Roman Malanke

Past Summer Experiences

This year’s summer proved to be very exiting. A lot of bright and positive things have happened to me both externally and inside my head. I’m happy to say that I remained loyal to all of my self-development commitments.

Indeed, I have continued to swim, exercise and do yoga regularly. I’ve done quite a bit of reading and language learning. I still practice playing guitar and roller-skating. And what is the most important here is that all these activities keep bringing me more and more pleasure and satisfaction. I even started to think of myself as a self-development addict.

My traveler’s outlook was enriched by unexpected journey to the entertainment capital of the world Las Vegas in the middle of July and wonderful trip to the heart of Europe — Czech Republic in late August where I fulfilled two of my biggest dreams at once — visited Prague and attended live Radiohead concert.

There were many things that I discovered, found to be of great use and loved during the summer.

First I will recall my findings in the area of Spanish language. As I wrote before I currently learn Spanish using only materials targeted to English speakers. I had already been listening to several podcasts aimed to teach the basics of Spanish when I accidentally came across very good audio materials based on Michel Tomas’ method of language learning. During one month I listened to four audiobooks called “Foundation Spanish”, “Spanish Advanced”, “Spanish Language Builder” and “Spanish Vocabulary” course. I’ve found those audiobooks really effective and I believe that now I have no problems with most of typical tenses and grammar constructions.

In educational reading I enjoyed “The Practice of Management” by Peter Drucker. This is really solid and adult management stuff. It’s hard to imagine that this work was written in 50s because most of the principles still apply nowadays.

In self-development area my major discovery was “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David Schwartz. This eye-opening book is definitely the best motivational works I have read so far. As I said I want to buy many copies of it in Ukrainian and Russian language and give away to every person I care about.

Another huge thing is the podcast I stumbled upon in iTunes called Pickup Podcast. Despite its unambiguous name it’s not all about picking up women. The hosting guys are self-development maniacs and they talk about ways to increase your value as a person, to have more quality life. I downloaded all eighty something episodes to my iPod, started listening from the very beginning and by now almost caught up with up-to-date episodes.

So, I thank the summer for its warm weather, cheap fruits and vegetables and looking forward to even more productive and exiting autumn!

2009-09-01