Managing oneself

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Gergina

Peter R. Drucker describes the core concepts of self management. The principles are very simple and very convincing: Only managers who understand their co-workers and communicate their expectations can succeed. Before they do that, they first have to explore themselves and find out what they’re best at. These are the questions we have to answer for ourselves:

1. What are my strenghts?
2. How do I perfom?
3. What are my values?
4. What should I contribute?
5. What can be expected from me?

Once you have the answer to these questions, you should communicate it to your co-workers and ask them to do the same self-analysis and communication. This way, you’ll get to know yourself and the others better. Because working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work.

Read Peter R. Drucker’s essential article on self-management here

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I carry your heart / Ich trage Dein Herz

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Gergina

I carry your heart with me.
I carry it in my heart.
I am never without it.
Anywhere I go you go, my dear;
And whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling.

I fear no fate.
For you are my fate, my sweet.
I want no world.
For beautiful you are my world, my true.
And it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant.
And whatever a sun will always sing is you.

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows.
Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud.
And the sky of the sky of a tree called life;
which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide.
And this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.

I carry your heart.
I carry it in my heart.

Edward Estlin Cummings

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Ich trage dein Herz bei mir. Ich trage es in meinem Herzen.
Nie bin ich ohne es. Wohin ich auch gehe, gehst du, meine Teure.
Und was immer nur von mir allein getan wird, ist auch dein Werk, mein Schatz.
Ich fürchte kein Schicksal, weil du mein Schicksal bist, meine Süsse.
Ich brauche keine Welt, denn, Schöne, du bist meine Welt, meine Wahre.
Und du bist, wofür ein Mond jemals stand
und was eine Sonne auch immer singen wird, bist du.

Hier ist das tiefste Geheimnis, das keiner kennt.
Hier ist die Wurzel der Wurzel.
Und die Knospe der Knospe.
Und der Himmel des Himmels eines Baumes namens Leben.
Der höher wächst als die Seele hoffen, der Geist verbergen kann,
und dies ist das Wunder, das die Sterne in ihren Bahnen hält.
Ich trage dein Herz. Ich trage es in meinem Herzen.

Edward Estlin Cummings

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New beginnings

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Gergina

Today is a historic moment in my life. Something to remember. My first experience on skis. With 30! This is how things can go. And they did go incredibily well. I can hardly describe the awe-inspiring mountains, the amazing view, the stillness of the world as seen from above, the rays of sunlight and the laughs of children flying down the hill on their skis. What I can barely believe is that I actually managed to stay on my skis and do a good job. And for that, I’m thankful. To new beginnings!

The Weepies: World spins madly on (Say I am you)

Rating: 8.7/10 (3 votes cast)

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Time for love

Posted on December 26, 2010 by Gergina

There seems to be some confusion about the things that matter, particularly at Christmas. We all know that Christmas is not about presents. It stands for the birth of Jesus Christ. What’s more, it represents the time of year where we are supposed to get together with our loved ones and share that special spirit of Christmas time with cozy fires, candle light and serenity. What Christmas is undoubtedly about is love. LOVE. Love for yourself, love for your family, love for your parents, sisters, brothers, grand parents and friends. Love for anyone who matters or doesn’t matter in your life. Even love for the strangers passing you by on the street or for the people you allegedly hate or abhor.

Try to find this love even if you seem to have lost it. Try to tickle it out of yourself because if you listen closely to your heart, you’ll know it’s there. Try to unleash it by doing the things you like with the people you cherish. You’ll find that the simplest things can be filled with the greatest joy – like I did with the first Christmas tree I put up and decorated in my first own place.

It’s astonishing how something so usual, so ordinary like a Christmas tree and its decoration can make you perfectly happy: with yourself and with the world.

I wish you all such quiet moments to realize how precious life is, how we should live it to the fullest, without fear, without doubts, without negativity but with courage, hope and delight.

I wish you LOVE.

Merry Christmas!

Your Gergina

Beyonce: Ave Maria (I am…Sasha Fierce)

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Experience is everything

Posted on November 8, 2010 by Gergina

October 31, 2010 was the day I ran the second marathon of this year as well as of my life. It was in every way a rather unexpected experience. I didn’t train as much as I was supposed to, I skipped the whole weight training as well as the very long jogs and focused on interval trainings, running distances up to 21 kilometers and swimming and dancing as alternatives. Even if I had set high goals for myself, wanting to run under 5 minutes per kilometer, I expected to utterly fail and finish much later than my personal best at my first marathon in Zurich last April where it took me 3:32:27,3 for these 42,195 kilometers. What I also expected was to be alone in Lucerne and to freeze my butt off.

Luckily, my second marathon turned out entirely different as is so often the case with prejudices. The weather played along with perfect temperatures – cool but not too cold – and sunshine. The crowd was pleasing and as I was standing amidst it, a friend who I knew from the 17 kilometers run at the Kloten airport (where she finished third!) found me minutes before the starting shot. It was incredible: The crowd parted and she just stepped up to me as if she had known the whole time where I was standing. And when the speaker addressed the runners warning them not to hope for personal records considering the topography of the Lucerne Marathon, we knew that it was going to get steep. It was just perfect! I let go off my fears and just said to myself: Go for it, you have nothing to lose!

The Lucerne Marathon is really pretty steep and not to be recommended to people looking to considerably improve their time. But my body withstood the immense burden in such a way that I even overtook my friend on the steepest parts of the road. Later on she overtook me again and we finished 24th and 25th. My time of 3:34:22,5 made me more than happy. I would never have expected such a time on such a terrain. It had taken me 5:04 minutes per kilometer which was just 2 seconds per kilometer slower than in Zurich! Overall I was 57th (and 25th in my category), in Zurich (where I finished 21st in my category) I was 86th.

As with so many things in life: Experience is everything! Stop worrying! Life will find you and show you the way. Just let go and…enjoy!!!

Kanye West: Stronger (Graduation)

Rating: 9.5/10 (2 votes cast)

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Hello baby!

Posted on October 23, 2010 by Gergina

Martin Vladislav Yotov saw the light of the day at 10:42 a. m. on October 14, 2010. He weights 3,200 grams and has a height of 51 centimeters. He’s my best Bulgarian friends’ recently adopted child and comes to an amazing family of kindhearted people. He’s lucky! I wish him and his family all the best there is! May the joy, happiness and goodness you spread, evolve to an eternal blessing guiding you to inner peace and infinite delight!

Love

Your Gergina

Tiziano Ferro: Il regalo più grande (Alla mia età)

Rating: 10.0/10 (1 vote cast)

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The net of the asocial

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Gergina

It’s surely no coincidence but rather a paradox that the world’s youngest billionaire and founder of the world’s most influential social network Facebook where 500 million users from 207 countries socialize is an asocial personality driven by excessive ambition, obsessed with the cause of creating the world’s biggest party without ever being part of it.

“The social network” by David Fincher – in my opinion Fincher’s definitive comeback since “The fight club” – brilliantly depicts Mark Zuckerberg’s weird mind by exposing his innermost wish – to be cool – and his complete lack of ever reaching this coolness in front of the eyes of the world in movie theaters around the globe. Fincher and his genious screenwriter Aaron Sorkin do basically the same that Zuckerberg’s platform allows its users to do: They label Zuckerberg…Representing this label is the scene at the end of the movie where Zuckerberg has just moved to the Facebook offices in Palo Alto and has just lost his only friend Eduardo Saverin (by a very mean and dirty move – Saverin has been tricked into signing his own demise from the company – an intrigue by perfidious Napster founder Sean Parker and Zuckerberg himself): Zuckerberg sits at his table looking at boxes with facebook branding containing his first business cards. The labeling on the cards says: “I’m CEO, bitch!” These aren’t even Zuckerberg’s words: They’re Sean Parker’s propaganda. As with so many things, Zuckerberg takes other people’s ideas and labels them as his own.

And there is another very representative scene right at the movie’s end where Zuckerberg talks to his lawyers’s assitant who says: “I know that you’re not an asshole. You’re just trying so hard to be one.” Another labeling. Zuckerberg is not even an asshole, he’s just a fake, a wannabe.

The final seconds of “The social network” sum it up impressively: Zuckerberg sits all alone in the law firm’s offices meeting room and “facebooks” his only love Erica who he lost due to his disturbed and egocentric behavior. Zuckerberg sends Erica a friend request and keeps hitting the “refresh” button hoping for her to accept his request any second. We all know that this will never happen.

There he sits, the world’s youngest billionaire – with 500 million virtual friends on Facebook, but none whatsoever in real life.

P. S. I particularly like Andrew Garfield’s interpretation of Eduardo Saverin. I’m sure we’ll be seing more of this newbie actor very soon.

Read a very interesting review of ” The Social Network” by the Social Meteor here.

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Five critical skills entrepreneurs need

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Gergina

The widely known computer industry entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan talks about the five critical skills entrepreneurs need:

1. Leadership: ability to build consensus in the face of uncertainty

2. Communication: ability to keep a clear and consistent message

3. Decision-making: knowing when to make a decision

4. Being a good team player: knowing when to trust and when to delegate

5. Ability to telescope: to focus in on the details and then move back to the bigger picture.

What stroke me as especially important is point number 4: Kaplan identifies the ability of being a good team player as a core skill of entrepreneurship and describes it as the ability of trusting the people with skills and knowledge disregarding their position within the organizational chart:

“A critical skill is doing team work. It’s about trust, it’s about delegation. It’s about supporting the people around you and believing that their skills are skills that you don’t have and most importantly knowing that sometimes they know better than you do…Being a good leader means being a good follower sometimes. You have to follow the people who have the skills, who have the knowledge regardless of where they sit in the organization chart.”

Watch other interesting videos from the talk with Jerry Kaplan here.

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homegate4.0: a star is born

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Gergina

There are no words to describe the feeling of accomplishing something so big: On September 25, 2010, last Saturday, the redesigned real estate portal homegate.ch saw the light of the day after a 14-hour-surgery and a planning and development period of more than a year. I’m overwhelmed by the extreme relief and happiness I feel after my immense commitment, an enormous overtime, countless weekends spent at the office working, sweat, blood and tears. As responsible for the editorial content of the whole website homegate.ch in the four languages German, French, Italian and English, I not only planned, contributed and realized all the editorial articles on homegate.ch, but I also created homegate.ch’s new visual world with new photos to illustrate the content, and even wrote some of the articles myself. My own personal baby is homegate.ch’s Living. Today, I’m looking at the reborn homegate.ch with a sense of pride…pride to have made it through everything in this project and pride to have come out stronger than before. And I still smile when I look at the texts and teasers and photos on homegate.ch because there’s hardly anything my hands haven’t touched, there’s hardly anything where I wasn’t involved. Check it out to see the amazing result of this grand project:

www.homegate.ch

Five For Fighting: Chances (Slice)

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Tag Archives: Recently added

Managing oneself

I carry your heart / Ich trage Dein Herz

New beginnings

Time for love

Experience is everything

Hello baby!

Five critical skills entrepreneurs need

homegate4.0: a star is born