2020 in Review

2020 in Review

This year was definitely… very strange (don’t want to use some other word). As in the last few years, I like to make an overview what happened in my life and everything impacted to my (and my family) life.

This year started as usual, it looked like an ordinary year… traveling, business as usual… and then suddenly everything stopped. Corona virus appeared and our world definitely was not ready for this. But as everything in life, you can find bad and good sides. Because of that, I’ll not start only with business. Rather I would like to start with everything important in my life. And my life cannot be good if there is not balance between inner peace, health, knowledge, and business.

As you probably know I love traveling, but sometimes if there is too much of something you like it becomes annoying. This year on the early beginning of year, I had an opportunity to visit Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Israel. After that I had to cancel all my flight tickets and hotel reservations.

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But again, it was good for me as I didn’t spend so much time with my family in more then 15 years. And this was amazing time… again to relearn how to live as a normal family ??. And we tried to spend this time as a really quality time. And even in these hard times, we had a lot of good news. For example, my son got married and he started new life founding new family and on new job. And they are living 850m away from us.

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Likely all my friends and family members are alive in these times. But in the May we had one very sad occasion – our dog (and the best friend) Rajko passed away after 14 years of our friendship… he is still missing a lot.

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OK, we needed to cancel some plans because of this situation, but I cannot find some really important reason why I’ll be sad because of that. Life will go on after a while.

During this period, we tried to be healthy as more as possible. Only my wife got Covid, but on the end everything was OK, and she didn’t have some serious consequences. It was not so easy, but on the end everything is fine. I was pretty active this year and based on my Strava account, this year I run approximately 2.300 km and ride a bike 1.700 km (started in the second half of year) with in total 304 active days. I didn’t finish my planned marathon (goal moved for 2021), but I finished 9 half-marathons and one 32km distance. And of course, I’m proud on my results (3 years ago I was 130kg weight).

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Of course, as I usually have 100+ flights during the year, I needed to find a way how to make good use of this new free time. One part of me decide to continue with regular reading as this is the best way how to learn about outside world but also about yourself. This year I completed 28 books and there are still 4 books in progress.

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I you want my advice; I would definitely suggest reading the following 5 books:

·      Non-fictions:

o  Sapiens – a brief history of humankind (by Yuval Noah Harari)

o  Homo Deus – a history of tomorrow (by Yuval Noah Harari)

·      Historical:

o  The American Civil War (by Gary W. Gallagher)

·      Biography:

o  Edison (by Edmund Morris)

·      Fiction:

o  An American Marriage (by Tayari Jones)

But with more times, new challenges appear. I (together with my wife) decide to learn Spanish. And I’m good for beginning. In 200 days, based on my Duolingo report, I have learned 5.142 words. Do not be confused with Italian in my Duolingo report, it was just a try ??. And with Duolingo you don’t need real time for learning… you can find a lot of times when you are doing nothing (just try to imagine all those moments) and just take your app and spend a few minutes; this is enough.

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Outsides of these two things, I invested a lot of time in learning new areas of business, especially in Power Platform form one side and in AI as a moving outside of comfort zone. I completed 4 MS exams and completed MCT for this year. I was a coach in one global Hackathon, and it was a great experience.

I’ve already attended a few soft-skills trainings, thanks to Microsoft and I would single out one: Story Impact: Learning to Connect and Compel by Lange International. If you have any opportunity to attend, you have all my recommendations as this is really great course where I learned a lot.

As I slowly slide towards business, let’s continue and finish my story. Even if we couldn’t travel to all events all around the world, I still provided a dozen of sessions (online, of course) on Dynamics Community NA, Directions EMEA… Also, I provided a dozen of different online trainings. We finally learned that this is not necessary to travel every time when you need to meet someone and to deliver some knowledge and this is something positive, we learned from this crisis. But do not be confused, even if we can provide a lot of things online, real on-site events are still not obsolete and even more, they are necessary. When we talk about event/conference, it is not only about content. Content plays maximum 25-30% and everything more requires face-to-face. I will not continue more in this direction as I already wrote my opinion about this topic in my blog. And yes, I was one of a few people who organized online Sinergija – Serbian MS conference.

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My success in working with partners was good as well. My partners published dozens of apps on AppSource and I’m proud on them. They made a good result. Also, we added new country to BC SaaS cloud environment. And one of my partners completed 18/18 MS gold competencies (I will not mention their name, but they know who they are and how proud I’m).

I expect next year will go slowly to normal (new normal or old normal, who knows) as vaccine is here. Anyway, I invested a lot in my private office and studio as for sure we will have much more hybrid model of business. As I said, we need to have face-to-face, but not all the time as we learned that a lot thing can be done virtually and sometimes even faster and/or better.

Cheers and I hope I’ll see you next year in better condition. I would wish to all of you first health and after that a lot of happiness. If we have these two, we can easy complete all our goals.

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