Seth Godin has published a new e-book about the values of the new internet age – what is valued by the people and what is needed for you to be and to have in order to be successful nowadays.

The book is entitled “What Matters Now?” and includes thoughts and ideas by the most popular authors and bloggers in the world like: Dan Pink, David Meerman Scott, Tom Peters, Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, Gina Trapani, Hugh MacLeod, Penelope Trunk, Tim O’Reilly, Merlin Mann, Seth Godin and many others.

This is a great Christmas gift for all of us and it will help us clear our vision and our goals for the new year and all the years ahead. You can download it for free from here. Read it and enjoy it!

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Alltop is a great place – this is a blog aggregator but its content is managed by editors and there you can find the best blogs in the (English-speaking) world divided in categories. For each blog you can see the last five posts and there is a little preview of each of those five posts.

There are great people in this world – they are masters, teachers, and leaders. And most of them have blogs where they share their knowledge, experience, and ideas with the others. Reading their blogs is priceless and reading from Alltop spares you a lot of time looking elsewhere.

Now Alltop offers us a new service – the ability to create your own page with all the blogs that you like and read regularly. This way all the people who are interested in you as a person will know what you are interested in. It is something like a blogroll but very, very rich and with a very high quality.

I liked the idea very much and I already made my page. It has a simple URL – my.alltop.com/MikeRamm – so come and visit it. I believe that you are going to like the blogs I read because the people who write them are really great.

Alltop is created by Guy Kawasaki – a man who I admire as my personal guru – and there you can also find his favorite blogs.

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His blog is devoted to project management and he has original ideas about how to manage people. I think he believes that we lack some thinking and understanding for the others and this is why I feel his blog so close to my blogs PM Stories and Stop and Think!. And probably this is the reason why I like his blog so much.

Read the interview here. You may find some food for thought.

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I’ve been silent for quite a long time but finally the good news is here – I put my own domain name – mikeramm.com – into a working state and I moved my blog Stop and Think to this address.

I took me long time to choose the new design and to adapt it to my needs, to move all important posts to here and to change all the URLs.

At the end you can see what I achieved. I like it. I hope you’ll like it too.

I won’t promise that I will write more often but I do promise that I will write here in English. I was only communicating with my Bulgarian readers recently but now I realized that I have some things to say to the world. So I am back.

There is a great new feature in the blog’s new design – Featured articles. You can see in the top right corner the most interesting articles that I have written and you will never miss them. I hope that they will be worth reading.

Your comments and criticism are highly appreciated. I believe that I will be able to gain your trust and provide you with something interesting and valuable.

Welcome back!

Mike

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I wish to myself and to all of you a happy and successful new year. It is gong to be a very important year of my life and I wish myself to be strong enough to stand the test and to reach the goals I set. I hope that the next year will be fruitful and rich for all of us.

Happy New Year!

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I am really flattered. Liz is a very popular blogger and a true authority in the blogging world and I am just a newbie in writing. I lost my job three months ago and I am still looking for my way in life and in the profession. I am just trying to share with you my thoughts although vague and confused trying to find new ideas which way to go and how to continue my life from now on.

I don’t know if I will have the will and the strength to keep writing in my blog and if I will be smart enough to give you interesting information but I know that there are some people out there for whom my posts are interesting and valuable. It is important for me to keep writing and it is enough to know that you – my readers – exist.

Thank you!

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• Happy Birthday To Me!

I love birthdays. It’s great when close and distant relatives, friends, or colleagues call you to wish you nice things, when they give you interesting presents, and in the evening, when you celebrate the end of the day with the closest of them eating delicious food and drinking your favorite drinks.

But there comes a moment when the years seem to pass to fast and you want to slow them down somehow. Unfortunately, there is no way to do that. There are birthdays in everyone’s lives when you become thoughtful, you take a look at your life that have passed and you try to evaluate it up to that moment – what have you achieved, where have you reached, and where are you going to. To some people it happens on so called “Christ age”. To me it happens much more frequently – say, every four or five years. Maybe it’s just because I am a thoughtful kind of person – I like to think upon Life, Universe and Everything…

Today, I’m getting 39. The last year of my thirties. I have the feeling that it is the last year of my youth. The numbers above 40 have always brought to me a sense of aging although some people say that the forties are the most productive time in one’s life. In my profession, where the average age is 24, the age and experience are not valued too much and many people consider me too old.

I, however, feel very strong and fresh, filled with energy and rich of countless dreams, despite all malevolent people and despite my own fears. After almost 20 years work in the information technology field, new ideas were born inside my head, ideas of career change. Instead of working for a salary I decided to take a chance on my own business. Instead of writing software, I started writing blogs and making presentations. Will I succeed? I don’t know but I feel strong and capable and I have firm belief in myself, in my friends, and in my family, who are standing behind me and are giving me an unconditional support with their faith and love.

The education that my parents and the society where I’ve grown up gave me has always made me look for the security – to get a good degree, which will help me find a good job and a high salary. But what exactly does “a good job” mean? Is it a good job where they make you do things you don’t like or at least are not interesting to you? Is it a good job where the boss yells at you and blames you for all their mistakes? Or it is a good job where you can’t find a way to communicate with your colleagues who secretly backbite you behind your back?

No, I don’t say that it all has happened to me! I don’t say that the jobs I had during all those years were bad! I’ve been working at very many places and everywhere I’ve been I have met people communicating with whom has been a great pleasure to me. I’ve always gotten into places where I have learned a lot not only about the subtleties of the profession but also about the human nature.

My jobs have always been “good” but have never been “good enough”.

Now I am taking on a new road. I want to work what I want, what brings me pleasure and satisfaction. I was asked if I consider making a blogging career. I don’t know how can someone “make a career” with this from Bulgaria. I still don’t know if it can bring me enough income to make a living. I only know that I like it damn much and I can do it well (and I am getting better every day). If I could make a career of being an IT consultant, author, speaker and blogger, one day (let’s hope it will be later) I would die happy.

The astrologers say that there are faithful years in our lives that come over a certain period of time, i.e. during those years significant changes happen to our destiny and our lives take a different direction. Perhaps for me this period is 13 years. Today a huge change is happening to my life. 13 years ago, when I was 26, I founded my first company together with my teacher in programming, my brother and two more colleagues. The feeling of doing what you can do best and what you like to do, of making your own decisions for your job and for your life, is incomparable! At that time we didn’t have a strong sense of insecurity because we were five partners and each of us felt the others’ support.

Unfortunately, we were young and inexperienced – not only in the business but also in the ability to understand each other. Soon the trust among us was broken and we had to separate. I couldn’t get the courage to continue my own business and I started an employee job. And it took 13 years – until now.

I believe something important and faithful had happened also when I was 13 (at least I entered the teenage) but probably because of my age my memories have faded and I cannot recall a significant event from that time.

Today it is different than ever. I am taking on a new road. I am alone but I am much more self-confident. I have a lovely family and loyal friends who, although not helping me directly, are my spiritual support and give me the courage and the strength to continue. Where exactly I will head to? I don’t know. Will I succeed? Nobody can tell. Time will be the only merciless judge who can say if I have succeeded or failed. What I can promise for sure is that 13 years later I will make my balance again and I will share it with you in my “little diary”.

Let’s hope we all be live and healthy until then (and many more years ahead)!

Cheers!

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I have to post these rules:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves which others do not know about them.
2. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog and post these rules.
3. At the end of your 8 random facts post, you must select 8 more people and leave a message at their site that they have been tagged.

In this meme, I was tagged by Zubli Zainordin along with the following “thinking” bloggers:

1. Janette Toral at Reflective Thinking
2. Peter Haslam at Necessary Skills
3. Mike Ramm at Stop and Think!
4. GloriaThinks at GloriaThinks (not existing anymore)
5. Amit Shekhar at Indian Thinking
6. Karen D’Amico at Fluid Thinking
7. Casey Carmical at Casey’s Critical Thinking
8. Dude at Thinking Tunnel (not existing anymore)

So here they are, the 8 random facts about me:

1. I am a thinker and I really think I’m smart but I am too lazy. People in my country call people like me “wooden philosopher”, which means something like wiseacre because I think too much, I talk too much but I don’t move so much.
2. I am currently unemployed. I am at a crossroad and I am looking for new horizons for my future. I am fond of blogging and I think this could be my new career.
3. I’ve been studying at a drama school for an actor and a theater director.
4. I am still in love with my wife and I adore my children. I thank God every day for being so happy with my family.
5. Mike Ramm is not my real name.
6. I love rock music. I am a great fan of Ronnie James Dio’s and I sometimes use the name Dio as my middle name.
7. I am afraid of heights but I live at the 12th floor
8. My zodiac sign is Leo and I like cats.

Well, this is it – I shared my deeply hidden 8 random facts about me.

Now I tag the following bloggers, who I admire and read regularly:

1. Bas de Baar at SoftwareProjects
2. Pawel Brodzinski at Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management
3. Mike Griffiths at LeadingAnswers
4. Craig Brown at Better Projects
5. Elizabeth Harrin at A Girl’s Gude to Managing Projects
6. Rajesh Setty at Life Beyond Code
7. John Wesley at Pick the Brain
8. Todor Hristov at NovaVizia

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