MS

Hello, I’m Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - to-do app for business owners and their teams. I write essays, books, work on projects and I podcast for you using #iPadOnly in #NoOffice as I believe that work is not a place you go to, it’s a thing you do. More…

2014 for me: total body and business makeover

🗓Yearly Reviews

Wow. What a year it was! I lost close to 10kg, did my first triathlon (and two more afterwards!), wrote my first solo book, launched Nozbe 2.0, radically changed our business model, created a new project (to be launched in 2015) and started growing my team the right way… and I still feel like I’ve yet so many things to accomplish! If you’re curious what I learned from all this, read on:

2014 for me: total body and business makeover

I was going to run more, lose some weight and develop my business…

In January of this year I wrote: “2013 was great and for 2014 I intend to keep running in biz & life - well, I must say I delivered more than promised. It started when I came back from my family Christmas vacation with additional 2 kg… I decided to finally do something more radical about my weight and just went with the slow carb diet all the way for 2 months straight… this triggered all the changes in my life this year:

  1. I “changed” my body…
  2. I wrote my first solo book..
  3. And I re-set my business goals

Here goes:

Part 1 - total body makeover - from an overweight runner to a lean triathlete!

Yes, you can change your body in a year! At 35!

I’m really amazed I made it all happen. I totally changed my body this year, started new sport disciplines and had a great time in the process. And I did it all at 35, while working full time and being a father of 2 and a husband full time, too. It’s all possible.

In 2015 I’m planning to just keep going and keep improving:

Part 2 - best-selling author… giving a #passionbook for free

This year I turned 35 and gave away a book I wrote on 7 types of passions I discovered while running Nozbe.

It was a great project. I loved the idea of giving away a book as a gift… and I’m happy to report that more than 6000 people read my book. Sweet.

For 2015 I have a new book idea and I want to give a shorter version of the book away for my birthday and actually publish a very cool productivity-focused book next Fall. Stay tuned. I’m going to blog big parts of it next year as well, so keep following me here :-)

Part 3 - launching Nozbe 2.0 and expanding my business the right way…

In 2015 I’m planning to double down on marketing activities for Nozbe, expand my team more, keep everyone motivated and connected (more company-wide meetings!). I think we have a fighting chance to reach 1M users next year (we’re at close to 300K now) so let’s make this happen!

Bonus - a side project inspired by the Productive! Magazine

I’m passionate about productivity and about digital publishing. Our Productive! Magazine family has just grown a lot more this year and inspired by this success and what we’ve done to make it happen, early next year we’re launching a second business. We’re very close to having an MVP - Minimum Viable Product - which we want to launch soon and see how the reception is going to be. We believe it’s going to revolutionize the digital publishing industry… but only time will tell. Stay tuned.

2014 was a great learning experience, 2015 is going to be even better :-)

Overall 2014 was a steep learning curve. It sounds from my post as if everything went smoothly. Far from it. It was a big learning experience for me. To learn about my body, nutrition, sports, running my business, working with my team, leading it the right way, my role in all this… I’ve had lots of ups and downs this past year but I think I’ve grown a lot more as a person. I’m a learner by nature and it was my best year thus far when it comes to learning and advancing in my roles.

Question: How was your 2014? What did you learn this year?

Tuesday, December 23, 2014 /2014/