Personal Growth

The popularity of chess skyrocket in recent times. It’s mainly because of the ongoing pandemic where all games benefit, as we can say from statistics of a leading streaming platform — Twitch. Theverg summarizes:

Twitch had a good 2020. Events were virtual; people stayed inside. The live-streaming site managed to clock 17 billion hours watched last year, which is a full 83 percent higher than 2019’s 9 billion, according to the latest report from StreamElements and Arsenal.gg.

Chess is one of the most viewed categories on the platform in the period.

The next reason is the huge success of The…

What is wisdom? Oxford dictionary gives a very straight definition:

Wisdom is the ability to make sensible decisions and give good advice because of the experience and knowledge that you have

That indicates the practical use of knowledge, not only having it, which is not always the case. We can gather lots of information from books or articles, but not many people can use knowledge, so as not to become a snob, but wise.

Once I heard that wisdom for intelligent people is an ability to understand what motivates people from “non-intelligent” circles. So-called “elites” fail on that part strongly…

Productivity

I am a freelancer since 2016, working mostly in digital marketing. During those years, I went through many ups and downs in my work efficiency.

I remember a 20-years-old version of me when I couldn’t organize myself, so I was “working” whole days with trembling hands from too much caffeine.

As a 22-year old, I started creating highly complicated plans, mostly in google sheets — charts, progress bars, conditional functions, reminders, data from other sources, etc. It ended up sitting each morning for up to 40 minutes filling all the data.

There was also a time where I tried to…

Personal Growth

Yesterday I came across Gautama Buddha quote:

Do not be jealous of others’ good qualities, but out of admiration, adopt them yourself.

When I started the writing journey, I was a proud and arrogant guy from the digital marketing community. I already had few achievements in the local market, authority, and recognition of my brand in the field.

That’s why I promoted my profile and whole social media in a very aggressive, childish way, and I had horrible results. My attitude was almost as bad as “I deserve to get noticed,” and I felt bad when it wasn’t happening.

Thankfully…

Personal Growth

I was very disorganized in my early twenties, and I tried to trick the sleep because it only “wasted my time.” The need for sleep was never the problem, but I guess I had to get that life lesson to humble the rebel version of me.

One day I read about Leonardo Da Vinci, who slept 20 minutes every 4 hours. I learned that the system of sleeping multiple times is called polyphasic sleep in general, and the exact Da Vinci was using is “the uberman.”

I decided to try that, and it was working great only because I was…

My story of $15000 ebook sales

In 2017, I published an SEO guide on the local market. It was a 40 A4 pages, 12000 words of technical guide that contained lots of my knowledge based on a few years’ experience. The price was “just” $50 and went up to $100 as the guide expanded with free updates to 110 A4 pages.

Initially, I wondered if I was exaggerating with the content and if it was reasonable to provide this amount of information at that price.

A few months later, it turned out that almost no one asked questions despite dozens of copies sold. Feedback was 100%…

Yesterday I got up in the morning thinking I should give up on my pen name. There was no reason to do this, but the thoughts troubled me.

Yes, I am writing under a pen name, although I don’t hide my actual name or face. The reason is that my actual name (Slavic) seems too hard to pronounce and remember to successfully write in the global community.

I was about to abandon “Jake Mura” when suddenly a friend hit me on messenger, and we started a normal conversation. …

I am not a native speaker, and I’m not living in an English speaking country. My only contact with the language is on social media or during writing.

I was quite an arrogant child. I didn’t like school and the whole education system. I was learning only to pass the class, and If I passed with the worst grade, that was enough — I was happy, my mom wasn’t.

So although I had the first contact with English already in kindergarten, and then during the whole education system — I didn’t benefit from it too much.

Being arrogant, bored, and…