Month: January 2024

One day, my Google Analytics broke. For some reason, it just showed zero traffic. I went on Upwork and messaged the guy I had recently hired to do some loading speed optimizations. He promised to fix it for a fee, and off we went. There was only one problem: While he was in expert in website speed, he had no clue about data and analytics.

We ended up going back and forth for days. He asked me many questions. He told me to change this or move that, and for the life of him, he could not get my analytics to work. My gut told me this whole thing couldn’t possibly be this complex, and so, after much wasted time, I said: “Stop. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

I posted a new proposal on the platform explaining my dilemma, and within minutes, I had someone else ready to tackle the challenge. I reviewed their credentials, they explained their approach, and I gave them the go-ahead. About five minutes later, I got a message: “Done. It works.”

After breathing a big sigh of relief, I started to laugh. How long had this problem been on my mind? Two weeks? How many hours had I wasted with the other guy? And all of that for this? A five-minute fix? It was comical — but also a great lesson in getting help, especially the paid kind: When you enlist someone to do a job, do it once but properly. Especially if it’s a job you can neither do nor explain yourself.

If you hire the wrong person, you’ll just have to hire the right one later, and you’ll end up paying three times: Twice in cash, and once in time.

If it’s a task you can do yourself, it’s only a question of whether outsourcing is the right thing to do. You show the work, you explain the procedure, and you’ll know exactly if what you’re getting is the real deal. But if it’s something you need help with because you don’t understand it, you’re better off slightly overpaying for an expert than underpaying for an acquaintance who’s keen to help but unable to.

In working as in hiring, do it once but properly — and when you’re about to sign on to a new venture, remember that an honest “No” can be a bigger favor than a merely hopeful “Yes.”

“If you look at every medical drama on TV, who gets the hero buttons?” Julia Hubbel asks. Answer: “The ER doc who saves the victim, the guy who let a disease progress way too far.” It’s true: Healthcare has incentive problems. And though ego boosts and savior complexes might only make a small portion of doctors act against their patients’ best interests, money interests everyone — and that holds even more of the same power.

If big pharma succeeded in curing every disease, what would big pharma do afterwards? From a profit-perspective, it’s better to just sell drugs treating symptoms, because symptoms can continue to be treated as long as the patient remains sick, which, if that’s all you do, they certainly will. Despite the obvious flaw in its setup, this is not an easy problem to fix.

Imagine the government offered a reward of $1,000 for every person who never gets diabetes. That sounds lovely, but it pales in comparison to tens of thousands of dollars of insulin payments. Plus, you’ll have to wait for them to die to arrive at your conclusion. And which company gets the money, anyway? Prevention is the most efficient medicine, but unfortunately, it isn’t all too profitable.

In healthcare, this dynamic affects millions of people, and you’d think that’s bad enough. When it comes to the climate, however, it affects literally everyone — yet here, too, we seem to insist the heart rate monitor go flat before rushing to…where exactly, actually? That’s climate change’s unique problem: There won’t be an ER to stitch up the planet in by the time it goes into cardiac arrest.

Carbon credits are the 21st century’s letters of indulgence. “We’ll pay someone else to offset our emissions” sounds like a nice idea, but if the ultimate goal must be to reduce the totality of our carbon wastage, it’s simply a paid permission to pretend to hand off a responsibility that, in the end, no one can get rid of. Every company is passionate about reducing all emissions but their own. “Ours are special! Important! Necessary!” Even if the certificates are costly, they’re not exactly existential motivation to think about better ways of operating. But if we don’t all come up with those ways soon enough, eventually, our carbon sins will be impossible to pardon. If only the church sold a letter guaranteeing our entry into heaven…

Planting trees is a better, albeit still too run-after-the-bus solution, for it comes with a 40-year-delay we might not be able to effort. By the time each new tree absorbs enough CO2, we’ve long produced a thousand times the emissions. Let alone will we find the time and space to each plant 200 trees per year.

When prevention is the only thing that works yet not well-incentivized, perhaps it is easier to bring sexier incentives to the task than to try and force productivity despite their absence. If Tesla can make electric cars cool and desirable, surely someone else can do the same for solar modules, green production, and living without grid reliance.

As for being healthy? That’s always been cool — and so is telling people how to brush their teeth correctly, make a habit of light exercise, and eat well enough to avoid insulin injections. If you’re one of the few renegades taking extra time to do so after you’re done writing prescriptions, drawing blood, or changing a patient’s pillow: Thank you. Thank you for your service.

And if you’re “just” one of all of us affected by the dilemma, know it’s never too late to take the first step into the right direction. Prevention might not be profitable, but if money was all we sought, humanity would have gone extinct a long time ago. Let’s choose kindness one more time, and see where it leads.

“When I was a kid, I had a dog named Bean,” Lily tells her friend Robin after the latter has just explained how she’s finally over her ex-boyfriend, Don. “Whenever he made the face that you’re making right now, you just knew: He pooped somewhere in the house. Where’s the poop, Robin?”

At first, Robin pretends not to know what Lily is talking about. A few “Where’s the poop?”s later, however, she finally admits: She called her ex in a drunk stupor and left a nasty message on his voicemail. In what’s becoming my favorite How I Met Your Mother episode long after the show has ended — for it holds so many lessons — time and again, Robin will pretend everything is fine between her and Don — and time and again, Lily will call her out on her bullshit. “Where’s the poop, Robin?”

In my quest to root out the poop in my life, I find it a helpful question. When someone presents a deal that looks too good to be true, I can ask myself: “Where’s the poop?” When a project is not going as planned, I can sniff around: Was it some external barrier I failed to see? Have I made a mistake? Or did I just not work as hard on it as I thought I did? And when someone’s way of doing things seems like the perfect solution to all my problems, I can wonder what downsides they might incur because of it. After all, little in life is as it seems, and even roses need fertilizer in order to grow. Poop, in other words.

When you go through Lily Aldrin’s bull-detection school, most of the time, your poop-seeking questions will point outward. This is natural and required. We’re all bombarded with more crap than we could ever produce on our own, and it’s the world’s stinky stuff we’d like to filter out. However, every so often, probably at least once a day, you’ll have to turn the excrement-extricating question on yourself: “Where’s the poop, Nik?” For one, even after you identify them, in the end, it’s on you to not step into the turds other people leave behind. And for another, in the long run, it’s our own bullshit that hurts us the most.

If you’re lucky, you have a good friend like Lily, who will occasionally remind you to clean up after yourself when you drop something unsavory into your life. But no friend is perfect, and so even without outside help, we’ll have to learn to take care of our own messes. “Where’s the poop?”

Thankfully, smelly as it may be, at the end of the day, poop is just poop. Like our loyal canine friends, we all make doo-doo from time to time, and though it might take more than a plastic bag — forgetting your ex’s phone number, perhaps — with the right attitude and a little courage, our carpets will be crap-free again soon. Who knows? Maybe one day, when our best friend asks us, there’ll truly be no poop to report. After all, a dog can dream — and humans can fix their mistakes.

Writing a master’s thesis isn’t hard for a writer. What might be hard is admitting that it’s the right writing project to take on. In my case, it meant agreeing with friends and family that, despite my decent start as an entrepreneur, I should finish my traditional education — and that’s the part I struggled with. Once I allowed that idea to sink in, the rest was easy. I finished a month before the deadline.

The word “admit” means “to concede” which, in turn, is synonymous with “surrender.” Nobody likes giving up. It’s not a nice feeling. But “admit” also means “to let in.” To make room for something for which there was no space before. Often, that’s the very aspect that makes us feel like we’re giving up.

Most of the time, you know the exact steps necessary to handle a challenge. You’ll know them from the moment the challenge appears. A thesis needs an advisor, a topic, a structure, an experiment, and a certain number of words. A drop in revenue needs an analysis, a few options on how to fix it, and then for those options to be executed one by one until some remedy works. And a calendar that’s too full needs honest reflection — and then for you to simply stop engaging with the tasks and people who aren’t actually important.

Once you get rolling on the steps, no problem is as bad as it looks. It’s tossing the boulder down the hill that makes us stop in hesitation. After all, as soon as we start working on it, we admit we have a problem. We concede that we were wrong or made a mistake. And we must let go of the person we were before the struggle. That is the struggle, actually. We solve problems all the time. But the ones that threaten our identity are harder to admit. To let in. Once they’re in the door, there’s no turning back.

Actually, that’s not true. If one challenge forces you to change in a certain way, who’s to say another can’t change you right back? Every day, you’re a new person — and with that, naturally, you’ll get new problems to solve. The faster you can admit what’s necessary, the more progress you’ll make, and the less friction in forward-movement you’ll perceive.

When you feel stuck, look for the truth your heart is resisting. Allow a new reality to come in. Admit it. As soon as you step up to the mat, the game can truly begin — and what is life if not an adventure for us to play?

In The Equalizer 3, badass retired agent Robert McCall is not having such a badass time. Of all the people who could — and usually can’t — hurt him, McCall gets shot in the back by a ten-year-old. Discovered by an Italian policeman, who brings him to the doctor of his confidence, the two save McCall’s life first, then ask questions later. One of them is…

“Did we save a good man or a bad man?” “I don’t know,” McCall says, no longer sure whether his killing sprees are actually done in the name of good or simply an addiction he can no longer get rid of. After the aging assassin recovers and settles into the comfy village-life of the Italian coastal town, new trouble soon appears, and once again, McCall must decide: Will I clean up this mess with a gun, or is that just going to make things worse?

Looking for some guidance on whether to fight for or abandon his new life, McCall turns to Enzo, the doctor who saved him. “Remember what I asked you?” Enzo says. “Am I a good man or a bad man?” McCall replies. “Yeah. And you said you didn’t know.” As if to reaffirm, McCall repeats: “I don’t know.”

“Only a good man would have said that.” And with that, McCall knows everything he needs to know. About what to do. About where to go. About which side to take, what to let go of, and what to take a stand for.

There’s only one reason to try very hard to convince someone that you are a good person: You need them to believe you so that you can believe yourself — because deep down, you’re aware of all the evidence to the contrary. It’s not other people that need convincing. It’s you.

If, instead of erasing the bad evidence by telling yourself and others a story, you simply try to make up for it with good deeds, you won’t find that conviction either — but you’ll realize it never existed in the first place, and that’s worth a lot.

When it comes to ethics, morals, and values, the only way to share our stance is to live it. Show, don’t tell, and when push comes to shove, ironically, everyone else will be able to tell who you are long before you show your hand.

When the trees started shedding their leafy dresses, I ordered a rake so I could clean the garden one last time before the winter. Every day since it arrived, however, it has been raining. The leaves are wet, the wind is cold, and so raking will have to wait a few more days.

We easily understand and are happy to comply with nature’s limitations. Why not our own? Do you really have to buy the new TV now, when your budget is low? It might be cheaper next year. Is it necessary to quit your job when the economy is at its toughest? Why not launch your business in the spring? Especially if you’re going to sell flowers.

It’s tempting to pour urgency over everything, but often, urgency, like the water in the sauna, only creates more steam. It heats up the room — but you’re still in the same place. Movement can happen slowly, and often that’s when it is most sustainable. Lions spend most of their time waiting. Only when the right opportunity presents itself do they pounce.

Don’t be the grumpy gardener, raking in the rain against the odds. Wait for the sun. Time the moment. Begin from a position of strength. Rake when it’s dry, and remember that life, like nature or a good TV show, has many seasons — sooner or later, the right one will arrive for you to accomplish what you set out to do.

Towards the end of the 2021 bull market in crypto, I took some of my paper profits from the portfolio and moved them from one coin into another. The new investment was a sort of index fund on the blockchain gaming industry, something I figured could do well if the sector started blooming, and it was also diversified enough to not suffer should any single game fall flat with its players.

Since the coin was in the single-dollar range, I thought owning 1,000 of them would be a well-sized investment. After launching at around $2, the coin topped at around $10 before the bull market ended. I bought my stack at $9. Ouch.

Over the next year, the investment did what pretty much every other investment in crypto did: It went down 90% and then some.

Investing might be the hardest arena to fight mental bias in. Sunk cost is yelling at you to not let go of the precious dollars you put into something. The endowment effect makes your investment feel emotionally valuable, even if, financially, it has nothing to show for. And those are just the voices in your own head. Go on Twitter, and there are millions more, each one happy to tell you exactly what to do — except no one knows what’s right and wrong any more than you do.

What I’ve learned and try to live by, however, is that the only position that matters is the position you are in right now. Whether your coin, stock, or blog traffic went up 1,000% or down 90% is irrelevant. That has already happened. What’s important is what position that leaves you in for the future, and how you should adjust based on all the information you have today.

In my case, the first question I had to ask was whether the coin was still a good long-term investment. I figured that it was. It had been released at the tail end of a bull market. As a result, it got caught up in the already-dying hype, but the underlying idea was solid. Many of the best games hadn’t been published yet, and the team had acquired a vast, well-diversified war chest to last through a prolonged bear market.

The next question was: If I’m going to stay invested, should I increase my position size? At such a big drawdown, the answer is obvious. Given the new price, 10,000 coins would now be a more solid amount to capture a meaningful part of any future growth — and to get back into profit faster, of course. So almost a year after my initial investment, I started buying more coins below $1. I kept stacking until I had 10,000.

Ultimately, I bought the first 1,000 coins for $9,000, and the last 9,000 for $5,000. I roughly 10x-ed my investment for only 50% more money. What position are you in now? In my example, I had brought the average price per coin down from almost $10 to $1.50. From that new starting point, it would be a lot easier to regain my investment.

Of course, bear markets always last longer than you would like them to, and my coins kept eroding in value. But I felt good about my position. I was confident that it would come back. At this point, my mind was made up: I’m holding this one for the long haul. Almost another year later, the price seemed to have bottomed at around $0.15 and was hovering around $0.20. Again, I asked myself: “What’s your position now?” I realized I could double my stack again for just $2,000 — and that would bring my break-even price to just $0.85.

In the end, what started as a good investment made at a terrible price became, through consistent doubling down all the way to the bottom throughout a grueling bear market, a good investment made at a wonderful price. It’s been only a few months since the first signs of an early bull market have finally reappeared, but here I am, sitting in slight profit on a position that’s over two years old and, for most of its lifetime, looked like a gigantic mistake to any third party.

The lesson here is not to stick to your guns. It’s to check your guns every day. Are they still working? Do they need cleaning? Is there a newer model you must switch to if you want to stay on top of the game? Or are your guns perfectly fine as they are, no adjustments needed?

Don’t hold on to what’s no longer working, no matter when it stopped working. Embrace what is useful, no matter when it has become useful.

The only position that matters is the position you are in right now. Make sure it’s the best springboard it can possibly be into tomorrow, and then tomorrow, you’ll check your position again — until you come out on top or, at the very least, into the green with your investments.

When the Pokémon Company prints trading cards, they pay a certain price for them. Probably no more than a handful of dollars for a few hundred cards. But then they put ten of them in a booster pack each, and they stack 36 booster packs into a display box. Suddenly, that box retails at $100, and of course, yes, the creativity in creating the Pokémon, and their attacks, and drawing the pictures, and so on, is worth something too.

If you’re trying to buy a display for a set that’s popular, however, perhaps one that was released a few years back, $100 is also not where it ends. In case of Evolving Skies, a set that’s not yet particularly rare but extremely popular, a box retails for over $400 less than two years after it was first released. Every now and then, you’ll catch someone opening one on Youtube, and besides it being thrilling to hunt for cool Pokémon, there’s usually also a question looming over the creator’s head: Will they get their money’s worth?

Almost invariably, the answer is “No.” Why? Because if you calculate the statistics after opening thousands of packs of that set (and yes, people have), you’ll instantly realize there’s only one card in the entire 200-card set that can recoup the value of the box in one fell swoop — and your chance of pulling that card is around 1 in 2000. A few others can get into the $100-range, and sure if you pulled 20 cards valued at $20 each, you’d break even too — but once again, you won’t, because there’s only a handful of “hits” in each display.

In other words, the odds of making money come close to those of a miracle. It is much cheaper to just by all the cards you want outright than to try and pull them from the boosters. And yet, people keep buying boxes and opening packs. Why? Hope. Hope is worth more than the box, and until you actually open it, every single one of them holds, at the very least, the potential to contain one of those bank-breaker cards. That’s why the displays are worth more closed than opened: The surprise, the potential, the hope is still there. As soon as you tear away the plastic, it dissipates, and reality sets in. Then, it’s back to cold, hard numbers — and who wants to return to those? How uninspiring!

Some people look at this, see a stupid game, and choose not to play. Others smell an advantage, create a spreadsheet, and assemble premium collections for half the price. Some just enjoy the occasional booster opening experience, and others make Youtube channels opening the oldest, most expensive sets for millions to watch. Whichever category you fall into when it comes to Pokémon cards, chances are, you’ll search for that same experience somewhere. It might be watching new movies at the cinema, meeting people in your industry for coffee chats, or playing the lottery, but we all want hope one way or another.

Hope is the spirit of art, joy, and connection. It brings out inspiration, optimism, and courage. That’s why no good story can make do without it, and why the box is worth so much more than the cards. For all its silly sources, remember that hope is not a trivial game we play. It’s an essential part of being alive. We need it to sustain us, and it’s one of our best tools for sustaining others. The questions are often more valuable than the answers, because questions, unlike answers, keep us going — including the one that has everyone wondering when they marvel at a $400 Pokémon-card display: “What’s in the box?“

It’s obvious, and everyone knows it, but I’m still regularly surprised by how often this is true, both for the people and events I’m trying to get a read on and for myself.

Why does the popular fashion Youtuber suddenly talk about everything under the sun, including many topics she knows absolutely nothing about? Why does my email service provider automatically charge me more when I get more subscribers but not charge me less when I lose some? Why does the writer I know is dying to publish a book continue to churn out Medium posts day after day? Money, money, money.

Most of the time, money’s magnetic force is fairly obvious. Sometimes, however, the irresistible incentive hides behind higher aspirations — especially when it’s you it wants to fool. I can tell myself a great story about why I send out sponsored emails, why I put together big list posts, or why I still promote products whose owners have not treated me fairly, but in the end, the answer is money.

It’s not a nice realization. Even if we’re somewhat aware of how money-driven we are, few of us understand the full extent of how often money is the deciding factor in what we do, and almost no one would want to have the full picture even if they could — because in that picture, we just wouldn’t look like the kind, purposeful, altruistic people we aspire to — and can — be. Unfortunately, looking into the mirror and pointing at those ugly specks of greed is the only way to actually live up to those aspirations.

When you’re sniffing around for people’s incentives, make “Is it money?” one of the first questions you ask. Find the many roundabout ways a desire for more coin manifests itself, and slice through bogus motivations at lightning speed. Most importantly, however, don’t forget to turn the question on yourself in everything you do — especially when it hurts.

Sometimes, money is exactly the right mark, and when it is, we should be honest and unashamed of it. But whenever short-term dollar blinders actually prevent us not just from our true goal but even from maximizing our financial returns in the long run, the kindest thing we can do for ourselves and others is to take those blinders off.

When in doubt, don’t do it for the money — and if you find you are, perhaps it’s time to do something different altogether.

While writing one of my books, I googled, “how to sell a million copies.” The only person that had any meaningful, been-there-done-that advice was Charlie Hoehn, who worked with several multi-million-copy bestseller authors.

I liked Charlie’s post. He made it clear that selling a million copies was neither a good nor a feasible goal, but he also offered a list of interesting questions to ask yourself to maximize your book’s potential.

When I recently came back to the piece, however, Charlie’s website had transformed. It looked more professional. Business-y. The personal blog flair had gone, and the article, too, had changed. While still adding his original disclaimer down further in the piece, Charlie now claimed that “Selling a million copies is not luck. It’s a science.” He also suggested the authors were 100% responsible for their success.

It was still a good piece with even more resources than before, but it felt like the role of luck was somewhat diminished compared to how much Charlie had emphasized it previously. Most notably, instead of 7 stress tests with around ten questions each to ask yourself about your book, there were now 12 tests with more than a hundred prompts.

Once again, they were all good questions, but as I was browsing them, I wondered: “How many of the bestselling authors Charlie has worked with went through this list before they wrote their books? How many of them made sure they complied with every single one of them?” I think the answer is zero. For one, the list seems to be constantly evolving. And for another, if any writer tried to satisfy all these questions, they’d never get their book done.

There’s no such thing as a million-dollar check list, and even if there was, it wouldn’t help you do the actual work required to make a million bucks. If you’re an author, write books, publish them, and try to make each next one a little better than the last. If you’re a restaurant owner, make good food, and treat your guests with kindness. And if you’re an athlete, train hard, and do your best on competition day.

The only million-dollar check list that works is the one someone else sells you: It will satisfy your FOMO, but it will make them rich, not you.

Take all the useful advice you can get, reflect on your endeavors regularly, and try to incorporate good feedback when you receive it — but in the end, success of any kind only requires one item on your to-do list: hard, honest work — and that’s a box you can check every day, even if you don’t google any business advice at all.