Like many kids in school, my ex-girlfriend often didn’t feel like completing the assignment at hand. “I don’t want to!” she would say. One of her teachers had a better response than the others: “Then you’ll do it without wanting.”

What an intriguing proposition for a nine-year-old! “Desire is not a prerequisite for action? What sorcery is this?” I’m not sure whether it’s better to learn this early or not, but I do know we all learn it eventually.

The follow-up lesson, however, is reserved only for those who show up reluctantly more than they’d like to: In the long run, especially if the outcome is important, the doing will beget the wanting more so than the other way around.

Keep doing. Life isn’t school, and the stakes are much bigger than getting a stamp on your homework.

The only thing worse than getting sick on your vacation is getting sick one week before your vacation. You end up only half-recovering and then cramming everything you have to do and prepare and finish into the last 48 hours before your trip. This happened to me in July.

You know when you finally recover from a multi-day sickness and you feel like you could rip out trees? I’d had only a whiff of that feeling, but on the second-to-last day before hitting the road, I finished reading a book I had to review, wrote some new stuff, scheduled two weeks’ worth of emails, and mowed the lawn.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted, which was good for my sleep but probably not great for the remainder of my recovery. The next morning, I knew more wrap-up madness was coming, but a thought struck me: Have faith, but don’t tempt fate.

It’s good to trust in your path back to health when you feel it coming. To put some strain on your body and spirit. Reactivate muscles and mind. Prepare to re-engage routine. But it’s not good to overdo it too early. To protract your ailment and turn a cold into the flu—or worse.

Where is the line? That’s life’s question to us. What good is wrapping up a small pile of infinite work if it prevents you from tackling a much bigger one with confidence two weeks later? Just as with family, “health most” does not always mean “health first,” but it sure translates to “don’t run before you can walk.”

Once upon a time, when you scored a job at Audi, the CEO would greet you and your fellow new hires with the following words on day one: “Welcome to 40 years of working life at Audi.” I wonder: When did the last person join who heard this guarantee and could expect it to last? Was it in the 90s? The early 2000s? At least the last decade feels like a stretch.

The American labor market has always moved according to the whims of Wall Street. Therefore, even if it was a first, Big Tech conducting mass layoffs solely to please investors—the salaries of those affected are a drop in the bucket compared to their annual profits—was only a matter of time. But when the German epitome of stability, Volkswagen (which owns Audi), scraps 30-year-old job guarantees, it really makes you think: Is the era of work loyalty finally, officially, unequivocally over? It sure seems that way.

Ten years ago, my mentor at BMW showed me that, even back then, tides were shifting. He left his role in marketing when my internship ended and became a pricing specialist. Before, he had done sales. Now, he’s a product manager. Unlike his bosses, who had followed a more traditional ascent from working in construction to cushy desk jobs in a related unit, leadership expected him to move across all kinds of functions in the organization—and master them all, of course. There were no cookies for doing your job well anymore. The cookies were always in some other team, and unless you moved, your career would stall and whither.

This trend is alive and well, and when it comes to switching jobs between companies, it is stronger and more obvious than ever: “Your job is not your job; your job is to get a better job,” like Adam Scott says. Why settle for a 2% pay bump, if that, when a competitor will offer you 20%, 30% more? Why deal with micromanagement and budget cuts and not getting promoted for silly reasons when someone else will throw in more holidays and extra equity on top? In tech as elsewhere, “always be switching” must be the motto of the employee who’s looking out for herself, even if she’s not trying to maximize profit. After all, the alternative to moving is waiting until you—or your salary, your privileges, your autonomy—get cut.

By and large, work is mercenary. That’s a sad state of affairs, but it is a state we must accept nonetheless. You know what doesn’t reward you for being a mercenary? Art. Art is forever. There’s no cheating mastery. You can put in the decades, or you can quit any time, but unlike the job market, the people with good taste won’t hand you a pay raise for the latter. The beauty of art, should you do it for the right reasons, is that the money is secondary to the practice. Show up every day, and you can claim your prize: the feeling of having shipped. Toiled. Wrought another fragment of creativity from the muses in another dimension. And on most days, that will be enough. It might have to be on all of them.

Will you be one of the lucky ones? The ones who find a firm that recognizes and repays their contributions in full? I sincerely hope you will be, but great employer or not, I can only recommend carving out a small space in your life that holds room for art—for art will always offer the type of home most workplaces can’t: the kind where practicing with intent is plenty to fill your heart.

There’s no perfect answer to the conundrum of diversification vs. focus as an entrepreneur, side hustler, or artist who wants to make a living. Focus too much, and your income is fragile. Diversify beyond necessity, and you’ll lose time and energy tending to pointless branches of your work.

Today, I chopped off one of those branches. I un-monetized all ~500 of my Quora answers. The $300 I received last year for some two million views were not worth having to write 12 custom invoices, figuring out FX rates, and dealing with all the red tape that follows. As it turns out, the only way to be free of this headache was to make the posts free again as well.

Sometimes, you need to make space in your wallet to make space in your mind. Trust that the shortfall will grow back elsewhere, and whether it’s focus or diversification you’ll chase next, choose clarity over distractions.

It’s honorable to concede that “less” is the right path forward, but where will it come from? You can’t shave five minutes off everything. Chances are, some activity will have to walk the plank. After all, if your sacrifice doesn’t hurt, it is not working.

Yes, sure, start with the obvious time-wasters. The news shortcuts in your browser you just tap on because they are there. The endless feed of Youtube subscriptions with more videos than you could ever watch. But once the frills have been trimmed, where will you reach next?

Sometimes, it helps to ask what the less is for. Not always its own sake. If I want to be an author, I must write books. If I want to be a reader, I must turn pages. As soon as I conclude those activities are more important to me than, say, collecting Pokémon cards, I can cut back significantly on the latter—the sacrifice will still hurt, but at least it will be made with open eyes.

It never gets easier, this question. But if you sit with it when you need it, you’ll always find yet another answer. Where is the less? Keep subtracting so you can add to what matters.

For you, a day where you couldn’t make a big dent in your project or failed to get your kids to school on time might feel like a bad outcome. But actually, a lot needs to go right for you to even be able to make those “mistakes.”

How many processes have to function in your body for you to even have the chance of doing four to six hours of work on a given day? Thousands? Millions? If you can get out of bed when your alarm rings and arrive at a desk not too long thereafter, you’ve already won. I know it doesn’t feel like it, and it’ll still take many of those “lucky” days to add up to a big accomplishment, but actually, even in average, even in failure, what’s working still outweighs what’s not—and that’s just you.

Every day the Brooklyn Bridge stands is another day the original planners from 1869 got it right. No one walking across it will know any of their names, but they’ll still benefit from that performance—each pencil stroke a play being made, successfully, to this day.

What if what you believe to be the norm is actually the gravy? Don’t worry about a perfect score. Look for what’s already going right.

A few years ago, I heard Naval Ravikant say that “the best workout for you is the one that you’re excited enough to do every day.” “He’s right,” I thought. “I need a workout like that.”

I’ve always enjoyed certain sports, but I’ve never been the most eager, fit, or genetically fortunate athlete. I don’t like the social theater associated with going to the gym, and more than once, I pushed my bodyweight workouts too far and discovered yet another natural limitation. Wherever it was available and affordable, I used to go to the pool three times a week, but in Munich, it had been neither. Clearly, I needed to find a way to move. Preferably a sustainable one.

“I can do 50 push-ups, I think. And 50 sit-ups. Let me try that.” I hit the ground and got to work. One push-up…two…three. The last ten took a lot of effort, but I did it. The 50 sit-ups, or crunches, if you will, were relatively easy. Therefore, I decided to do 100 sit-ups the next day. I entered both activities into my habit tracker, and that’s how my daily workout routine began.

Today marks the five-year-anniversary of that routine. That’s 1,825 days. A lot has happened in my life since then. I graduated with a master’s degree. I got into a relationship and moved in with my girlfriend. My career and portfolio have seen more ups and downs than I can count. Friends have married, had kids. There was a pandemic, a stock market boom, two wars broke out, and on and on the list goes.

The workout itself has been through a lot, too. I varied the amounts of push-ups and sit-ups I did every day. I tried to raise them, then lowered them again. I made a rule to always do at least one push-up and one sit-up, even when I’m sick. It’s merely symbolic, but it feels empowering. I added other habits, like jumping jacks and stretching, then decided to only do them when I have the time. But every day…50 push-ups and 100 sit-ups. That baseline never wavered.

I’ve also learned many a lesson: that after 1,000 days of doing something, you can probably stop counting. That days beat dreams and consistency beats effort. But perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned that the key word in Naval’s description is “enough.”

The best workout for you needs to be one you can physically sustain. It must be accessible, both geographically and in terms of equipment. But most of all, it must be a routine you’re “excited enough to do every day.” The difference between including the word “enough” and omitting it is the difference between reality and a fantasy. Why? Because no routine will make you excited in an absolute sense on a daily basis. On some days, “enough” will mean you’re not looking forward to your workout at all—but you’ll still be eager to have worked out yesterday tomorrow, and that’ll get you to show up when the odds aren’t in your favor.

How many push-ups and sit-ups have I actually done in those five years? It’s impossible to tell. But even when I knock 20% off my daily averages to be conservative, I’m still closing in on 100,000 push-ups and 150,000 sit-ups. Have they turned me into Adonis? Nope. But they’ve kept me a little healthier than I otherwise would be, and that’s what good habits are all about: not “best” but “enough.” As soon as you accept that, you’ll understand why Naval used both words in one sentence: because in this world of tradeoffs we live in, often, the two are one and the same.

I don’t remember when I started making to-do lists for my weekend. I usually write them down on paper. After all, a 48-hour reprieve from the everyday rush is always too short—especially considering it’s rarely 48 hours of reprieve at all. There are floors to vacuum, bills to pay, and family members to call. So let’s make the most of it!

As time wore on, I often found myself with such a long weekend to-do list, I’d start adding in my hobbies and fun activities. “If I can’t fit them in around the edges, I might not find time for them at all!” I thought. So I wrote those down, too, and the list became a balancing act of trying to get the right mix of items done.

Recently, I was sick towards the end of a week. Saturday happened to be the first day I was back with the living. I hadn’t made a weekend to-do list yet, and I ended up forgetting it altogether. Since I wanted to feel fresh and rid the house of the last virus cells, I did some cleaning. Making beds, washing sheets, scrubbing toilets. By the afternoon, I had done a lot of chores.

I went through what else I thought needed doing in my head. “Call grandma. Get a haircut. Fold the laundry. Oh! I probably won’t do all of this today. I should write these down!” But right then and there, I stopped. “Really? Should I?” Somehow, my weekends had started happening under the soundtrack of the same humdrum to-do list beat that dominates the workweek, which has its uses, of course, but I had only noticed it now that I had accidentally broken out of my steady rhythm. “To-do lists might also work on weekends, but maybe weekends aren’t for to-do lists,” I thought.

Being the OCD-type that I am, I ended up with a compromise: I scribbled my remaining tasks on a piece of paper, but then I turned it upside down. “This way, I can look if I forget, but only if I really need to.” My brain got the satisfaction of knowing nothing would get lost, and I got the inner peace of not having a to-do list for my weekend.

I don’t know how far this experiment—in what is perhaps only returning to the sensible norm—is going to go, but I do know this: Life feels better when I have fewer lists. Maybe that’s the only information I need to write down.

The European honey buzzard commonly migrates across long distances. We’re talking 5,000 kilometers and more. We know this because we track them. In one particular case, a specimen supposedly made it all the way from South Africa to Finland in 42 days. That’s 10,000 kilometers in six weeks. Almost 250 kilometers each day—more than most semi-seasoned cyclists can cover, let alone do so 42 times in a row.

Perhaps most impressive, however, is not how far she flew but where. Chart her path on a map, and it’ll be a straight line from Reitz to Helsinki, minus a brief detour along the Nile so she wouldn’t have to fly over open water where she can’t soar. It’s straight-right-left-straight. The most direct course to her destination, given her abilities.

We might never be able to traverse 20 countries at 250 kilometers per day with the sole power of our bodies, but there’s still a thing or two we may learn from a creature you can: Adjust course to accommodate yourself, but insofar as you’re able and can see your final haven, keep flying straight.

Most of the time when I type an angry tweet, I eventually go, “Argh, alright, I’ll email them again first.” I don’t know how much it has helped my case in various instances, but I’d like to think it has upped my karmic balance.

When you take an argument public, there’s always a chance it’ll be the last one you have. Do you really want to do that for a critical piece of your business infrastructure? Or a person you see every day? Flaring up should be your last resort. First, try following up. And when that fails? Then you follow up again.

Praise in public, probe in private. You can always set the conversation—and perhaps the relationship—on fire later.