Month: December 2023

This year, I made 50% more revenue, but my profits almost doubled. How? I cut my operational expenses in half. I was able to reinvest more into the business, pay myself a higher salary, and still have twice as much left at the end of the day, all because I stopped outsourcing, showed up for the work, and trimmed the frills.

Often, it’s easiest to get more for better. Instead of worrying about a $500 expense, you should think about how to make $500 more. The latter will often carry you well beyond the target, whereas the former puts boundaries on your thinking. Why purposely limit your income to collect a check from the government if you can use your creativity to blow the government’s honey pot out of the water?

Once you’ve built a sizable operation, however, it may indeed pay to look at how you can get more from less — in my case literally. Volume can have sustenance, or it can consist entirely of bloat. Let the excess air out of the system! Balloons fly higher when they’re filled with helium, and chances are, you’re the best person for the job.

Seek more for better when you can, but don’t forget about getting more from less. Don’t let anything or anyone blow hot air into your operation for too long, and remember to enjoy the work that’s calling upon you to do it.

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful,” Warren Buffett says. Countless people know the saying. Most of them agree with it. Barely anyone can actually act on it.

“If I, today, imagine how I’d respond to stocks falling 30%, I picture a world where everything is like it is today except stock valuations, which are 30% cheaper,” Morgan Housel writes in Same as Ever. “But that’s not how the world works. Downturns don’t happen in isolation. The reason stocks might fall 30% is because big groups of people, companies, and politicians screwed something up, and their screwups might sap my confidence in our ability to recover.”

It’s easy to believe you’d handle a challenge well if you think about that challenge in a vacuum and from your current, comfortable position. But reality hits different. “I’ll buy Apple stock when it falls 30%.” Sure, but what are the odds of Apple stock falling that much while everything else stays peachy? Close to zero. And when everything falls 30%, the news will be full of headlines proclaiming the end of the world. Red, red, red is all you’ll see. Your neighbor might have to close his store, and suddenly, saving that extra cash looks a lot better than putting it into the market.

The same applies to great success, of course. One day, your portfolio might tick over the $1 million mark, but you won’t feel all that different. You’ll still go to work, eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, and wake up with a headache every now and then. “If you think of your future self living in a new mansion, you imagine basking in splendor and everything feeling great,” Housel goes on. “What’s easy to forget is that people in mansions can get the flu, have psoriasis, become embroiled in lawsuits, bicker with their spouses, feel wracked with insecurity and annoyed with politicians which in any given moment can supersede any joy that comes from material success.”

“Reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention” — and we struggle to allocate that attention in the right proportions, in the moment but especially in advance.

Make your plans, steel your nerves, and prepare as best as you can, but remember: Reality hits different. Set up reminders to recall your intentions when those intentions will feel far away, and expand the scope of what you believe the future can look like. It’s much harder done than said, but with the right knowledge, habits, and attitudes in place, you can be ready when the storm hits — and perhaps you’ll become one of the few who can actually “be greedy when others are fearful.”

In November 2017, Jeff Bezos became the first man whose fortune moved sustainably beyond the $100-billion mark. Six years later, every single one of the world’s ten richest people owns more than $100 billion worth of stuff, and the new king of the list, Elon Musk, is worth nearly two and a half times as much.

When my dad was in his 30s, no one could even have imagined a single company being worth more than a trillion dollars. Today, we have six of them, and the list will keep growing.

Numbers are an easy victim to pick because inflation alone makes them go up on autopilot to a certain degree, but the real lesson is neither that things will get better on their own nor that inflation is our friend — it’s that frontiers fall all the time, and just because we can’t imagine one breaking down doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

“The social democrats will never partner with the lefties,” politicians asserted in Germany not that long ago. Until, in one of the local state governments, they did. “Bitcoin will never go over $10,000.” But it did. “The US has never defaulted on its debt.” Well, one day, it might!

If one man can amass a $100 billion fortune, why can’t we imagine another man — or woman — amassing wealth worth $1 trillion? If a $1 trillion company can exist, why can’t a $10 trillion one? It’s just another zero, and new zeroes tend to eventually appear.

Don’t dismiss big thinking, even before it becomes big reality. Time might be relative, but history only moves forward. Get used to the new status quo before it walks around the corner, and life will rarely catch you off guard.

I recognized myself in his struggle. In an essay, the man — let’s call him Ned — described how, after four years of on-and-off meditation, he gave up. He did, however, find a new, perhaps more fitting companion, Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages ritual, and a bit of comfort in an old book from Joseph Campbell: There is more than one way to be mindful, and spirituality is as individual of an experience as it gets.

Like me, Ned admitted to being skeptical of “running is my meditation” folks. After all, only meditation is meditation. The whole point is not doing, not replacing your scary thoughts with some distraction or other that happens to feel immersive enough to get you away from your mind for a while. But for a man besieged with depression, anxiety, and dark moods, perhaps bathing in those emotions is not the best idea — at least not right off the bat. If a 30-minute writing session can make Ned feel more comfortable inside his own brain, perhaps that habit should take precedence over hour-long sitting sessions in silence. He can always add meditation back in later, should he still miss it.

What struck me most about Ned’s story, however, is the fervor with which he searched for a solution to his emotions. From meditating for eight hours in one day to running shirtless in a blizzard to gushing out page after page in his journal, Ned, like so many people in their 20s, is a seeker. He’s tried every morning routine, hack, and habit. He’s done them all for a while, but none all that consistently. And ultimately, he will realize, for all his seeking, there is nothing to be found — because you can’t fix what’s not broken.

You, dear Ned, are not broken. I don’t know which of the many parts you described are you, and which are just band-aids, but you don’t need any of the latter. You are simply human, and this existence comes with many challenges. Yours might lie in the mind-department, whereas someone else’s are more of the physical variety, but challenges we all face regardless.

How we deal with our trials is only a small part initial attraction to a solution, and a large part making that solution a lifelong habit. All habits are acquired tastes, and all tastes can be acquired. How do I know? I hated nearly all vegetables when I was 12, and now I love most of them. It might be that morning pages flow more easily out of your pen than thoughts through your mind during meditation in the first week, month, or even year. But sooner or later, you won’t want to do it. No matter what “it” is, on some days, it will seem tiring. Demanding. Pointless. It is on those days that it’s most important we continue, precisely because we are not in the process of fixing a broken human but merely living our lives, complete with the habits we’ve chosen to value above all others. Whether it’s meditation, morning pages, or a daily run: If you do it long enough, you’ll learn to like it — and if you do it even longer, you’ll follow through even on the days when you don’t.

The point of mindfulness is to make room to deal with our emotions. That room must be accessible every day. Even if we sometimes leave it empty, sometimes fill it until it bursts, knowing that this room exists is what truly creates lasting contentment and inner peace. We need to be able to trust ourselves that, yes, more emotional space is on the way. Always. The rest is flexible. Adjustable. The final pieces will fall into place automatically as long as the entire puzzle is on the table. The consistency of our mindfulness practice — and any practice, really — is more important than which particular practice we choose.

As human beings, we are already complete, and that’s exactly why there is much to do. To share. To create. To live. To experience. Habits are not blowtorches, meant to ratchet up and down in intensity until the meal is crispy — until the problem is fixed, the leg works again, the anxiety fades away. They are companions on our journey, ideally for the whole trip, and which habits we choose simply reveals how we individually want to deal with the universal experiences we all share. If you stop moving your leg after it’s healed, guess what? Sooner or later, it will stop working again. Worry, fear, and sadness will equally never make their last appearance. There’s always an encore from the emotions section of the orchestra.

Habits are a way to accept life’s many recurring patterns, and to invite them in instead of shooing them out the door, hoping they’ll never return — which they’ll always do regardless. Know that your habits are more than solutions to problems, and that, when it comes to your humanity, there really are no problems to begin with — only experiences, waiting for you to live, process, and share them in the unique ways of your own choosing. That choosing is the job we’re truly asked to show up for, and like any job, it gets a little easier with routine — but hey, when the draft doesn’t work, you crumple it up and try again. Even shredded paper can feed a fire, and at the end of the day, what matters is that your soul stays warm.

This week, I published several pieces on Medium that went nowhere. I also read a rant by an author condemning Amazon to be worse than any traditional publisher, making him less money than a few Medium articles each month despite his 30 published novels. Finally, I observed a Twitter feud where one thread writer accused another of stealing his work for his new, competing writing class.

The truth that unites the four of us? It’s just not that good. Our stuff, that is. The work we think is hot enough to make the big bucks. Or wish it were, perhaps.

There are a million ways to fail when shooting for the moon, but the following three won’t even land you among the stars. They’ll make sure you’ll stay firmly grounded with little to show for, failing quickly and silently into oblivion.

1. Easy mode. Amazon sure has its problems, but if there’s one thing they like doing, it’s making a buck. If your book sells, even a little, Amazon will keep pushing it — if only a little. If you have 30 titles out yet can’t make $500, the problem is not Amazon. The problem is your first book was not that good — and you seem to haven’t learned anything since. It’s comfortable to stay on easy mode. To repeat the same work over and over again, mistakes and all. But you can’t expect different results if you’re refusing to change. Try harder, but mostly, try something harder.

2. Addiction to moral high ground. Especially on Twitter, it’s en vogue to show how virtuous you are by tearing someone else down — as if that wasn’t a paradox. If you find yourself trying to claim copyright for three-word tweets composed of the most common words in the English language, you’ve probably lost the plot a little. It just makes you look silly — as does using those same phrases to sell a purported writing class when, actually, all you’ve ever done is tweeted. Perhaps first, before going to war over your values, you could do some actual writing. Which brings me to…

3. Playing the wrong games. Reposting my blog posts on Medium is fun. It might make a dollar or two. But it’s not only easy work when there are many hard tasks left to do, it’s the wrong game to play altogether. Whatever time I can spare should go to books and big, daring pieces, the kind that might not work but that could also turn out to be “just that good.” Not making a few more shekels with light edits and carefully picked cover images — especially if the pieces I’m choosing are not the ones perfectly suited for the Medium audience.

Pick the right battles, challenge yourself, and don’t get lost in berating other people. Some failures are better than others. Crash in the right lane so you can keep going after you hit a wall and still reach your ultimate destination.

Today, I was late on sending my newsletter. I was late because I had a stomach ache, which I got from a big meal I ate yesterday for date night, which is why I was too tired to do it yesterday night, and which we went on yesterday instead of our usual day because on that day, I have a surgery at the dentist’s, which I have on that day because they asked me to move it twice from its original date, which they did because…

I could keep going. Endlessly. I could slice this blame-chain into a million different branches, each of which would make logical sense and be more or less reasonable. Understandable. Justified. Or, I can just continue. Continue writing the newsletter, and hit send when it’s ready. Continue with this blog, the Christmas gift planning, and the next, relaxing gaming session when I’m done.

There’s always something to complain about. Always a valid reason of concern. Everyone has them. No one deserves them. Yet here we are, and in each tiny, microscopic instance, the world is split into two: those who complain, and those who continue.

I’m sorry about your struggles, but please: Don’t let those struggles define you. Keep on keepin’ on. Trade your complainer’s hat for a continuer’s cape, and then, whatever “it” is, go and prepare and do it. You’re bigger than your misery — and every time you show us, we’ll remember to keep continuing too.

What do the makers of low-content books, a dropshipper, and a car company that buys 90% of its parts have in common? They’re crown-less kings, hoping to be something without doing it. Why else would you outsource the point?

A person who’s proud to design calendars, planners, and notebooks would call themselves a designer. A maker of “low-content books” calls themselves an author or publisher but doesn’t write a single word. Someone who runs Facebook ads to get people to buy disco lights on a Shopify store that ships said lights straight from China via Alibaba — sight unseen on both the buyer and the seller’s part — that person is not a maker but a salesman. And if you’re putting together car parts you bought from all over the world instead of making your own, are you really a manufacturer? Or simply managing a very expensive Lego factory with a long, convoluted supply chain?

When you consider starting a new venture that seems all too easy, ask yourself: Do you really want to do the work that comes with the terrain? Or are you planning on giving away the crown? The latter almost never leads to success, let alone the lasting kind.

Sometimes, however, we simply forget along the way. We perform the magic for so long, we get tired and ask for a break. Suddenly, four years have passed, and we realize we’re riding in a carriage without a driver. How could we ever have handed over the reins?

For around three years, I didn’t write any of the summaries on Four Minute Books. I handed off that responsibility. In hindsight, I should have just published less. Now I’m stuck with a lot of summaries I know should — and could — be better, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to fixing them. But I did take back my crown. I see other summary sites relying on poor, AI-generated content, and I shudder: When you give away the lifeblood of your project to a machine, you might as well give up.

This isn’t to say that outsourcing can’t support you in doing more of what you care about. I could never run a Youtube channel without Adam‘s help. But unless you’re amplifying the core work you’re busy doing, handing off work isn’t productive — it’s giving up.

Don’t throw away your crown, and don’t begin anything if you’re not willing to wear it. Take pride in doing the work in your arena, and when you need a break, remember that less magic is always better than no magic at all.

When his oldest friend and longtime collaborator, Michele Besso, died only a few months before he himself would pass from this life, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to his family. He mentioned that their letter correspondence later in life could never quite live up to their conversations on walks home from university when they were young, for “with his pen, Besso could not keep up with his versatile spirit.”

Einstein closes the letter with a now famous phrase: “Now he has again preceded me a little in parting from this strange world. This has no importance. For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present, and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.” As the man who had corrected Isaac Newton, proving time is relative, not absolute, Einstein knew a thing or two about this “tenacious illusion.”

So did Siddhartha, the protagonist of Hermann Hesse’s eponymous novel. After a long journey through life that seems to have gone in one big circle, he, too, concludes that “‘times to come’ are a deception, are only a parable.” The enlightenment Siddhartha had been chasing? It was within him all along — and everywhere around him, too. “The world is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: No, it is perfect in every moment. All sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself; all small children already have the old person in themselves; all infants already have death; all dying people the eternal life.”

Whether we do so through deep meditation or some other means, if we “put time out of existence” and imagine all happenings — past, present, and future — as simultaneous, we shall see that in this state of unity, “everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman,” Siddhartha explains. It is only from this oneness, this attitude of total, complete acceptance, that we can draw a unique kind of invincibility, he continues: “Therefore, I see whatever exists as good. Death is to me like life, sin like holiness, wisdom like foolishness. Everything has to be as it is. Everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me.”

Of course, Siddhartha had to walk a long and arduous path to arrive at this conclusion. He had to sin, to suffer, to lust, to lose, to desire and to despair “in order to learn how to give up resisting. In order to learn how to love the world. In order to stop comparing it to some world I wished for, some world I imagined, a made up kind of perfection I invented,” and to instead “leave it as it is, and love it, and enjoy being a part of it.”

It’s hard to believe that the world is perfect, especially with so much evidence to the contrary thrown in our faces every day. It is harder still, however, to practice this belief on a daily basis and act accordingly when it is tested. When you get fired, face disease, or lose a loved one. Yet it is outright impossible for me, or Siddhartha, or even a man as brilliant as Albert Einstein to hand you this belief on a silver platter. It must be won by walking the path of life. Your path. A path no one knows, not even you, until you’ve walked it.

Everything has already happened. Everything is always happening. Everything will always still happen. The golden Buddha was, is, and will be inside you. At which perceived point during the tenacious illusion we call time will you choose to be it? That might be life’s greatest mystery — but perhaps all it requires is our consent, our willingness, our loving agreement to be good for us, to do nothing but work for our benefit, to be unable to ever harm us.

After all, thus goes a message Einstein passed on to a little boy near the very end of his life, on against the imaginary yet stubborn current of time, a message he once learned together with his friend Michele when he was young: “One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. Do not stop to think about the reasons for what you are doing, about why you are questioning. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Never lose a holy curiosity” — and if it is curiosity that gets us to love the world as it is, to be a versatile spirit that enjoys being a part of life, the universe, and everything that exists, then that truly must be the noblest of all, perhaps even a holy pursuit, don’t you think?

Yesterday, I put the last brick on a 500-piece Lego set. It must have been the first one I assembled in almost 20 years. My girlfriend, who had never built Lego before, was surprised at my ability to quickly spot which parts we needed, how to put them together, and where each next, intermediate piece went on the larger construction. So was I, to be honest.

Having built dozens of Lego sets as a kid, it seems the skills I acquired back then never disappeared. They were just asleep; ready to re-emerge from their nap at any time. Now, I wonder what else is down there.

Could that one good pencil sketch I made when I was 14 still be of service later? Will I ever put the collage-making skills I used to tune my homework planner in high school to some other use? Who knows — but it gives me some sense of comfort and confidence that those and plenty of other tricks are hiding up my sleeve, just waiting for the right challenge to appear.

Writing a CV is hard because you have to dig for abilities you might no longer know are even there — but in life, those abilities will always reveal themselves when you truly need them. Don’t underestimate your slumbering skills.

It’s not every day that the greatest scientist alive is the recipient of a lesson instead of its teacher. But after she reminds him of his infidelity, his continued insistence on exposing her to the dangers of living in Nazi Germany, and his complete absence in his sons’ lives for months, Elsa Einstein is not satisfied with her husband’s answer.

“Yes, well, things have been…”

“Things are always!” she cuts him off.

And just like that, Albert Einstein remembers there’s never a good time to prioritize your family. To do what is necessary. Good. Important.

To publish a paper that might upset the scientific community but improve our understanding of the world. To complete a theory many esteemed colleagues don’t even believe in. To choose a larger, worthy cause and serve it, sacrifice and all.

The day you’re waiting for — the day when making a big change, an important decision, a necessary commitment will be easy — will never come. Things are always. All we have is today — so today might as well be the day we step up.