Category: General

This category contains general posts, articles, or just thoughts, that contribute to the four pillars of success. Most of all, these posts would be interesting articles that I have found while researching or browsing.

The four pillars

These posts will not fit perfectly into the big picture but may provide an interesting material for further reading. They will also link you to my influencers.

Topics

The topics covered with these posts could be virtually anything, but I will try to limit them to the four pillars:

Personal growth – how other people have achieved growth; what tools and techniques they are using; what tips and insights they would share
Personal optimization – how other people have achieved efficiency; what tools and techniques they are using
Professional growth – life lessons from the experts; how they structure their tasks and work; what they have learned
Professional productivity – how experts stay productive and competitive; how they pick the skills to learn

Taking a Sabbatical in 2023

Tin Mayer is taking a sabbatical for 2023. Read the full post to find out why.

Dear Goliaths, 2021 and 2022 were huge years for me, this is why I am taking a sabbatical in 2023.

A Gnome’s Quest

After four years of writing and one year of querying, I decided to self-publish my first book – A Gnome’s Quest. In parallel, I increased the frequency of my posts to twice a week. Also in parallel, I was dealing with the pandemic (like everyone else), supporting my family (like most of you), and working my full-time job (again, like most of you). Now, at the end of 2022, I decided to pause and reflect on the experience.

Tools of Goliaths

A few months ago, I started querying agents and publishers with a pitch about my next book (tentative title of Tools for Goliaths). There, I hope to dive deeper and explore the more specific tools which helped me get to where I am now. Just like with my first book however, it has been a frustrating experience so far. But this time I have promised myself to keep trying until I can convince an agent to represent me and a publisher to invest in me. Otherwise, it is just a hobby.

Zettelkasten

Finally, I have been working on establishing a more formal process of knowledge management for myself. It based on the Zettelkasten method and, like everything else, it takes time to setup and internalize. The initial results have been really promising and in the summer I doubled down on it and started organizing my thoughts into Zetteln.

Sabbatical

But long story short, the goal of this post is to announce that I will be taking most of 2023 as a sabbatical. Blogging in the current form I am doing it, ceased to be fun for me. I need to rethink my commitment to it. Writing books and querying agents and publishers is also rather boring and unsatisfying. Writing, in general, continues to be my passion. I intend to keep ready and to keep working on expanding my knowledge base.

Where can you find me?

I do not plan to write any more posts in my blog in 2023. But I plan to still write my signature “Best Books I Read in 2022” post, because I think I read some incredible books in 2022. I will only remain active on my Twitter profile (although with the current developments at Twitter, I might soon have to stop that too in case Elon makes it a paid platform). If you would like to reach me, go to my Contact.

I wish you a great holiday season and a very successful 2023!

How to Be a Writer

To be a writer means to be alive. To be alive is a gift of privilege, not a right. Writers earn life by practicing what was awarded to us.

Ray Bradbury was a writer and one of the most famous authors of science-fiction that has ever lived. I have read numerous of his short stories, to which my father introduced me when I was about ten years old. I was really surprised recently when I discovered one of his non-fiction books: Zen in the Art of Writing (link to Goodreads).

I decided to become a writer many years ago. Not because it is cool (it is not). Not to become rich (I am not … yet). And not because I have a lot of free time (I don’t). I did it because I could not not do it.

In this article, I will show you a few of the tips which Ray Bradbury shares about writing. Most of them really resonate with me and with my decision to pick up writing.

Tin’s List of Best Books 2021

This is a list of the best books which I have read in 2021 divided into six genres.

Here we are at the end of 2021 and here I am compiling my traditional list of the best books which I read in 2021. This year was … interesting … again. We all hoped that the global pandemic crisis will be over by the end of the year, but it is not. Still, I am ending the year on a hopeful note and I hope that all of you will be able to do so as well.

My reading focus this year was what I called financial education. I finally decided to take my personal finances, budgeting, and investing into my own hands and read a bunch of books on this topic. I also concentrated on my and my family’s health, spirituality, and well-being. And I have some book recommendations in that direction. Finally, I continued exploring the topic philosophy and I continued reading a wide variety of books on the movements that speak to me.

Just like last year, I have broken down my recommendations into genres. And just like every time, if I only inspire one of you to pick up one extra book, this will mean success!

This is the fifth list in a row. These are my previous articles on this topic: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017. You can go to my Goodreads profile to take a look at all the books that I’ve read.

Tin’s List of Best Books 2020

A list of the best books I’ve read in 2020 which are relevant to the topics in my blog – personal and professional growth, optimization and productivity.

Below is the list of the best books that I read in 2020. What a year has 2020 been! I mean did anybody see this coming back in January? I must admit, just like most of the people in the world, I had read the news about COVID-19 coming from Asia in Dec 2019. And, just like anybody else, I dismissed them easily. What a good lesson! But anyway, if there was anything positive out of 2020 it was that I got to spent a lot of time with my family. I hope that a lot of people could say the same.

And … I spent a lot of time reading. I broke my previous record of 30 books and I read 35 books in 2020 (woot!) I also read more than 10.000 pages for a second year in a row. I read early in the morning before the working-from-home madness would start. I read on the weekend during the quiet time.

In this article, I listed the best books that I read in 2020. This time I’ve broken the list down into genres. Not always the genre that the authors picked when they published their book, but the genre that I would assign to it.

This is my forth year in a row. These are my previous articles on this topic: Best books 2019, Best books 2018, Best Books 2017.

Self-organize Your Personal Life

The real-life journey of an Eastern European gnome to self-organize and become a Big Tech goliath. The lessons that everybody can use on their own journey.

Dear Goliaths on the path to self-organize,
In the past 18 months I have been connecting the dots of my first book in English – Self-organize Your Personal Life (working title). Most of the topics covered in the book will already be familiar to my blog readers. I am writing this post now, mostly to set a deadline for myself to actually publish. Many writers say that writing the text is actually the easiest step of the process. I tend to believe that.
In the following lines I will share with you my journey so far and I will create the structure that I will send to publishers pitching my book. As always, I welcome any feedback, comments, suggestions.
Big thanks to those of you that already read the very early draft. Thank you for your feedback and the tons of useful suggestions!
Best regards,
Tin Mayer

Pitch

The real-life journey of an Eastern European gnome to become a Big Tech goliath and the lessons that everybody can use on their own journey.