martin zeman's blog

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. (William Morris)

When I look back at year 2011 there are two things that stand out.

Firstly a decision to leave my employment career and join David at elexu – an ambitious startup that aims to help people achieve their dreams. When I joined elexu I thought we would launch in a couple of months but those were very naive and unrealistic expectations. Although it went slower than I had hoped we have been moving forward. Our main activities involved clarifying elexu’s concept and specifications, networking and strengthening our team.

What I found personally quite distracting was working part time in Cogent Law, even though it was only for two days a week – an undivided focus is extremely important. So I left Cogent Law before Christmas and now I am fully focused on elexu as is the rest of our team. January and February will really show what we are made of – I am very enthusiastic and optimistic about elexu right now.

Secondly the year 2011 was a year of learning for me. Apart of learning a lot about the world of startups, especially from David, I’ve read a fair amount of books. I’ve read mainly business books and books about personal development (I maintain my reading list on Linkedin). The book of the year for me was Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins.

Probably the most valuable experience for me last year was recruiting an analyst, my replacement, for Cogent Law. The lessons I’ve learned will definitely come handy.

Looking forward to 2012 I have one goal – launch elexu. I expect an eventful year full of new experiences and learning on the go. I will surely meet a lot of new people and probably go through some emotionally challenging times but I am sure it won’t be a boring year – I am looking forward to the adventure.

Lately I have been re-thinking my personal social media strategy. What the …? You know: blog, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. It’s not that I wouldn’t have anything else to do but it has started to become a bit of a pain. With me recently picking up twitter it got a bit overwhelming and I realised I wasn’t really clear on what I had been trying to achieve with those tools while at the same time realising their importance and usefulness if handled well.

Blog martinzeman.cz

I got a bit confused as to who I write this blog for. Is it my friends and family? Is it potential elexu investors or future elexu users? On a related note – what should be my topics? I have read an advice that in order to have a successful blog you should only have one main topic. I thought about it and realised that having a successful blog is not really my primary aim. What I want is to have a freedom to write about anything I find interesting or important.
And that’s how it’s going to be: this blog will be a reflection of my thoughts through times.
At the same time I want to use this blog to shape my views and opinions through discussions with you – I am really really grateful for all your comments and emails I love to hear your views and stories and find them very interesting. I often learn a lot so please keep talking I am listening.

Linkedin

Linkedin used to be my favourite social network, I found it to be the most useful one. But after I quit full time employment a perceived value of Linkedin has dramatically dropped for me. I still see Linkedin useful just not as much as I used to before. I think it can provide the most value to full time employees and particularly job seekers. Maybe the next time I will use it it will from the side of an employer to find people to join us in elexu, who knows?

Twitter

I am a late follower to the twitter game, until recently I haven’t felt a need to use it. I am still figuring out how to best utilise it but at the moment I am enjoying it as a dynamic RSS feed, discovering interesting articles.
Also it seems to be a simple and unobtrusive way to connect with interesting strangers. Anyway it’s definitely a tool which you can’t understand without actually using it.

Facebook

I haven’t been a regular visitor to Facebook – there has been too much information and it was too time consuming to find pieces I would be really interested in. However FB now offers ways to filter a lot of that noise out so I am planning to give it another shot, tweak my settigs and become a bit more active there.
I have synchronised FB with Tweetdeck which is an excellent tool that enables me monitor both FB and Twitter at the same time without explicitly logging into those sites – love it.

Google+

While I like many Google services particularly Gmail, Maps, Calendar and Picasa, I don’t see Google with their Plus succeeding as a social network. I don’t plan to be too active there.

Few months ago I asked myself some powerful questions. Now is the time for some answers. Today I would like to share my core values. These are the values which I regard most highly. They are what I stand for:

• Openness & Honesty
• Courage & Fairness
• Respect
• Cooperation
• Doing things that matter
• Simplicity
• Common sense

It causes me lot of pain when one of my core values gets violated so I do my best to prevent that from happening by staying compliant with these values.

Maybe it helps you understand me better – it certainly helped me understand myself better.

Now, what are your values?

Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it. (M. Scott Pec)

Although I have read a lot of blog posts about time being the most precious resource all of us have I have never fully appreciated it. Not until now.

I have always had loads of things I would like to do and which I felt I should do but I had almost no things I felt I ‘must do’, things that would keep me awake during the nights and which would distract me during the days.

This has changed recently. A friend of mine, David, has asked me to assist him in launching his company – Elexu. I see it as my biggest opportunity to make the world a much better place as my destiny.

Elexu is bigger than anything I have ever dreamed of (and my imagination is very skilful). But I am not overwhelmed, I can clearly see how it will become a reality and how to get there.

I am extremely excited and I will surely write more about Elexu in upcoming weeks and months. In the meantime you can subscribe to our newsletter at www.elexu.com if you wish.

Since David told me I think about Elexu almost all the time. What really surprised me was the impact it had on my sleeping habits. I have always slept long hours I couldn’t force myself to get up in the morning and I always wanted to get few more minutes of sleep. Now? I go to bed after 11pm and I am awake at 6am – without an alarm – with my thoughts running speedily in my head. Surprisingly enough I don’t feel tired at all – actually I feel energized. What a paradox?

Probably for the first time in my life I can see time as the most important resource and I am utilizing it to the maximum. Recently I looked at my time allocation and I was shocked how much time I used to waste. Surfing net without a goal, checking facebook all the time, reading news, watching TV, going out to pubs, drinking a lot there and then sleeping long hours and feeling rough the following day.

I have tackled most of those things. We don’t have TV at home since we’ve moved to London and I am really grateful for that. I have stopped reading news – both in the tube and online. I go to facebook very rarely nowadays and no longer I use it just to keep myself busy. And what I am probably proud of the most – I have reduced time I spend at pubs and amounts of alcohol I drink. I set myself a target of a maximum of two alcoholic drinks a night and I am loving it.

Time scarcity also affected my approach towards sorting out emails – I used to spend a lot of time with every email I sent out – not any more – now I am rather brief and sometimes even austere. But I do it for a good reason and I hope that my family and friends will understand it. I just need the time elsewhere. Not only for Elexu but also for my other top priorities – spending quality time with Iva, meeting with friends, sport and read. Getting priorities right is just as important as saving the time.

Until next time – Have a lot of fun.

If you don’t step out of your comfort zone and face your fears, the number of situations that make you uncomfortable will keep growing. (Theo Pistorius)

Recently, I have had several great opportunities to face my fears and get out of my comfort zone. Unlike in similar cases in the past, this time I have confronted the fears and accepted the challenges. If you want to know which challenges they were please read on.

The first one came in November after I had decided to participate in Movember and to raise some money for the fight against prostate cancer. While it was a challenge on its own to commit to grow a moustache the difficult part for me was to ask other people for a financial contribution. This was very very far from my comfort zone. But I identified a handful of people, mostly my former colleagues I knew well, and sent them an email asking for a donation. But even a bigger challenge came later. It was in my new job where I started a month before that. At one of the managers’ meeting discussion turned towards my mustache (we discuss work as well, sometimes, I swear). I explained that looking sexy is not the main reason for the ‘tache and that it has a deeper meaning. One of the managers told me after the meeting that I should have sent them a link. I wrote an email addressed to all the managers including my boss (my closest colleagues), but I really hesitated – should I really send it? We have only known each other for a month or so. Isn’t it totally inappropriate? What if … and then I made my decission, my heart beat speeded up, a heat wave run through me, I took a deep breath and … email sent.

The second challenge was presented to me by my friend Jakub. He was organising a movie screening and a dinner at his home. Fish. I don’t eat fish – since the incident at kindergarten, when school teachers forced me to sit over the carp for four hours, I avoid dead fish. A year ago, on our honeymoon, I allowed myself to be talked into eating supposedly the best salmon in the world – others were vomiting due to seasickness, so I said to myself that in the worst case I will just join to the club – which I didn’t. However since then I haven’t had even a tiny bit of fish meat. Normally I would have told Jakub that I will have something else but I wanted to test a guide on how to change your habits from the book Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. It worked.

The third time I ventured into the world outside of my comfort zone yesterday. I enrolled as a volunteer for a PHP UK Conference. The day before the conference I was asked if I can take care of management of one of the side rooms (welcoming delegates and introducing speakers). The story of myself and public speaking is full of fear and fighting and it probably deserves a separate article but I said to myself – hey they need me and so I signed up for it. On the day of the conference I found out that there is fair number of other volunteers and I thought that I could easily convince someone else to do it instead of me – but then I told myself that it’s time to stop running away and that I will stand up to my fear and I will do it. The evening before the conference I was replaying in my head over and over a vision of how I am successfully doing it. I have managed to kill all the demorilising thoughts (like “You are awful at public speaking!” “Your English is not good enough!” or “You know nothing about PHP!”) at the very time I’ve spotted them not giving them enough time to grow. And when the time came, I stood up in front of those hundred and fifty people and I spoke.

Maybe you will not find my challenges so big but for me they were tremendously high walls I thought I could never overcome. By destroying the walls not only I got much more freedom, but also a lot of confidence to overcome any obstacles in the future. I believe we all have such walls built up inside our minds – let’s not let them imprison us – let’s break through because it is absolutely amazing behind them.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
(Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, Dune – Frank Herbert)

In the old days a man who saved money was a miser; nowadays he’s a wonder. (Author Unknown)

Ever since my early childhood I have liked saving and counting money (Scrooge McDuck was my hero) – I guess I have never been saving for a particular thing I was just saving for the joy of saving itself.

About three years ago before we headed for our UK adventure both me and Iva have written down a list of our hopes and expectations. On both our lists (among other things) there was a bullet point about saving up some money. I was wondering how much it would probably be so I made a little calculation.

Naivety has always been one of my biggest strengths (although it’s not what it used to be nowadays), so it doesn’t surprise me how far from reality my expectations were. Firstly I underestimated the costs of living in UK but not too badly. But then my plan that my salary would increase by 20 thousand pounds every year has not been fulfilled either (only because of the financial crisis, of course ) but that still wasn’t all – I also forgot that we have to pay taxes.

Later on I recalculated the plan with a more realistic look … and then we flew over to New Zealand. The flights weren’t very cheap on their own but the biggest impact for the saving plan came from a loss of income for the few months between leaving the UK and finding a new job in New Zealand. On top of that, Stuart Rose – back then executive chairman of M&S – laughed right in my face when few weeks after I had bought the flights to NZ he announced that bonuses were to be paid three months earlier than usually. I would have probably stayed for 3 more months to get extra 15% of my annual salary but it was too late then. But surprisingly it did not bother me that much – maybe it’s because of my unwavering naive belief that there will always be more money. Anyway, that’s the explanation why the second saving plan did not work out either.

After returning from Zealand, I started to think about the financial plan again. But this time I decided not only to come up with the plan, but also to monitor and adjust it regularly. Basically I just copied methods used in commercial companies. I created an excel spreadsheet and began to watch closely how we are doing moneywise on a montly basis – what we spend money for and where we could potentially save some. During the first few months, we have already discovered a couple of holes through which the money leaked unnecessarily and patched them.

Not only such a habit can improve your financial situation, it is also an excellent preparation for the working life. And it’s great fun too – setting goals and trying to hit them, celebrate when you are successful and trying harder next time if not – wonderful!

However the best thing about this is the feeling it gives you – the feeling that you have a control over your own live.

Do you do something similar? Please share your tips with me. Cheers.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. (Eugene Ionesco Decouvertes)

Here are some questions I am currently pondering over. No answers today just the questions – they are more important anyway.

Who am I? What are my values and beliefs? What is my destiny, my purpose? Do I have a mission? If yes, what is it? What am I capable of? How can I best use my talents to change the world for better. What am I passionate about? What makes me happy? How happy am I nowadays and how can I increase level of my happiness in the long term?

What an interesting bunch of questions, surprising I haven’t asked them myself before, isn’t it? Probably I was too busy, maybe I didn’t know what to ask, maybe I did ask but didn’t listen to the answers. Time to change it. Answers to come…

The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!

Hi, this blogpost is about a few changes I made or I am going to make on this blog. The most important change is the focus of the blog. Up till now it was mainly about my and Iva’s lives. From now on I would like to focus more on the stuff that’s going on in my head. I feel like my head is bursting with thoughts and ideas but very little (almost no) action has been made based on them. And we all know there is only one person to blame … YOU! just kidding, you guessed it right.

My expectations from moving the thoughts out of my head into the blog are twofold:
1) I expect to free a bit of space in my head so the remaining thoughts are free to roam there.
2) I sincerely hope that you will actively help me sort the ideas out and polish them and maybe we will end up with some amazing diamonds we will be able to share among ourselves and with others.

Other changes are technical.

I have prepared separate RSS feeds for English and Czech articles – usually I write an article in one language and translate it into the other one (sometimes translations are so relaxed that articles differ quite a bit). Sometimes when I think an article is not relevant for Czech or English readers I write it only in the other language. Comments RSS feed is mixed for both languages, I couldn’t find out how to separate them in Wordpress but in the end I thought it’s not such a big deal quite contrary – it might enable multinational discussions.

I have also set up email subscriptions – you can register your email on the right hand of the page. You will then be informed once a new article is published. Email feeds are separate for English and Czech – it automatically subscribes you to the language that is currently selected.

More changes will probably come in the future but if you have some ideas or comments regarding the blog, please let me know.

Thank you.

I have always liked reading books. But I realised I enjoy it much more recently. Maybe it’s because I have more time for it (commuting to and from work for more than an hour each way each day). It could also be due to the books I read now – less fictional, more inspirational. But that’s not all.

Since I’ve launched Travelling Books my reading experience has changed. It’s like my subconciousness is consistently thinking to whom I could or should send a particular book that I am just reading. Sometimes, usually when I stumble upon a part of a book with an interesting idea, my subcounciousness prevail and my mind wanders away from the text and start imagining how a person, to whom I will pass the book, will perceive this part and what he or she will do based on it. Sometimes I imagine how it will be like when I will be passing the book to them. I really enjoy these distractions – they are a completely new dimension of reading and although they are distractions and I have to stop reading I love them.

Sometimes I know straight away to whom a book will go. But sometimes I can’t decide – I might have two or more people in mind and then the distractions are even more often – who will benefit from the book more?

It’s a lot of fun and I always look forward to the moment when I finish a book and pass it on. Don’t take me wrong I still read the books primarily for their contents but the additional dimension of Travelling Books is none the less exciting.

The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs… one step at a time. (Joe Girard)

In response to Seth’s prompting blogpost Year in Review I am publishing a list of things I shipped in 2010.

As Seth mentions in his article it’s not that easy to publish a list like this – defeating modesty is not simple but we should all be proud of what we’ve shipped. It doesn’t really matter if it was a success or not – the shipping is what counts. Here’s my list:

(more…)