3-lane highway (to Heaven)

The Third Lane

There’s a huge traffic flow these days. Billions of people worldwide take their lane, every day. We can see three kinds of driving behavior:
The first enjoy the rat race – from the kindergarten’s square sandbox, trough the cube-shaped university and cubicle career to the weighty top management position. In the System they see a secured “happy smile of success”, someday, somehow, somewhere – after 40 years of work FOR somebody. There’s lot of isolation from your own values, family and life here.

The second type of guys manage to establish and work IN their own companies, 12-14 hours a day, until they grow, sell or quit the business. Kind of ambitious, brave, creative, innovative and “suicidal“.

The third kind enjoy an automated passive income (web service, IPOs, commissions, etc.) on the third lane, while working ON themselves, globetrotting the world in a search of the perfect mate, life, value, etc. Kind of adventurous, speedy and peaceful at the same time.

Recently, I found (by investigation) that in this high density region:

1. We often pass each other from the inner lane
2. The traffic flow in the low density region of the outer lane is enhanced and kind of “reserved” for a strange, extra-ordinary, out-of-the-box type of people
3. There is a benefit if you stick to your lane and don’t change it unnecessary.

I used to stick to the first lane for an year, switched to the second for 10 more years and now, after I tried the third one (and it seems to be my type), I’m ready to keep the pace there and enjoy the freedom of doing what you love at the time and speed you prefer with the ones you love (their smile, creative time, etc).

Whichever your lane is, I wish you a safe and twister/ tsunami-free drive!

the perfect One

the perfect One

Many philosophers have thought there is no universal, ultimate perfection – the perfect One is different because everyone has different wishes. Other argued that the perfect One is flexible enough to be able to meet the wishes of anyone or at least the wishes determined by the majorities. Evolution theories, fairy tales, magazines and movies propagate ultimate beauty as essential for well-being and survival. I have to admit, there are some “beautiful” features, which are fundamental signs of health, growth and evolution, beauty as certified quality – attractive attributes, that positively correlate to quality, healthiness and fertility (no, not the hour glass 0.7 waist to hip ratio or the ultimate celebrity features):

Wise & Intelligent – mature, insightful, trying to go beyond your exact search, seeking to get a sense of what you’re looking for and pull up the best, based on understanding, experience, trends and hot topics.

Organic & Natural – with a good sense of humor and ear for music, optimistic, attuned, deleting all things against us (like grudges, past, etc.)

Warmhearted & Broadminded – talkative, sincere, funny, patient but passionate, caring but sensual, outgoing but easy-going.

Intuitive & Creative – energetic, one who makes us feel like we’re the best one in the world and one who can complete us, encouraging to change for the better.

Diverse & Flexible – one with multicultural heritage, self-confident and inspiring, trust-worthy and surprising, mission-critical and adaptive

Beautiful & Humane - curvy and asymmetrical, kind and polite, with a sense for the most relevant actions to current challenges and problems, especially in extreme situations, where coolly observation is required.

Focused & Suggestive on the best traits and strengths, outsourcing the rest to third parties, helping to find the best way to the desired topic.

Communicative & Sharing knowledge, experience and solutions, supporting your common world of interests, goals and everything, which contribute to higher soul/body/ lifestyle levels.

Now finding the perfect and successful one is easier than ever. We can search, create, enjoy, present to the right friends and audience and archive, if necessary. She has a great voice, keeps us well organized and comprehensive, increases the assets and reduces the maintenance costs – an outstanding solution for us, our SMB or even our brand. She is multifunctional, solving problems in minutes, with a wide supporting community of friends and contributors. She offers intuitive management, fast and easy to use, without advanced knowledge, attended by detailed life-books/ manuals?…

HolyMoly - who is she: a perfect Woman, Muse, Content Management System, Search Engine, musical Composition or all of the above?

Never mind, she is always on the road to perfection. See ya at the top!

In a search of an extra month

October

Back to our personal values, goals, beliefs, muse… and digital branding projects. After a long vacation, it’s kinda  hard to sync back with ongoing projects and schedules. Shouldn’t independent consultants merge their free and working hours to dissolve the difference?

Well it depends from your level of lifetime design freedom – what you do, when you do it, where you do it and with whom you do it. Some of us still can’t afford to travel all over the world for 4 months and keep up with all important todos in parallel.  Even if you cover 80% of them, you still need the rest 20% shortly afterward.

Despite the falling leaves, energy is here, the timing is right, we just need some more time, right? October usually starts with a day for dissection of personal and business life. What we dream vs. what we should do. Today vs someday. Excitement vs. existential vacuum of business boredom. Realistic vs. Reachable.

My approach is to sit down with a sheet of paper and glass of good wine ( helps getting terrific life-hacking insights) and cut down half of my activities and tasks to the bone, leaving only the 3 most important projects. Less follow-ups, more planning. After eliminating the “muda” waste (as a Japanese friend of mine use to say) , it’s time to dig in the swipe-file data and deliver (and overdeliver!) what I promised to myself and to the customers ASAP. To do what we do best, with greater speed, accuracy, efficiency, creativity and honesty.

This means launching important websites, upgrading production equipment, tuning brand performance. No communication distracters, no trips, no music making, no poetry, no blogging, and most of all, no fakebook chitchat (sorry virtual friends, I’ll be off for a while and I don’t care “Which kind of pasta are you” . Let’s cut the fat from our schedule, clone or replace ourselves with partners, outsource the fluff, free our time and focus on bigger/ better things.
Searching for the best life, unleashing our potential on a world-class level, living our days to the best with energetic passion and harmony… 500 months still to go?  Just pass me an extra one please.

Cheers from the sunny slopes of the autumn mountain! Great branding brains are warmly welcomed at our official BrandBuild launch – 20 October 2009.

P.S. What’s your secret recipe to recover your performance and sync your time, financial and ranking independence? Where you will be in one month?

Virtual branding escapism

Brand Trust

Oh my dear Nielsen,

I do agree that “virtual” and “real” friends are our best brand builders (not only on our birthday), but consumer’s recommendation from known people or strangers is not a form of advertising. You also missed the biggest brand trust builder -  Google’s top5 organic search results (I hope intentionally

Social media is the key for building trust in brands?
Yup, in a few “developed” countries, the rest of the world use it for time killing and enterprise resources wasting activities.

Consumers trust real friends, virtual strangers and brand websites the most? So, I have to start to trust my virtual friends same way like the people I know, right?

Yada yada. It’s like “the law of big numbers” by Mr. Power. You start a spammer’s “social network”, expose thousands of personal emails in their profile URL to Google and than you claim that Quantity is what matters. When you “build your network”, you do some business with 1 in 100 people, good businesses with 1 in 1000 and than “1 in 10000 of those people will become mentor, supporter, helper in your life”.

Well, I really have great ideas sharing and collaboration experience with hundreds of “virtual friends”, but I do care only for real friends I’ve met in personal (most of which started out as online ones .

Do we need a friend/girlfriend in every city?
Nope, just few real friends, who care, dare and move ahead, together eventually.

Just a recent example: When you share your birthday wish (to help few kids from “underdeveloped” countries get a color text-book and attend a school at least for few days) with hundreds of “socially responsible and concerned” western “virtual friends”, you get (accidental, inspirational and spontaneous) response by few “real friends” from your eastern neighborhood?! and zero feedback from them.

Hey Mark, where’s the “friends”-list sanitazing app? Let’s make every day a great one and let’s care about our real friends and Future. Yeah, birthdays, holidays, virtual or real…

THANK YOU FRIENDS for all your phone, facebook, email, twitter and sms birthday messages. I’ll have a small out of town/ traffic/ heat/ smog chill-out party with lot of music, cocktails, fruits and icecream… A big thanks again for all the birthday wishes, everyone!

Do you have virtual friends, who are as good as real ones (without huge exposure in facebook, twitter and other illusions ?

Life strategy? One life, Live it.

When you ask your friends if they have created a life strategy for the next week, month, year, five or even ten years – over 90% will answer No! or should I?

Yes, we should. Some of us create to-do lists, (I prefer to make not-to-do lists), other are permanently writing “business-in-recession” strategies, but do we share our life strategies? Rarely. Are you interested to prepare a life strategy, If you knew how to?

We share those mumble-grumble social network status updates that “it was a great weekend, but now it’s Monday again and I have to wait 340 more days for my next vacation“… but there is no time to think and commit to paper?

Most of my friends from the past have only shorter life horizons because it is difficult to them to look far into the future and predict an outcome.
We didn’t learned why it’s important to create a life strategy at school. It was only “I want it all and I want it now”, or “I’ll be happy if I can afford a beer tomorrow” Carpe Diem, live in the moment – spontaneous, natural and keep rolling?

Well my friends, I don’t agree. Well-being is the way you want it to be. We should be open to all possibilities and not overlook new opportunities, but how you will know WHAT’s a new opportunity if you don’t know where you are going?

A life without a strategy is like a ship without a target and reason. Your canoe will definitely sail you somewhere, but where you end up may not be where you really want to go. Or the most important part is to live every moment as though the whole world were watching?

Life strategy is not about a boxed career, income, buying a house, getting married, having kids or being a self-reliance, financial self-sufficient entrepreneur, retired as multi-millionaire at 60. It’s about the big idea, HOW to achieve the desired level of freedom, relationships, income, business, emotional and spiritual intelligence, etc.

I’m happy that most of my current friends and contacts have a life strategy, they can share it with a Tim Ferris’ DreamLine or Richard Koch’s ActionPlan in 10 minutes  and that we can compare our progress, meet for monthly happiness plan brainstorms and and we can shorten the horizon to our goals together.

Do I have one, yes, I wrote one, called Clouds (abstract, but solid foundation of clear life-goals) when I was 15-17 and it’s continually tuned every day, with every new knowledge and experience, tweaked for perfect outcome. Clearly, developing and sharing a life strategy makes a lot of sense and can be useful to all of us, which want to find something to be happy about.

Why? Because we can feel unlimited where we stand, to know that anything that we desire can be ours, that we are eager and full of life, free and fun and easy. Let’s challange our perception of personal limits and don’t let our dreams stay dreams.

Here are 10 highlights from my mid-2009 life strategy update:

In the second half of 2009 I will:

• Move from doing most of the things to what I do best and let others do the rest. (I can’t be expert on 80 things, just on 20
• Leap-frog my top5 direct competitors in the next 6 months, building and top positioning global brands with higher quality at 70% of the price.
• Increase the quality and reduce the quantity of my relationships and friend-lists by at least 30% for 6 months.
• Decrease compromising my integrity for anything or anybody to 10%.
• Decrease the communication and social noice by 60% more in 3 months.
• Say NO politely but immediately 20% more often.
• Stop expending energy on peripheral issues that cannot yield a payoff no matter the outcome.
• I’ll use pure strenghts and truth instead of trying to make true that which I love or I am weak at.
• Use free will and energy to go ahead and uphill, day after day
• Stop wasting time talking about my plans to others. Give you only 2 minutes to say what you have to say quickly and simply – then we probably stop talk/ chat? Zipping the lip.

We have all the time on this planet, but without Destination, Route and Actions, we are going nowhere.  Success is our own damn fault. So work less, succeed more, enjoy more, be more strategy-focused, less tactic-focused,  and let me know what you think.

The Revolution starts on 1st of July. You are Vellycomed to join.

Go global with InterNations

Sofia goes global

Last month we had our first InterNations global event in Sofia. Thank you all for coming and making the get-together salutary, rich and interesting.

I hope to turn it in a bimonthly tradition, as most of you requested. We are preparing presentations and live jazz for the next time. We will be around 60 people. Any suggestions for time, place and focus are welcomed.

InterNations is the first online community for people who live and work abroad, reaching out to the international community: diplomats, members of IGOs and NGOs, foreign correspondents, expatriates employed by multinational companies and their family members. We also cater to the interests of local residents with strong ties to this community (e.g. journalists). While our network is represented by more than 260 local communities, membership is strictly invitation-based: you may join after receiving an invitation from a current member. In this way, InterNations will remain a network of personal trust, where data security and privacy protection are top priorities.

If you want to meet other global minds, stay in touch with international friends and receive advice from expats, let me know and I will send you a personal invitation to InterNations. Wish you a great day, see you again in mid July.

Dear friends in Sofia,

We are very pleased to announce Vellyslav Petrov as the InterNations Ambassador for the Sofia Community.
Vellyslav Petrov is a branding consultant, focused in corporate identities, web solutions and brand strategies for moving local and global brands to the top. His favorite activity is helping companies to grow faster and reach the top through digital marketing. Vellyslav is recognized for extensive knowledge of global web market trends and high-end web solutions, improving user experience, global visibility and brand popularity through design & technology.

As the InterNations Ambassador, Vellyslav is your on-site contact in your city. He will look after the local Guide, moderate the Town Talk forum, organize “real-life” events in Sofia and take care of the community in general. At our InterNations events, you can meet your online friends face-to-face and get to know each other better.

All the best from Munich, the InterNations Team

Late start to tell you a story?

I will tell you a story about the highest, poorest and most beautiful land of our Planet. A story in colors, fresh images, high-definition video and original music, which I brought from my last month’s visit to Nepal and the Himalayas. Is it created for the SlideShare’s Tell A Story Contest ? Yes and no, but you can still vote for it, if you like it. Once upon a time on the long way to the top of the world…

Web Marketing Consultant

Wow, thank you very much for the great interest and the 340 CVs in our last top talent recruitment HR folder, but I should be clear here – we will pick only professional web marketers, who can backup their claims with observable results on the web – case studies, high-quality content, solved problems, top-ranked websites or reputable service.

Glad that you want to start a new hobby, a new digital branding career, but if you start at ground zero, there is a great chance to fail. Despite your skills and background, you will be overwhelmed with paralyzing volumes of information and digital marketing courses. Even following our blueprint, your lack of digital marketing basics will eat your time and focus.

Sure, persistence, good communication and writing style are one of the most important skills, but consulting and building successful online businesses is not equal to blasting emails, answering phone-calls and organizing cocktails. How about video, presentation or web analytics skills?

It takes years before one knows how to build successful online businesses. We just don’t have the time to spend months learning how all this works and you have bills to pay, right? Same here. Building a solid brand, successful online business or global top rankings in Google takes months and years. We look for this experience in every team-member and partner.

If you still believe you are the one, even overqualified! one, or you are an overnight-web-success-exception to all above (yes, we got few ones), please give us a call. Thank you again and hope to see you at the top!

See you at the top

This month I jumped in a great adventure, which I dreamed years ago.
Visiting one of my SEO and Google top positioning customers in Kathmandu, I discovered Nepal – the highest country, Buddha’s birthplace and best destination for mountaineering, adventurous trekking, rafting, wildlife jungle safaris, cultural and mystical tours and even golf. With a diverse population of more than 57 ethnic groups, 6500 species of plants, over 800 species of birds, and history, starting with the Kiratis 2800 years ago, today Nepal has an awesome nature, fragile economy, extreme poverty and illiteracy and an ethnically fragmented population, growing at a frightening rate.

I didn’t managed to shoot how the Mediterranean see met the Tibetan plateau when the Indo-Australian plate collided with the Eurasian continent to form the earth’s buckle Himalayas 60 million years ago, but I did manage to get thousands of great pictures and videos from the top of the world. From paddy fields with bamboo, mango forests and palms, through the tropical jungle, used as safeguard against possible invasion by the British (you can still see the rhinos, tigers and elephants in the Chitwan national park’s jungle) through the hills, where the large mountain ape gigantopithecus (my brother Yeti) was roaming half a million years ago, to the countless Himalaya snowy peaks and ranges…the soul for the Sherpas.

The Khumbu region, which was opened in the 1950s for trekking, is awesome. You can trek only with a daypack and spend over a month there with a relatively tight budget. A great holiday of fresh air, breath-taking views, great people and culture on the trail. In 1964 only 14 foreigners visited the region. Today they are over 25000.  Independent teahouse trekking is the most flexible, free and economical way to enjoy the mountain. You can stop or rush whenever you like. One of the great joys is that you meet common-minded people everywhere on the trek – at the airport, hotel, bus, lodge, on the trail. Another great experience is to mingle with the locals for a culture-rich and colorful adventure.

When I get a chance, I will publish my notes about the Nepal kingdom’s adventure as a rich-illustrated PDF.
Meanwhile check my HD video about the great world beyond laptop and iphone horizons and the Nepali-inspired music with western instruments, recorded in my studio back home.

Himalaya Spring – trekking in the Everest region

Instead of altitude sickness, I got altitude addiction.
So, keep brandmoving and we will see us at the top!
(both on Google and Everest)

Perfect time and place to buy?

Price trend for 60 days

These days I get trend alerts for services and products with over 520% price deviation! (my last booked fare moved from $650 to $3420 and back to $870 in just 2 months).

Today we can track service prices and scan product barcodes at the store, choosing the perfect time and source to get what we are looking for. Awesome, isn’t it? Same product, same quality, 526% price amplitude ? Welcome to 2009!

Name it as you want it  – crisis, shaking demand or branding wars…