Being able to tell the four cardinal directions from the sun.
This has saved my life once already. Here’s the story.
Read MoreMonth: March 2017
Professor Lupin’s Procrastination Antidote
Remember the scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Professor Lupin introduces his class to the boggart?
A boggart transforms into whatever the person facing it fears the most.
Read More“Follow the spiders? Why spiders? Why couldn’t it be ‘follow the butterflies?’” — Ron Weasley
This Tiny Daily Habit Could Be Life-Changing
Which one is it? Writing. Whoa, hold your horses! Before you say: “That’s not a tiny habit!” hear me out. I’m not talking about pages here. Not even paragraphs.
I’m talking about a 1-sentence journal.
Read MoreOne Thing You Can Learn in 2 Minutes That Will Be Useful for the Rest of Your Life
In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Greek general Pericles led a fleet of over 100 ships towards the enemy island.
As they were charging ahead at full speed, suddenly, a solar eclipse cast the entire fleet into darkness.
Unaware of the scientific nature of this unexpected and shocking event, panic befell the soldiers and sailors. But not Pericles.
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Dear Millennials — A Letter To The Lost Generation
“You are all a ‘génération perdue!’,” the garage owner shouted at the young mechanic, who couldn’t fix Gertrude Stein’s car fast enough.
“That is what you are. That’s what you all are … all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”
Stein later told the story to her dear friend, Ernest Hemingway, who’s largely responsible when historians today refer to those born between 1883 an 1900 by said name.
What Hemingway alluded to in The Sun Also Rises isn’t lost in the sense of gone, missing or forsaken, but “disoriented, wandering, directionless — a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war’s survivors in the early post-war years,” as Samuel Hynes points out in A War Imagined.
When I look at my generation of fellow millennials, I can’t help but feel as if history is about to repeat itself.
Hence, this open letter.
Read MoreHow To Change Your Life in Just 10 Minutes per Day
10 minutes, ha! I’m going to show you not one, but six things that will change your life — and we’ll do it with time to spare.
After this, you’ll feel calm, prepared and ready to take on the world, like this:
Let’s go!
Read MoreHow Do You Think Like a Genius?
I don’t have to teach you to think like a genius. You already are.
A genius is by definition someone who’s wrong a lot so they can be very right about one, usually extremely specific thing, way before everyone else is.
But what if that’s not a special trait of geniuses? What if we’re all geniuses?
I mean, you and I are wrong a lot, aren’t we? And sometimes, we get to say “I told you so” to our friends.
All we do when we call someone a genius is elate them to this status in hindsight.
But in order for us to be able to do that, a genius has to do one thing first, and it’s the only thing that really makes them different: when they know they’re right, they speak up and do something about it.
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14 Warnings From Trust Me, I’m Lying
I’m a writer. As such, I’ve always written to the best of my ability and with the purest of intentions. You might think that’s the most natural thing in the world, but just recently I learned that many writers don’t consider these two items – which are really just the right thing to do – part of their job description.
As part of my quest to learn more about writers, who inspire me, I decided this year I would get all books from one author I like, read them in chronological order, and look at how they and their style have evolved. I started with Ryan Holiday.
The Best Advice to Give to Your Younger Self
On February 17th, 2017, Bill Gates came to speak at my university, TU Munich.
1,000 people attended the live panel. 500 of the tickets were raffled away to students. Over 10,000 applied.
Sadly, I didn’t get a ticket. Luckily, they streamed the event live.
Next to the moderator and the Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, they included a student ambassador who carried forward the most commonly asked questions by students.
At the very end, he asked one that must have been submitted at least a couple hundred times…
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