I need to rake the leaves later today. When I look outside my office window, I can see myself standing there, raking. I can feel the cold come in under my sweater, and I can see my breath form little clouds in the freezing air.

It’s not a pleasant vision, but it still allows me to get comfortable with the idea. It makes me believe that, in a few hours, I’ll actually be raking, and that alone increases the likelihood of me going outside by a great deal.

When it comes to a new reality, every animal will “believe it when they see it.” Humans are the only creatures who can bring about said new reality by turning the phrase around. See it in order to believe it. Once you can feel something being true in your heart, often all it takes is a little push for life to adjust.

If anything could happen, it might as well be something good. That’s one of my mottos.

In a chapter titled “Roll the Dice” in his book Creative Doing, my friend Herbert Lui transfers the idea to being creative: “If you’re ever experiencing blockage or a sense of stuckness on a decision, try opening the door to chance in order to support your creative work,” he writes.

Sometimes, a calculated gamble just might point you in the right direction, Herbert believes. Instead of continuing to stare at a wall, why not throw something at it? Flip the dictionary to any page, play with a random name generator, or toss some coins onto a table and start with whatever pattern they land in, Herbert suggests.

When it comes to work projects, you may want to ask someone on a completely different team for an outside perspective. Stuck on bad first dates? Go somewhere you’d never go. A violin concert, perhaps, or a pottery class. Even for your energy, a bit of entropy can help on occasion. Maybe staying up late for once will make you feel more energized, not less.

No matter the arena, the point remains: “If you want to make fewer decisions, enlist chance as an assistant,” Herbert says. Fortuna is a goddess, not a creature of the underworld, and for good reason: She wants to be on our side. Will we relinquish our stubbornness and let her? The right time only we can determine, but sooner or later, we should.

See chance as an ally, not an enemy. After all, if anything could happen, it might as well be something good.

David Rowland wanted a better chair. It took him eight years to invent one. Then, plenty of rejections. Finally, a man named Davis Allen gave Rowland a chance: He ordered 17,000 of his 40/4 chairs for a university campus his firm was designing.

50 years later, it all seems obvious: Which company wouldn’t want a chair that stacks only four feet tall when you pile 40 of them on top of one another? But initially, different just seemed different, not better.

Rowland knew what he was doing. He wanted “better,” and he was willing to cycle through “different” as many times as he needed. In a 1965 interview, he admitted as much, leaving behind a maxim for us which might be even better than his chair: “Different is not always better, but better is always different.”

Our default approach to “better” is “more.” After we realize “different” is the way to go, we often still stray. It takes a thoughtful, deliberate kind of “different” to land on “better.” And even once we do, it may still require years of rejection and a stranger giving us a trust advance before the world can see: “Ahh, this is the ‘better’ we’ve been waiting for.”

“Different” is hard—but worth it. “More” is a socially acceptable dead end. “Different” offers no guarantees, but it’s the only road that might lead to “better.” Choose different. Try for better.

The dentist is a great place to practice. Patience. Courage. Trust. But most of all: avoiding needless suffering.

Yesterday, I went there to change a filling. “We can do it without anesthesia,” she said. As I lay there, listening to the drill, thinking about something else, I suddenly realized: I’m as stiff as a floorboard. I was tensing the muscles in my shoulders, arms, and legs. “Why am I so on edge?” I wondered.

On the surface, everything seemed fine. But underneath, I could sense I was worried, worried that, any second now, the drill might hit a nerve—and then I’d feel an intense surge of pain. “But wait a minute: If I stay this tight throughout the entire procedure, I’ll be in pain no matter what happens. Can’t I just relax until any potential agony actually arrives?” I tried that. It helped. My muscles loosened a bit. But every now and then, I could feel the anxiety coming back, and I once again had to remind myself: “There isn’t any pain yet. So relax.” Naturally, no pain ever came.

If actual hurt was the only kind we suffered, the world would be a very different place. You’d go to the dentist, scream perhaps once, most likely zero times, and go home. Instead, we wait for torment that never comes and, in the waiting, torment ourselves more thoroughly than life ever would.

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,” Seneca wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. Be it at the dentist, the office, or on a first date, it’s still true: The worst pain is not pain. The worst pain is fear—so let’s only cross the bridge of suffering once we come to it.

In the original and most subsequent Pokémon games, the endgame is to defeat your childhood rival—but not before you’ve made it past the Elite Four, or “Top Four” in German. They were the toughest Pokémon trainers in the game, and you better came prepared. In fact, you had to pass a whole set of separate trials along Victory Road just to get there.

Whenever you arrive at the Elite Four, however long you’ve been playing, there’s always a bit of dialogue allowing you to reflect on how far you’ve come. “Wow, I made it. Top Four. Unbelievable!”

Yesterday, I opened my productivity app. It has a leaderboard. You can sort by highest scores on various time frames, like the current week, month, or all-time performance. I flipped to the all-time view, and there I was: top four. Wow. Unbelievable!

The app has been around for five years. I’ve used it for around 14 months—but from the first day onwards, I’ve tracked at least some, usually most, of my work sessions every day. I don’t know who else made it to the top of the leaderboard when. But I have seen plenty of people come and go.

440 days of consistency. That sounds like a lot, but is it? In the grand scheme of things, 440 days pass quickly. Rack up a few points every day, however, and your score will keep climbing—just like a dedicated Pokémon trainer, taking the last steps up the Indigo Plateau, realizing only at the top: “Oh. Elite Four. Already?!”

Days played with your children; pages in a book; coins racked up in a wallet. Keep going a little every day. Before you know it, you’ll have reached the top four.

A few days ago, I miraculously got my hands on some original Dubai chocolate. A friend happens to live there, and his girlfriend kindly brought me a bar while she was in town. “Tell me what you think,” he texted me, “but I believe you and I will agree.”

Based on what you can see on social media, you’d think the chocolate was filled with liquid gold. The product gets hundreds of millions of views. Knockoffs abound around the globe. Even in Germany, I already saw Dubai crêpes, Dubai cake, and Dubai donuts. One person tried to smuggle 45 kilograms into the country.

So how does it taste? It’s good. Very good, even. But it’s still chocolate—with pistachio and some crunchy bits inside, sure. But “just” chocolate nonetheless. Maybe that’s the spoiled German in me, who’s used to Milka, Kinder products, and the likes of Lindt and Läderach from Switzerland. But like my friend suggested, we agreed: It’s cool, but not the-world-must-lose-its-head-cool.

There is, however, one reason why I enjoyed the chocolate more than any ordinary bar: It was a gift from my friend. I did not expect it, yet one Sunday, I sat there, holding it in my hand. It’s the kind of magic even 100 million views can’t work—but that, unlike those views, lingers long after the masses and the taste of the chocolate have gone.

Perhaps, instead of wondering, “Which chocolate should I eat next?” we should try a different question: “Whom do I want to gift the next bar to?

I rarely comment on politics, the economy, or global affairs on this blog. It’s not for a lack of opinions.

Commenting on the news is easy. There is always news. But if all you ever talk about is today, 99% of your stuff will be irrelevant come tomorrow.

Of course, 99% of my writing might end up in obscurity anyway. But if I can reduce that percentage to 95% by skipping the politics, that’s a chance worth taking.

Jeff Bezos once said that “What’ll change in the next 10 years?” isn’t nearly as interesting of a question as “What won’t change in the next 10 years?”

Headlines get washed away with the evening tide. Whatever you are honed in on, choose to focus on the parts that remain.

One word which repeatedly grabbed me in Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf was “eternity.” Hesse used it in a strange but comforting way. As if to say, “Don’t worry, there’s always eternity!” And even though eternity is not something accessible to us, every time I read about it in the book, it still felt soothing to think about it. Odd, isn’t it?

As it turns out, philosophy has reserved a dedicated term for this very phenomenon: sub specie aeternitatis. Translated from Latin, it roughly means “from an eternal point of view.” The idea is to get us to look at life and ourselves more objectively, but also to find inspiration and peace by taking a cosmic rather than an earthly perspective.

The term goes back to Baruch Spinoza, a man who, against all odds, spoke critically of all religions in the 17th century. To Spinoza, god and nature were the same. “Don’t separate life into boxes,” his work says. “It’s all one and the same, and we should love and appreciate it all.” What an enlightened way to think—and a main character of the Enlightenment he became indeed.

When your toe is itchy, take an eternal point of view. If you feel anxious about work tomorrow, take an eternal point of view. And when life seems to hold too many doors closed for you, take an eternal point of view. Inhale right now, but remember: Sub specie aeternitatis, it’s all a drop in the ocean, and the best reaction is to smile.

A recurring theme of my 30s has been realizing how clueless I am about most things. In my 20s, I seemed to have more answers. The answers, of course, came almost exclusively from other people. It was naive to latch on to them, but at least it was easy. It helped me live with conviction, if only ever for a short period of time.

What’s frustrating about living by other people’s answers is that, sooner or later, those answers will always let you down. I did get burned out from that. Eventually, I always found a fatal flaw in this mentor or that guru. So one day, I concluded heroes were also just people and stopped following any template in particular.

The flip side is that I’m now as clueless as everybody else in navigating this life, and that, too, is challenging. It is also…just life. There are no answers. Nobody knows where the stock market will go, whether this election or that one will be good for the future of a country, or how they can do a great job at work without messing up. There’s no one right way to raise your kids, no perfect diet, and no meaning of life except the one you choose for yourself. That’s why being an adult is scary.

What I do know is that it’s okay to be scared, that the future is less frightening when you realize you’re not the only one facing the unknown, and that, in the end, asking good questions is more important than obsessing over answers which can never last to begin with.

Start with here. Start with now. Take one breath, one step, and learn something for tomorrow. It’s an answerless world we live in, but that’s one of the many parts that makes it a beautiful one–if only we learn to coexist with the unknown.

That’s the latest mechanism on Substack, a platform dedicated to email newsletters and those who like to read and write them. But what is it for?

The post I just read, I read in its entirety. Having successfully scrolled all the way to the bottom, I saw the heart-shaped button. “Did I like this post? Yes, I did.” Tap, done. So why should I press “L” instead? The only sensible answer can come from Substack’s point of view: Because it’s faster.

“Why wait to hit ‘Like’ if you can press a button halfway through the piece? And after you’ve liked it, there’s no need to finish it, is there? Just move on and read the next one—but don’t forget to like!”

For any piece of reading, the end is the right place to ask: “What’s your reaction? How do you feel?” For any social platform, however, the right place to ask is wherever it’ll get the most clicks. It’s unfortunate these two incentives are at odds with each other, but downright sad so many platforms choose the easy way out.

The only shortcuts that work are the ones working against you. Skip the cheap tricks, and let time do its thing.