Welcome to my journey!

End of the month means only one thing. A beginning of a new one. What will be your goals for this month?

Workout is important to keep yourself fit. But what if you eat junk food all the time? This is a similar case when you devel a product. You want the environment for your people to foster their creativity. If you failed to do that. It is hard to be creative and innovative. Think about it? Many companies want creative and efficient working environment, but they don’t provide the right “food” for their employees and therefore they are doomed to fail.

Most of us have a bank account. At the end of the month, we can check our bank balance. Did we spend as much as we can afford or not? For many people, sticking to a budget is a hard or even an impossible thing. But this is where the true mastery of life lies in. You must know on a weekly basis what your skill balance is, what your bank account is and what your friends’ relationships are. If you don’t, you will never reach out to your true potential. ANd your true potential is the combination of money, time and network. The richer you are, the more you have of those elements.

In my post, The power of networking I had explored how important it is to network. But also, you need to be surrounded by the right people. There is a saying that you are the sum of the 5 people you interact the most with. And if you interact with the wrong people, then you will end up with the wrong results. Sometimes it is hard to say no to the wrong people. Maybe you know them from a long time. But to power to create a new destiny is to make the hard decisions and stick with them.

When speaking with many people, one key skill always comes up. The power of networking. There are many amazing positions and opportunities hidden for you and I. You need to know the right people, no matter if you want to become a famous actor or the future director of technologies and one way to gain them is to know the right people. Networking is also hard. You need to know where to go and with whom to talk with. Also, there is an opportunity cost. Is it better to focus on your own things or to invest the time to meet new people? With a little bit of luck, we can all become better at networking and find those hidden opportunities.

Feeling that days are grinds is really horrible. However, there will be such days in everyone’s life.  The goal here is to have less bad days and more days you are focused on the important things. I am still adjusting my own habits to serve me instead of me serving all the social medias. Whoever it is still a struggle and a battle. One good tool you can use is called Year compass to adjust what you want to BE and HAVE this year!

I still see some issue being 100% concentrated on the most important things, but as long as every day I am 1 percent better it is fine. The thing is having bad habits gives us a really bad fundamentals. And it is very hard to change them. The main reason is to be kind and to do our best daily.    

Big corporations possess a lot of imperfections. The reason for it is the slow decision making and the preference for stability over agility. There is a need for both in this world. You wouldn’t want to use a plane which was barely tested and pray you reach safely your final destination. But also, if you want to grow, being stuck in stability might not be the right place for you. What I am doing to introduce more variety in my daily work is to add study and to learn new technologies on a monthly basis.

Many people have the issue of wasting their time with “guilty” pleasures. For me, that is politics, and I observe the political changes carefully. But what I realize is that the politics is such a slow game and things don’t drastically change month by month, if the system is very stable. This means that the time I am investing is actually a waste. What I want to do over the long term is to say no to too much information and yes, to more actions.

A lot of “promising” technologies go busted last year. This just proofs that when the market is over optimistic, everyone wins. But when the market trends reverse, then few things will survive. Choose carefully your investments, especially when you are not a professional investor and this is not your full-time job.

To have an opinion is expensive! I see a lot of time on the social media and in the real life that it is hard to find people with strong opinions who will share or able to state it. One of the reason is fear. Opinions are expensive, period! When you share your opinion, you become vulnerable to be attacked by others. In the ancient Greece, philosophers are called Sophist. Their only purpose is to win an argument no matter what it is. “The Sophists held no values other than winning and succeeding . They were not true believers in the myths of the Greeks but would use references and quotations from the tales for their own purposes. They were secular atheists, relativists and cynical about religious beliefs and all traditions.” Your opinion will be attacked by people who don’t understand it well, people who might have something against you and completely random people who understand it wrongly. The price you will pay is the time you need to invest to defend it. It is a high price to pay. Y

Already 20 days during the year, I am proud to keep the momentum with one blog post per day. What I learned about this experience is that you need to sacrifice one thing to gain another thing. Let me paint this picture, to get lean you must stop eating sweets. Sweets give you this nice feeling, but also they are bad for your goals. When you want to achieve something new, think about what are you willing to sacrifice.

Emerging technologies are always exciting and a scary new adventure. They disrupt the current status quo and provide us with a new way of thinking. But this chaos is also their weakness. Different parties who prefer to not comply with the law and the norms will exploit those new paradigms and use them. That is why governments must create regulations. But if there are regulations, this new thing becomes less exciting. The challenge is how to make enough regulations without suffering the innovation.

Testing Jabber meeting experience. And to be honest, I am not very impressed by it. I like the fact it has a simpler interface, but there are so many things MS Teams or Zoom got it better. We need to use 2 messages at the moment and I guess the reason is the limited functionality Jabber provides. Anyway, with a market share of less than 1 percent, it is normal to have that result. The moral of the story is if you want to compete in such tight market dominated by Slack, MS Teams and others, you really need to introduce something exceptional or accept the fact you will stay as a small boutique application.

When things are not developing according to your plans, the only thing remaining for you to do is to have a leap of faith. I had read many biographies, and I noticed this pattern. In the darkest hours, the leaders who manage to push it through and become extremely successful are the one who are not afraid to risk it all. If you want to achieve that level of success, you also need to adopt the same mindset.

A new week means more opportunity to progress towards your yearly goals or more opportunities to do nothing. It is what we decide and focus on and find the time that will determine to success or failure. This year I had decided to keep writing one blog post per day. Sadly, last year I didn’t achieve this goal, but it this failure showed me how important it is to be consistent and to plan ahead. Sunday is a great time to be consistent and to plan your week ahead, and I highly recommend to anyone who wants to get things done to start applying a Sunday review process.

People are proud of being lazy, but no one is proud of being poor. Why is that? Being lazy is comfortable, being poor is not. But chasing the comfort is our nature, so we need to flip the switch and the way we think about our life. Instead of focusing on being lazy, focusing on what we want to achieve. Is it a better work-life balance, more free time, job promotion or something else? It is up to us to persuade what we want to become.

To grow, we need to say no to things we did before and say yes to new opportunities. When was the last time you did that?

The great way to sell something is to show how good you are in it! Giving your best information will attract more people to your cause. But to be able to do it, you need to practice and adjust your material. Practice makes perfect. Try to practice as much as possible before you are ready to move to the bigger game.

Interesting how all the crypto gurus tries to hypnotize us to buy the dip. But the dip keeps dipping. This shows that instead of listening to “experts” you must make your own mind and listen to both gurus and critics. Sadly, crypto becomes more of a politics where emotions took over rational thinking. Be very careful about such games and try as much as possible to Escaping the politics

There is a big risk in the market. Interest rates increase and we expect the unemployment rates to increase as well. What we need to do is to be patient. Emotions are a big enemy for 2023. Better wait. If you invest now, you risk losing a lot of money. But if you are patient, you can earn a big prize and a huge return for your invested money. Create a model and prepare to rip the rewards.

Spouses are special kind of people. Let’s discuss the popular opinion that the opposites attract. That is a very bad idea. You will end up in a situation of compromise on most of the things and this will affect your chances of living a rich, authentic life. Compromises are important, but what if you want to achieve your financial freedom and your spouse wants to spend money on everything? There will be conflicts and both parties won’t be satisfied.   Looking at the other perspective, what if you and your spouse have similar goals? Then you will have someone who is a cheerleader for you and you will be a cheerleader for them. This will increase your muscle memories and you both will become better and achieve your goals faster. The best thing is to be surrounded by people with similar values and grow together.

The political games are dirty and long. The politicians don’t look for the best solution. They are looking for the solution that will make them look good and the opponent look bad. Politicians hate when people start to use logic. They prefer when the people use their emotions. Logic is the enemy of anyone who over-promise things. When you use logic, you can see over their strategy of divide and conquer and what is their real goal. So next time you are in a conflict discussion with another person, stop and ask yourself, are you really defending the politician or their policy? You will be surprised when you explore the policy of how it is ill thought and just tailored towards your emotion satisfaction.

In the Czech republic, there will be a new president elections. The candidates are two, one populist and another one general. Are they both qualified to be a president? One is being investigated for corruption, but he was the ex-prime minister. The other one doesn’t have a political experience. You want your president to be experienced, but the most you won’t be someone who reflects your values. The fact that the prime minister who is accused of corruption still has the chance to win shows a lot. Shows that it is a matter of messages that the candidate says to the audience and not about who they are.

In order to succeed, you need to adopt a special kind of psychology. A psychology that other people don’t have. And that is doing things other people won’t do. Spend more time on things others won’t do and so on. See what successful people’s psychology is and make a resolution to adopt at least one of their habits in the 2023.

I love learning new things and one of the best way to do it is to attend conferences related to the topic you are interested in. When was the last time you attended a conference related to a topic you are interested in? If it was a long time ago, it might be a time to rethink your strategies and new years’ goals.

I found another interesting scam, this time a guy who claims he worked for Barclays Investment Bank. What I found interesting is the comment in Reddit: This guy popped up on my YouTube and it took me a few seconds to recognise him, it was actually his annoying droning voice that made me realise I used to work with him at Barclays. His claims in the ad seemed pretty wild – I remembered him as being totally useless. I googled him and this post came up really quickly. To clear up a few things: He was on the grad scheme as a salesperson at Barclays. He never traded at Barclays. He was on the Rates desk (govt bonds and IRS), so he wasn’t an FX or futures guy whilst employed at Barclays No successful trader in any product ever leaves a paid trading job to set up as a solo FX trader. It doesn’t make any sense: the margins in FX are so small that you’re much better off getting paid to trade (when Neerav was at Barclays,  junior  traders were getting £3m bonuses on top of their 6-figure salarie

I saw a post from Grant Cardone, you can learn more about him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7SrO-D2TwQ The issue with those gurus is they will sell you the dream, without doing the work. Why? Because it is way riskier to walk the walk, compared to just consult others. There is a percentage of chance. If you coach someone and they become successful, the guru thinks they are genius, and if their coachee failed, then they were not motivated enough. Risk-free strategy. And I had met many coaches who present themselves as success, but in reality they are scam. Therefore, it was fun to see how under Grant Cardone tweet a message to sell his course and then I saw how fake gurus try to promote themselves and even one person made a fun out of this situation. This person wrote: “I actually coach the coaches who coach other coaches on how to coach coaches”. The inception is so hilarious.

Happy New Year! There were so many amazing things happening this year. I achieved a few of my dreams, which I wouldn’t think they will be possible before COVID. And I got my second master’s degree, this time in Psychology and I am really proud of this achievement. I also met amazing people who tough me a lot and we have awesome gatherings. The team in Thales completed and delivered the Tacho transformation project for one of our clients and it was a big success. The challenge was to migrate legacy OSGI application to a modern architecture. We also improve the documentation and the security design. I gathered a team, and we won a hackathon, and the Czech minister of transport gave me the award. How cool is that? Also, supported local Toastmasters community for their demo meetings and delivered workshops for their leaders in the Czech Republic. And many, many more amazing things. Happy New Year! And I wish to meet more of you in real life this year!

Second day of the year is usually the hardest time to stick with your resolutions. It is the same with any habit change and habit building techniques. After the end of the euphoria, it is time to really see if you can stick to your word. And change is hard. It is a survival instinct for all of us to stick to the familiar things after a certain age. Kids, on the other hand, are great at change. They change their opinion in a heartbeat. Thi makes them very chaotic, adults on the other hand are very predictable. This introduces interesting dilemma, how to add a little chaos to our life to ensure we can slowly change for the better.  

New Year equals new challenges. I see a lot of people moving their priorities in 2023 from working hard to prioritising mental health. One of the reason is that working hard led them to nowhere. They were overworked and underappreciated. This cost them a lot. The challenge with big companies is how to make the effort being worth it. Most of the companies are very bad at that. Therefore, many employees saw this is a red flag. They decided to prioritise themselves. The best analogy I have for this is the flying with a plane metaphor. When you fly, you get some safety instructions and one of them is, in case of decompression, you should first put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help other people. This is a great example of your life too. If you want to be productive and help others, you must first start doing that for yourself. Go now and create the best year for you. Plan not only hard work but also balance and relaxation time.