martin zeman's blog

Whenever I get to the TV (we don’t have one at home, but it is a coincidence rather than an intention), I marvel what television stations serve us. How can anyone watch anything like that? The worst part is that while I fully realize that I still sit in front of TV and watch it for long hours. Why?

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When Jimmy sent me an email that said Grow your mo! I immediately started to come up with reasons why not to grow it. Iva is not a fan of beard, I look silly with moustache, my sister was going to have a graduation ceremony and I was about to see my niece and nephew for the first time.

I have indeed shaved on the 4th of November not to ruin my sister’s graduation ceremony pictures (I’ve seen the pictures and, well, it didn’t help). That seemed to be the end of the story (rules of Movember say shave on the 1st and than grow a mo for a whole month). But then I realised how stupid it is to look for reasons not to do something instead of just doing it – especially when it can help others and maybe even myself – and decided to do the right thing.

So if you too have an urge to do something rather than searching for excuses, please be my guests and donate to The Prostate Cancer Charity to support the fight against the most common cancer in men.

As a thank you for your donations I will make and publish a suite of photographs of myself and my moustache – for every £10 donated – 1 picture. So if you need a new screensaver on your computer, you know what to do.

I would like to share a few links with people who plan to spend some time in New Zealand.

If you have some other useful links, please post them into the comments.

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Two months ago I was thinking about spending some time traveling before my return to London. Based on your recommendations, and from economic and practical reasons, I chose South-East Asia.

When I look back to those three weeks of traveling, main thing I recall is a mass of interesting people I have met in such a short time.

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He who lends a book is an idiot.  He who returns the book is more of an idiot.  (Arabic Proverb)

Last year I wanted several colleagues of mine to read The Little Prince. I didn’t want to buy it for each of them and got the idea of Travelling Books. One will read the book and pass it on to another person. I thought it would be nice to capture the jurney of the book and so I asked the readers to write a comment or note into the book about how they liked the book, what were they thinking after reading or a short story (e.g. about reading the book in a bath and drowning it completely ).

Then I realised that I would lose all the fun from the comments and being selfish I asked the readers to send the book back to me once there is no more space for comments. And that was the awakening of Travelling Books.

Fairly soon after that I was told that a similar project already exists – BookCrossing.com (it’s so hard to come up with something completely unique these days – it’s a weird feeling when you think you got onto something awesome and new just to find out you are not the only one nor the first one. It’s not necessarily bad feeling, just weird).

After finding out about BookCrossing I lost interest in Travelling Books little bit but then I read Linchpin from Seth Godin and realised that if I don’t ship now with Travelling Books I will always struggle to ship anything in the future.

So here they are: TravellingBooks.net. Any feedback welcome. Feel free to send your own travelling books or go on the bookcrossing and try to find one of their books but do read it’s worth that.

PS: Finally, I shipped – awesome feeling.

I have a small anniversary today. I have connected with 100th person on LinkedIn (Hi Femi). What a nice opportunity to recommend this social networking site to you.

LinkedIn makes your work life easier and more exciting. (Martin Zeman)

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Seth Godin is one of the biggest leaders of our age. He is not a politician or a powerful CEO of a big company. Still, his influence is huge and worldwide. What makes him so great? He inspires others to lead.

In his latest book Seth describes a group of people who work differently than others. People for whom their job is more than just a way to earn money and who go well beyond their job description. People who love to connect with their peers, colleagues or complete strangers. People who strive to do work that matters. Seth calls them Linchpins.

Ultimate goal of Linchpins is to ship. I am sure you can imagine (or you know from your own experience) how difficult it is to make something happen, to launch a project and succeed. In order to ship it helps a lot to have a support from people who believe in you and in what you are doing.

Now you have a unique one-time opportunity to meet like-minded people that will help you ship in YOUR city.

In the evening of 14th of June (next Monday) in 800 cities worldwide people will meet and network with each other. Does networking without a set agenda scare you? Fight it! Register here and come anyway. Be a part of something spectacular.

You have so little to lose, you have so much to gain.

Enjoy!

I will not write about every single place we visited. All the names would just confuse you – they all sound exactly the same – like Wanakiki, Pukunoi or something like that, plus I don’t remember the names anyway. We had almost faultless GPS – Dina – so I didn’t have to worry about where we were and I just enjoyed the beauties of New Zealand. I think it will be more interesting if I will describe you how we travelled.

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