Two Hamsters in the Background

We had some friends over for coffee and cake. Instead of just playing music from a speaker, I put on a lo-fi mix on our TV. Like most music videos of this kind, it featured a drawn wallpaper image. In the background, there were two cute hamsters, sitting, sipping tea from their cups.

It was only a small detail, but my gut told me the hamsters would be a hit. And sure enough… “Ha, how cool are those hamsters!” one guest eventually said.

We don’t put effort into details because we’re certain they’ll get noticed. We do it because we trust that, in the long run, they will matter.

A funny hamster picture might make someone’s day. A clean sink could inspire them to organize their home. And sprinkles on the cake may make them want to bake again for the first time in years.

Show up for the details. Even without moving, two hamsters in the background can spark their own kind of momentum.

One Does Not Love Breathing

Scout is smart for her age. By the time she goes to school, she can already read. Her teacher, instead of being amazed, sees her as a threat—to the other children but also to herself. When she is told to “tell her father to stop teaching her at home,” which he never has, she realizes for the first time: “What I have is precious, and there are people out there who’d take it away from me.”

It is at this point in To Kill a Mockingbird that Harper Lee issues a profound observation through her six-year-old protagonist: “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

This idea has two implications: For one, love and worry go hand in hand. If you’re not at least a little concerned about losing what you have, chances are you don’t love it—or, more importantly, them—all that much.

For another, a small-minded teacher attacking a child might make us realize that we needn’t justify what comes naturally. Scout happened to sit on her father’s lap when he was reading the newspaper for so many hours, eventually, she picked up the words. Why would she have to defend herself for continuing to collect more of them as she went along? In a way, when we justify what we do for its own sake, we’ve already lost. It’s not our job to comply with the world’s expectations.

When it comes to the people, activities, and experiences pulling at your heartstrings, don’t worry about being worried—and remember there’s no need to justify what comes as naturally as moving new air into your lungs.

The 3 Kinds of Eternity

Harry, the antihero of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, suffers a prolonged, fundamental identity crisis. One idea that gives him comfort is the concept of eternity, which various supporting characters define anew for him in illustrious ways.

There is Goethe, for example, who appears to Harry on several occasions, claiming that “eternity is but a moment, just long enough for a joke.” Harry’s friend Hermine, on the other hand, claims that eternity is “the realm of the real,” including such great human feats as the music of Mozart, epic poems, and the saints who provided a great example for their fellow men. “But eternity also includes the image of every real deed, the strength of every real emotion, even if no one knows about it and sees it and writes it down for posterity. In eternity, there is no posterity, only the contemporary.”

It all sounds mysterious and vague at first, but if you sit with it, you’ll see that, in essence, Harry’s friends are drawing a map for him, and that map breaks down into three particular kinds of eternity:

  1. Liberating insignificance: Compared to the age of history, the age of Earth, the age of the universe, you are but a grain of dust in the desert. Most likely, nothing you do will ever matter, and even if it does—what are 500 years of remembering Shakespeare against millions of years of his nonexistence? Nothing has meaning, so don’t take your life and yourself so seriously.
  2. Empowering significance: Paradoxically, at the same time that nothing matters, everything is indelible. When you stroke your partner’s cheek, that’s real. When you eat a piece of fish, that’s real. And when you feel a strong emotion while looking at a painting, that, too, is real. Everything you do, feel, and experience is definitive, and it will all become an infinitesimally small part of that gargantuan, overwhelming tapestry that is eternity. So in a way, everything has meaning, and perhaps you should act accordingly.
  3. Transcending presence: If both everything and nothing we do becomes part of eternity, how are we to live? As Harry’s friends hint at and he eventually realizes, “eternity was nothing more than the salvation of time, was in a way its return to innocence, its reconversion into space.” In other words: Live in the present. Give yourself fully to every moment, because in an existence where time squeezes us from both sides, with both crushing pressure and debilitating meaninglessness, the only path forward is to transcend time by surrendering to it. Once we relinquish control, we are free.

In the novel, Harry recognizes this last kind of eternity, the final stage of enlightenment, by a particular type of laughter he hears throughout the book. “The laughter of the immortals,” he calls it. It’s not laughing at someone. It’s “only light, only brightness.” An innocent, childlike, wholehearted laughter from deep within. Whenever he hears this laughter, be it from Goethe in a dream or from himself in a strange situation he takes with surprising ease, Harry knows: Eternity is but a moment, just long enough for a joke—and that’s all we need for a lifetime of happiness.

Connecting Is Leading

My friend Mike hates giving presentations. He doesn’t enjoy being the center of attention in a group of people. He’d also be the last to volunteer to do role plays at work. Despite this, nobody I know would hesitate to call Mike a leader. In his own words, he just “leads from behind.”

Mike has worked as a freelancer for many years. I’ve never seen him pitch to get clients. People just “find him.” I’m always amazed at how many people he knows, who he knows, and how he bumps into the right person at the right time. Needless to say, if I’m trying to connect with some person or company, Mike is the first person I ask.

“Connect” is the right keyword. Malcolm Gladwell would call Mike “a Connector.” In The Tipping Point, Gladwell describes them as “people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” They are “the kinds of people who know everyone,” and “all of us know someone like this.” My friend Ted from third grade is a Connector. At our annual city festival reunion, you can’t walk ten meters without him shaking hands with someone. My friend Marc from my Master’s is another Connector. He’s had dinner or worked with seemingly every other person in Munich.

Connectors aren’t leaders in a typical sense. They don’t sketch out some socially or technologically utopian vision and then rally everyone around them to make it come true. They don’t necessarily love the limelight. But lead they do nonetheless—lead you to people, places, and new possibilities.

When I met Mike, I introduced him to other people I knew. Most of them were writers. Mike, on the other hand, connected me both to new people inside my bubble as well as folks completely outside of it. As Gladwell said, we all know Connectors—but we rarely consider how priceless of a friend these people actually are. That was one of the key findings of his book: Yes, the entire world is connected in a surprisingly tight network, but that network runs through just a handful of people. Remove the Connectors, and the entire network collapses.

If you’re neither a leader in the most traditional sense of the word nor a first follower, you might be a Connector. Connecting, too, is leading. And if you’re not? Then that just means you’re a leader of another kind—and that you have all the more reason to be grateful for the Connectors in your life.

Early Following Is Leading

In 2010, Derek Sivers gave a short-and-sweet TED talk that changed my understanding of leadership forever. Showing a short clip of a shirtless guy dancing by himself at a music festival, Derek explains: “First, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed.” Well, that part I knew. It’s the part every movie, book, interview, and case study explains over and over again.

In this particular case, however, the leader’s 100% improvised dance moves are easy to follow. Therefore, soon, his first follower joins him, taking on a role that, as it turns out, is just as crucial as the leader’s: “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader,” Sivers says. This is “an underestimated form of leadership in itself.” After all, the first follower will stand out almost as much as the leader.

As soon as the third person joins, however, we’re no longer talking about one or two lone nuts. “Three is a crowd, and a crowd is news,” Sivers continues. Shortly thereafter, two more people join, then three more, then people already start running so they can “be part of the in-crowd.” Before long, not dancing would put you in the minority, and so within minutes, everyone is on their feet—”and that’s how you make a movement,” Sivers concludes.

Whether it’s an employee pitching a new initiative, a mom setting up a baking meetup, or a lonely dancer following the beat: An original leader’s courage sure is unparalleled. But if their vision is to become more visceral, a real community people want to be a part of and help push forward, they need a first follower to bridge the gap between them and the rest of the world.

That follower might not carry quite the same desire or creative spark that the leader does, but they’ll risk almost as much ridicule, all while comforting the lone nut as they keep dancing, normalizing their behavior for others to see and consider joining the cause. They rarely get it, but a first follower deserves just as much recognition as the visionary leading the charge.

Are you the former or the latter? It doesn’t matter—because early following, too, is leading, and we need all the lights in the sky that we can get.

Ride the Schoolbus

The first train connection from my parents’ house to a larger city where I transfer runs through the middle of nowhere. The second stop is a town with a school. Often, many kids get on the tiny, two-wagon train. So for the next 40 minutes, I’ll sit there, tucked away quietly between three dozen high schoolers, listening to their laughter and conversations. I always learn something.

Yesterday, some of them tried to prank strangers on the phone. They called people and reminded them of the elderly stripper they “had ordered,” usually to hang up in giggles after the first sentence. I also overheard someone suggesting McDonald’s now did a “Dubai burger” based on the currently-everywhere chocolate—but as it turns out, that, too, was a hoax.

Riding the school train makes me feel old, but it also reminds me to stay young. It’s a window into the minds of the young. What are they thinking about? What moves them? What do they already know that I should probably be aware of?

Every now and then, ride the schoolbus—it’ll keep you grounded, curious, and in sync with the beat of the world.

Relevant Notifications

When the Pokémon hype gets real, trying to buy new card sets throws me right back to the 90s. Except instead of driving to a store on release day, hoping to get some product, I’m checking various Discord servers and online shops ten times a day. “Is it live yet?” Naturally, I often end up missing the five-minute window in which listings go up and immediately sell out.

“Why don’t you just have your phone ping you?” you might say. For one, there’d be plenty more notifications than I’d actually want or need. And for another, most of those extra pings would seriously derail my day. It’s a tough needle to thread.

When you can be notified of everything instantly, the consequence of saying yes is constant overwhelm. That’s why I turned off all notifications on my phone years ago. Unless I unlock it and open certain apps on purpose, I won’t see anything. But when there are scenarios where you’d want to know about just the right topic at just the right time, you’ll also miss out.

You’d think we’d have this figured out by now. That technology would be smart enough to tell you only about certain keywords being mentioned in certain channels. I think it is—but it’s not in companies’ best interest to allow you to do this at scale. Who’d be glued to their screen consuming ads if everyone could just filter it all down to the minimum? So custom work is needed. You either do it, or you go back to the 90s. Same slow, manual process, slightly different modalities.

The world spins slower than we think. New problems are usually old ones in a different dress. Let’s see when we get relevant notifications.

Anxiety Blankets

Asked why he went back to drinking coffee after living without it for 30 days and seeing many benefits, Tim Ferriss said: “I use coffee as a security blanket when my life gets hit with something unpredictable or things seem a little out of control. So even though I realize, intellectually, that it’s counterproductive […], my response to feeling a little anxious is to want coffee—even though it increases anxiety physiologically.”

I, too, use coffee in much the same way. I don’t need the caffeine kick by any means. My mind is too active as it is. But I love the taste and the feeling of holding a warm cup in my hand. It makes me feel that I can deal with whatever daggers might be flying my way. The irony, of course, is that coffee in almost any quantity also makes me jittery and less focused. It seldom enhances my productivity. Between fidgeting and now worrying about fidgeting so much, I basically stay nervous—the source of my shakiness has changed but not its presence.

I wonder how many people drink coffee mainly for the same reason. For how many it’s “a life raft of consistency,” as Tim calls it. I can imagine the number being in the billions. That’s what we do, isn’t it? We make blankets to cover our anxiety only to realize we’ve knitted a comforter made of anxiety of a slightly different color. No wonder it rarely works.

I don’t know if and when I’ll quit coffee for the last time. I’ve done it for seven days, 40 days, even 100 days. But always, for some emotional reason, I return. The lesson is a hard one to act on but still one that rings true: If your anxiety blanket is made out of anxiety, it’s only a matter of time before you’re cold again—so maybe what you need isn’t a cover but a new outfit altogether.

The Rest Is Confetti

Before she can finally save her siblings from their shared, haunted past that is Hill House, Eleanor “Nell” Crain pays the ultimate price—but it does allow her to send a message, and, sometimes, a message is enough.

Having realized that the house constantly played tricks on not just their minds but time itself, Nell explains:

“I thought for so long that time was like a line, that our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they fell, one into another, and on it went. Just days tipping, one into the next, into the next, in a long line between the beginning…and the end. But I was wrong. It’s not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain. Or… snow. Or confetti.”

Even without cursed houses pulling a multiverse on us, we, too, can see time rain into our lives like confetti. A memory from the distant past throws us for a loop. A vision of the future distracts us or scares us. We can only live in the present, but we’re not always here, are we? According to Nell, that needn’t be a bad thing. Though she won’t be able to leave the house, her siblings just might.

“I am not gone. I’m scattered into so many pieces, sprinkled on your life like new snow. Think of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti.”

Every morning, we wake up, and we try our best with what we have for the people we love. It won’t make us perfect. Sometimes, we’ll get lost in a storm of confetti. But, at the end of the day, it is just shreds of colored paper—we can watch out for it, marvel at it, get distracted by it…but when we decide to put our heads down and focus on what matters most, it can never throw us off course for too long.

Experiences Don’t End

Yesterday, I met someone at a party who, as it turned out, was in my year during undergrad. Same college. Same classes. Same exams. “Oh, but you must have never studied at the library then,” she said. “Actually, I was in the library all the time, often from 7 AM to 10 PM,” I responded. “Ahh, that’s why—I always went at night!”

“How amazing,” I thought. “14 years later, and I can still run into new people from this experience whom I’ve never met before.” I believe it goes to show: Experiences don’t end. We just stop pulling on certain threads. I graduated from that college in 2014, but I’m in touch with some of the people from back then to this day. And if I wanted to, I could start hitting up every connection from back then that I can remember or find online. I could join an alumni group or start one. In other words, I could keep playing the “Karlsruhe Institute of Technology student” experience until the day I die in some way or other. Most of the time, I just choose not to.

You don’t have to think about the infinite nature of experiences all the time. But on occasion, it can be an encouraging reminder: You can pick up where you left off any day. You won’t get the same result as if you’d kept pulling on those threads way back when, but you’ll still get some continuation of a phase of life you’ve enjoyed—and, made with the right timing, that can be worth just as much, if not more, as a new experience altogether.