller and more fragile than my peers. This made me shy and pushed me toward more introverted hobbies, like video games, comics, and fictional ninja fights in our backyard. For example, I spent over 10,000 hours playing Counter-Strike.

Toward the end of upper secondary school, I wanted to turn things around and started going to the gym actively. I realized that even if I didn’t build muscle easily, my nervous system could handle high intensity and I was able to develop strength. I began competing at the Finnish national level in, among other things, powerlifting, arm wrestling, military bench press, and indoor rowing. Strength became my identity.

When it came to choosing a career, traditional paths felt foreign, so at the end of high school I decided to try making a living from sports betting. After it turned into a lonely grind with statistics, I eventually returned to a more conventional path and applied to study business in Joensuu. Already at the start of university, I realized that sitting in lectures didn’t feel like my thing and that the pace of studying was quite slow, so I began completing studies at a rate of 120–140 credits per year.

Driven by a sense of strength, a tendency toward extremes, and a fondness for absurdity, I ended up in all kinds of “boys will be boys” adventures as a young man. I did everything at full throttle without worrying about tomorrow, and things often went overboard. I was hungry for achievement, learning, and adventure. At times I drank over 40 units of alcohol a day. I combined studies and work for a couple of years at over 100 hours a week, and at worst, I even skipped sleep for two nights a week, making 130-hour weeks. Many have asked if I burned out. I didn't believe in such things.

Through recommendations, I became a full-time teacher at the age of 22 at both a vocational school and a university of applied sciences, while simultaneously completing pedagogical studies in adult education. In 2012, just as I was about to start my corporate career, my agreed job fell through and I found myself without work for the summer. I had been involved in entrepreneurship and startup communities for a long time and had been waiting for the right business idea to mature. That summer, I returned actively to old training routines I had neglected for years and took a deeper dive into wellbeing. I decided to start my first actual company, Sisusavotta, which provided personal training, wellbeing coaching for companies, and natural movement camps.

I later moved to Jyväskylä to study exercise biology and at the same time became actively involved in entrepreneurship communities, where a strong spark to build something bigger than a small business was ignited in me. That period also coincided with my golden era of traditional self-help and personal development, and I founded both the Jyväskylä Speakers club and a Self-Development Club.

The idea I had been waiting for arrived when a friend introduced thoughts about starting an online grocery store and making grocery shopping more affordable. Naturally, I jumped in with full commitment. We secured funding in the same week, and I paused my studies. The following year, 2015, with a slightly different team, we built a new grocery brand from scratch—Mukava Ruoka—with our own delivery service. The venture didn’t quite take off, and we eventually went bankrupt.

At the same time, together with my beloved partner Emmi, we had started running a side business, the escape room company Mysteeri. What began as a hobby quickly took off and grew into a larger growth business I had dreamed of. We designed and built all the games ourselves—it was an exciting, ever-evolving adventure that we lived and breathed. We created dozens of escape rooms across Finland, had at our peak 50 employees, and became the largest escape room chain in Finland. Initially, we had wanted to build a wide variety of different experiential games, but ended up focusing on escape rooms. We eventually made exit from escape room business and since then have focused only on custom productions, such as a safety training game for the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant, a corporate game for amusement park Linnanmäki, espionage adventures, mystery dinners, and gamifying city museums.

Even before stepping away from Mysteeri, I had become deeply interested in the concept of flow and immersed myself in studying it. In 2019, I wrote the book Flow – the Wisest Gear to Knowledge Work and shifted from occasional speaking into full-time training and coaching. On January 1, 2020, I founded Flow Akatemia, where we started producing a podcast, content, flow retreats, and training programs for companies related to flow, wise work, and wellbeing.

In the spring of 2021, I had a dream in which I acted as an expert in anti-flow. I woke up in the middle of the night, realized the idea of reversing things was intriguing, and went to my computer to write a stand-up set. The idea remained in the background of all my other training and entrepreneurship projects. In 2023, while dancing at techno bus, I realized that I wanted to bring more trickster archetype into my life. I decided to make tricksterity my profession, founded the Academy of Foolishness, and transformed from a “wise work” expert into Vessi Junalainen, an expert in foolish work, who teaches how to do work in the most foolish way possible. Foolish work was originally a joke, but I created a category around it—apparently becoming the world’s first fully reverse-psychology trainer.

Foolish work changed my life significantly, as it became the deepest embodiment of my artistic entrepreneurship. It gave me the courage and encouragement to live more boldly in my own way, in my own style. Now it feels like I’m increasingly living my own personal renaissance. At the same time, the need to push and perform has started to fade—I no longer need to prove or achieve, but I’m rewarded strongly for simply being myself. I’ve found my service role in bringing different ways of thinking and new perspectives to others. I’ve also discovered Burning Man events and co-creation culture, which feel like home to me. High-functional weirdos feel like my tribe.

As a child, I admired explorers. In the end, I became one myself. I don’t explore countries and continents, but the body, the mind, work, humanity, and life. I’ve also taken to the stage as a show-like trickster character.

My life has been a wondrous, eclectic journey of exploring how life can be lived. Along the way, I’ve encountered thousands of loving, inspiring, and thought-provoking people, and this richness of humanity has been the salt of my life. I’ve had the opportunity to live a safe, free, healthy, and privileged life—and I’m deeply grateful for it all.

Different paths are for different people.