Month: October 2022

When Mark Zuckerberg urged the Facebook team to “move fast and break things” in the early days, he really could have omitted the second half of that motto. After all, when you move fast, things breaking is an inevitable consequence.

If you’re just starting out, be it in a business, a project, or a relationship, speed may not be a bad idea. How much can you really destroy in an empty warehouse?

Chances are, the first widgets you break on your website weren’t that good to begin with. Now, you get to set them up again, except this time, you’ll do a better job! Why not find out if you work well together on a one-week kayaking trip? Sure, you’ll probably both land in the water, but at least afterwards, you’ll know a lot more about each other than after three more coffee dates.

In his book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb explains that many systems actually benefit from “shocks, randomness, and stressors.” Evolution, economic markets, certain companies, even our bodies and minds need a certain level of challenge to thrive. However, for an antifragile system to gain from adversity, its parts need to be allowed to break, Taleb claims. Free markets are efficient because individual companies can die. Evolution works because each animal is a genetic test subject. And so on. Therefore, it is in the very breaking of things that growth is to be found — at least in the early stages.

As our endeavors mature, however, we must grow with them. Over time, antifragility will be reserved for more rare and extreme events, whereas day-to-day operations must be marked by robustness. How long could you run around your carefully furnished house before knocking over a lamp? A day? Two? A week? Sooner or later, you’d break something you have painstakingly assembled with effort, skill, and experience — and now, you won’t be excited at the chance to do it again. You’ll just be annoyed.

In 2014, Zuckerberg officially dropped the company’s motto for the first decade. A 10-year-old must slowly learn what it means to be part of a larger community! Nearly another decade later, however, they are still struggling. As it turns out, not everything they broke so quickly is easy to fix.

At the end of the day, life is not about speed. It is about pacing. Sometimes you’ll need to be fast; sometimes you’ll need to be slow. Keep asking yourself when’s the right time for each setting, and remember: You can’t spell fragile without agile, but you also can’t spell dash without ash.

When I first caught the entrepreneurship bug, I tried to light every similar spark in other people. If someone told me they were thinking about starting a blog, quitting their job to freelance, or launching a startup, I always encouraged them to do it. Blank-check optimism.

One reason, other than that I am a blank-check optimist, was that I thought these people must encounter enough downers when sharing their aspirations, and so I wanted to provide some counterweight to society’s usual choir of “you can’t.”

As I got older, however, my takes became more balanced. “Do you think that’s really you?” “Don’t jump off a cliff without a parachute.” “That’s not gonna work because X.” For one, my sense of what’s a real aspiration vs. just a pipe dream got better, and for another, I myself had chased enough pipe dreams and burned my hands enough times to want to help people avoid my mistakes. So while I still leaned towards encouragement, I would add more disclaimers.

A few years later, I now realize there’s a time and place for both approaches: Under normal circumstances, you should make sure your friends keep their head on straight. Don’t let euphoria carry them away like a hot air balloon. Otherwise, they’ll crash and burn, and whether they would have taken your advice or not, they’ll definitely ask: “Why did no one warn me?”

When a loved one is down in the dumps, however, don’t burn the rope they have mounted in hopes of climbing out of their hole. In cases of grief, depression, or burnout, it doesn’t matter what that rope looks like or even if it will last them all the way. The point is that they themselves have chosen to get better — and who are we to thwart their first attempt? Now’s the time to show them unconditional love.

Most of the time, we can be helpful by pointing out the signs our friends are missing, but sometimes, our job is just to cheer — for as long as someone encourages us to get back up, we’ll always rise after we fall.

Compiling the ideas from authors William Strauss, Neil Howe, and Julia Cameron, Yancey Strickler describes four theories of time.

The first suggests that time is chaos. There is no order or meaning whatsoever. Any patterns would be entirely accidental.

The second theory is that time is a circle, and it somewhat disproves the first. We may not know why, but we can observe that, clearly, some things in life do repeat with reliable consistency. Like nature’s seasons, for example. Or the female reproductive cycle. Or the earth revolving around both itself and the sun, creating day and night and the calendar year.

The third theory is that time is a line, forever stretching forward and, in humanity’s case, up and to the right. Especially for the last 500 years or so, the speed of innovation and technological progress has kept increasing dramatically, making it seem like we’re headed towards some inevitable utopia in the long run, minus a few speed bumps here and there, such as world wars, pandemics, and climate change, for example.

Each of these theories has its own problems. The first is not just depressing, it is also false. Since we can now quite accurately see, measure, and even predict the same shifts in seasons, sea tides, and even star constellations from one year to the next, theory number one is out the window.

The second theory, while providing us with a baseline attitude towards time that makes concepts like birth and death, growth and decay a little easier to accept, poses no necessity for evolution. We could repeat the same humdrum steps every year, treading water in the same place until we die — and some of us do. Go to work, eat, watch TV, repeat. That too quickly becomes depressing.

The third theory finally brings some true meaning and much needed optimism into our perspective of time, but it too has a flaw: When we pretend that progress is inevitable, we’ll stop putting in the very effort it takes to make said progress actually happen. “When society believes that a better future is constantly just around the corner, getting ready for the worst feels unproductive and pessimistic. Even the existence of a Plan B can challenge the entire value system,” Strickler suggests. Other futurists, like Peter Thiel, have also criticized this “indefinite optimism,” as Thiel labels it in Zero to One.

So, what are we to do? The solution comes from an artist, not a scientist. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron puts the line and circle together, thus creating — and this is theory number four — time as a spiral. “The Artist’s Way is a spiral path. You will circle through some of the same issues over and over, each time at a different level. There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path.”

According to Cameron, life, especially the creative life, is like walking a long, winding path leading up a mountain. “‘I’ve been here before,’ we think, hitting a spell of drought. And, in a sense, we have been. The road is never straight.” In a spiral, we can go up, and we can go down. Growth is not inevitable, and even if we successfully pursue it, we’ll have to learn — and unlearn — the same lessons many times.

Besides delivering a more accurate view of reality, however, viewing time as a spiral adds another important element to our emotional arsenal, Strickler says: forgiveness. Being aware that our past challenges might return in the future in slightly different colors allows us to “grow without demanding perfection,” to pursue “the longer journey toward mastery” more calmly, and to enjoy life without expecting we’ll ever be completely done with all that we came here to do.

When you choose to believe in the spiral of time, each day becomes an opportunity to go up or down. You won’t always manage to go up, but every day, you’ll have a compelling reason to try — and when it comes to dealing with a force that much greater than us — time — trying may be the most important part.

May the winds of time be with you. I hope they’ll grant you safe passage up the infinite mountain, no matter how winding the path.

I’m not talking about House of the Dragon, although, if the early reviews are any indication, that too will require getting ourselves together until season two arrives. The seasons I mean are the ones you can watch simply by looking out your window. Today, I saw the first leaf drop from the big maple tree across the street. Fall is officially here.

There is something magical about spring blossoming into summer, summer stepping aside for autumn, and winter softly covering fall with snow. It’s as if we had cast a collective spell to transform the air, and with it, our spirits also change. Despite our not playing an active role in it, the passage of seasons is worth acknowledging.

Maybe you’ll come up with a little ritual, like lighting a candle on the first day of each quarter, or the first time you see a flower blossom, a person eating ice cream, a leaf or snow fall. Maybe you’ll write a diary entry, treat yourself to a season-themed meal, or spend a day outdoors. The point is to participate in life without letting nature yank it right by you in front of your eyes.

It doesn’t take much to do this. As long as you’re present, really there for the new season’s arrival, a single moment can be enough. “Wow. Okay. It’s no longer time for shorts. I guess fall is truly here.” Then, you can start asking questions.

“What did I do this summer? How do I want to spend the winter? What should be my theme for the spring?” Acknowledging the shifting tide of seasons makes us more resilient to the passage of time. Instead of waking up five years later, wondering where it went, we get to check in with ourselves every three odd months or so. “Ah! I do have some control here. I can change what I’m doing.”

There’s room for gratitude too. For nostalgia. For calling a friend and saying, “You know what? That was a great spring of working out together once a week.” Most of all, however, saying hello and goodbye to nature’s seasons will make it easier to do the same for the seasons of our own lives.

It takes conscious effort to switch from being a family man to working really hard on your business or vice versa. You can neglect your health for a while to hang out more with friends, but eventually, you’ll need to return to taking care of yourself regularly. If you’re already used to greeting and sending off spring, summer, fall, and winter, you’ll more easily reorder your priorities when it’s time to do so — and those times tend to find us more often than we expect.

Open your window. Look outside. What season is it? And how can you best savor life while it lasts?

Society treats health as binary because it needs to keep functioning. When a factory worker has the flu, it is better for the business if that person doesn’t show up. Otherwise, ten factory workers might have the flu next week. The same applies to schools, concerts, or gatherings of important politicians: Wherever there’s a risk of disease spreading, we try to prevent the diseased from attending, and that makes sense.

The result, however, is that every child learns that health only comes in two forms: You either have it, or you don’t, and depending on your current status, you will (and should be) blocked from certain activities until you have your wellness back. This mindset comes with a long tail of problems.

I first glimpsed health’s more continuous true nature in 2016. After shipping a big article right on time, a big lump of stress fell off my chest, but all it did was make way for a nasty virus. I learned that some kinds of stress are better than others, and that it wasn’t the strain itself that got me but its imbalance. We always have some stress — the question is whether we actively manage its types and totality so it won’t knock us out.

In the same vein, we are always ill to some degree. Both our physical and mental health are sliders on a spectrum, and we must constantly make an effort to keep these barometers well-balanced. You might not have missed a day at work in years yet go to the dermatologist every week because you have dry skin. You could be a million-dollar rockstar living the dream but feel completely empty and depressed on the inside. You may be confined to a wheelchair but improve the mental health of millions through your positive attitude.

In other words: You’re never 100% healthy, and you’re never 100% sick. While this means there’s always something to worry about, work on, and improve, it also suggests there’s always something to feel good about, enjoy, and capitalize on. If you can no longer sprint because of a knee injury, perhaps you can lift weights and discover you have a knack for it. What makes you anxious about playing the trumpet in front of the whole school might be the very thing that makes you a great listener and private trumpet tutor.

Health is a dynamic, ever-moving balance, and if we want to use ours to its full potential, we must keep flowing with it. The limits of our physical health are not always clear, but they’re more obvious than our mental ones: When our body won’t allow us to get out of bed, we simply can’t. When it’s our mind telling us to stay under the covers, things become tricky.

“Whenever I began to feel a tiny bit ill again, I would become deeply anxious and depressed that I was back to being properly ill,” Matt Haig writes about his mental health struggles. “It would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would become ill because I believed I was.” The solution? Like eating good food, exercising, and sleeping enough to maintain our body, we also have to work on our inner attitude and balance. Those, too, are tasks we’ll always face. “We have to accept that bad feelings and memories can return,” but we an also take comfort in the fact that “if they do we will be ready for them, accepting of what they are, transient and changing.”

If anything showed us health isn’t binary, it’s coronavirus. Some people barely had any symptoms. Others went to the ICU, lost their sense of smell for months, or even…died. Different countries came up with different rules, and different people came up with different ways of flouting them. Some took planes they weren’t allowed to take. Others refused to wear masks or strategically didn’t test themselves. This isn’t to say the rules were perfect, but it proves that even though it was (and still is) a global health crisis, there was no one-size-fits-all solution — because there’s no straight line demarcating the “healthy/not healthy” border for humans.

Long before covid, flu-ridden people went to work. Parents sent their chickenpox-plagued children into kindergarten. “Let them all get it and be done with it!” Will a 19-year-old skip a concert because of a dry cough? Probably not, especially if they can “kill the bacteria” with alcohol. Are these good ideas? Unlikely. Meanwhile, depressed people often keep to themselves for far too long. Don’t wait until the dark thoughts already have you by the ankle. Speak up now! Call a number. Start a chat. There are plenty of free resources, and you can confide in someone anonymously.

You’re never 100% healthy, and you’re never 100% sick. “Reality isn’t a simple jar we can stick a label on, to say this is what it is, and it will never change,” Haig writes. “We can move against the current of life, and forever meet resistance, or we can let our thoughts flow, and become the free uncertain river.”

Be water, my friend.

I have a shower mat. My girlfriend laughs at me for it. It makes me look like an 80-year-old man. Why would a perfectly healthy guy put a rubber mat down every time he showers? The answer is that I slipped more than once — and I don’t intend to fall.

There’s a lot of stuff you can land on in my bathroom. The sink. The toilet. The floor. None of it will provide a soft landing, and if you’re unlucky, you’ll make the “dumbest ways to die” list the next day.

My grandpa is an 80-year-old man. In fact, he’ll turn 82 in a few days. Not too long ago, he did fall in the shower, and the bruises were neither fun to look at nor quick to heal. It was the last warning shot I needed — and so I bought a shower mat.

Life pulls the rug from under our feet often enough. We don’t always get fair warning, let alone multiple ones, and yet when we do, we usually ignore them. We keep barreling down the slope on our skateboard, thinking we’re invincible. A helmet? Knee pads? Those are for suckers! Sure they are. Until the wheels catch a tiny stone, and we get the flying lesson we never asked for.

If fortune is generous enough to let you slip before you fall, don’t take it for granted. Heed that warning. Buy the anti-slip socks, the helmet, or the flowers that let your girlfriend know you love her. Life has given you a chance to prevent unnecessary disaster, and it is your duty to take it — if not to protect others, then at least to save your own neck.

Slip once, buy a shower mat, phew. Slip twice, fall, that’s on you. May you never hit the dirt.

Society is far too accommodating for humanity’s countless addictions. Just because over a billion people drink two cups of coffee a day does not make it normal to not be able to function without your 8 AM cup of joe — but in the affluent countries where 50, 60, 75% of people drink coffee on a daily basis, it can seem weirder to skip it than to sip it.

Different addictions become socialized in different geographies. A friend from Brazil once told me that in South America, everyone is extra-addicted to their phone, particularly Instagram, and therefore obsessed with their looks. In Bavaria, annual beer consumption averages out to half a liter per person per day. Take out the non-drinkers and more casual consumers, and you’re left with a lot of alcoholics, no matter how high-functioning they may be.

Germans have endless jokes about beer bellies, relationship bellies, and traveling salesman bellies not because those bellies are normal but because two thirds of men and more than half of women are overweight — and about a quarter of adults is outright obese. Common is not “normal.” We apply that word to whatever we frequently see, and we use it to make ourselves feel better about what’s really an untenable situation.

The next time someone tells you something is “normal,” ask yourself: “Yes, but is it natural?” Our ancestors didn’t have a flat rate for soy milk lattes, and they got out of bed just fine. Beauty wasn’t a contest but an indicator of natural selection, and alcohol, like other high-calorie foods, was a rare indulgence.

This isn’t to say we can’t enjoy today’s abundance of these goods, but we must not pretend that depending on them is healthy, even warranted. Skip your coffee for a day. Quit drinking for a month. Look around your town, your office, your country, and dare to question the masses.

There’s a difference between what’s common and what’s natural, and we ought to remember it.

Yesterday, I stood in front of Picasso’s Woman With a Violin. No matter how long I stared, I could barely make out the instrument among the sea of cubes, let alone the woman. Eventually, I snapped a photo of the painting, then moved on.

Back home, I went through my pictures, and lo and behold: From the more distant perspective, both the woman and violin were perfectly clear.

Sometimes, we’re too close to something to see the beauty that’s in it. A tired waiter might miss the deep gratitude resting in a customer’s smile. A frustrated parent may forget how far her daughter has come. And an art dealer doing too many transactions may no longer be able to spot what’s special about a painting.

That’s life. It happens. We all get too deep into the weeds from time to time. But when we realize it, we can also take a step back. Get the distance we need, be it in time or in space, to once again see what the (big) picture is truly about.

You’re not a cynic, unappreciated, or incompetent. Try again tomorrow. Pick a different angle. Chances are, you’re just standing too close to the art.

If your work involves manual labor, you are transforming physical reality. Pause for a second, and realize how profound this is. Carving a chair out of wood, assembling metal sheets into a car, operating a machine that turns sand into glass bottles — manufacturing is nothing short of alchemy. Back in the Middle Ages, kings dreamed about converting lead into gold, but what we have accomplished is a thousand times better.

If your work mainly consists of thinking, you too perform alchemy, just a slightly different kind. Instead of transmuting the materials already present in our physical realm, you are bringing new ones into it. You are chiseling knowledge, ideas, and emotions out of the fabric of space — and that, too, is an awe-inspiring task.

Science tells us space is empty, but that is not true. After all, everything that exists came out of space. Earth. Other planets. Donuts. Skyscrapers. Even humans — you and I — are rearranged stardust. In that sense, sculpting a little more stuff out of ether should seem as natural to us as fetching water from a spring.

If you imagine this “life force,” this basic, cosmic soup, as something a little more tangible than air, a translucent, smoky substance perhaps, or invisible, rainbow-colored cotton candy, your work will begin feeling less abstract and more meaningful. You also won’t be alone.

In Star Wars, they call it “the Force.” In Final Fantasy VII, they call it “the lifestream.” Even the Stoics had a word for it: “Logos” — the divine yet perfectly natural “anima mundi,” the soul or spirit of the world. The ancient philosophers thought this “operative principle” of life to be invisible yet ever-present, elusive yet palpable, and they wholeheartedly believed it was forever driven forward by virtue and purpose.

The lifestream is more than destiny. It is not a predetermined future, but the raw material from which we create it. Whether we shape our contribution with our hands or our mind, we are drawing from the same source, and that source wants goodness — in creation, in history, in us — to prevail.

Every day, we collectively carve tomorrow out of the cosmos, and in this grand scheme of creation, smiling at a young child while picking up her family’s trash is as important as discovering the next cancer therapy that wins a Nobel Prize.

You are here for a reason. You may not always get to choose what you do, but rest assured that, no matter the task in front of you, that reason is always intact.

Your work matters. Thank you for giving it all you’ve got.

I planned a weekend trip to a nearby lake. Then, the weather forecast said it would rain. On the day of, the skies were cloudy, but the rain was a long time coming.

Instead of grabbing my bag and going, I waited. I knew it would come, just not when. An hour went by, then three, then five. In the afternoon, the sun even poked its head through the clouds. Preposterous!

But eventually, at 9 PM or so, the skies opened, and torrential rain poured down. Finally! It kept raining for the rest of the weekend. My trip would have to happen another day.

Sometimes, all you can do is wait for the rain. Maybe the rain is an email. Or a rejection letter. Or news from the doc. Whatever shape your weather blockade takes, it doesn’t mean your delay is dead time. You can still fill those hours. Carpe diem — seize the day!

I read while I waited. Rested. Called my mom. Had a schnitzel. Bought some bread. Even went outside. It wasn’t the trip I had planned, but maybe it was the trip that I needed. Forced breaks are an opportunity to reflect on your pacing. Are you going too fast? Too slow? How can you make the wait time well spent?

We can’t always avoid the rain, but even when the downpour is inevitable, we can still choose how we spend our time. Life never “waits” in the sense that it stops altogether — and neither should we.