At the time, it was mostly self-encouragement: “The key to winning numbers games is to not care about the numbers,” I told myself. Now that that particular chapter—the one of me applying for jobs—is closed for the time being, I can say I was right. I wrote the post when I had sent out 45 applications. It took 52 more to get a job, and I sent plenty of spares beyond those.

It’s not that racking up effort numbers isn’t impressive. It’s draining at times and comes with real sacrifice. But even when you know you’re playing a numbers game, worrying about the numbers slows you down. It also tends to create more worry, which, if it spirals, can stop your progress completely for months at a time or, worse, get you to leave the playing field altogether.

While you’re cycling through at bat after at bat, the most productive attitude is to pretend the numbers don’t exist at all. Many posts on this blog are just that: encouragement to keep going, odds be damned. Sometimes, I think if the blog did nothing else each day, it would still be enough. This week’s posts were an homage to that idea. So yes:

Keep submitting.

Keep applying.

Keep following up.

Keep trying, not score. If the game you’re playing is fun enough, you’ll win no matter what the numbers say in the end.

One of the most productive projects we completed at work last year was to create a course for a blockchain education partner with massive reach. We had the content, they had the contacts.

Since it was a win for both sides, I figured we could scale this approach. I set a goal to get at least one other partnership of this kind in place for 2026.

In late December, I started reaching out to potential partners. Most of them had some kind of form you could fill in if you wanted to apply for distribution of your content through their network. I submitted several of them and waited.

Nothing happened. So, I started to follow up. One partner in particular I was keen on. They had a great B2B network of relevant companies who might benefit from learning about our tech. The process seemed easy enough. And I already had a connection to them since they owned a company I used to work with. But first, I had to find out: Who do I follow up with in the first place?

The form I had submitted did not give me any contact information. I went on LinkedIn, browsed the company’s list of employees, and found some who seemed to be in content-related departments. I took some best guesses at their email addresses, wrote a nice short message, and hit send.

At first, I only followed up with one person. She didn’t reply. I sent her another message a week or so later. Then, another one. Still, nothing.

Then, I tried another person. Sent him an email. And another one. And one more. Never too hasty. Always a few days apart, at minimum. One day, he got back. “Thanks for suggesting this! It looks great! I will put you in contact with our content partnership team.” He pointed me in the right direction and sent me on my way.

Now, I had a new contact. I didn’t hear from the lady in charge after a few days. So? I followed up. “Hi! Might you have any updates for me or next steps I can follow?” She came back to me and said they were very busy, but that the team was reviewing our application, and that she hoped to have news soon.

Then, she went quiet again. Guess what I did? I followed up. Every now and then, I forgot. I let it sit dormant for a week or two or three. But on occasion, I’d remember, and whenever I did, I sent another message. “Hi there! Any news? Just checking in!”

This is the part where I would be happy to tell you that, eventually, we scored the partnership. But we haven’t. I’m still following up.

The process has continued for many months now. I still don’t have an answer. It seems like they are interested but busy with other, more important work. I’ve counted at least nine follow-ups so far. How many more will it take? I have no idea! But I’ll keep following up.

If you do it nicely, following up is free, takes little time, and carries close to no risk. You can always start yelling later if you really need to. But if you’re trying to make something happen with little leverage, the best way is to stay friendly but persistent. Show people you’re willing to help, and that, even after many unrewarded attempts, you’re still here. It’s the most convincing “statement” and, often, the only one you need to eventually win folks over.

Keep following up.

I decided to look for a full-time job in May of 2024. That month, I sent out four applications. Three were highly tailored and went to companies I really wanted to work for. Two of them ghosted me, one sent a rejection.

In June, I sent out 31 applications. That’s more than one per day. Many took almost no effort. Others were more customized. I was ignored five times and got 26 rejections.

In July, I only fired off five applications. I don’t know why. Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was busy. Three rejections, two ghostings.

In August, I shared my CV 10 times. Two silent treatments, eight rejections.

In September, I went into high gear. 47 applications. More rejections, more being ignored. I got to the second round for a gig that was a terrible fit and eventually canceled. I was also invited to interview for the job I eventually got. But not before…

In October, I applied to 29 more jobs. One company was interested but couldn’t even get close to my target salary. The rest? Half silence, half rejections.

Even in November, I still applied for jobs. Six of them. When my offer on the gig from September came through, I stopped.

Total count? 132 applications. One job offer.

This is a common experience now. Is that good? No. But don’t worry. You’re not paid enough for that. Once you’ve entered the arena, you must continue playing the game you have chosen.

Whether filled online form or elaborate cover letter: If the role might be worth having, your CV is worth submitting. Keep applying.

BookBub is one of the world’s largest book deal sites. Their main promotion channel is a massive email list with millions of subscribers, segmented by genre and geography. Each day, they send targeted emails to these groups, sharing a handful of discounted ebooks with them.

Getting featured on BookBub requires making it through their application process, and it also costs a fee. But if your book ends up in one of their emails, you could get hundreds, even thousands of sales. Plus, if word of mouth catches on, your book’s sales can stay elevated for a long time after the deal is over.

Since even bestselling authors are keen on making it into BookBub, I didn’t have high expectations when first starting to submit my books there. But after publishing The 4 Minute Millionaire in late 2021, I immediately began. You’re allowed to submit each of your books about once a month. So every five weeks, I handed in my book again.

The application itself is simple, but your book needs to be high-quality. No confusing book cover. No typos in the description. And, ideally, existing customer reviews. My book had all of those. I had sold over 1,000 copies myself during the launch. And yet, I kept getting rejected. Month after month after month. After publishing my second book, 2-Minute Pep Talks, in September of the following year, I started submitting that one, too. I applied 12 times over the course of a year and got…nothing. No deals.

At this point, I reached out to BookBub. “Am I doing something wrong here?” I asked them. Their rejection emails said they only feature 20% of the books submitted—but that meant, statistically, I should have been selected for two deals at this point! Was something wrong with my work? A kind representative eventually confirmed everything looked good, except my books being available only on Amazon. “Making them available on more platforms could help, since we want to offer our readers as much choice as possible in where they get their books from,” she said.

I got to work and made sure my books popped up on Apple Books, the Google Play Store, Kobo, and a slew of other market places next to Amazon. Then, I kept submitting. Four months and eight more submissions later, I finally got my first deal. I’ve had several since then, and while they haven’t propelled me to stardom, they’ve helped me sell thousands of books with a little bit of profit to boot. At first, I didn’t get any of the big geographies. Several years and submissions later, I was eventually nominated for a US feature, which is their biggest audience. Recently, I landed my first global deal. All because I kept submitting.

The book market, like all markets, is broken. It’s riddled with gatekeepers, power laws, and unfair competition. But if you’re an author, what are you going to do? Quit writing? Of course not. You choose to play in a broken system, and you play until you win or die.

Wherever your work is eligible that’s relevant and could make a real difference: Keep submitting.

One pattern you would observe in the tight-knit cryptocurrency community of the late 2010s is that price action of individual coins was highly reflexive.

There were many triggers a token’s price might have reacted to. A tweet from an influencer about intransparent token economics. A global news headline. The price of Ethereum or Bitcoin going down. Sometimes, even the price of the coin itself increasing or decreasing was taken as a signal.

Whatever the cause, once a direction was established, the word would spread like wildfire, mostly on Twitter. Like dominoes, people would sell or add to their positions, drastically stretching the price further in the current direction. Sometimes, a few hours later, news to the opposing end would come to light, and the cycle could revert as quickly as it had gone the other direction.

This always seemed silly to me, and, often, it was. The crowd’s price pulse was way too sensitive. Every minor development was blown out of proportion before it was even interpreted, let alone interpreted correctly. But the reflexivity still had a strong impact on prices and, in some cases, even killed projects altogether.

Almost a decade later, it feels like the internet has truly hit global real-time status, and this same unreflected reflexivity is now everywhere. The president of the United States makes a post, and the oil price decreases by $10. An influencer rants about her ex, and a lynch mob knocks at his door the same evening. The new movie trailer drops on Youtube, and before the film is out, people have already review-bombed it down to one star out of ten.

It is such a great power we hold, the ability to instantly disseminate information, and yet, by and large, we’re wasting it on dumb shit. We’re creating momentum in all the wrong directions, almost as if collectively hypnotized, and by the time the crowd wakes up, everyone wonders: Why did we care about this so intensely again?

Reflexivity can make a real difference. When a country’s leadership has oppressed the people long enough, and protests arise, it’s critical enough people join at the same time. When a terrorist group or natural disaster creates real danger across a wide area, we must get as many to safety as we can. But these situations are far and few between, and, often, actually mere tipping points after long deliberation. It takes a lot of corruption for a people to march against its regime, and it takes a seasoned expert to recognize a catastrophe in the making.

95 out of 100 times, unreflected reflexivity is just that: joining the crowd without thinking. And it’s not just us turning off our brains. We’re encoding this behavior into our machines and algorithms, too. Gold traders can’t sell within seconds of the latest headline dropping. But high-frequency trading programs can. Social media platforms boost popular posts first, then verify their accuracy later, if at all. And since AI is built on probabilities, it usually tells us exactly what we want to hear.

In many ways, it was better for the world when news traveled more slowly—because most news aren’t newsworthy at all. They’re nothing-burgers which, by the time the mail carriage crossed into the third state, had fizzled out completely. Relevant information, meanwhile, went through countless layers of filtering before it reached the masses. Its essence had been distilled, its veracity established.

When every idea can reach everyone in hours, it’s easy to default into “What should we do here?” The real question, meanwhile, is “Should we do something here?” Most of the time, the answer is “No,” and that has always been—and will continue to be—a perfectly valid response.

Watch out for unreflected reflexivity.

In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, main character Dave is a nerdy loner preoccupied with building a Tesla coil project in a dark basement. His roommate Bennet has other ideas about what it means to get the most out of college. In trying to get Dave to go party on his birthday, Bennet pitches him on his favorite animal: the gray wolf. “The gray wolf is a pack animal,” Bennet explains. “He must find a mate. He must hunt and grunt. He must participate!”

I would love to call my grandparents every day, but life gets busy. I try to ask them at least some of the many questions I have whenever I meet them. What was it like growing up after the war? How did the 70s feel to someone in their 30s? And so on. But I can’t participate as much in their lives as I would like, and that’s just life sometimes. Sad, but life.

A few years ago, someone in our family had a great idea: Let’s give grandma and grandpa a digital picture frame. We bought it, set it up, and now, we can all send photos to them whenever we’d like. A photo on a frame hits different than one in a chat message, but the process is just as simple. You open the app, pick a pic, add a caption if you want to, then hit “Send.” Moments later, it pops up on the frame in our grandparents’ kitchen and becomes part of the usual rotation. They might not see it instantly, but at some point over the next few days, they’ll notice: “Hey, there’s a new picture! Looks like the kids went to a Roman restaurant!” It’s almost like sending a tiny letter—a small but meaningful way of participating.

It’s great to want to be the best friend in history, and there surely are times to drop everything else and show up. But most of the time, most of us can only keep up with each other on occasion. Yet, even if you only see each other in person once a year, you can still participate. Participation can be small. A quick chat message. A song recommendation that made you think of them. Or a picture uploaded to a frame.

Later in the movie, Dave asks Bennet for his help. He got roped into an ancient war between powerful wizards, and it’s time for the good guys to win. When he finds Dave working on a solution to a magic problem with Becky, his childhood crush—whom Bennet has been encouraging him to go after a dozen times—the big guy breaks into a smile: “I don’t know what you’re into here, Dave, but whatever it is, you are definitely participating!”

“Why do you hate the hiccups so much?” my fiancée asked me yesterday. It was a good question. My speculative answer was that I got them quite frequently as a kid, and since each jolt through my body felt quite strong, they sometimes prevented me from falling asleep. I also observed that if I got the hiccups in the morning, I was likely to get them two or three more times that same day. So I never trusted them to be gone for good once they left.

Thankfully, I now get the hiccups much less frequently. A few weeks ago, I had them for the first time in a while. As usual, the afternoon hiccups were only the vanguard. Then, they came back with a vengeance after dinner, and I found myself lying in bed, hiccing up this way and that, grunting and struggling to fall asleep.

Over the years, I’ve tried many of the countless home remedies: holding my breath, getting a jump scare, drinking lots of water, and of course the classic a schoolmate once taught me: pulling on your tongue. I believe the idea behind all of them is to interrupt the pattern long enough to give your spasming diaphragm time to relax. Once it eases back into its natural state, the jumps stop.

Sadly, none of them worked that time. I decided to focus on the simplest thing I could think of: continuing to breathe. As I sometimes do when I’m meditating, nervous, or stressed, I drew a deep breath in for as long as I could. Then, I held it for four, maybe five seconds. Finally, I slowly breathed out, also pushing as far into a full exhale as I was able to. I repeated this long breathing cycle four times, but the hiccups disappeared on the first one. They didn’t come back, and I slept like a baby.

Yesterday, at dinner, I could feel the hiccups rising again. I was trying to do to much with each breath. Eat, talk fast, gesticulate wildly about some minor problem. Sure enough, there they were. I remembered my cure from last time. “Hold on,” I told my partner. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and reset: Deep breath in. Hold for a few seconds. Long, full breath out. Once again for good measure, and voilà! No more hiccups!

In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. If the body starts acting funny on its own, why would it need vinegar, lime, sugar, water, or anything else external? Surely, what comes from inside must be curable from inside. And where better to look first than at our most basic function of existing? Breathe in. Breathe out.

But the most interesting takeaway from my new hiccup cure was that it works for many other ailments as well. Stress. Anxiety. Sadness. A hard conversation. A difficult problem at work. A physically demanding task. Not because it makes those problems disappear, but because it helps us ease into them, then do what needs to be done. Whether for the hiccups or any other challenge: Start with breathing.

Every morning, I do three Makko Ho stretching exercises. They are simple and fast but also demanding. One of them requires you to sit upright, spread your legs, then bend forward as far as you can. Your arms should also extend forward, and if you can, you’ll want to place your palms flat on the floor.

I’m not the most flexible and have knee issues, so it’s a strenuous position for me. How far can I spread my legs? How much more can I inch forward with my fingertips? Almost without fail, when I first get into the position, I instinctively hold my breath. Maybe it’s because the bend forward squeezes the abdomen, or because the overall amount of tension in my muscles runs high.

Whatever the reason, as soon as I’ve arrived in the pose I’m supposed to hold, I kindly need to remind myself: “Hey there! You should continue to breathe.” “Oh! Right!” my brain goes, and even though it’s not easy, I draw in as much breath as I can. With some fresh air in the system, I can then get back to focusing on stretching further.

This morning, I spent a good hour lying awake in bed, worrying about time, money, and my dreams. Eventually, I realized: “Whatever concern you feel about these things right now, this is exactly like your Makko Ho exercise. You just need to continue to breathe.”

Life can make us gasp for air at times, but usually, it’s us who forget to inhale. Don’t let the stretch knock the wind out of your sails. You’re inching into your potential, and the next breath is always enough.

The Japanese space agency JAXA is planning a mission to fly by the asteroid 3200 Phaeton in the year 2030 and, ideally, collect some samples from the special rock floating through space. The Phaeton circles the sun roughly every 18 months and, for several days each December, crosses paths with Earth’s orbit. During this time, an intense meteor shower, the Geminids, can be observed with the naked eye.

Yesterday, a friend showed me pictures of the Geminids. Last year, he and another friend went shooting star–watching. They picked one of the least cloudy spots in Germany, the Sylvenstein Lake, set up camp at 11 PM in mid-December, and waited. The ended up seeing two to three meteors every minute, and even on a dimly lit screen, the still frames of the event are a spectacle to look at.

On the way home, I summarized what I had learned for myself in my head. I could barely believe it. There’s a rock flying through the space on the exact right path to reliably show up in our sky once a year. It is circled by other rocks, some of which always fall down as it passes, burning up in our atmosphere, creating a show of stars raining from the sky. On a cloudless night, in the right spot, we can simply stand outside and see it with our bare eyes. We can even capture the visual in a device millions of times more powerful than the rocket which took the first man to the moon. And yet, at the same time, we still struggle to send a vehicle to the source of this miracle nearly 60 years later.

We live in a world of endless wonder. If meteors on schedule won’t convince you, I’m not sure what will—but I do hope you’ll find and remember it.

After publishing a course with a partner company at work, I was following up to see what other topics we might collaborate on. Our contact said he needed some time, but then, one day, the lady who ran our joined social media campaign informed me he had left the company. “For this year, publishing new courses is not a priority,” she added. I found this an interesting statement—and also promptly ignored it.

Janitors have a lot of wisdom to dispense. But when the guy cleaning the building tells you acquiring new TV shows is no longer relevant now that the head of streaming has left, that’s a bit strange, isn’t it? How could he possibly know? Until there’s a new person in charge, no one knows. Not even the CEO.

I don’t believe our marketing contact had bad intentions. Maybe she was simply trying to buy her team some time or instructed by someone higher up to try and get us off their back. But in life as in business, if something’s important to you, yet you keep being rejected, you simply go one level higher. In our case, the team lead may have been gone, but the CMO was still around. And my boss happened to know her. So next, we’ll follow up with her instead.

It’s a great flaw in how organization’s work: When most initiatives are dictated from the top, an offhand remark from a senior leader can cause a ton of commotion and, ultimately, wasted resources. But this gap can also work out in everyone’s favor. If a helpful partner manages to sneak in a useful project at the top of the queue, both parties win.

Every check-in one level higher is exactly that: a pulse check with the other side on whether the right person believes in the value you’re offering. It is also the same for you: another chance to reflect on what you’re hoping to accomplish. Is it still relevant? Will it bring both sides closer to their goals? If not, that’s okay, too. Welcome the chance to drop it, and move on.

Just don’t accept a “No” from someone who also lacks the authority to say “Yes.” Know who to listen to and who to ignore and, when in doubt, go one level higher.