The first day of the year also marks my birthday, which makes for a more powerful review of the past year. Inspired by Nate’s article, I decided to write a personal retrospective of 2018 and a few thoughts that run through my mind now that I’m 31. Read more…
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A few days ago, I had breakfast at an avocado fast food place that just opened in Bucharest (my home town), which reminded me of a similar themed restaurant I discovered this year in Tokyo and I’ve been planning to write about.
The place is called Madosh, it’s located in Harajuku neighborhood Google Maps link – basically, where all the hipsters and most expensive shops are, and all dishes in the menu are avocado-based. Read more…
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In the past years I’ve found myself oscillating between publicly talking about how I’ve built a running habit, sharing training and races experiences, versus going completely dark and not saying a word about it, not even making my Strava feed visible. Read more…
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I know, I know, I look like I went for a walk and somehow accidentally found myself caught in a trail running competition. The only thing missing from the picture is a dog.
It was actually taken during last weekend’s trail running race I competed in, the Hercules half marathon. Read more…
TweetThe following list is a token of appreciation to all the awesome thinkers who write newsletters I highly recommend. These are content sources that I’ve been closely following for a few years, learned from them and applied their lessons in my own personal and business life.
I’m trying to keep a zero inbox (“try” being the key word here – I’ll often procrastinate replying to an email for an unpermitted long time), but, at the end of the week, the odds are I won’t leave unread any single one of the following newsletters.
If you happen to know any more similar mailing lists, please drop the links in the comments below.
P.S. This article was initially published in June 2018 and updated in October 2018. Read more…
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I’m writing this article so I can directly send the link to everyone who’s asking me how to start running. 
As this year’s running season is about to end, city streets in big cities across the world will be closed and overtaken by thousands of runners who are competing in races.
Over half a million people finished a marathon (a 42 km long race) in 2016 in the US, out of a total of 56 million Americans who run. In Europe, 41,708 people crossed the finish line of the Paris marathon, 39,072 finished the London marathon, and 36,054 the one in Berlin (these are stats for 2016). The eleventh edition of the Bucharest marathon (the city where I’m based) will take place this Sunday (cc: future mad car drivers).
As this sport’s popularity is on a rise, I think it’s a safe bet to make that some of you will consider starting running in 2019. When this happens, you only need to remember that I wrote this article, to come back to it 
and get these two things right before lacing your shoes and jumping out the door for your first run: Read more…
Ray Dalio’s words from Principles have been echoing in my mind lately:
“You can have virtually anything you want, but you cannot have everything.”
Today marks the 1 year anniversary since I publicly announced The CEO Library, the project I founded together with my friend and mentor Bobby Voicu. At the same time we started working on it, I launched Friday Read, my personal newsletter. In the past year, I divided my attention and tried to grow them both, fooling myself into believing that I’m capable. It became increasingly clear to me that I’m not. Read more…
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Buffer (the most popular social media management platform) and BuzzSumo (top SEO and content marketing tool) teamed up for an interesting analysis regarding Facebook engagement. They looked at 43 million statuses posted by top 20,000 Facebook pages and published a study on what brands can do to succeed in 2018.
Two key takeaways:
1. Engagement dropped overall with more than 50% in the past 18 months (engagement = likes, reactions, shares or comments). Basically, it’s now so low that even the top Facebook pages perform worse than the lousy Facebook pages did two years ago.
2. Photos have the best engagement rate, not videos, as it was previously the case. However, keep in mind that photos interactions dropped as well.
This is a welcomed data-supported confirmation of something that, intuitively, we all already knew. As competition grows and businesses are screaming louder and louder in the pursuit of people’s attention, the social network somehow needs to filter what we do end up seeing in the newsfeeds. The same thing will happen with Instagram or any other social networks using this business model.
For more details, take a look over the study.
While I personally quit Facebook back in December, I’m still keeping up to date with its algorithmic changes, for business related purposes. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, here’s the advice I gave all brands that I worked with in the past decade: stop building houses on a rented land and instead focus on growing channels that are under your control – through your own websites, that is, and look at anything else as potential ways to capture people’s attention and bring them there.
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