Month: March 2024

In 1914, Thomas Edison’s lab complex burned down in spectacular fashion. Thousands of patent ideas, gadgets, and inventions, destroyed in a few hours. Contrary to what one might expect, Edison did not fall to his knees and cry.

“Go get your mother and all her friends,” Edison told his son. “They’ll never see a fire like this again.” He even claimed that “it’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.” It wasn’t part of his plan, but at 67 years old, Edison decided to “start all over again tomorrow,” as he told The New York Times the next day.

Within 3 weeks, buildings were partially restored, and his employees were at work in temporary facilities. The following year, his company posted $10 million in revenue, about 10x what he had lost in the fire.

Even if you aren’t as good at coping in real-time as Thomas Edison, whether it’s with some temporal distance or a lot, you, too, can turn a calamity into a can-can. With the right perspective, a big loss is not a bereavement but merely a prompt to begin anew, with a clean slate, and reinvent yourself.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a disaster. Only an invitation to dance — and even if the ticket arrives in fire and flames, what is life but the chance to say yes and start twirling?

When he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars because his wife was annoyed at one of the comedian’s jokes, Will Smith traded several years of his life for a 30-second reaction.

Imagine standing there a few minutes later, finally, after decades, holding the Academy Award for Best Actor, and having to give an acceptance speech to a room full of people who now hates your guts — and, worst of all, rightfully so. The adrenaline! If a situation like that doesn’t cause your body to produce a stress reaction worth the equivalent of seven years of grunt work, I don’t know what will.

If you’re not a Hollywood star, your chances of ruining both your career and your inner peace in a single moment are lower — but not nonexistent. Plenty of CEOs have been fired for hitting the wine too hard at the company Christmas party, and many an athlete has lost their biggest sponsor over an offhand comment at a press conference. Often, it is only after the mistake that the loss of life force truly begins.

But even in our everyday lives, we commonly trade more time later for silly indulgences today. Every cigarette puff now might be a few hours you won’t have in your 80s, and every meaningless spat with your spouse today could turn into days of silence after retirement.

Don’t trade years for seconds. We all make mistakes we can’t take back, but let’s at least try to not make them on purpose.

If you have ten years of experience in your field, you don’t need daily industry updates to make sound decisions. Your gut should inform your thinking, not the other way around. But nowadays we all have an endless, constant stream of information pouring into our brains day in and day out. That makes it hard to use our gut at all, no matter how well-developed it might be.

Let’s say you’re a designer tasked with rebranding an orange juice company. If you go online and start researching, you’ll find mountains of evidence that round, flat shapes are the way to go. You’ll also find data that supports 3D images making a comeback. You’ll find success stories from brands with one-syllable names without vowels and brands with names that sound like they’ve been around for 200 years.

In other words, you can buy into any narrative and subsequent set of decisions that you want. It all worked for somebody. Overwhelmed with options, which route you ultimately choose ends up being somewhat random, influenced by which information you find when, or whoever’s story sounds most compelling. But if you go about your work that way, you neglect years of training. You use your gut only to latch on to other people’s advice instead of using it outright.

A great designer doesn’t open their browser at all when starting a project. They consult their gut first, and perhaps later, they might supplement what their experience tells them with information. “What makes this brand special? What kind of design would reflect this specialness well?” All you need is a bunch of questions, some boredom, and perhaps a sketch board or iPad to doodle on.

It’s hard to put technology aside in a world where technology is ubiquitous. But it’s neither impossible nor a recipe for disaster. Remember what your strengths are, but even more importantly, remember to use them.

It’s easy to lose your headspace when the world around you feels like a tsunami. To question everything and throw even the most basic assumptions out the window.

As a writer, it’s tempting to write off the daily blog as a nuisance because almost no one reads it. In a world that is filling with information ever faster, little daily trinkets won’t win the war of engagement. In the long run, long-form, high-quality writing is required. But a daily blog, run, or home-made meal aren’t meant to win the war. They’re combat practice for the real fight that must happen later.

I can’t produce something mind-blowing in 15 minutes — but if I don’t spend 15 minutes warming up my fingers and brain every day, I might never produce anything mind-blowing at all. Don’t confuse the training for the competition. Otherwise, you might quit too early.

Remember that practice is just practice, and then keep showing up for it.

On some days, you just don’t — and then it’s okay, even generous, if you don’t. Let others fill the space you usually inhabit, and if the audience basks in it all on their own, that’s fine too. Wrapped in the right intention, silence is as great a gift as any other — for the giver as much as for the recipient.

One of the few privileges my grandparents had that I didn’t is that they could keep their money in the same bank account for most of their lives without ever having to worry about it losing its value. Between 1955 and 1989, Germany always had real interest rates of 3-5%, meaning even after inflation, your money would grow a little bit every year.

Today, protecting your money is a much bigger feat — and the perfect bank account no longer exists. Trust me, I know. I have six of them.

One account with a neobank is for Four Minute Books. It’s fast and cheap for currency conversions, but verifying my identity, “proof of funds,” etc. is a nightmare. So I don’t want to hand them all my money.

Another account is for my writing activities. It’s smooth and easy to use, but it costs 10 euros per month, and I don’t get any interest whatsoever.

My personal account is with one of Germany’s oldest banks. It’s nice that they know me. I can call them with any problem, and they don’t fuss too much whenever I need to bump up my credit limit. Unfortunately, they’re terribly slow, often block and inquire about my transactions, and pay zero interest. Plus, their fees keep going up. They just raised them again — by 70%.

For every problem one account solves, it provides another challenge only a different bank handles well. It’s a never-ending circle, and so I keep opening and closing accounts, moving money around, and have to stay somewhat up to date on the developments with each bank. It’s hard work, and I’m not sure it’s always worth the hassle, but I’d rather pay too much attention to my money than too little.

Of course, what applies to banks applies to everything else in life, too. It’s a point well-made on a t-shirt Tim Ferriss saw someone wear while at a rock climbing gym: “No solutions, only tradeoffs.” For every plus, there’s a minus, and while you can swap ones and zeroes as much as you like, you’ll always end up with some wins and some losses.

Going back to my grandparents, while they might have enjoyed an average interest rate of 4% for more than half a century, the steady availability of those rates has turned Germany into an extremely risk-averse market for investors. Many people I know today still think stocks are dangerous and akin to gambling. Even ETFs “sound sketchy.” Historically, only around 10-15% of Germans even own any stocks at all — and that means entire generations, including my grandparents, have missed out on the massive growth in equities as compared to even very good interest rates.

No solutions, only tradeoffs. Pick your problems wisely, and don’t worry about perfection.

The skin on her fingertips was starting to peel. Both the cold and the adhesive were to blame. This was flyer number 1,273. “BOY GONE MISSING (8 YEARS OLD),” it read at the top. That was a lie. It had been two years. If Joshua was still alive, he was now 10 years, 5 weeks, and 3 days old. But Kate refused to acknowledge that fact. Acknowledging any of it meant admitting there was a chance her son would never come back. And despite plastering every telephone pole in Chicago three times over, Kate was not ready to do that just yet. But she was ready to call it a night. Just then, a phone call. The police station near the docks. A blonde boy dressed in nothing but a pair of soccer shorts and a torn blanket had just walked in — and he claimed his name was Joshua.

Sometimes, Kate looked at Joshua and tried to imagine what he looked like when he was nine. She had never seen him at that age, and she could never quite get the picture to de-pixelate. That’s what many of their interactions now felt like. She reached into a place, but there was no other hand to hold. The version of Joshua she longed to access was no longer there. That’s what the kidnappers had really taken. Not her boy, but a part of his soul. And unlike his body, that part might truly not return. It wasn’t that Joshua was mean, angry, or violent. On the surface, he seemed to be the same old Joshie, just more silent, more withdrawn, and that was a lot worse than any outbursts could ever have been. A black van, children in cages, the run for his life after a careless guard’s mistake — they never got past the central points of his story. Those were enough for the newspapers to spin a story in the same bold lettering Kate had used on her flyers — “THE BOY WHO LIVED — AND HIS NAME IS NOT HARRY” — but not sufficient to fill the hole in their relationship. The therapy helped, he reassured her time and again, but his mind had placed a firm lock on any of the deeper memories, and who could blame it? Would he ever be happy again? Would Kate?

When he was 15, Josh disappeared overnight. He missed both dinner and his curfew. All hell broke loose. First within Kate, and then all around her. She raised a search party, called the police, called the news. They combed the area around her house in a mile-long radius, but nothing. When the sun rose that summer morning, Joshua walked up the driveway, smiling. Waving. Holding a grey kitten with green eyes in his arms. He had chased her all night, determined to take a stray friend home. No matter what happened to them, it seemed teenagers would always insist on being teenagers.

By the time Grayla went to cat heaven, Joshua was 28 and had just finished vet school. Animals in cages, helping the helpless — the metaphors for his own story were all there, but Joshua didn’t see them. Didn’t need them. What point in telling a story when there’s someone you can help right in front of you? Whether it was the Eastern philosophy course, the book about Stoicism, or the years of therapy that did the trick, Joshua didn’t know. All he knew was that he had escaped from a dark place twice: once with his legs, and once with his mind. Whenever he returned home, his mom was beaming. She had never been a pet person, but whichever stray friend he brought with him, Kate was eager to cuddle and feed them.

Joshua didn’t become the world’s most sought-after veterinarian. Kate still had her mortgage to pay. There was no miracle reward for their trauma. But between the two of them, they often felt like Nobel Prize winners. If there was a gold medal for overcoming adversity, they sure each had dozens of them. And though the prize for their resilience was not one they could display in a glass cabinet, they forever carried it with them — and neither of them ever forgot the day Joshua came home.

As I was lying awake at night for the umpteenth time, I finally realized these are the two main problems in life. At least my life. “I think my email service provider should stop charging extra for telling you who are your most and least active subscribers.” “I think I should work on this piece of writing first thing in the morning.” “I think I need more focus this month, or otherwise I’ll never get anywhere this year.”

I. Think. I think, I think, I think. “I” and “think” are the two constructs most obstructive to inner peace and fully experiencing life as it is.

“I” means the ego is speaking. Not your true self but the character you’ve created and play in the world every day. The ego is self-centered. It is obsessed with survival beyond reason. It wants to accumulate fame, wealth, and pleasure. The ego shuns service, responsibility, presence, and all the other roads that lead to real freedom.

“Think” means your omniscient gut has left the chat. Thinking is the ego plotting its next move. Can you hear the gears rattling in your brain? It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Chasing thought after thought, getting ever more anxious, more worried, more regretful when, supposedly, thinking is the tool meant to lift you out of those holes. Why isn’t it working? For one, even the best tool becomes blunt when you overuse it, and for another, if all you have is a shovel, the only thing you can do is dig deeper. But you don’t need to think to earn your value as a human being. In fact, you don’t need to think at all. If all you do is be present for the life unfolding right in front of you, that’ll be more than enough.

If I give my ego permission to die, if only in my imagination, and I allow myself a break from thinking, I can sense something deeper. Something that dwells within me, and that’s still there when ego and thinking are absent. What is it? A ghost? A spark? The best way I can describe it is as a light of awareness. A glowing ball of sunshine, hovering in the space wherever one’s soul is supposed to sit. If I can feel my way to it, I know immediately: This is the true you at the root of everything. The entity that’s supposed to be in charge but that, ironically, so rarely gets to see the light of day.

I could spend forever curled up in my ball of sunshine, and I’d never feel in a rush to go anywhere. When I listen to its silent guidance, somehow, everything always happens at exactly the right time. Whether life on the outside goes up, down, sideways or upside down doesn’t matter. No one can take my light from me, and wherever I end up, inside my light is always home.

I don’t know how to stay in my light at all times. I don’t know what it’ll take for you to find yours. What shape it will appear in, or which name you’ll choose to give it. All I know is I must encourage you: Take a break from “I.” Take a break from “think.” You might find you’re so much more than ego and brains, and that the questions life truly asks us can’t be answered with either.

When I wake up after a strange dream or particularly restless night, thoughts come gushing out of me in the morning. On the one hand, this might make for multiple writing ideas, but on the other, it makes me incredibly slow.

Between exercise sets, I might sit there for five minutes and brood over my bank raising prices yet again. Before meditating, I may draft an entire response to an email in my head only to send a totally different one hours later. In other words, because I have so many differing thoughts, I get hung up on some of them. My mind is “sticky,” as Bruce Lee called it:

“Do not let the mind be grasping or sticky. Don’t look at ‘what is’ from the position of thinking what should be. It is not to be without emotion or feeling but to be one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked.” A non-sticky mind is “immune to emotional influences,” Bruce said. Like in a river, “everything is, flowing on ceaselessly without cessation or standing still.”

When a baby feels excess air in its system, it lets out a burp or a fart. We think it’s cute and pat it on the back. “Well done!” we even say. As adults, we’ve learned to suppress our bodily winds, be it for politeness sake or, more often, to avoid public embarrassment. But sooner or later, the air needs to come out — and so do our thoughts and feelings.

When I remember Bruce’s words while barreling down a distracting train of thought, I tell myself: “I’m a human being, and these thoughts are just passing through.” That makes it easier to let them go, and then both the thoughts and I can be on our way.

Beware the sticky mind. You are not your thoughts, and, often, the best thing you can do is wave them right on through.

After I decided to once again hit pause on Empty Your Cup, I was sad, but I also felt an immediate sense of inner peace. I instantly knew that, now, I had enough time. None of my problems had yet disappeared, but deep in my gut, I had conviction that with the additional space and effort, I’d get a handle on everything.

Will that be true? Or am I just telling myself a story? It’s too soon to tell, but the pivot re-emphasizes a lesson I’ve already learned a few times: The feeling of having enough time is more important than how much time you actually have.

If whatever schedule you’ve set for yourself gets you to say, “I just know I’ll never be able to complete all of this,” then every day, you’ll behave like someone who’s fighting a losing battle — and those people tend to act like they’ve already lost. In reality, you might actually be able to achieve more than you think you can — but right now, that doesn’t matter. What matters is how you feel and how you’ll act as a result.

When I’m behind, I spend more time fretting, which, ironically, puts me more behind. When I’m ahead of the curve, that spurs me on to try and finish early. If you function in a similar way, I encourage you: Plan your life around feeling that you have enough time, not what you rationally think is physically possible.

Nothing motivates us more than hope, and no one has more hope than he who strongly believes he can win.