Why Going To New Zealand

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Once my business completely sold and after all the other assets will be transformed into money, we will move to a new country, New Zealand. This announce made quite a bit of shock among my current circle of friends, business partners and relatives. For those of you who don’t know, New Zealand is almost exactly under Romania, the Eastern European country in which I was born and lived up to my 37th year. Basically, if you put a long enough sting into an Earth scholar globe, and start from Bucharest, it will go out exactly from the Auckland, New Zealand, the other side of the planet. I guess it’s more than 180 degrees of change, if you know what I mean… So the surprise and shock were understandable to some point.

Most of the people were puzzled by the size of all the involved changes and, most of the time unconsciously, made the assumption that the decision was a sort of escape, a “take the money and run” attitude, in which we try to move from a difficult country as far as possible. Living in Romania is hard these days, it’s an evolving country, and its evolution is accelerated. There is an incredible diversity of attitudes and people, from the consumerism and deception, to spirituality and compassion. The proportion of these ingredients varies drastically though, and this mix makes up for some pretty interesting rollercoaster. I was living here all my life, and for the last 10 years as an entrepreneur. It’s not easy, and I know a lot of people who got really sick and tired of all the moral problems like corruption, deceptive politics, economical instability, and ran as far as possible from them.

Well, is not my case. I know it’s difficult to live in Romania, but I’m not going away because of that. From some very practical approach, living in a new country, whatever country that might be, is far more difficult than living in a country you do know for more than 30 years. The main point is that I’m doing it out of intention, not out of reaction. This is a very important difference and I will try to make it as clear as I can below.

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Change management: it’s still you, only better

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Each and every personal development program gives you at least one big thing: a promise of change. It tells you that during this program or challenge, you will change your habits. That’s something pretty big. And, most of the time, overlooked or ignored. People tend to forget that changing is a difficult process. Not because you have to spend your time and energy to make it happen, but because it will shift your identity. It will, literally, make you another person. Are you totally in sync with this new person? Are you identical with the new you? Are you congruent in thoughts and actions?

Perhaps not. It’s trivial to know that because you do that personal development program in order to change something about you, and that something is something that you don’t have yet. And those things in the old new and those things in the new you will collide, sooner or later. At that moment you will have an identity problem. If the change is small, the identity problem wouldn’t be big, not even noticeable, most of the time. It’s like loosing 3-4 kilos, it will show a little difference, but not so big, many people won’t even realize that.

But if the change is big, like a total lifestyle shift, then the identity crisis will be for real. You will notice it and people around you will notice it. It will make you question yourself almost every minute. It will challenge your thoughts and values. It will be something really important. 

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Dragos Roua’s Next Steps

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It’s time to make some announcements here regarding the future of Dragos Roua’s blog, and also the author’s – Dragos Roua, by his name – medium term intentions. First and foremost, I have to tell you that I’ve finished the exit from the company I founded 10 years ago, Mirabilis Media. The company was one of the players in the web publishing industry in Romania, owning several niche portals (automotive and gastronomy, mainly). I was the founder and the only shareholder, and I started the negotiations for the sale more than a year ago. The exit was a real success, both in terms of financial compensation and transaction structure (basically, I negotiated my own exit terms with the buyer). I feel relieved.

To be honest, in the last year, the company felt more like a burden than a fulfillment for me. Although I was disciplined enough to make it work better and better – thanks to all the productivity posts here 😉 – I didn’t felt any specific joy or exhilaration by working there. Don’t get me wrong, the company was one of the best in its field, and I had to chose from 7 potential investors, with whom I had negotiations for more than 14 months. It was a real asset, and the conversion into money of this asset was a real concern to me. But the everyday feeling was not as strong as it was in the beginning.

So, it had to be sold. It had to become something else for me, in order to free me and let me continue my chosen path. In DragosRoua’s terminology, this company sale situation was one of the crossroads I hunted, in order to become more me, to come closer to a much vivid life experience. I spent 10 years of my life in this business, and it was the moment to acknowledge that all the goals I’ve set in the past were reached. Is so easy to get stuck with your own patterns. Especially when those patterns are creating a comfort zone around you. Getting out of the comfort zone is what really scares you. And perhaps that fear prevented me to do this business exit even earlier.

Whatever was in the past, is done now, anyway.

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GTD Tips: It’s Not How You Feel About What You’re Doing…

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But about what you’re not doing… Yeap. Precisely. These GTD tips are just short sentences synthesizing in a very simple way some of the GTD concepts I found interesting or somehow become especially close to me. There are already 3 other GTD tips available. All these tips are coming in just one line of text. … Read more

Put Your Blog Into A Mind Map

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There were several posts here at DragosRoua.com, related to mind mapping, over the last two years. In fact, there were so much posts about mind mapping that I had to create a separate category for them. From an introduction of how and why to blog with a mind map, up to a recap of my most downloaded mind maps, I wrote extensively about this. For the newcomer, mind mapping is a writing technique, which expand the linear thinking by letting you write in different “directions” or “nodes” of a mind map. This seems to be the brain’s most convenient way of representing reality, and it is often used as a creativity enhancement tool.

I found mind mapping very useful when it comes to speed up my management activities. Such as maintaining a blog. Like this one. You know, writing on your blog is a completely different beast than maintaining it. It requires a different set of skills, it takes a certain amount of time, and, like all other activities, can be optimized. If I can use mind mapping to streamline my blogging activity as a whole, why not do it?

My blogging process is the result of several different things: the software I use, the ideas that I want to write about, the posts, the categories, the plugins, the downloads, the revenue strategy… Quite a bit of stuff, right? And is not from the same league, as you already saw, it’s a mix of information, skill, activity and strategy. The challenge is to keep this in a manageable structure.

One very important management principle says: keep everything visible. If there are things on your business that are not visible to you, chances are that your customers won’t seem them either. Keep a broader perspective, try to always look at whole picture. And there is nothing more convenient for the “whole picture” than a mind map.

So, I put my entire blogging process on a mind map, and started to unfold it. Here’s the result:

As I already told you, blogging is a mix of different activities, information and tasks. Must be all visible in order to keep a consistent perspective, right? Must put together all items that create the blogging process and my whole blogging process look like this:

  1. headline
  2. categories
  3. posts
  4. revenue
  5. promotion
  6. plugins
  7. downloads

As you may see, there is no specific order in which I added them, and no consistency, some of them are information, like posts and categories, some of them are activities that I have to perform, like promotion and monetization, and some of them are pieces of software, like plugins. Not all blogs may have all the items listed above, but my specific setup does, and I’ll take a wild guess that the vast majority of blogs are pretty much like this.

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7 Simple GTD Rules For Bloggers

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We all know what GTD can do for top managers or busy businessmen, this is what David Allen is doing all day long, training big guys to get things done. But GTD is not necessary a business-only process. It can be used with great results in other activities, such as blogging. If you are not … Read more

Do It For Yourself – who’s benefiting from your actions?

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Remember that we started this series with a fundamental sentence: you are the most important person in your life. You, and only you, are responsible for your actions, for their outcome, and for the level of energy that fuels you as a result. You’re responsible for your wealth or poverty, for your relations, for your … Read more