Some Amazingly Big Milestones.. I truly love my life

A quick note from the hotel here in Lagos Nigeria jetlagged and wide awake even as my body screams - you are dead tired and you should sleep... 

Nigeria became the 100th country I have now visited lifetime, including both business and leisure travel. Wow. I wanted a 'jetsetting' life when I was growing up but did I ever think even a dozen years ago when I was setting up my own consultancy that I might ever hit 100 countries visited lifetime. No. I truly have lived a wonderful and rich life of seeing the world...

Talking of that world. Lagos coincidentially today was the 100th city where I have been seen speaking in public about mobile! (100 cities/63 countries/all 6 inhabited continents) That is mindboggling. Even many 'real' rockstars don't get to visit 100 separate cities (and far fare less 63 countries) in their touring lives during their careers haha...  

So imagine if someone told you - let us fly you to New York. And to Tokyo. And to Paris. And to Cairo. And to London. And to Toronto. And to Sao Paulo. And to Moscow. And to New Delhi. And to San Francisco. And to Singapore. And to Beijing. And to Amsterdam. And to Istanbul. And to Atlanta. And to Dubai. And to Cannes. And to Auckland. And to Prague. And to Johannesburg. And to Belgrade. And to Barcelona. And to Hong Kong. And to Buenos Aires. And to New Orleans. And to Vancouver. And to Medina. And to Caracas. And to Vienna. And to Nairobi. And to Oslo. And to Bangkok. And to ... you get the picture. 100 cities. Do a presentation (45 minutes) and have you travel and hotel paid (and often get also a speaking fee...) and enjoy the town..  Wow. Public speaking has given me a wonderful wonderful life. 100 cities. I could not have imagined this to be possible. (obviously I travel MASSIVELY more than that in my private workshops and seminars to my clients also on all six continents) .. and to Turku, and to Winnipeg, and to Birmingham, and to Calgary, and to Budva, and to Oulu, and to Muscat, and to Jeju, and to Billund, and to Perth, and to Dusseldorf...

And to Lagos, Nigeria.

I have a lot of memories and thoughts and recollections (and some pictures) that have been coming back to me over the past few weeks as I was waiting for this Lagos gig to happen. I will be blogging about that in a picture essay a bit later. But for the loyal readers of this blog...

We have passed 5 MILLION lifetime visits to the CDB blog. Communities Dominate! Thank you to our readers! This is my digital home, you regular readers here are my closest virtual family (the Twitter followers are more like friends of the family haha)...  I read every comment you post and when I have some time, I try to respond to many.

And while we do those milestones I also just passed 4 million lifetime kilometers (2.5M miles) in the air. Its still not quite like George Clooney did in that movie about the jetsetting consultant, 'Up in the Air' - he did 10M miles on one airline! - but hey, 4 million km in airplanes is 8 months of continous 24 hour flying if put back-to-back. Or 100 times around the planet at the equator. Or five trips to the moon - and back!

I love my life. And I owe it all to the wonderful industry of mobile and the fortune I've had in being involved in its thought-leadership. So now I post this and go back to bed trying to fall asleep.... 

Comments

[Warren Wilson]

Congratulations, Tomi! That's quite an accomplishment. Now if the Anaheim Ducks get into the Stanley Cup final will you be travelling to see Teemu? 😊

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Cheers. Guess what. Teemu (and Jari Kurri) both signed my 3rd book 3G Marketing !!!!!!!!!!!! (plus I have a world championship tournament Teemu game-played hockey stick...)

I just might burn a coupla FF miles to get there :-)

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Bruno1024]

now we wait for baron95 to tell you that your life actually sucks. :)
anyway, congratulations, good job.

[Timo M.]

Grats Tomi. Looking forward to the "regulars" beginning to dispute your numbers in *this* blog.

[baron99]

congrats Tomi ....keep publishing the truth over the non-sense from the Microsoft shills and astroturfers. You really do annoy them! ...and please continue to point out that NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE! :-)

[Robert Atkins]

"...and please continue to point out that NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE! :-)"

baron99, please check your facts. Windows phones are selling by the DOZENS! And I've finally seen one in the wild. The owner is pissed however, that her phone(given to her...) is stuck on Win 7.5, and she can't upgrade. But what the hell, I'm sure she will go for a new Lumia - someday - when hell freezes over.

p.s. Tomi, your Twitter posts overwhelm my feed sometimes; could you hold it down to maybe a DOZEN or so posts?
Congratulations on 100. It's more than most of us will ever do.

[togga]

Congratulations Tomi. You are a steady pillar in the mobile reporting, especially when strong astoturfing winds from Redmond are blowing.

For what its worth, here is another mobile takeover I noticed. Android surpassing WinXP on statscounter in April:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-os-ww-monthly-201304-201404

Even Win8 has a slightly negative trend, mobile is going strong and representing the new, while Microsoft is representing the old.

[Interested to know]

Congrats. I was happiest when travelling a lot and I didn't see nearly as much as you have.

[MH]

Will you be taking a Nigerian Taxi Experience to celebrate?

[baron99]

Hi Robert ...I thought I saw a windows phone in the wild the other day too. ...but is was April Fools day. Clearly, it is only useful as a joke because we all know that NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE! LoL!

[zlutor]

@Tomi: Congrats, nice 'milestone'! Is Budapest on the list? If not, please, give it a try - we also have F1 event here in July... :-)

[David Doherty]

Find it hard to believe you've never been here but we need to work out how to make Ireland (Home from home for many of the biggest mobile brands eg. Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Tripadvisor, etc) as I'm sure it would be the perfect 101st country for you.

I'll be meeting some of the organisers for the Summit (http://thesummit.co) that takes place 4-6 November and I think you'd make a great addition to that program so I'll see if I can convince them and let you know.

[baron99]

I should have posted this here for news:

Some new marketplace perspective on the next iteration of crappy Microsoft products. They have a new CEO but the same stupid monopolist arrogance. This company is truly lost.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/slideshows/10-reasons-the-surface-pro-3-wont-work-as-a-notebook-replacement.html?kc=EWKNLEDP05222014A&dni=127036425&rni=23383474

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi everybody!

Thanks for the wonderful comments. Yeah I love my life. Budapest? Been there done that. Dublin. Been there done that. Whoelse was in the list...

I returned from Nigeria, have some great tidbits of the mobile industry from an Africa perspective I'll be writing about. And Gartner seems to be taking their time to give us their count of the smartphone market in Q1, the moment the data is out, I'll do my Q1 blog.

Cheers!

Tomi Ahonen, the Happy Wanderer/Digital Gypsy :-)

[baron99]

More news to annoy the Microsoft astroturfers (BTW it is an excellent read):

http://semiaccurate.com/2014/05/15/microsoft-now-irrelevant-computing-want-know/

Let's see who defends Microsoft LOL!

[zlutor]

@Tomi: "Budapest? Been there done that"

Nice people, beautiful city and wonderful girls - come back! It is different every day! :-)