Month: August 2022

“Negativity is totally unnatural,” Eckhart Tolle asserts in The Power of Now. “No other life form on the planet knows negativity — only humans.”

Case in point? The unhappy flower. “Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree? Have you come across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a problem with self-esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird that carries hatred and resentment?” The only time animals are in “a bad mood” is when they live with humans, thus inheriting our negativity, Tolle claims.

I love this analogy for two reasons. First, because it feels inherently, factually true, even though no one will ever prove that hypothesis. Second, it perfectly illustrates that what we strive for when we say “mindfulness” is actually “mindlessness.”

“I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats,” Tolle continues. “Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation. How peacefully they float along, at ease with themselves, totally present in the Now, dignified and perfect as only a mindless creature can be.”

Mindless. No mind. When the mind is absent, what follows is peace.

A flower has no mind and is, therefore, perfect at every stage. In The Practicing Mind, Thomas Sterner explains that a flower simply does whatever a flower does at its current stage of life. A seed must sprout, and a sprout must grow into a stalk. The stalk then grows towards the sun, and eventually, one day, beautiful blossoms appear. Then, they release their seeds and wilt away, starting the process anew.

The flower does not fret about getting to the stage where it blooms. It is not anxious about “making it.” The flower is not worried about how its blossoms will look, nor what the other flowers, let alone humans, will think about them. It is equally unconcerned about dying shortly thereafter, nor sad about the little time it gets to spend in its “ideal” state.

Do you see the potential for tremendous peace in living more like a flower? Imagine waking up in the morning, unfazed by the ebb and flow of everyday life. You do your best to stay in the moment and simply complete whatever tasks lie ahead. And the next day, you do it all over again. You are perfect at every stage.

If you ask Will Smith, affording yourself this kind of mental and emotional space is what true (self-)love is about: “I think that the real paradigm for love is ‘Gardener-Flower.’ The relationship that a gardener has with a flower is the gardener wants the flower to be what the flower is designed to be, not what the gardener wants the flower to be.”

“Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is,” Tolle encourages us. “Surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.”

Treat yourself like a flower. Look after yourself so you may sprout, grow, and blossom. Give yourself whatever you need at any current stage, but never be in a hurry to get through the whole cycle of life. Take your mind out of the equation whenever you can, and negativity will subside.

Unhappy flowers and stressed animals don’t exist because they were never meant to be. There is no reason we should assume anything else for our own, beautiful species.

It’s a paradox, but it works. In fact, it’s the only thing that truly does. If entrepreneurs, artists, and makers only gave the world what it’s already clamoring for, we’d drown in a sea of fast food, clickbait, and plastic smartphones even more so than we are – and yes, that is possible.

But the only reason we have smartphones in the first place is that someone, namely Steve Jobs, made one because he wanted it. I don’t know how much he wanted it for consumers vs. for himself, but creation is the one time ego plays an important, even essential role: If you’re not stubborn in bringing something from the realm of imagination into reality, your best work will never see the light of day.

For entrepreneurs, this often means scratching their own itch. Solve a problem you struggle with, and if other people face the same issue, you may have yourself a business. This concept extends far beyond being pragmatic, however. If you want to see something in the world that’s not there yet, no matter how harebrained the idea, it is your job, even your cosmic duty, to build it, for you have no clue how well received it might end up being – and neither do we.

How often do we not know what we want until we see it? This applies to food, friends, jobs, even who we’ll marry. It is not always the case, but in principle, no field of choice is off limits. Yet, on those rare occasions when we do know exactly what we want, we shy away as soon as we realize it doesn’t exist yet. What are you waiting for?! For someone else to make the thing? Nonsense! Roll up your sleeves and get to work!

It is ironic that only we can be the people to give the world what we most desperately want to see in it, but that’s how any kind of progress is made.

By the way, it may not always be a tangible thing. We’re not all here to make smartphones, paint, or build chairs. Sometimes, what only you can give is a feeling, an attitude, a moral stance. You can show love where there seems to be room for none or put your foot down and say, “No! Until this far, and no further.”

Whatever your contribution will be, give the world what you want, and you’ll always feel like the world has enough to offer. Content. Satisfied. After all, you made it so – and you played your part in the grand cycle of history to perfection.

There’s that saying about making your bed and then having to sleep in it. “You’ve made this choice, and now it is also you who must face the consequences.”

Actually, our decisions rarely happen in isolation. Most of them affect other people in one way or another. A breakup is not an event we carry alone. Nor is any decision made at work or in business. We have customers, coworkers, and partners.

Even what you choose to eat can impact other people. Not just the ones who produce, market, and sell the food you buy, but also those close to you. If you eat yourself sick, they might be the ones caring for you, be that until your stomach bug has passed or providing lifelong assistance in your battle against diabetes.

The point is that, most of the time, you’re not just making your bed. You’re making other people’s beds as well – yet they too must then sleep in them, even if the choice was cast upon them.

It’s easy to wander through life recklessly when you believe you’re the only one dealing with the fallout of your actions, but the truth is you almost never are. You’ll shoulder the brunt of it, sure, but there’ll always be someone in the periphery, and we know radiation can kill even at a distance.

Be a good innkeeper, will you? Know who’s around your guest house. Remember whose beds you’ll have to make beside your own, and then do it with intention.

If you don’t, you should probably quit. What gets in the way? Money, usually. Sometimes it’s comfort. Sometimes it’s fear. Most of the time, however, it’s money. We don’t want to quit because the skills we have pay the bills, and the better they pay, the less we’re inclined to start over.

Most writers don’t want to improve. They just want to be writers. They crave the feeling of being a writer more so than the process, and there is no level of outward success past which that pattern fades. In fact, when you’re doing well by external measures, it’s often harder to change what you’re doing.

That’s why even successful writers get stuck writing the same posts, covering the same topics, and no longer surprising you with anything you couldn’t already guess after reading the headline. They have money, they have reputation, and they’re too comfortable and afraid to risk losing either just to try something new.

It’s tough, reinventing yourself. It’s not an easy thing to do, let alone do over and over again, especially after some of your reinventions have failed. Do you think Avicii liked being booed at on the Ultra stage? “Country and EDM don’t mix,” people said – and then Wake Me Up became the most popular song in the world.

Unlike staying on a path out of habit, improving takes courage. The only way you’ll find it is if you truly want to improve. Check in with yourself from time to time. Is your flame of passion still strong enough to drive out the fear? Are you shying away from sacrifices made in service of your craft? Why?

It’s easy to change what you’re doing when nothing’s working. The hardest part of success is continuing to do what you did before you found it: keep improving. Even if, this time, it means abandoning something that works.

I’ve experienced Lisbon mainly above 30 degrees Celsius, and yet, the temperature I perceived changed all the time.

36 degrees with the sun in full view, zero clouds in the sky? That’s brutal. Siesta time. 36 degrees after the sun has set, with a light breeze as you walk along the sea? That’s lovely.

The most surprising, however, was 36 degrees in cloudy conditions. The sun was just as strong, but a layer of reflecting, absorbing white made the heat much more bearable than you’d think. Had I known this before, I’d have planned my activities differently. You never stop learning.

When we know what 36 degrees feels like at home, we tend to think we know what 36 degrees feels like everywhere, but that’s not true. There’s a lesson in there about not overvaluing statistics, but there’s also one about the difference a single variable can make. Slide a sea of clouds between you and the sun, and voilà, a barely traversable city becomes a joy to explore on foot.

The knowledge about the effects of such singular variables must often be painstakingly collected. It is a hard-won sap from the tree of life, and no one else can extract it for you. This knowledge won’t always be useful, but it’s a joy to share it with those for whom it might be.

Keep your mind open and your eyes on the sky. You never know how the weather might change, and you’ll only find out what those changes mean once you see them.

When I went to Sri Lanka with a college friend, we met a fisherman at the beach on the very first day. He had just caught a small squid and insisted on showing us around. He told us a bit about the beach, about how he was still trying to repair his boat from a tsunami that happened years ago, and we even ended up eating the squid at his house, that his mother prepared with some curry.

I felt a bit uneasy during the whole interaction, but my friend was a much more well-versed traveler than me, and he was always up for adventures like this. Unfortunately, at some point, we realized the inevitable: The fisherman would not leave us alone until we paid him some money. He followed us all the way to the hostel, and I would have been happy to give him, say, the equivalent of 20 euros – a lot of money in rupees at the time – for his kind if slightly misguided attempts.

My friend, however, took adventuring rather seriously: He did not want to pay the guy a dime. I don’t remember exact numbers, but let’s say it was near-impossible to convince him to even give the guy five euros. Ultimately, I ended up giving him a lot more than what my friend was willing to give him, and I paid it out of my own pocket.

If you ask me, it was the stupidest debate to even have. Here we were, tourists with a thousand times the economic means this guy would ever have, too cheap to give him what meant months of survival for him yet little more than two cinema tickets for us. Sadly, it was a debate my friend and I would keep having throughout our trip.

Maybe my friend was just a bit cheap, but I think he also succumbed to a pattern I still see in many people I know today: Everyone wants to be a traveler, but no one wants to be a tourist.

People love to think they’re getting a bargain, that they’re the ones seeing all the places “the masses” don’t see, eating all the food no one else but a local would find. In reality, we’re all tourists most of the time, getting nothing more than what locals have worked out makes sense to present to us – and, actually, that is perfectly fine.

You wouldn’t expect some random person from a foreign country to come into your office on Monday and tell you how to do your job, but when it comes to travel, we all like to think we’re experts before our plane has even landed – and the locals better treat us that way. How dare you show me the Taj Mahal? I want to see the little side street with that one special samosa shop 23 minutes away!

Travel isn’t a competition. How much fun you have is not determined by how local you can pretend to be. In fact, if you’re getting your sense of satisfaction from travel mainly from feeling smug about which activities you’re choosing vs what most tourist guides are suggesting, you’re missing the point entirely.

It is perfectly fine to be a noob in some areas, and guess what, a country you’ve never been to definitely qualifies. It’s a wonderful opportunity to let go of our anxious desire to look smart all the time, yet we often only use it to play more of the same games we play at home.

When you’re a tourist, be a tourist. Do whatever the hell you want to do, and if that’s going to Disney Land for the 17th time and paying eight bucks for an ice cream, so be it. If you’re lucky enough to be able to afford “spending big” in terms of another country’s currency, consider that the more you spend, the more you’ll support that country. You don’t need to throw money out the window, but you don’t need to haggle about every croissant and keychain either.

There’s that saying about teaching a man how to fish instead of giving him one, but if you’re just visiting, the gift of a week’s worth of food is often more than enough.

When Phil Rosenthal walks around a new city, he looks down a lot. Mainly because “he doesn’t wanna step in anything,” he says. In Lisbon, however, Phil found a better reason to look down: The sidewalk looks absolutely gorgeous.

Wherever you go, black and white limestones alternate to form beautiful patterns. Circles, squares, waves, even royal emblems and other elaborate images have found their way into Lisbon’s mosaic pavement. Originally said to have emerged so the king could parade around on his newly gifted rhinoceros care-free, 500 years later, “Portuguese pavement” is world-famous – and still free to marvel at for any visitor.

Sometimes, those visitors think rather deeply about the art beneath their feet. Like Phil, who ponders: “What does it say about a place [when even] the thing underfoot is beautiful?” If you ask this fellow sidewalk-observer, I think it says that love is in the details; that beauty is all around us; and that life happens everywhere, not just wherever we happen to be most engaged – and especially not just in our heads.

Don’t just look where you’re headed. Look up. Look around. And most of all, remember to look down. Sometimes, the best part of your day will hide beneath the soles of your shoes.

My dad once went to Portugal for work. Being the good German that he is, he showed up at the plant at 8 AM sharp, but no one was around. At 9 AM, the first people showed up, unlocked the door, and had some coffee. By 10 AM, they finally started discussing some work issue, but it was not the one my dad had come to help and solve.

Eventually, my dad started asking them when they would get to work on this thing, but by then it was almost 12, clearly time for lunch. After lunch there was a break and then more coffee, and around 4 PM, everyone finally, gloriously began to work – and then, work like hell they did. At around 9 PM, the employees dragged my dad to dinner, and at 11 PM, he fell asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Going in with a German attitude, my dad had simply missed the silent Portuguese agreement: It is too hot to work in the morning, so we work in the afternoon. And, after walking around the streets of Lisbon at 37 degrees Celsius, I can only say: I absolutely understand.

When nature gets too hot, it makes sense to push back social life a few hours. But if you don’t know about this convention or don’t allow yourself to give it a try, let alone settle into it, you’ll get left behind. Whatever resentment follows is on you, not the convention.

There are many silent agreements in many places of the world. Wherever you go, you’ll encounter them among teams, families, and nations. It is our duty to listen for these agreements, honor them if they make sense, and adjust as well as we can depending on how much adjustment the situation demands.

You can choose to be annoyed by your ignorance, or you can make discovering silent agreements fun. The decision is yours, but my guess is you’ll sleep better if you choose the latter – and you definitely won’t show up way too early for work.

I’m not sure if it’s my age or the result of years of meditation, minimalism, and both mental and emotional decluttering, but the older I get, the more quiet I seem to crave.

When I was younger, I thought living in the countryside – the kind of place where only three buses come and go on any given day – was torture. I wanted to be mobile, and I wanted to spend as much time as possible with my friends.

Now, having lived in the busy, buzzing hearts of cities for over a decade, I think the countryside is a blessing that should probably never be traded – especially for what, ultimately, mostly amounts to more noise.

I desire outer silence, not least because I sleep better, and I realize in a city, there’s only so much of that you’ll ever get, no matter how well-insulated your apartment. I am also learning, however, that there’s another kind of quiet, and that no amount of money will buy: inner silence.

We each contain an ocean, and in that vast body of water, there swim our memories, experiences, sensory inputs, interactions with others, knowledge, feelings, and god knows what else. We are chock full of data, albeit not all zeroes and ones, and the more that data is in motion, the more restless we feel.

I think with age, our inner ocean only gets bigger. As you keep living, more and more information floats through the sea, and the more is in there, the higher the chances that bits will collide – and cause a raging storm in the process.

What you want is for your inner ocean to be calm. A smooth surface rippling along as the sunshine falls on its expanse. Outer silence supports this kind of quiet, and not only because it gives you the space to calm the storms. It is in physical quiet that we can most comfortably face this ocean, even marvel at it without feeling threatened.

You need silence to listen for what’s going on inside, and if you don’t know what’s going on inside, you’ll never be able to have any positive effect on it. Sure, it’s an ocean, and there’s only so much you can do, but you can absolutely learn to calm yourself, to not cause more bad weather than however much nature has deemed necessary.

The more I chase external quiet, however, the more I’m also grasping yet another lesson: When the peace of daily life goes out the window, you can’t throw your inner harmony right after it. We’ll never have the perfect, forever-tranquil environment, at least most of us, most of the time. Where there’s bars and people and cars in the city, there are chainsaws, lawnmowers, and Home Depot fanatics in the countryside.

It is a hard thing to admit – that your inner life is yours to manage – and harder still to concede you’ll never be the perfect boss. But awareness brings light to everything, and so, in time and with practice, both you and I shall preside over the kind of quiet money can’t buy.

Namaste.

The Munich housing market is ruthless. Hundreds of applicants vie for a single apartment listing only minutes after it is released. If you can’t play the insider’s game, trawling the usual marketplaces might take months – unless you find a way to stand out.

When I applied for my current flat, I put together a little PDF file. It included my CV, an excerpt from the German debt register, my passport, and even some income and tax statements. I uploaded the file to Dropbox and included the link in the message I sent via the contact form. This way, instead of the usual “Dear Sir or Madam, my name is… I would like to apply…” bla bla, potential landlords would get all of the data they’d need right away.

“But Nik, that’s risky! What about your privacy? Now every landlord in town has a lot of your data! How do you know you can trust them?” I can’t – and that is exactly the point.

In business and in life, transactions require trust, and the only way to build trust is to show vulnerability.

When it comes to financial deals, vulnerability often takes the form of transparency: People want to know what they are buying, and the more expensive it is, the more they want to know. There is no better way to build trust with a potential buyer, or landlord, in this case, than to give them all the transparency they need up front. You’ll have to open your kimono anyway, and doing it before they ask you to shows you’re willing to be as transparent as you’ll need to be to get things done.

That little link I included in my messages acted as a trust advance. I show you some vulnerability, and you’ll know it is safe for you to show me some as well. That’s how the world works. We all understand, appreciate, and to some extent even expect this when others are forthcoming with us, especially if they want something from us. Often, however, we are reluctant to do the same when it’s our turn.

Transparency is a great trust advance, and not just when it comes to money. If you raise your hand at work and say you’re going through a tough time, your boss will take it easy on you. They’ll trust you to handle your situation in time. If you tell your partner you’re struggling with a task, they won’t rush you to get it done.

Trust is a capacity we must build again and again throughout life. Transparency is a great way to get out in front of it. Life flows more smoothly when we can establish trust quickly. The next time you move, buy a car, or make a big purchase, be sure to hand out some trust advances.