Month: June 2025

If I’m in a hotel with air conditioning, you can bet I’ll turn it off at night. Too cold, too much noise. So, while in Italy for a work event, I did the usual. The room had a nice, big window front with a little balcony. In the morning, it was all fogged up.

As I got ready for work, I opened the large sliding door a good deal so fresh air could come in and clear the fog. When I left my room 90 minutes later, the glass still wasn’t fully see-through again. I thought about what else I could do, but I realized: If I wipe away the rest with my hands or a towel, all that’ll do is create smears and stripes across the pane. The only way to get the window back to normal was to let the fog recede on its own.

Life can be like that, and so can our minds. When you’re going through a difficult time, you might want to run faster in hopes of making it out. But if you can’t see where you’re going, how is more speed going to help? Most likely, you’ll simply hit a tree. All you can do is dust off your dignity every morning, and let life play out. Similarly, you can’t unwind someone’s bias by whacking them over the head with a baseball bat. It takes education and time until the person can untwist their point of view on their own.

Fog may take time to clear, but have faith. If you trust in its slowness, you might find it recedes at the perfect moment for you to see.

“Sit up straight!” we tell our kids or remind ourselves. But that assumes we know what straight feels like. Most of us probably don’t.

The hotel bed I slept in last night has a very tall headboard. During my morning meditation, I sat cross-legged and leaned against it. But instead of just pressing my back and shoulders into it the way I usually do, this one allowed me to rest my head against it, too. So I did, and it felt strange.

But the headboard is a flat surface. If I sit upright and maintain full contact with it, that’s the vertical equivalent of lying down flat on the bed—straight, in other words. Clearly, however I usually hold my head while meditating, it’s not necessarily how I’m supposed to hold it for good posture. “Huh,” I thought. “So this is straight?”

Often, we assume we know what words mean solely because we—and everyone else—have been using those words for a long time. But eventually, we must admit: Most of us are just pretending, because with so many others already “in the know,” it would have been embarrassing to start from scratch.

Well, it’s okay to start from scratch. In fact, it is the point—and every time you learn something previously assumed, you should share it with those around you. Including what it truly feels like to sit up straight.

I’ve read some great books in the last few months. I’d love to summarize them. Not just to share them, but to solidify their lessons for myself. Alas, it’s not a priority. What little time I have next to my job I spend writing my own books.

Yesterday, when going to the toilet, I randomly grabbed one of those good books. I spent 10, maybe 15 minutes going through it, reviewing all my highlights. Many of them triggered the same feeling of inspiration I had when I originally read them. It was probably better for my long-term retention of the book than any summary could ever be.

Writing summaries is a great way to process what you learn. It’ll show you how well you’ve understood and can communicate the material. Plus, you get to share with others and hear their thoughts. An interesting summary is the best book recommendation.

But when you want a book to really seep into your soul, the only way is to read it, re-read it, and then read it again. You need to spend time with the real deal, and lots of it. Those books will, and probably should be, far and few between—but when you find them, remember that if push comes to shove, highlights beat summaries, and little echoes longer in our hearts than other people’s memorable words.

In 2012, a new lottery launched across EU states: the Eurojackpot. It was much more attractive than the German national lottery. For one, the jackpot could reach almost twice as high, up to 90 million euros. At the same time, the odds were almost 60% better. Instead of a 1 in 140 million chance of winning, you now had a 1 in 60 million shot at the big prize. Still unlikely—it’s the lottery, after all—but hey, we’ll take it!

Unfortunately, the lottery design changed over time. Eventually, the odds were decreased, first to 1 in 90 million, then again to 1 in 140 million, just like the national lottery. The jackpot was still bigger—you could now win up to 120 million euros—but the increased odds were what made it more fun. Bummer! Or was it?

A friend of mine is a sports betting guy. He’s good at poker, picking stocks, and anything where you need to calculate the odds. While I’m no longer sure he was the one who originally showed me the Eurojackpot, he did point me to one unique feature of it that remained even after all the changes: the forced disbursement of excess funds. Once the jackpot hits its cap of 120 million euros, as long as no one wins it, all extra earnings from future rounds are passed down into the second tier—which has, yet again, much better odds. Around 1 in 7 million. That’s a 20x higher chance! And with sums ranging from, say, five to 25 million in that category, it’s still plenty to retire.

My friend being my friend, he developed a system: He’d only play if the winnings in category two were attractive. Sometimes, he asks me to join him. We double our tickets and split any substantial winnings. Of course, there were none of those so far, but that’s not the point. “As any good better knows,” my friend once said, “a good bet is a good bet. You take it because the odds are right, not because a win is guaranteed—which it never is.”

It takes a lot of smarts to identify good bets, but it takes ten times more emotional endurance to still remember them as good bets even after they don’t pan out. Taking the same good bet over and over again is how strategic players win. But to put your money down for the eleventh time after the same bet has failed on the last ten occasions? That’s hard.

Keep making good bets. Even playing the lottery can be a good idea—as long as the odds are ever so slightly in your favor.

I used to keep all my Pokémon “bulk,” as it’s called. These are all the cards you get out of packs that aren’t worth anything. If you have a lot of them, maybe you can trade them for a few bucks. But, like, a lot a lot. 20,000 cards for $50 dollars, if you’re lucky. It’s basically worth as much as actual paper.

As thrifty as I try to be, I realized this is not worth my time. It’s not worth managing the bulk. It’s not worth all the space it takes up in our flat. And it’s definitely not worth the money. I tried giving it away before, but even that was a hassle. So, eventually, I started throwing it all away.

At first, I felt a bit sad not being able to direct these cards to better ends. But each next time a stack of them goes into the bin, I feel a little better about it. The relief is almost visceral. One more thing dead and gone—but also one less thing to worry about.

Maybe you’ve experienced this before. The joy of letting go. But if I told you you’re cheering on destruction on a regular basis, you’d probably disagree. “What, me? No way! I’m a maker. Creator. I want to build things, not tear them down.” That’s most of us, and it’s the right aspiration—and yet, every time we look at the stars, we get more proof that destruction, too, can be beautiful.

Stars are hot, burning balls of gas. They accumulate as much energy as they can, incinerating every piece of matter they can pull into their orbit. It’s all fusion and heat and fire and atoms until, one day, the star runs out of steam and dies. The glimmer we see in the sky at night? That’s one spark of that fire that happened years ago. A snapshot of destruction carried to us over millennia, and when we finally see it, we think: “Wow! That’s so pretty!”

Destruction shouldn’t be the default, but it has its place. Cut your losses when they’re due. A fire burns wood to flicker, but it’s still an invitation to dance.

One massive benefit of a regular paycheck is that you can automate your investments. If your income hits on the 25th, you automatically send what you can afford to your broker on the 30th, choose an ETF, and set that to auto-invest as well for a few days later. And while slow and steady tends to win the race, perhaps you want to do more than that.

On top of the usual, I try to make individual, targeted investments where I can. Crypto, stocks, Pokémon cards, whatever I think makes sense and seems to have a chance at a large return. To me, these are lottery tickets. Some of them are smaller, like a Pokémon Elite Trainer Box that might go from $100 to $500 down the line. Others are bigger, like a crypto coin I believe can go up tenfold or a company whose stock I really have faith in. The idea behind these lottery tickets is to buy them, forget them, and then let them either die or add another zero.

Of course, there are infinite lottery tickets out there. Sometimes, looking for them can become a distraction in and of itself. But instead of checking for Pokémon deals or analyzing stocks for the hundredth time, perhaps I should write a book, build a product, or run a sale of my existing ones—and get more cash to buy more lottery tickets.

It’s easy to spend all your time ogling at the ends and forgetting to use the means you already hold in your hands. That’s why both automated, reasonable investing and occasional, moonshot investing are good habits—but it’s also why we shouldn’t get lost in either. Even lottery tickets cost money, and whether they hit the jackpot or not, there are few things more rewarding than making an honest living.

My local post office is massive but rudimentary. A huge space, equipped with barely anything. The waiting area in front of the counter consists of a rope-and-post barrier and a “Queue here” sign. That’s it. Except for one more thing.

With five people ahead of me and some time to kill, I noticed how nicely folks were lining up. Everyone left at least half a meter of space between themselves and the next person. It was welcome but unusual in a busy place like this, where mostly-grumpy people go to complete mostly-necessary everyday tasks.

Suddenly, I felt a middle-aged lady breathe down my neck. Okay, not quite, but she definitely inched a lot closer than everyone else. “Here come the people in a hurry,” I thought. Wondering when it would be my turn, I looked down. Then, it clicked.

Next to the barrier, on the floor, were several stripes of worn out tape. Set horizontally in equidistant gaps of maybe a little less than a meter, they said two things loud and clear: “This is where you should queue, and we’ve been here since the pandemic.” Clearly a remnant of a time when lining up with distance was more essential, the tape was still doing everyone a favor today—and probably would be for some time to come.

Sometimes, we make changes out of necessity and forget to revert them later. Then, only with the hindsight of even more time do we learn: Actually, this was the right thing to do all along.

Allow your temporary fixes to linger. Observe them just a little longer than you’d have to, and if you find yourself surprised, don’t be afraid to keep the lines.

My boss recently went to Japan for the first time. She struggled with the food options, but more so with the lack of flexibility in restaurants. “Every time I asked them to change the smallest thing, they had to first ask their manager, then their manager’s manager, and on and on.”

Yesterday, I got dinner with friends here in Munich. One of us saw the dish she favored was marked with three chili peppers. She asked the waiter: “How spicy is three-chili-spicy?” The guy started laughing. “Oh, that’s not a problem, we can make it however spicy—or not spicy—you want. It’s not like it’s a premade dish!”

Following the rules and breaking them both have value. It merely depends on the time and the place. An administrator in a nuclear power plant might not want to press any button too quickly. For a waiter in a restaurant, it’s probably fine to use their judgment in determining what the customer really wants.

Turning our brains on or off is not a switch we press just once. We get to decide again every moment: Is it time to follow or time to lead? Above all, keep making that call. More often than not, you’ll find the universe picks up.

On yesterday’s train, the wifi was slow and erratic. It took me 40 minutes to watch a 20-minute episode of my favorite anime. Towards the end of the journey, it improved, and I could even get some work done. Leaving aside the fact that wifi on a train is a miracle in itself, with todays’ hindsight, I can see: Functioning wifi is good, and good is a privilege.

As most German train journeys, mine are often plagued by delays. Yesterday, however, every train was on time. I switched, got off, got on, and it all went off without a hitch. Punctual trains are good, and good is a privilege. This applies to many other things.

You’d like your bread to taste amazing, but nothing can taste amazing every time. But if your bread is not doughy, too hard, too bland, or has a hair baked into it, that’s worth a lot already. It’s just normal bread, but normal is good, and good is a privilege.

Normal coffee. Normal working hours. Normal parcel delivery service. It’s all just the standard, and yet the standard being standard, happening reliably, again and again, is already cause to celebrate. Normal is good, and good is a privilege. Cherish the enabling status quo.

It’s a simple question with an easy answer—unless you don’t know it. Two generations. Most people have hundreds of opportunities to ask their grandparents this question in person. How many do?

I happen to know my grandparents’ siblings. They each had one, and I met them both in person repeatedly. But will I still remember this when I’m as old as they were when I last saw them?

My grandparents are now in their 80s. Whenever I see them, I try to learn something from their personal stories. But when I asked my grandpa about his grandma’s siblings, he came up short: “I don’t know how many, actually. At least two!” One married and died young, leaving behind two children for her sister to care for. She then also married the same man for financial and social stability. The 19th century was a different time.

The limits of our knowledge will always stay narrow. As we age, our brains can draw them even closer around us. But where facts go missing, wisdom can remain—if only we choose to ask everything we can ask while we have the chance to do it. Even the simplest question is a good start. A question like: “How many siblings did your grandparents have?”