Month: April 2023

When you heat up a frozen pizza, for the first 7-8 minutes, not much happens. It is only in the last 1-2 minutes that the cheese takes on its delicious golden brown, that the salami curls up its edges, and that the crust gets crispy.

What you do for those first 7-8 minutes almost doesn’t matter. You can watch the pizza intently, take a phone call, or do laundry in the basement — but if you mess up those last two minutes, you’ll end up with either an undercooked mush or a very large piece of coal. Whatever you do, you better make sure you’re around for those crucial last two minutes. Only then can you make sure you get your pizza exactly as you like it.

In life, too, the crispiness often comes at the end. It might be tempting to sell your business after seven years of struggle, but chances are your biggest growth spurt is just around the corner.

Stocks return the most in the years right before we retire — because even if the annual growth rate is the same, our base has already grown into a large pie to begin with. 8% of $1,000,000 is still $80,000. That’s a year or two of living expenses.

Relationships are most rewarding once we’ve found our rhythm. Friend or partner, it’s easy to feel good in the company of someone you’ve known for 20 years. What if you break up just before you’ll hit your stride? We can’t always know, but it’s important to try to be there for the tail end.

The night is always darkest before the dawn. When you feel most doubtful whether years of struggle have been worth it is likely the moment when you’ll most benefit from steering the course. Don’t give up too soon. Be there for the last two minutes of your pizza. It always gets crispy at the end.

The guy in front of me wore the perfect sweater given the queue we were standing in: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” Having arrived at the airport with 25 kg of luggage only to find out my flight was canceled, I’d say those were some good lemons. The lemonade I ended up sipping came courtesy of some food vouchers, and 24 hours later, I’m still enjoying the bittersweet fruits that are the free perks in an airport hotel.

As I was dealing with some admin items over breakfast, I caught myself thinking: “Please, no more issues. Not this early in the day. I’m not ready for another big problem.” Reality, of course, cares not for such thoughts. My flight might be cancelled yet again. Something could go wrong with my luggage. An unrelated work thing may pop up. And the truth is, if any of these things happened, I would just handle them, because I’d have to. So actually, I’m always ready — and so are you.

True readiness does not come from feeling ready. It comes from accepting new situations as they are, and then making of them what you can. Whether we have the feeling of preparedness has little bearing on our ability to actually handle what’s coming well.

It doesn’t matter whether you want to deal with a canceled flight or not. No one ever wants that. The important part is that you stay calm, come up with a solution, and find a way to move on with your day — and all of those things you’ll have to do in the moment, not before. Your feeling ready for calamity does nothing if, in reality, you’ll lose your temper at the first sign of difficulty. Wouldn’t you rather not have felt ready but then kept your cool anyway? That’s just as possible, because the two are barely connected.

Don’t tell yourself a story about what you can and can’t handle. You can deal with anything. Whenever it happens, and whatever “it” is, you are always ready — and if you don’t know how to make lemonade, you’ll learn it when life hands you some lemons.

A professional massage therapist will read your body like a map. They will take some time to get oriented, trace the various lines, and then find out where they need to go.

A massage is not always comfortable — especially if it works. You can feel the knots of tension as the massager identifies them, but they won’t leave voluntarily. It’s almost as if your body wants to hold on to the tension, stretching and winding, hoping to evade the therapist’s skilled fingers. You must breathe properly and let go; allow the tension to pass and flow out of your body. If you don’t, you’ll feel slightly pampered afterwards, but the effects won’t last.

Most of our Gordian knots lie inside us. Blobs of inner stiffness are just a very literal example. If your upcoming move causes you lots of stress, perhaps it’s time to reframe the move as a joyful event, after which you’ll have a new home better suited to your current phase of life. If all roads at work seem blocked, maybe you can focus on a different project, switch to another team, or get a new job altogether.

We don’t have to solve problems on the same plane we found them on. In fact, the best solutions often lie on different levels. But in order to see those solutions, just as in a massage, we first have to breathe in, breathe out, and accept the situation as is. Only then can we use our metaphorical swords to cut through our intangible, tangled ropes.

May your back stay pliable and your mind stay sharp — so you can slash away on the inside and thus solve the world outside.

Congratulations! You’ve decided to take it slow today. You slept in, did your routine, and had a nice breakfast. It’s 11 AM when you leave the house for work, and that is okay.

But then the bus driver needs to take a detour. The lady at the café takes some time to toast your tuna melt. And the office barista needs five minutes to get more milk. Slowly but surely, your graciousness makes way for anxiety, and before you know it… “Come on man! Move faster! What’s taking so long? I’m already behind!”

It’s easy to be generous when you can plan for it. Once you’ve decided that the day will be a slow one, moving slowly becomes the norm. But what about other people? What if they, too, need some extra time? Just because you can’t add it to your calendar does not mean those folks deserve your graciousness any less than you do.

It’s a great achievement to be nice to yourself, but if you want inner peace in full bloom, you can’t let the niceness end where your nose does. Unless you extend the same courtesy you afford yourself to others, you’ll quickly lose what you have gained. If you’re going to be kind, go all the way.

Asked about the challenges of being famous, Rowan Atkinson says the worst part is when people half-recognize you. Having gone through that experience once while getting spare parts for his Land Rover, Atkinson found it impossible to convince the fan that he was in fact the actor playing Mr. Bean.

“I bet you wish you were!” the guy said, and insisted Atkinson “try doing some look-alike work.” “You could make an absolute fortune!” The more Atkinson tried to prove who he was, however, the harder the fan held on to his conviction — to the point of getting angry with Atkinson for “going around the country, pretending to be Mr. Bean.”

Our brain’s ability to make quick, near-instant judgements is one of our greatest advantages as a species. Unfortunately, this skill is a two-edged sword, and when those judgements go wrong, the consequences can be disastrous.

The German word for a perfect look-alike is “Doppelgänger.” In a How I Met Your Mother episode of the same name, the gang finally meets the fifth and last body double they’ve been looking for, having collected a match for each of the five friends over the years.

Before they encounter Barney’s real look-alike, a fertility doctor named John Stangel, however, there are several false positives. Most notably, Lily excitedly points her friends to a pretzel vendor who, in fact, looks nothing like Barney. The catch? Marshall and Lily have agreed to try for a baby once they see Barney’s doppelgänger — and Lily’s insistence on having found him merely proves she is ready to have kids.

Humans have an amazing ability to see — literally and figuratively — but when we choose to see just what we want to see, we squander our potential. Sometimes, the consequences are harmless if embarrassing, as in the Mr. Bean case. At other times, our emotional investment into a point of view can have life-changing implications, like for Lily and Marshall.

Whether at work, in life, or with people: Most things are worth a second look. “Am I seeing the real thing? Or is this just a doppelgänger?” Ask before you judge, and even after you’ve made up your mind, always keep the door ajar.

Hangovers serve to humble us. They remind us where our limits are, and that, in fact, we do have limits. Their best aspect, however — not that should ever shoot for them on purpose — is that they teach us perseverance.

When you wake up with a massive headache, rumbling stomach, or sea-sickness-feeling after a wild night out, you know: The only way out is through. You can try to sleep, drink lots of water, or pop an aspirin, but at the end of the day, the only thing that’ll truly return you to your fit, excited, fully sober condition is time — and time can’t be bought, bullied, accelerated, manipulated, or faked. You’ll just have to lie there, enduring, resisting, hoping, waiting. As much as it sucks to lose a Sunday, this is decent training.

Hangovers are the result of hubris. They’re an easy-to-understand form of punishment. Life won’t always make you feel bad for reasons you so clearly understand let alone can be held responsible for — but even when the slump is hard to fathom, the recipe remains the same: Hang in there, and don’t give up. It’s never a class we sign up for voluntarily, but if the occasional hangover prepares us for worse, then sometimes, that last drink that was one too much was actually just enough.

I’m setting up a bank account for the sole purpose of having another account attached to it that can hold my renter’s deposit. Classic German red tape. In theory, the initial account is free — but only if I have 700 euros going into it each month. In practice, I already have more bank accounts than I would like, and the administrative effort would cause several major headaches.

As I was brainstorming how to manage this financial game of musical chairs, I realized: I can just pay the 4.50 euro fee each month and save myself considerable headache. Is it the ideal setup? No. But will the 54 euros each year cost me any sleep? Well, also no.

Ironically, the way I arrived at this conclusion is by asking myself: “What would I do if I were rich?” The obvious answer was to just pay and not worry about it. It was only when I added up the annual costs, however, that I saw: “Oh! I can already afford to do that now.” In that sense, I’m already “rich.”

Rich is relative, and chances are, you’re not giving yourself enough credit for what you’ve already achieved. Whatever your potential to use money to make small issues disappear, use it! Don’t keep thinking like you did five, seven, ten years ago, especially if your income has gone up.

Only you can decide what things are worth to you, and just because you will spend where others won’t does not make those choices bad decisions. A millionaire with a penny-pinching mindset is no richer than a six-figure earner who spends all her money and then some on her lifestyle — both are trapped, one in their mind, the other in their belongings.

Rich is relative. Where are you rich, and how will you use that power?

Yesterday, my friend Mike asked me to leave some notes on his book manuscript. “I’ll just make a Google doc, and don’t worry, I’m not gonna fight the comments.” We talked about how, sometimes, when you ask people for feedback, they take the honor of being asked so seriously that they turn advice-giving into a competition. If you have counterpoints to their points, they’ll start arguing. They might demand you implement every tip that they give you or at least feel offended if you don’t. But that’s not the point, is it?

The point is to help the artist in charge — and, ultimately, only they can decide what to cut and what to keep. Our chat reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s fantastic piece of writing advice: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

The main reason Bruce Lee never published a comprehensive book about Jeet Kune Do, his own school of thought about the martial arts, is that he worried a “finished” framework would lead people into cultism, not the individualistic thinking he wanted them to practice. “He struggled so much with it,” his daughter Shannon writes in Be Water, My Friend, “that though he took many technique photos and wrote pages upon pages of text about his thoughts on combat, he could never bring himself to publish them, wanting to avoid the problem of concretization and creating ‘devout’ followers who would refuse to question their own experience.”

The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, a book edited by Lee’s wife and Mito Uyehara of Black Belt magazine, was only released posthumously, and it is thanks to a high level of abstraction that it can stay true to Lee’s spirit and ideals, Shannon explains: “In seeking to guide the reader, it doesn’t seek to bind the reader, but rather allow the reader to be an active and flexible participant in their own process of understanding.”

Guiding is not binding. When you hope to teach, adding disclaimers is a service. Remind people to find their own way. Don’t demand they try to follow in your exact footsteps. Chances are, their shoe size differs from yours. Whether you guide out of your own volition or because you were lucky enough to be asked for your opinion, don’t strangle us with your insight. Wisdom doesn’t mind where it’s applied and when it’s ignored — and neither should you if you truly have other people’s best interests at heart.

I slept like crap today. My head hurts, I’m exhausted, and there are a million things vying for my attention. Those are just feelings, however, and feelings pass — but not if you reinforce them.

This morning, in the bathroom, I noticed I was telling myself a deflating story. “Maybe I’m not good enough to achieve this. What if I’m burned out? Am I just doomed to fail?” As I looked into the mirror, I realized: “Wait a minute. Are you rattling off this story because you think it’s true, or just because you feel bad right now?”

When people talk about visualization, affirmations, or the law of attraction, what their arguments ultimately boil down to is this: Your subconscious is powerful, and you can tell yourself any story that serves you until it seeps in and gets you a certain result. Of course, if you tell yourself a disempowering story, then that will also take effect.

It’s easy to tell yourself a crushing story when you already feel bad. It’s counterintuitive to give yourself a pep talk, raise your fist in the air, and say, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna rock this day!” when you’ve slept 5 hours and your head feels like a construction site — but that’s exactly when you need an empowering story the most. Don’t double down on feeling bad by telling yourself a story that makes you feel even worse. Cut the loop off before it starts, and remind yourself that your grogginess, grumpiness, or exhaustion — like all things — will pass.

Ask yourself: “Is this a feeling or a story?” If it’s a feeling, let it end where it begins. Frustration is just frustration. If you don’t make it into a story, it will fade. And if it’s a story, it better be one that helps you deal with the feeling rather than just wallow in it. Accept your feelings, choose your stories. That’s how you take charge of your life even on days when the deck is stacked against you.

I know what shoes I wore yesterday. They were red. Monday’s were black, and on Sunday, I don’t think I left the house at all. When it comes to my footwear, my memory quickly gets foggier from there — and that’s perfectly okay. All I need to know is yesterday’s color so I can pick a different one today.

We live our lives one day at a time, so for most things, it’s okay to only use yesterday’s data to adjust for tomorrow. Why did you say the wrong thing on May 15th, 2020? How come you bombed the client meeting last week? Individual failures could have a million reasons. Often, it’s at least a handful of them, and so there’s little we can gain from analyzing singular breakdowns. It’s tragic if a patient dies on the operating table, but does that mean you should hang up your doctor’s coat for good? Probably not.

The past is mostly helpful in big chunks. What’s interesting — and the only pattern we can truly spot, really — is when we commit to the wrong path again and again, doubling down on it until life forces reality down our throats: “Dead end, buddy. You’re gonna have to go back and start over.” Identifying the wrong roads before we’ve fully traced them is what deep reflection is for, and it’s usually enough if we practice it a few times a year. Even the hardest-won lessons, however, perhaps especially those, often get baked into our intuition in a way that allows us to access them without covering an entire whiteboard in marker.

When it comes to small, everyday adjustments, however, a tiny dose of yesterday is definitely enough. If you make one tiny improvement each day, those changes will still add up. Sure, you’ll undo some progress along the way, but on any meaningful timeline, the power of compounding is even harder to stop than it is to fathom.

Go on. Wear a different sweater, adjust your inbox management, or take a different route to work. Try one thing today, and you’ll find something else to try tomorrow. Remember yesterday’s outfit, but more importantly, remember that no lesson is ever lost — even if you can no longer recall the teacher’s name.