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.

Having assembled and filled his new bookshelf, my friend Tom invited three of us to his apartment. We were all men in our mid-30s to early 40s, and we had all originally connected over writing and reading. Now, we’re all friends.

In Germany, we call this “a mens’ round.” Just a bunch of guys hanging out and shooting the breeze. Society’s expected version of these events is men drinking copious amounts of beer to lubricate some honest sharing, the results of which everyone forgets by morning. Then, everybody emotionally shuts down again, returns to their family, and humbly goes about their everyday life.

Our group was not like that. It wasn’t group therapy, but it was still personal. And all we had was a beer each, if that, and some pizza. It was an evening of culture, not escape. We discussed the selection of books on Tom’s shelf, of course, which was broad and extremely well-curated. But we also discussed work, AI, military service, family dynamics, living arrangements, and geopolitics.

In the context of the latter, my friend John said “two things can be true at the same time.” I found the same applied to our mens’ round as well: First, I was fascinated how many differing opinions you can find between only four people. And second, it was nice to see you can still share these opinions without tearing each other to shreds, which has become the sad default of most of the “discourse” we see online these days.

If you had recorded our three-hour session as a podcast, most listeners who know us would likely have been surprised by at least a statement or two each of us made. But collectively, I’m sure the audience would have agreed: This is the kind of civil debate we need. In Germany. In America. And anywhere else in the world, really.

We didn’t have any great ideas. No magic bullets or clever solutions to ongoing wars, volatile commodity prices, or human-replacing technology. But we actually discussed these problems in a productive way, and we all left on terms which made us look forward to getting together once more.

Politicians needn’t be friends, of course, and, sometimes, being nice won’t get the job done. But if the only modus operandi of leadership is “my way or the highway,” there eventually won’t be anyone left to lead but oneself. It’s okay for leaders to not know, focus on connection, and lead from behind, especially if the alternative is dragging the world through the mud to try and cross a finish line no one else can even see.

Whether you separate your get-togethers by gender or not doesn’t matter, of course. Have a ladies’ round, a mens’ round, or a people-in-their-50s’ round. What counts is getting together, sharing, daring to venture wherever the conversation will go, and then still parting as friends. Beer or not, I say cheers to that!

After I watched Jaws for the first time, I read up on its history and wrote about it. Like many iconic films, its road to reality wasn’t exactly smooth tarmac. Memorable movie, memorable backstory.

The other day, my parents were in town, and they, my fiancée, and I sat in a nice Asian restaurant for dinner. Between courses, we ended up talking about movies. Everyone gave their most recent recommendations, and I told them about my Jaws experience. I also shared some of the behind-the-scenes trivia that I had written about.

I explained how technologically advanced and daring Jaws‘ production was, and how many problems it encountered. I told them how many prop sharks and fake boats they made, and how big the teams were who created and operated them. I recounted how much the initial budget was, and how much Spielberg went over. Same with the production timeline and ultimately record-breaking gross earnings in theaters.

“Wow, I had no idea!” everyone said afterwards. It wasn’t the world’s greatest story, of course, but it made for grade A dinner conversation, if you ask me—and it wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t had the numbers in my head.

We keep saying rote memory is dead, and it’s mostly true. But only mostly. Because in some situations, you won’t have your smartphone. In others, you won’t be allowed to use it. And in the kind I was in, it simply would have broken all the magic.

Of course I could have read the facts off Wikipedia or have AI narrate them back to us—but it wouldn’t have felt the same. It had to be me telling the story. Not so I can get the credit, although that, too, was a consequence. But so people can feel the joy of another human telling them a story. Not a robot or digital encyclopedia. A person—and only persons bring stories to life.

Did I remember the tidbits about Jaws because I had been fascinated by its Wikipedia article? Or because I had written about it? Probably a mix of both. But what I can confirm for sure is that it’s different when you know the facts. Stories hit harder. Arguments are more convincing. And the biggest opportunities in life rarely allow you to read off the page. You have to be ready before you enter the room.

Make use of what you remember—and don’t be afraid to go out of your way to memorize the facts.

It’s a bad habit I’ve held with many different stats over the years: One of the first things I’ll do in the morning is look at the numbers. It could be any kind of number, and there’s no shortage to choose from.

Views, reads, comments, claps, likes, shares of my writing on a given platform. Words written on a project. Time estimates for upcoming tasks. Time already spent writing on a project. I can check my stock portfolio, crypto portfolio, or Pokémon card portfolio. I can open the news and see the latest market data.

The point is if I want to look at a number, I most certainly can—but it’s rarely a great start to my day. As soon as I see a number, my natural inclination is to want to make it go up, and that’s a job I’m always behind on. The more time I can pass without worrying about the numbers, the better.

Your alluring numbers might be different, but everybody’s a numbers person as long as it’s the right digits they’re looking at. Our world is full of data, and we’ll bump into it everywhere whether we like it or not. We used to be short on numbers, but now, usually, we’re short on thinking. On making decisions the numbers can’t make for us, and then let the data evolve as it may.

Numbers are a key part of life, but unless they’re in your cereal, your morning routine is likely better off without them. Think first. Arrive in the day. Check the dashboards later, when you might actually benefit from the information. Don’t start by injecting yourself with numbers.