Speaker Insight Series - Bert Boerman

Bert Boerman, CEO and Co-founder, Governance.io

Here's part three of getting to know our speakers ahead of Adminovate next week. We’ve borrowed the format from Tim Ferriss’s new book ‘Tribe of Mentors’. You can read about the book here and buy it directly here.

Throughout the book, Tim poses 11 questions to his interviewees with the request to respond to 3 to 5 questions.. or more, if the spirit moves them. Bert Boerman sends his answers from Luxembourg:

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

1. The Lean Startup: Why: Great book on how to build an agile and scalable business.

2. ReWork: Why: this book is spot-on about everything that big companies do wrong. I recognised every page, and it helped me to choose entrepreneurship.

3. The subtle art of not giving a F*ck. Why: because despite it’s rough title, it is a fantastic book about focusing on the important things in life and making the most of the valuable and limited time you have.

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? My readers love specifics like brand and model, where you found it, etc.

My Logitech MX Master 2S mouse. For desk athletes like myself, this equipment helps me be as efficient as I can on the screen!

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it — metaphorically speaking, getting a message out to millions or billions — what would it say and why? It could be a few words or a paragraph. (If helpful, it can be someone else’s quote: Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by?)

"The most important thing of getting things Done, is Do" (Bert Boerman: don’t overthink, don’t keep discussing, don’t procrastinate, just do it, make mistakes, learn, improve and start again)

What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? (Could be an investment of money, time, energy, etc.)

Governance.com! We invested time, money, sweat and tears, but we see it paying off.

In the last five years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life?

Fear less about what others may think. Even the most confident looking people are just improvising the hell out of life.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? (If helpful: What questions do you ask yourself?)

I follow a methodology of GTD: Getting Things Done. The main concept is to brain-dump everything you can think of having to do in a long list, and then deciding which are the things that need to be done NOW, what are the things that need to be done the rest of the day, and hiding everything else by deferring it to another day. This gives me back control when I feel like I am losing grip.