Many people wished me happy birthday yesterday. 37th birthday.
The truth is, though, yesterday I celebrated 1st year of my life.

Exactly a year ago I was rushed to hospital after occurrence of SDS (sudden death syndrome). I woke up and survived only thanks to defibrillator I have implanted since 2012 as prevention. I was reborn and it’s been a great year since then.

There were three main themes for that year:
i) slowing down ii) family iii) sharing / teaching

One week after my release from hospital my son was born.
One of the greatest blessings in my life.

I managed to slow down and carve out 16 weeks of vacation during the year (Germany, Italy, Slovakia,  Czech rep, US and Australia). All quality time spent with my family. All time off and new member of our family, really made us bond more and moved our life to whole new level. I can’t be grateful enough to my wife for her support, love and tolerance.
She’s great mum and a best partner I could ever wish for.

Ironically, all companies where I am involved as founder / co-founder were performing at their best. All growing (some doubled revenue year on year) and most of them profitable. Very solid results given I was away for so much time and slowed down by my health situation. This is no doubt thanks to people working with me. All credit for those results goes to them. I am truly blessed to have all these great people around me. With years spent together, it really feels like my second family.

On “sharing / teaching” front I was privileged to be a guest speaker at Creative mornings; Pioneers Unplugged; 3D experience conference; My Way conference.  All great events with inspiring people and I am grateful for opportunity and trust.
Google featured me in their initiative on SME’s using on-line advertising for building business.

My story was featured in couple interviews and I published series on marketing focused on SME in leading Czech business newspaper. 

My passion for sharing what I learned materialised in my blog. At the beginning, Jonh Vanhara gave me an opportunity to guest blog as well as Ondrej Bartos from Credo Ventures. This gave me good feedback on my writing and motivation to continue. By today there were over 26 thousand visitors on my blog.

I also started to mentor at every opportunity I can get (my wife can confirm :)).
Node5, StartupYard, CzechInvest in Prague let me share what I learned with their start-ups. Will Dayble took a risk and let me fly over to Melbourne to be a mentor at his “academy for getting shit done“. I hope I added some value and I appreciate the chance to be there, teach and inspire, learn and be inspired.

For the small things, during this year I managed to take 6cm off of my waist just by improving my eating habits and my diet. Also my reading picked up again going through 20+ books this year.

My health situation slowed me down, but it was a blessing in disguise.
Looking back, it was not such a bad year after all.
Looking forward, I see another great year ahead.

Wish me luck and stay in touch for you all make it all worth it.