Two incidents from this week which highlight different shades of the same lesson:

First, a man reached out to me wanting to feature my book to his Boston-based book club. He seemed well-informed and excited. We emailed back and forth a bit about what’s possible, from doing some Q&A to a discussion, and so on. Then, after he had reeled me in, he dropped the big ask: “There’s just a small coordination fee. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll send the details.”

Second, a recruiter pinged me on LinkedIn. Some copywriting role in Dubai. We also exchanged a few messages, and she eventually sent a job description. It didn’t sound like a gig I’d be interested in, but I was curious about the numbers. “Can you share a salary range?” I asked. “The salary range is totally open and depends on the interview. No bar for the right candidate,” was the answer.

I would give both of these people the same advice for different reasons: Lead with the price. If there’s a cost, and you know what it is, just share it right away. You’ll save everyone time and build credit faster.

The first person immediately destroyed our relationship when asking for money after setting up a different connection. Publications feature writers because they believe their work will add value to their audience. They also charge for advertising. Pretending you’re doing one to only later reveal you’re doing the other instantly casts everything else you’ve said and done into doubt. Now, I even wonder whether the guy was actually prepared or just had AI spit out an informed blurb about my book.

The second person seems either unprepared or also disingenuous. Business owners generally know how much they’re willing to pay to get something done—and if they don’t, it doesn’t bode well for their long-term prospects. Chances are, someone with a “totally open” salary range just wants to bait you and then lowball you when the process is about to close. After you’ve invested a lot of effort, of course. To make you feel vulnerable and more prone to taking a disadvantageous deal. Either reason is a good excuse to run for the hills.

It’s not 1950 anymore. Few people have time for song and dance. And if a good schmoozing is still required, we can just as well do that with our cards on the table. Lead with the price.

Books like The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan aim to help us focus, and that’s a noble goal. They also romanticize what’s possible when aspiration meets reality.

If you’re self-employed or a senior employee, you might have enough control over your time to implement various productivity systems end to end. But if you’re an employee in the middle ranks or work with a large or even multiple teams, good luck imposing your system on everyone else or even defending its boundaries.

“What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary?” It’s a good question. It helps you zone in on what matters. But it won’t free you from a random request by a more senior colleague which she needs done by the end of the day. Plus, your answer is what you think. What if your team doesn’t agree with you abandoning most of your projects to pursue one idea, even if it’s a great one?

Personally, I’ve adapted the concept from this particular book to make it fit a little better into my real life. Sinking your teeth into one goal and chasing it to completion is great when you can swing it. But when you can’t, actually doing one thing a day still goes a long way. Both in my own business and at my job, I find if I can make meaningful progress in just one area, more or less complete “one thing” every day, I’ll feel accomplished and move the needle.

For an essay that’ll take some time to finish, one thing could be drafting one of its sections. For a small video project of re-editing existing footage, it might be adjusting and exporting all videos in one afternoon. For communications it could be as simple as getting back to inbox zero.

If there’s a mode of working that always works for you, by all means, do what you must to implement and maintain it. But chances are that mode will change many times, and life will get in the way. Proxies, principles, and simple rules can bridge gaps. Often, they offer all the flexibility you’ll ever need.

What’s one thing a day you can do to move forward and feel accomplished? What’s that one thing today?

One micro-habit I’d love to drop is speculating more on time than necessary. That means in the long run, of course, for example by simply focusing on my work, earning money, and then buying assets I believe in whenever i have capital to spare, but it also applies in more immediate settings.

I spend a lot of time wondering how much sleep I’m getting while I’m trying to sleep. “What time might it be now? Hmm, it’s still dark. So not yet 7 AM. I slept at 12:45. Or was it 1 already? How much can I get if I go back to sleep in the next 15 minutes? Six and a half hours? Seven?” The exercise is entirely futile, of course.

I have an alarm, so I know when I’ll wake up. I try to go to bed on time, but I don’t always make it. Whatever happens in-between won’t change either of those established patterns. Nor will the knowledge help me throughout the day later on. When I’m tired, I’ll get some rest. And if I feel full of energy, I’ll do some extra work or writing.

Time speculation extends to other areas as well. You can wonder how long you’ll need at the bakery, how your bus coming five minutes later will affect your arrival time at your destination, and on and on. Most of the time, the settings we do most of our speculating in are situations where we actually control little of the outcome at all. The speculation acts like a pacifier. It feels productive, as if we’re doing something when, actually, it’s merely a way of distracting ourselves from our worries—about showing up late, about missing something important, and about, well, not sleeping enough.

Don’t fight dead time. Recognize it, then make it come alive. There’s no need for speculation when, in your heart, you already know what to do.

Everything is ten times harder when it’s live. Teaching. Singing. Speaking. Dancing. Even something as seemingly trivial as moderating a 30-minute panel discussion.

At my company’s annual industry event, I watched such a discussion. Going in, I thought the host had the easiest job. Just introduce the guests and then make sure they piggyback well off one another, right? Ha! A few minutes in, it already became clear this is harder than it looks—and far from the whole job.

Do you introduce your guests? Or do you let them do that themselves? If so, for how long? Who do you call on first? How do you pass the baton? Can you adjust your prompts in real-time so you can move from one speaker to the next in a way that makes sense? When do you interrupt a guest because they are taking too much time? Where do you ask a follow-up question? It’s a Pandora’s box of questions, this moderation thing!

Clearly, the host in this panel struggled with it. He didn’t distribute time well between speakers. He called upon guests with questions they weren’t well-positioned to answer. And he frequently inserted his own talking points instead of maintaining the panel’s organic flow. All in all, the discussion could have been much more fruitful. Interesting. Substantial. Alas, our moderator was not ready for the live factor.

Preparation is “half the rent,” we say in Germany. For live events, the attention you put in before the spotlights go on is worth just as much as your presence on stage, perhaps more. Submit the challenge to your subconscious early on. Go and prepare and do it. Once the timer begins, all you can do is trust your intuition and let your training show its results.

Never underestimate the live factor.

Eight years after first talking about it, I still 100% believe in intuitive highlighting.

For a while, I tried creating a more sophisticated system for myself. I used markers in different colors to highlight in multiple tiers. Blue was a new concept or original idea. Green was a more common point that was still a good reminder. Yellow meant something else, and so on. It didn’t work. Too much hassle.

Anything that makes reading feel like a chore must go. It’s more important to enjoy reading—so you’ll maintain the habit—than to perfectly capture every detail. Therefore, intuitive highlighting it is. That doesn’t mean your highlights are meaningless, by the way.

Just because you don’t consciously decide doesn’t mean you won’t have a good reason for every line you mark in a book. Yesterday, I talked to a friend about this. We came up with five on the spot:

1. Reaffirming a belief. You read a line and go, “Yes, absolutely!” You connect with the author and find a mutual point of agreement. This is powerful. A universal yet special kind of attraction. As you run your highlighter over such lines, you’ll shape your character together.
2. Grasping aspirations. There are the beliefs we hold and the people we’d like to be in order to live in accordance with those beliefs. Books don’t just remind us of the former. They can also show us the latter—and even if we’re not perfect, we can always strive for better. Highlighting descriptions of better helps us cement it in our souls.
3. Capturing aha moments. Did the writer convince you of the opposite side of an argument with their unique take on it? Or did you discover a new perspective you’d never even considered? Epiphanies will automatically jump at you, so it’s no wonder you’ll pick them up with your marker.
4. Tracking arguments for understanding. Some books will make your brain sweat. For me, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus was a mental jungle gym. In hindsight, most of my highlights were me trying to go from one logical monkey bar to the next—and I didn’t have to be conscious of this process for it to work.
5. Preserving important seeds for whenever they’ll blossom. Your subconscious knows more than the active thinking machine that runs permanently while you’re awake. Intuitive highlighting allows the former to do its job. “I don’t know why this sentence feels important, but it does.” When revisiting such highlights later, you might be able to file them into one of the above categories. Or entirely new ones. Or none at all still. Given enough space, stars align in their own time. Let them.

Don’t be a surgeon when you’re reading. Be a graffiti artist. Spray your colors widely. Generously. Allow your mind to expand. Like in a stunning mural, different shapes will fit together in the end. These are just five of many kinds of highlights—and you won’t have to think about any of them in the moment for them to become part of your big picture.

I’m an organized guy for the most part. Ergo, my Pokémon card collection lives and dies by a spreadsheet. It’s great for keeping track and making sure that, for the investments, I buy items that make sense to hold together, for example all sealed items from one particular set. But it can also become a burrow I hole up in for no reason.

Sometimes, I add and remove collection targets on a whim. I’ve spent hours in that sheet arguing with myself. “Should I really try to buy all of these tins? Or just let them go?” Especially with vintage items, it’s hard to decide whether you should bite the bullet and buy it at a high price or accept you missed the boat. Most stuff will hold its value and even increase over time, but vintage doesn’t rise as fast as newer sets, and it’s already expensive to begin with. You can already see how it’s easy to go in circles.

Last night and this morning, I did just that. After finally talking myself out of buying some stuff I didn’t even know existed a few years ago, I looked up. The sun was rising, and the sky was a beautiful, wintery pink, specked with fluffy clouds. As it slowly bled into yellow and blue, I just sat there, gazing. “Huh. Almost missed it. Thank god I just closed that tab.“

A colleague asked me to create some slides for a case study we hadn’t covered previously. It was a startup from our ecosystem which had successfully listed a digital asset token backed by real rubies and sapphires from Greenland.

I wanted to see if AI could speed up the process, so I fired up Gemini and went to work. I uploaded two sets of slides from previous case studies, both of which followed the same structure. First, you show the challenge, then an insight, then the solution, and so on. I uploaded some materials about the company and asked Gemini to fill in the blanks. It worked, and the output was decent.

While transferring the material, I noticed I had to make edits. Text didn’t fit in boxes. Some details weren’t relevant. A few numbers didn’t fit or make sense. I went back and forth for a while, switching from my slides tab to the AI and back. After around two hours, the pack of six slides was finished.

Was that faster than if I had done it manually? Probably a little bit. Maybe even by an hour. But it felt…weird. I had delivered something, but I didn’t feel I had a good grasp on it. As if the thing wasn’t “mine.” It also left my brain in a fairly disjointed state. I felt torn, not satisfied.

When I write and ship an essay, I’m always content afterwards. I never know how it lands, but I know what I’ve made. I’ve walked every step of the way, and I can feel the effort in my bones. The more I use AI for tasks at work, the more I realize how much it breaks down any holistic process.

An MIT study from a few months ago suggested AI-first essay writers suffer severe cognitive debt. They can’t quote from their pieces, become dependent on the tool, and adopt shallow ideas without reflecting critically. Having experimented myself—and it’s good my job forces me to—I’m not surprised.

When you collaborate with AI, it really is as if another person is handing you input on an assembly line. You’re still going from A to Z, but you’re skipping half the alphabet. Where you used to cover A, then B, then C, now, B comes straight out of the chatbot, and so of course you can’t connect C back to B, let alone to A, as easily as if you’d manufactured all the parts.

In the study, experienced writers used AI more sparingly. Critically. To improve their existing work. For writing, an AI-assisted editing layer after you squeeze a first draft out of your own brain definitely feels more appropriate than starting with prompts. Still, the best defense for our thinking will always remain doing it ourselves—at least on a very regular basis.

Whatever you’re building, don’t forget the basics. Put stone on stone from time to time, and remember your ABCs.

During my first industry conference, I had dozens of fascinating conversations with the many visitors to our team’s booth. “I have a startup.” “I work in the media.” “I’m a professor at a local university.” No one person had the same background as the next, and everyone had an interesting story to tell.

Of course, people don’t pay 500 euros for kicks and giggles. They want to move their work forward, and that’s why most conversations at conferences follow the same pattern: “What do you do? What is your goal? And what can we do here together?” Both sides reflect on each other’s ambitions and try to find common ground.

After several days of meeting people and sparring with them nonstop, you’ll end up with dozens, maybe hundreds of potential starting points. Depending on how many notes you’ve taken, you might go home and think, “Okay, let me get working on these next week,” with the expectation of picking up every single thread once you’re back at your desk. At the very least, you’ll connect with everyone online, maybe follow up with a message.

This system is flawed and unkind. When you design your own business strategy, you naturally trade off time, energy, and resources. You’re not trying to follow every avenue. You know you must pick a lane and stick to it. But since no one wants to be the bad guy who rejects most people at a conference, we try to align, and that creates expectations. Yet, we could all make our lives so much easier if we traded just one question for another: Instead of asking, “What can we do here?” let’s ask, “Should we do something here?”

The if is more important than the what. It’s not the number of new contacts that counts. It’s how many remain after sending them through a strong, narrow filter of where your business needs to go next.

Thankfully, my boss understands this, and so she gave us a handful of channels into which to sort people before we even set up our booth. If someone ran a startup, I could point them to our accelerator. If someone worked in corporate, I could talk about our enterprise enablement workshops. And if they were just an individual trying to learn or educate about a certain blockchain topic, I showed them our online platform and open-source materials.

“What can we do here?” prompts you to be creative. To imagine until you can find an idea that seems feasible. But if you and a potential business partner are a strong match, the mode of cooperation should be obvious. If the what doesn’t appear on a silver platter, the odds of your collaboration leading to explosive growth are fairly low. So, at industry events, don’t look for common ground outside of trying to connect with people on a personal level.

“Should we do something here?” is a generous invitation. It’s a door that’s slightly ajar, just as happy to be closed again as it is to be fully opened. Let your should conjure an open crossroads in front of you and would-be partners. Approach it with a default: Most likely, everyone will go their own way, and that’s absolutely okay. And if the adventure ahead is indeed to be shared, it’ll be clear as day to everyone standing at the intersection—because the path that appears in front of you will glow in a color only this particular fellowship can recognize.

The United States were born in 1776, but actually, there were few states and little unity. It was a hodgepodge of 13 colonies who agreed mainly on one item: We no longer want to be ruled by a king overseas.

It took America 125 years to include the first 48 of its 50 states. The last two took another 47 years to add. So the US you know today is actually just over 60 years old! With the initial 13 members all being stuck on the eastern coast of the country, perhaps it’s no wonder the rollout and re-gathering was a slow process. How did it even start?

Yesterday, a colleague told me. He once visited a whiskey maker in Kentucky. Their Buffalo Trace bourbon has been made in the rugged beast’s spirit for over 200 years, and its name was chosen deliberately: because the first westward riding settlers had no roads to ride their wagons on. Only trails, blazed by none other than the mighty buffalo.

Wherever the animals ran in herds, their strong hooves and heavy bodies made way. Literally. So the pioneers followed in the wake of their stampedes. Flat, sturdy surfaces. Wide, dusty paths. The first roads in America were not built by humans. It was the animals paving the way.

Look down. If you didn’t make it, how is there still ground for you to stand on? Appreciate it. Be thankful. No matter how in charge we appear to ourselves, we still live in nature, not off it—and on many days, we’re being carried on the shoulders of both giants and shrimps.

Kris Gage hit Medium like a whirlwind in 2017. She shared no-BS, clear-cut takes on love and relationships straight from her brain through her keyboard, and resonate they did. Within a few months, she had 10,000 followers. Two years in, 80,000. Then, she suddenly disappeared.

For a good five years, no new posts. No chirp. Nothing. It happens. In fact, most of my favorite Medium writers have quietly vanished over the years. But Kris did something unusual: She came back. As if not a day had passed, there it was. A new piece. Boom! Did half a decade go by already? Really?

Later, Kris explained she felt overwhelmed by all the attention, particularly people asking her for writing advice. As someone who writes just to write—and there are fewer and fewer of us—Kris did not understand the question. Folks asking louder and louder didn’t help. So she quit. Until writing felt right again. Until she had more stuff she couldn’t not say.

I’m happy Kris is back, and I’m happy she didn’t announce her return. Just showed up again the same way she used to. Thank you, Kris, for reminding us: There are no rules. You can come back any time—and, most likely, you’ve still got it.