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.
I started cycling seriously when I got my road bike back in 2014 after I completed my first triathlon. Since then I’ve participated in many races and I’ve done over 15,000 km on the bike (both road bike and MTB) while also having only few accidents. Luckily, most were minor, but there were two that stood out and taught me valuable lessons - one that happened back in 2014 and the other last Saturday. Here’s what I learned from them:
In my childhood I remember admiring Garry Kasparov, the best chess player of all time. Now I see him actively engaged in a game with far higher stakes: the preservation of freedom and democracy. You should follow him on Twitter but first I recommend you watch his amazing talk on Ted: ”Stand with Ukraine in the fight against evil” which he gave earlier this month - it’s only 15 minutes and it’s absolutely worth your time:
Things that happened over the past few years that made me realize something I never thought was true. I belong to the most privileged part of our society because I’m a white and straight male. It’s a fact that was hard for me to fully embrace first but now I see how it’s true in today’s world. The question is, what do I do about it?
I like to travel a lot. Thanks to my global business I also have “virtual friends” in many places in the world. That’s why whenever I’m going somewhere I’m always thinking of people I could see there. Especially now that the pandemic is subsiding, I’m appreciating again a chance to see new and old friends in-person. In the current virtual world, such meetings can build lasting relationships. Or if the opportunity is not taken seriously, this chance can be gone forever. Here’s why:
If you’ve followed me long enough, or interacted with me in anyway, you probably know by now that I’m generally a very nice, easy-going and optimistic person. I rarely get angry and I always try to find a glass-half-full solution to anything. On top of that I welcome feedback eagerly, even if it’s critical. I love being like this and that’s who I am. However, I’ve noticed that sometimes people perceive this kind of attitude as a sign of weakness. Well, they’re wrong:
When I published my best posts from 2012 I realized that there are things I started doing a decade ago and I keep doing to this day. Like working standing or using iPad as my main computer. It turns out, that 9 years ago I started having a minimalist wallet attached to my iPhone and never looked back. Today, my iPhone 13 Pro wallet looks like this:
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:
