In 2014, I was an intern at BMW M in Munich. I lived in a tiny apartment offered by the company that somehow still cost almost my entire below-minimum-wage salary. I was young, relatively broke, and single.

For the first three months, I had no internet. It was a deliberate choice so I’d go out, get to know the city, and meet people. But that also meant I couldn’t watch the very last episodes of How I Met Your Mother as they were released—and my single-self really needed that inspiration. So every once in a while, I went to a coffee shop, bummed their wifi, and downloaded the latest episode. Then, the introvert and romantic in me could watch it in the quiet comforts of his home whenever all the intern buzz became too much.

In one of those episodes, Ted and the love of his life, Tracy, finally go on their first date. Naturally, it’s awkward. The restaurant they’re supposed to eat at is noisy and has terrible food choices. They bump into Tracy’s ex and hide behind a car. By the time Ted is about to drop Tracy off at home, they both admit they’re probably not ready for a new relationship. But then, right as the thought, “I’ll never see her again,” forms in his head, for some reason, Tracy gives him a kiss. “Unless…do you want to walk around some more? It’s still early.”

Ted agrees and, as Tracy is standing three feet in front of him, holding out her hand, some cosmic intuition hits him. He doesn’t really realize it, but deep down, it clicks: “This is it. So for a moment that feels like an eternity, he just stands there, staring. Until Tracy asks: “What are you doing?” And to that, Ted can only offer the truth: “Remembering this”—because in his soul, he knows this is a once-in-a-lifetime event he will carry with him forever. And just as quickly, Tracy says, “Come on.” They join hands, start walking, and the moment is passed—lost but not gone.

I, too, will forever remember this scene. Not just the 10/10 storytelling from a great TV show, but myself, sitting in that tiny room without internet, watching it play out on screen—still single, still waiting for that special person, and, thanks to How I Met Your Mother, never losing faith that she is out there.

Love is not all we want out of life, but it sure is an image, isn’t it? Someone who holds out their hand to us and says, “Come on! We’ll walk together.” Just so we can stand there and say, “Okay. Yes. Thank you. I’ve waited a long time for this. But first, let me take a second to remember this moment.”

Whether it is love, work, friendship, art, beauty, pain, or inspiration that writes the next climactic scene in the movie of your life, be sure to take it in fully as it happens. Breathe deeply, listen to what your heart is telling you, and whenever the answer is, “This is it,” ask for some extra time to process. And if someone asks you what you’re doing, just tell them the truth: “Remembering this.”

“Where does that door lead again?” Confusion arose in yesterday’s gaming session. My girlfriend held the controller for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. As part of her turn, she had stormed headlong into a new dungeon. I kept asking her to backtrack, but that was not her style. “No, no, no, just keep going!”

Once it was my turn, I did all the backtracking I had longed for—not because my girlfriend’s approach was wrong but for my own peace of mind. It was part gaming experience, part personality: I want to discover all of one area before moving on to the next. This helps me build context for what’s to come, and it also prevents landing in a room whose puzzle you can’t solve for lack of a tool you failed to pick up before.

In life as in games, there’s no one way to play them. If you want to charge, charge! Keep walking straight until you bump into an obstacle, then assemble your pole for vaulting over it on the spot. But when you feel unsure, cautious, and want to steel your nerves, map the terrain. Explore every nook and cranny before moving on, and mark each find as done and dusted.

Let your preparation give you confidence so you can step into the unknown with clear eyes. None of us know the future, but it often helps to remember which path we took to get there.

“Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror.” That’s one of Bruce Lee’s Striking Thoughts. When I read it, I realized that, actually, this is an encouragement to be like water, period.

When water is moving, it flows. But when water is still, it reflects—just like a mirror. If you want to reflect—about yourself, life, and the world—you first have to stop. You must allow the waves of your actions and emotions to calm down.

The time to think is when you’re not moving. Still your waters on occasion so you can see yourself for who you really are and reality for what’s actually in front of you.

That’s an odd phrase to type when you’re 33 years old. But I guess it is. Outside of some internships, only one of which lasted five months instead of just a few weeks, I’ve never held a full-time job—until now. “Business Course Writer.” That’s my title. My responsibility will be to create materials that’ll help enterprise employees understand blockchain and its applications. Kinda cool, huh? I’m definitely not complaining. Storytelling all the way!

After ten years of self-employment, you’d think I’d have a lot of feelings about working for someone else. Resistance, perhaps. The belief that I had failed to keep my business running. Surprisingly, I don’t. New is just different. I feel some relief that my rent and expenses will be covered, although that’ll only fully kick in once my probation period is over. I’m grateful I’ve found a place that seems to be a good fit, with good people and a good mix of tasks in a field which interests me. But a few days into the job, it’s mostly “wait and see,” yet when I look back, I have no urge to grind my teeth. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’ve made my decisions deliberately.

When I realized I’d need a new business model for the umpteenth time, I could have dug in my heels. I could have pushed and shoved and forced, and kind friends gave me plenty of ideas on how to do so. But I didn’t want to. Grinding hadn’t gotten me any closer to being an author in the last few years, so why not try a new angle? Why not write on the side, stop compromising in order to make money, and spend whatever time I can spare to make the art I actually want to make? “Let’s see if I can walk that road,” I thought. “Let’s find out where another path leads.” I didn’t choose to end up in front of this particular intersection in life, but once I arrived there, I chose to make less. To trade dollars for integrity and sacrifice time in favor of art. If anything, that felt empowering.

So here I am. Ready for new. Ready for different. Ready for a re-set. My name is Nik. I’m 33 years old. And I just started my first job.

Every year, I choose a one-word theme. For 2025, it’s “Reset.”

When a ship traverses the sea for a long time, it’ll accumulate barnacles on its hull. For the tiny crustaceans, it doesn’t matter where they sit. They’ll attach to any surface, as long as it supplies them with the water from which they get their nutrients. For the ship, however, in time, they become a heavy burden—literally. And while the weight of the barnacles will rarely be enough to sink the vessel, it might slow it down or bring it out of balance.

2024 was the year I realized: After ten years of writing and working for myself, I’ve racked up too many barnacles. For the first half of those ten years, I was mostly learning, growing, finding myself as a writer, person, and entrepreneur. But from the pandemic onwards, everything was a blur. Financially, it was a rollercoaster, and the velocity of that ride kept me latching onto whatever next thing I could get a hold of. But in late 2023, there was nothing left to reach for, and my ship slowly started sinking.

It took me all year to process everything, to shed off my old identity, to rise from the ashes of a fire that had burned for a decade. And now that I’ve finally accepted change is in order, well, it’s time to scrape off some barnacles! Time to reset.

The word “reset” means to start over, of course. To shut down, erase, reboot, and begin anew with a clean slate. But it also means to adjust. To fiddle with just slightly, so that an imbalanced, misaligned object may once again slot into its proper place. That, too, is “re-setting.” Moving a piece of the puzzle for the big picture to make sense. I’ll need to do a lot of both, hence “Reset” as my theme for 2025.

My work will be reset. I’ve picked up a full-time job, and everything else will have to fit in around the edges. Four Minute Books will be reset. No more ads, affiliate revenue, or any form of monetization that is not me selling my own creations. Perhaps it’ll have to be merged into this blog or disappear altogether. My writing will be re-set. I’ll get a chance to realign on what I really want to write, but I’ll also have to adjust to make time to then do that writing.

It’s easy to reflect at the turn of the year, and I can only recommend picking an annual theme, but I also know this to be true: Reset buttons are everywhere. You can hit as many of them as you like at any time. Whether you need to re-set some planks or build a new ship altogether, don’t wait. You deserve smooth sailing at all times—and every removed barnacle counts.

A few weeks ago, I was scheduling dozens of posts from the blog to republish them elsewhere. Copy, paste, pick date, hit the button, repeat.

The scheduling interface allowed you to type in the publishing date manually, but once you clicked into it, it opened a full calendar view so you could select the date with your mouse. Eventually, I realized that for all dates beyond three months into the future, the calendar was grayed out. “Oh, I guess I can only schedule so far,” I thought. Then, I closed the tab and moved on, taking what I could get.

Yesterday, I went back to that interface. I looked at the calendar again. Then, I tried something sneaky: I manually typed in a future date that lay beyond the three-month mark…and voilà! As it turns out, you can schedule posts as far into the future as you like—you just have to type the date instead of select it from the calendar. Ironically, I’d been using this method all along. But when I saw that grayed out window…

Some walls are literally made of dust. They shine brick-red but give way at the faintest push. The opposite of invisible walls, these blockers barely exist at all. It is only once they make it past our perception that they seem as solid as concrete.

Don’t let dust walls keep you for too long. Whatever obstacle you are facing, poke the bricks before you take the long way around. They just might give way without making a fuss.

Sometimes, I happen to draft article ideas during my meditation, and sometimes, all 15 minutes of endurance training go to that activity. That’s not ideal, but it, too, teaches me a lesson: If I spend as little as a quarter of an hour brainstorming, thinking through the past 24 hours, about what happened this week, and allowing my mind to resurface whichever thought it prefers, I have article ideas out the wazoo.

After 1,000 daily blogs, you’d think I’d start running out. The opposite is true. The hard part is not finding an idea to write about. It’s picking one out of many that is specific enough to hold meaning but that I can also get to the point of being shippable—perhaps not finished, but shippable—in a time frame that doesn’t swallow the rest of my day.

For all the difficulty the execution brings, the reminder that the creative mind never runs out is wonderful. Creativity is an infinite well: It will always, always fill your bucket—as long as you make the effort to go and fetch water.

Sometimes, a word transforms completely when you see it not for its dictionary entry but for its parts. Will Smith is a master at this. So was Bruce Lee. In Striking Thoughts, he notes that “response-ability” is one of several synonyms for “living in the now” and leaning into your creativity.

When we think about responsibility, whatever we imagine usually looks like work. “Ugh. Do I really have to?” But what if responsibility is not an obligation but an opportunity? A chance to practice your ability to respond?

Life doesn’t force you to do anything. It just presents you with challenges. Whether you face them or walk away is up to you. But in every moment, you have the ability to respond, and how you respond is entirely up to you.

You can walk out singing the day you get fired. You can write a poem with a rhyming scheme no one’s ever used before. And instead of taking every word literally, you can pull them apart and infuse them with your own meaning.

Nothing is your fault, but everything is your responsibility—and when you use your response-ability, that word means “freedom” instead of “burden.”

That’s how many I sold when I finally got my long-coveted Kindle Daily Deal.

On its Kindle store for ebooks, Amazon does both monthly and daily deals. They approach authors, and if they agree, their book will be discounted for a day or a month, and then Amazon will promote it.

Years ago, I read on a blog that Daily Deals worked much better than Monthly Deals. The idea was that if a book is only discounted for 24 hours, Amazon will push it much harder, and thus you should sell more copies. The article even showed some statistics to back this up!

My books have been out for three and two years, respectively. So far, all I’d ever gotten was the occasional Monthly Deal, and sure enough, they didn’t really move the needle. Ergo, when I recently got an invite to do a Daily Deal for Indian readers, I was thrilled! Finally I might see Amazon’s promotional powers on full display.

But the day came, and the day went, and I got zero sales. It’s not like I had high expectations. How and when you get picked for these events is arbitrary to begin with. Yet I was still underwhelmed.

In the end, the whole event turned out to be nothing more than a useful reminder: Getting picked is not all it’s cracked up to be—so never wait to get picked.

When his son Dino died at just 24 years old, the great Enzo Ferrari learned that engineers can’t fix bodies. In the world of Alita: Battle Angel, the opposite is true: With most people being at least partially cyborg, Dr. Dyson Ido, played by Christoph Waltz, repairs bodies all day long.

When he finds a special soul, a mysterious teenage girl robot—or what’s left of her—in the scrapyard, he restores her completely. Now in a cyborg body that was reserved for Ido’s deceased daughter, Alita, the now-eponymous main character starts discovering who she is. Naturally, she completely wrecks her new frame in the process.

Thankfully, before returning to pieces, Alita found an old battle torso—the very kind she used to operate in her past life. So for a second time, Dr. Ido mends Alita’s body, and it is here that her journey comes to a crossroads. “Now you know who you are,” Ido tells her, pointing at the shiny nanotech covering Alita from head to toe. “But that’s just a shell. It’s not bad or good. That part’s up to you.” And sure enough, soon thereafter, Alita must choose how to use her newfound power—and choose wisely and fast.

Maybe one day, we, too, will be able to replace body parts as easily as we swap broken screens on our phones. Until then, however, our mortal forms will remain something even the most gifted engineer can’t fix—and yet, a body is just a shell. Why endlessly preserve a vessel with an expiry date if we don’t intend to put it to good use? However capable or limited your physical frame, make sure you fill it with good while you can—and don’t worry about a little wear around the edges.