How my life influences my business and the other way round. How I design my lifestyle and how I succeed or fail in the process.
How my life influences my business and the other way round. How I design my lifestyle and how I succeed or fail in the process.
Recently a friend wrote to me asking about an interesting Christmas 🎄 gift 🎁 story and what I shared with him I decided to write up here. Especially after my recent COVID-19 analysis, I wanted to write something uplifting - how technology saves lives. Here’s how the Apple Watch is keeping my dad in control of his health after a heart attack:
Yesterday I got my COVID-19 booster vaccine shot and because I’m a huge fan of the Hamilton musical I decided to celebrate my 💉 by compiling all the great My Shot remixes that talk about the vaccine. The best one is coming from the doctors 🥼 themselves:
Dear John1, you are one of my closest friends. You’re smart, driven, intelligent, caring and I’ve been always able to count on you. Yet now, as we’re both dealing with this global COVID-19 pandemic, we’re drifting apart. You didn’t get vaccinated and whenever this comes up, we get to a heated debate that just makes both of us angry. That’s why in this letter I want to take a different approach - I want to appeal to your intelligence by not trying to convince you of anything, but by laying out facts before and by trusting your judgement:
There’s no real-life John. “John” here collectively symbolizes all of my close friends, who despite being very intelligent and smart, refuse to use their intellect to understand the situation we’re in. I want them to take a step back, look at the facts, and without consulting anyone just use their brains to figure it all out by themselves. I hope they will! Plus it’s a Nicholas Sparks reference. ↩
One of my best personal decisions of the pandemic-driven 2020 was to finally migrate my old blog from Sliwinski.com to this. To Michael.team. And not only because I have a new, shorter domain, but mostly because it’s a different technology stack and I can completely control it. I wrote about the transition here. As in Nozbe I hire brilliant programmers, I don’t code the app anymore. But I still like using programming languages to build something out of nothing and for this purpose, this blog is my place to do that.Last weekend I decided to get back to coding and built some long-overdue features like “next post”, “previous post” and “related posts”. It was so much fun! Read on, if you’re a programming geek like me:
Sugared drinks are a big part of our pop culture. They have all the marketing money in the world and they try to sell us on the idea that drinking sugar-bubbly drinks 🥤 is good for us. Yes, they taste good. But essentially they are just empty calories, they elevate our glucose levels and basically make us fat. We should drink water 💦 instead. That’s why I was so happy to see the world-famous footballer Cristiano Ronaldo rejecting Coca-cola on a Eurocup press conference, indicating to drink water instead. What an example!
Finally both me and my wife managed to get our first shot 💉 of the Moderna type of the vaccine against the COVID-19 disease. In this post I want to explain why we got it, why I’m excited about it and why I hope to encourage you to give it a shot (pun intended) as well. Here’s us after we got ours:
Apple discontinued the HomePod and was selling them “until supplies last”. Instead of getting rid of the HomePod I had in the kitchen, I did something completely different. I listened to Marco Arment praise HomePods on ATP here and then here, especially recommending a stereo pair. So I hunted down two white HomePods for my living room and hooked them up:
Derek Sivers in his book “Anything You Want” coined the term: Hell yes, or no!. This basically means that if a decision is not an instant, exciting yes for you, it should be a no. Turns out my 4-year old daughter, Liliana, already gets it. She applies a very similar rule: I don’t love it.
10 years ago today the big earthquake hit Japan and I was there to witness it first hand. It was my first ever trip to Japan to promote Nozbe and the Nozbe Handbook. What was supposed to be an exciting trip to Japan turned out a lot more exciting due to the earthquake and its aftermath. Today, a decade later, I want to get back to these moments:
I grew up as a Star Wars fan. I always admired Jedi knights and especially their Jedi Master Yoda. So when I got Disney+ for my kids and realized there was a new series from the Star Wars universe called The Mandalorian featuring a “Baby Yoda” character I had to watch it. I loved it. So this past Christmas I doubled-down on my childhood memories and got a LEGO set featuring this cute character.