Embracing the Extraordinary in Every Moment

For years, my Garmin Fenix 6X Pro was the definition of a serious watch. Big. Bulky. Built like it could survive a small apocalypse. And honestly—I loved that about it. But after living with the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra for a few weeks, I realized something important: my needs had changed. And WearOS had grown up while I wasn’t paying attention. This is the story of why I switched.

For years, we’ve labeled communication, empathy, adaptability, and leadership as soft skills . The name itself carries an unintended weight —  soft suggests something secondary, less rigorous, even optional. But in today’s world, these are not soft at all. They are fundamental . We’re living in an era where AI can out-compute, out-analyze, and out-automate most technical or procedural work. Algorithms can generate code, summarize research, and even draft reports faster than any human. What AI cannot replicate — at least not yet — are the deeply human capabilities: the ability to read a room, inspire trust, resolve conflict with empathy, or lead people through uncertainty. These are not “nice-to-haves.” They are the very skills that determine whether teams thrive or collapse, whether ideas take root or wither, whether organizations merely function or truly innovate. Why “Fundamental Skills” Matters Renaming them fundamental skills reframes their role. They are not complementary t...

While working on a project we are constantly faced with risks — please recall the delusion part as research in Ariely book, mentioned above, and to be clear once more — there are NO projects without risks . But also, be rational, not everything should be identified as a risk, otherwise we will be burdened with unnecessary activities, which will have a direct impact on the entire project. To keep this under control, we are using probability and impact matrix. Probability is divided into 5 categories: rare, unlikely, moderate, likely, very likely. The impact is divided into 5 categories as well: trivial, minor, moderate, major, extreme. The overall result is divided into three categories: low, medium, and high. Matrix is created according to rules as described in the following figure: Risk severity definition matrix I performed an example of risk assessment and identified the main risks as I foresee for the fictitious online tourism service. For each risk, a probability and impact are de...

Dan Ariely, in his widely popular book “Predictably Irrational”, explains that our reasoning abilities and expectations are often affected by emotions, social norms, and other hidden forces from the environment. “When we believe beforehand that something will be good, therefore, it generally will be good — and when we think it will be bad, it will bad.” [1] This leads to delusion, and in business, we really cannot afford this to happen. Remember, our product is not all about our entrepreneurship adventure — others depend on company success, and their families too. How do we mitigate the risk of a belief that everything is going to be fine as we wish it would be? We need to do a reality check regularly. There is an easy to use tool that can help us —  SWOT/TOWS analysis . Here a simplified example of SWOT analysis on a fictitious online tourism service: SWOT analysis Once that we responsibly and honestly identified all good and bad factors that have an impact on our product, we act guid...

The ultimate question is — does our project have what it takes to be successful? I will answer with an additional question that will lead us to the right answer by following certain steps of the process — does our project have drivers for specific goals that will be interpreted with the proposed solution and lead to certain benefits ? Looking from the perspective of fictitious online tourism service: Project plan So, what does it mean to be original? That implies making something completely new — do something that has never been done before. We can always challenge ourselves in a way to build something upon others’ ideas, but not to copy from them. Almost everything today is built upon something that already exists. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” — Pablo Picasso Due to the open worldwide communication, the fact that almost all information is available and each of us has an enormous amount of ideas, can we make something completely new? Well, we can put ourselves in a po...

Days of one-size-fits-all are gone, an individual approach is required. Of course, unless we are building some very specific products or services, we cannot serve each of our consumers fully individually. It is not rational, it is not cost-efficient, and it is simply said not doable. What we need and should do is tailor our product to so-called expectation groups. In previous chapters, I covered this partially by talking about selecting the target audience, but there is much more than that. As the saying goes “It takes all sorts to make a world” we might be back at the beginning again — individual approach, but fortunately, scientists have found that there are some rules of conduct among people of similar age, to be more precise — generations. According to their conclusions, society, as we know it from recent history, is made up of 5 generations [1]: Traditionalists or Silent Generation: born 1945 and before Baby Boomers: born 1946–1964 Generation X: born 1965–1976 Millennials or Gene...