Month: March 2025

It’s possible to write a daily blog in 15 minutes. Even ten. Even five. The question is how many minutes went into it before you started typing?

Sometimes, the very spontaneous, off the cuff, almost-stream-of-consciousness pieces turn out amazing. Most of the time, they don’t. If nothing went in, how can anything come out?

When you press a dry sponge, it releases no water. First, you must soak it. Continuing to fill an already-filled sponge merely changes the composition of the output. Squeeze too early, however, and you won’t get any output at all.

Don’t be afraid to keep inhaling.

A new LinkedIn connection sent me a nice compliment. I thanked him, gave him my email, and we briefly went back and forth. He asked to speak more, but when I offered him a 20-minute chat on a weekday, which, given my full-time job, is a lot, he said: “Oh, that’s not really enough for a proper presentation.”

That one sentence made me second-guess our entire interaction. So far, everything had seemed genuine. Kind. Authentic. But now? Crack. Did he say all the other stuff so he could pitch me his product in a meeting? Or did it just occur to him because of our interaction? Maybe I’m seeing ghosts?

Now, no matter what follows, I’m suspicious. The potential for a real connection has all but left the chat. The sad part is not missing out on one of them. It’s that this scenario has happened to me hundreds of times. Inevitably, I’ll sit on a call, and, sooner or later, there comes the pitch. “Ahh, here it is…”

It’s fair to make calculated moves in business. But what you should calculate is the product. “Our flights will be the cheapest, no frills.” “We will not compromise on the quality of our locally sourced ingredients.” Run the numbers, then let the market decide.

Humans, however, are made from love, not calculations. That’s why no one likes being a number in someone else’s equation.

If you want to ask, just ask. If you’re not sure, don’t. There’s no template for the perfect transition. Some relationships turn from business to friendship, others vice versa. But no one enjoys being hoodwinked 15 minutes after the introduction. Beware your calculated moves.

Samurai Champloo is an anime classic set in Japan’s Edo period, a time of shoguns, samurai, and strict social order. The story follows three unlikely friends: Fuu, a young waitress from a teahouse, Mugen, a short-tempered outlaw, and Jin, a quiet, disgraced samurai, aka ronin.

Looking for “the samurai who smells of sunflowers,” the trio stumbles into all kinds of adventures. In one episode, they end up in a village tormented by a “tsujigiri,” a rogue samurai randomly attacking—and, in this case, killing—others. This particular tsujigiri has been going after the best swordsman in the area, and, as it happens, both Mugen and Jin can more than hold their own with a blade.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, Mugen is most eager to encounter the tsujigiri. One night, while following a trail of clues to a sake bar, he finds him. For the first time in the show, it appears Mugen is outmatched. Thankfully, a bunch of villagers come to his rescue. “At the next full moon, same place!” the tsujigiri yells as he runs away.

Even if it was his own, Mugen has tasted blood, and so, for the next month, he trains like a madman. He works on his handstand and jumping skills. He practices with his sword. He even lugs a heavy Buddha statue up and down the stairs. Time flies by, and the next full moon arrives.

As the trio is busy with their usual evening activities, Mugen suddenly gets up, picks up his sword, and walks off. “Well, I’m heading out for a bit,” he says. No one dares say what they actually think, but Fuu reminds him: “Hey, you haven’t forgotten, have you? You’re gonna help me look for the samurai who smells of sunflowers, right?” “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Mugen goes. Even the quiet Jin feels compelled to pitch in: “If someone is gonna kill you, it’s gonna be me, got it?” The usual banter is met with the usual response: “Who do you think you are, my wife or something?” And with that, Mugen strolls into an unknown future.

Life drops us at difficult crossroads. Even when we’re not alone in facing them, sometimes it’s easier to not draw out the worst-case scenario. “Don’t paint the devil on the wall,” we say in Germany. If everyone already knows, why dwell on the conclusion? Pretending a fateful day is the same as every other can be a way of letting our loved ones know: No matter what happens, nothing between us is going to change.

Will Mugen defeat his challenger? There is only one way to find out. But even before we do, we already know: In not breaking character, his friends have shown they truly care for him—and they’ll be there regardless of what comes next.

As I was lying awake at 6 AM this morning, hoping for another hour of sleep, I tried to focus on my breath. It helps whenever I can manage to stay with it. Unfortunately, that’s rare. Thoughts follow thoughts, and, before I know it, it’s time to get up.

One reason might be that, often, I doubt my method instead of using it. I take a few deep breaths and go: “Why isn’t this working?” This morning, my answer was new: “Maybe I just don’t believe in it working. I have to believe that focusing on each next breath is enough. If I don’t, I’ll always jump on another thought to justify my existence.”

I spent some time encouraging myself to hold fast to the idea. But, inevitably, I reflected more, and I realized: Actually, “the next breath is enough” is not something I must believe—it’s something I merely need to accept. After all, I have 33 years of physical evidence that it’s always been true. There’s nothing else I’ve been doing as consistently throughout my entire life. Neither have you, of course. Even food, water, and sleep come second to breathing. So it’s not just a comforting idea. It’s the absolute, undeniable truth: The next breath is enough.

Acceptance also isn’t easy, but it has a different feel to it than trying to will yourself into belief. That, too, I found comforting. “Ahh, yes. I can get cosy around this. The next breath is enough.” I didn’t fall asleep again, but I did find more rest. And if I wake up at night again today? Maybe I’ll remember that the next breath is enough and, this time, drift back to sleep. Now that one I’ll gladly will myself to believe.

I need to rake the leaves later today. When I look outside my office window, I can see myself standing there, raking. I can feel the cold come in under my sweater, and I can see my breath form little clouds in the freezing air.

It’s not a pleasant vision, but it still allows me to get comfortable with the idea. It makes me believe that, in a few hours, I’ll actually be raking, and that alone increases the likelihood of me going outside by a great deal.

When it comes to a new reality, every animal will “believe it when they see it.” Humans are the only creatures who can bring about said new reality by turning the phrase around. See it in order to believe it. Once you can feel something being true in your heart, often all it takes is a little push for life to adjust.

If anything could happen, it might as well be something good. That’s one of my mottos.

In a chapter titled “Roll the Dice” in his book Creative Doing, my friend Herbert Lui transfers the idea to being creative: “If you’re ever experiencing blockage or a sense of stuckness on a decision, try opening the door to chance in order to support your creative work,” he writes.

Sometimes, a calculated gamble just might point you in the right direction, Herbert believes. Instead of continuing to stare at a wall, why not throw something at it? Flip the dictionary to any page, play with a random name generator, or toss some coins onto a table and start with whatever pattern they land in, Herbert suggests.

When it comes to work projects, you may want to ask someone on a completely different team for an outside perspective. Stuck on bad first dates? Go somewhere you’d never go. A violin concert, perhaps, or a pottery class. Even for your energy, a bit of entropy can help on occasion. Maybe staying up late for once will make you feel more energized, not less.

No matter the arena, the point remains: “If you want to make fewer decisions, enlist chance as an assistant,” Herbert says. Fortuna is a goddess, not a creature of the underworld, and for good reason: She wants to be on our side. Will we relinquish our stubbornness and let her? The right time only we can determine, but sooner or later, we should.

See chance as an ally, not an enemy. After all, if anything could happen, it might as well be something good.

David Rowland wanted a better chair. It took him eight years to invent one. Then, plenty of rejections. Finally, a man named Davis Allen gave Rowland a chance: He ordered 17,000 of his 40/4 chairs for a university campus his firm was designing.

50 years later, it all seems obvious: Which company wouldn’t want a chair that stacks only four feet tall when you pile 40 of them on top of one another? But initially, different just seemed different, not better.

Rowland knew what he was doing. He wanted “better,” and he was willing to cycle through “different” as many times as he needed. In a 1965 interview, he admitted as much, leaving behind a maxim for us which might be even better than his chair: “Different is not always better, but better is always different.”

Our default approach to “better” is “more.” After we realize “different” is the way to go, we often still stray. It takes a thoughtful, deliberate kind of “different” to land on “better.” And even once we do, it may still require years of rejection and a stranger giving us a trust advance before the world can see: “Ahh, this is the ‘better’ we’ve been waiting for.”

“Different” is hard—but worth it. “More” is a socially acceptable dead end. “Different” offers no guarantees, but it’s the only road that might lead to “better.” Choose different. Try for better.

The dentist is a great place to practice. Patience. Courage. Trust. But most of all: avoiding needless suffering.

Yesterday, I went there to change a filling. “We can do it without anesthesia,” she said. As I lay there, listening to the drill, thinking about something else, I suddenly realized: I’m as stiff as a floorboard. I was tensing the muscles in my shoulders, arms, and legs. “Why am I so on edge?” I wondered.

On the surface, everything seemed fine. But underneath, I could sense I was worried, worried that, any second now, the drill might hit a nerve—and then I’d feel an intense surge of pain. “But wait a minute: If I stay this tight throughout the entire procedure, I’ll be in pain no matter what happens. Can’t I just relax until any potential agony actually arrives?” I tried that. It helped. My muscles loosened a bit. But every now and then, I could feel the anxiety coming back, and I once again had to remind myself: “There isn’t any pain yet. So relax.” Naturally, no pain ever came.

If actual hurt was the only kind we suffered, the world would be a very different place. You’d go to the dentist, scream perhaps once, most likely zero times, and go home. Instead, we wait for torment that never comes and, in the waiting, torment ourselves more thoroughly than life ever would.

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,” Seneca wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. Be it at the dentist, the office, or on a first date, it’s still true: The worst pain is not pain. The worst pain is fear—so let’s only cross the bridge of suffering once we come to it.

In the original and most subsequent Pokémon games, the endgame is to defeat your childhood rival—but not before you’ve made it past the Elite Four, or “Top Four” in German. They were the toughest Pokémon trainers in the game, and you better came prepared. In fact, you had to pass a whole set of separate trials along Victory Road just to get there.

Whenever you arrive at the Elite Four, however long you’ve been playing, there’s always a bit of dialogue allowing you to reflect on how far you’ve come. “Wow, I made it. Top Four. Unbelievable!”

Yesterday, I opened my productivity app. It has a leaderboard. You can sort by highest scores on various time frames, like the current week, month, or all-time performance. I flipped to the all-time view, and there I was: top four. Wow. Unbelievable!

The app has been around for five years. I’ve used it for around 14 months—but from the first day onwards, I’ve tracked at least some, usually most, of my work sessions every day. I don’t know who else made it to the top of the leaderboard when. But I have seen plenty of people come and go.

440 days of consistency. That sounds like a lot, but is it? In the grand scheme of things, 440 days pass quickly. Rack up a few points every day, however, and your score will keep climbing—just like a dedicated Pokémon trainer, taking the last steps up the Indigo Plateau, realizing only at the top: “Oh. Elite Four. Already?!”

Days played with your children; pages in a book; coins racked up in a wallet. Keep going a little every day. Before you know it, you’ll have reached the top four.

A few days ago, I miraculously got my hands on some original Dubai chocolate. A friend happens to live there, and his girlfriend kindly brought me a bar while she was in town. “Tell me what you think,” he texted me, “but I believe you and I will agree.”

Based on what you can see on social media, you’d think the chocolate was filled with liquid gold. The product gets hundreds of millions of views. Knockoffs abound around the globe. Even in Germany, I already saw Dubai crêpes, Dubai cake, and Dubai donuts. One person tried to smuggle 45 kilograms into the country.

So how does it taste? It’s good. Very good, even. But it’s still chocolate—with pistachio and some crunchy bits inside, sure. But “just” chocolate nonetheless. Maybe that’s the spoiled German in me, who’s used to Milka, Kinder products, and the likes of Lindt and Läderach from Switzerland. But like my friend suggested, we agreed: It’s cool, but not the-world-must-lose-its-head-cool.

There is, however, one reason why I enjoyed the chocolate more than any ordinary bar: It was a gift from my friend. I did not expect it, yet one Sunday, I sat there, holding it in my hand. It’s the kind of magic even 100 million views can’t work—but that, unlike those views, lingers long after the masses and the taste of the chocolate have gone.

Perhaps, instead of wondering, “Which chocolate should I eat next?” we should try a different question: “Whom do I want to gift the next bar to?