Month: November 2025

That was the lesson of step 28 in Tai Lopez’ 67 Steps program, which I took way back in 2014. In that particular lesson, Tai talked about John Wooden, Lao Tzu, and the power of foresight. The idea was simple: The worst time to buy health insurance is when you’re already in the hospital. Wherever you can prevent big problems by taking small precautions now, you should make the effort.

Health is indeed a good example. Working out a little every day, stretching, walking, brushing your teeth—it’s the little habits maintained over a lifetime that give you the best odds at making it to 90 and beyond. But, yesterday, this idea popped back into my head in a different context.

It was dinner time, and all I’d had thus far was an espresso, a cappuccino, and a pretzel. I was ready for some yogurt and cereal, as my partner and I had discussed, but since she’d had a bigger lunch at work, she gracefully offered me half of a scrumptious chicken burger, which we still had left over from the day before. Once I started eating, I asked her if she also wanted some, but she declined.

Super happy with my unexpected burger dinner, I barely managed to pace myself. I didn’t quite wolf it down, but man, I was hungry. Before I knew it, I held the last piece in my hand. “I really should offer this to her again,” I thought, “so she can at least have a bite.” Guess what? It was hard! I did feel some friction before asking my fiancée whether she’d like the last piece. Crazy, right? How entitled we can feel to something that was gifted to us as a complete surprise only moments ago.

Alas, I’ve done harder things, and I was very happy when she took the last bit of the burger and also got to enjoy it. So, all in all, it was easy enough to share delicious food even whilst I was hungry—yesterday. If it was another day? Who knows. That’s when the saying resurfaced in my head: Do what is hard when it is easy.

Be kind when it feels easy. Start the big project when it feels easy. Do the chore when it feels easy. That moment, that mindset, that psychological state of affairs might not come back any time soon, and your karma bank needs all the currency it can get. Prepare, prevent, and anticipate, sure, but also leverage your moods to carry you to the big aspirations: Do what is hard when it feels easy.

Last week, a partner at work sent us a request. It was about whether we’d sponsor a promotion for the launch of a course we’d developed together. We hadn’t agreed to this in our original contract, so the issue was up for discussion. It was around 10 days before the go-live.

The email thread had multiple people on it, and everyone replied to different parts. Here’s a bit of copy for the landing page, there’s an update to the press release, and so on. The promotion idea would have sat with one of our colleagues, but, on the first day, he didn’t reply. The next day, my boss tagged him in, suggesting he was the one with the expertise to assess this opportunity. He didn’t reply. I wrote an email breaking down the ask in two sentences to make it easier for him to give his input. Once again, he didn’t reply.

After about 48 hours, my team started running with it. We contacted legal, told the partner we were assessing it, and so on. It’s now been over a week since the original request, and I have yet to hear the thoughts from the guy who supposedly knows best how to handle such a situation.

The incident got me thinking about inaction as a form of communication. If you get a request, and you choose not to do it, that’s the obvious scenario. And in most cases, you’ll clearly say no, and everyone will be informed. But what about if you want to do it but can’t get to it? What if you agree initially but can’t find the time? It turns out that, sooner or later, inaction will do the talking for you.

How much time must pass depends on the situation, but eventually, inaction becomes your statement. As with words, people will interpret your statement differently. Some will think you didn’t care or are lazy. Some will believe you’re just busy. Others might forget the whole issue themselves.

The part you don’t have when you let inaction speak is control. You can decline in a million ways. Kindly. Aggressively. Apologetically. But you can’t make up people’s minds for them. That they’ll do on their own.

It’s true that, often, talking is silver and silence is gold. But whether elected or enforced by circumstance, once you know inaction is the answer, you might want to settle for second place.

One of the main reasons I love summer is that I never have to think about what to wear. I throw on shorts and a t-shirt, and I’m good to go. But that time of the year has passed for now, at least in Germany. Now you open the window in the morning, and a wave of cold air rushes in.

Before I go out, I do the very same. To check how cold it actually is. How many layers I’ll need to wear. The house is also a bit colder, of course, and the heating isn’t on full blast just yet. The air can get a bit frigid here and there, but after you keep everything closed for a while, room temperature slowly settles in.

No matter how much I might complain about them, these literal cooldowns actually make me think. Not just about what to wear, but about how to behave in general.

When it’s warm, the laissez-faire attitude extends beyond my attire. It’s easy to let your guard down when you’re comfy. That’s not always a bad thing. But the cold has a way of activating our senses. We look out, think ahead, and make our choices more carefully. If those same traits also shape me beyond what I’m wearing, perhaps winter has its benefits.

Adversity’s job is not to bring you down entirely. Most of the time, it’s simply a coach hoping to whip you into shape. Let the cold, literal or metaphorical, sharpen your senses, and appreciate your heightened awareness.

Underpromise and overdeliver. That’s the official line of advice in many business books. But what does it even mean?

Is underpromising about lowering the client’s expectations before the work even begins? Or delivering less than you’re capable of? Is it maybe about shipping exactly what’s asked for but on a slower timeline? Overdelivering comes with equally few instructions. Should you do what’s needed but faster? Do 10% more? 20%? 100%?

I still remember reading James Altucher’s take on this concept years ago: “You have to overpromise and overdeliver.” James suggested that overpromising “sets you apart from the people who underpromise” and overdelivering “sets you apart from people who just delivered.” “It’s not that hard to do both,” he wrote. “It’s easy to slightly overpromise and slightly overdeliver because nobody else is doing it.”

The truth is setting expectations and meeting them is highly context-depended. On Reddit, developers report great results with asking for more time they think is needed for a task to account for unexpected hiccups. If they turn in the work faster, they look like a hero. If bugs do turn up, at least nothing will catch fire until their original estimate is up. Meanwhile, a writer working against tight deadlines in quick succession can’t afford to take twice as long on every article. It’ll make them look unprofessional.

When I was self-employed, I didn’t have to promise anyone anything. Sometimes, I did. And while I often moved deadlines, I always ended up overdelivering—even if it was just to myself. I wrote posts tallying 5,000, 7,000, even 10,000 words or more in hopes of completely covering a topic. Sometimes that worked; sometimes it didn’t.

Now that I work for a company, overpromising and overdelivering seems like a good recipe to burn out within a few months and little else. My firm is basically a startup. Naturally, everyone asks for more all the time. Our visions are simply bigger than anything we can ever build with the people we have. In this context, it doesn’t matter how perfect each delivered project is. What matters is getting more work out the door. Underpromising keeps you alive, and then how much you can deliver will change for each next venture.

Samsung, on the other hand, can’t afford to ship even 2% of their phones with cracked screens. When you sell expensive devices to consumers with high expectations, overdelivering is tablestakes.

There are times to underpromise and overdeliver, times to overpromise and overdeliver, and perhaps even times to underpromise and underdeliver—for example to lose a bad client or show how hard a goal is to actually pull off.

Rules of thumb can be good starting points, but remember: You have nine more fingers, and it’s okay to use them differently each you get back to work.

While writing a new welcome email for my newsletter, I tried to trace back my journey to its beginnings. Where was the fuse of words first lit in me?

There are neither right nor wrong answers, of course. Life is an unbreakable chain in which every moment influences the next. It all counts.

There are, however, standout points we can actually see. For me, one of them was my statistics professor, Gary Davis, whom I took all of one class with while studying abroad in the US. That class, however, made all the difference. Or, rather, Mr. Davis did.

First, he made us use software to do our statistics homework. Smart and relevant. What was outright genius, however, was that he made us share our homework on a Wordpress blog. That’s how I learned to set up websites. More than a decade later, mine is still live.

The best part of the class, however, were the conversations. We were a small group, and not everyone showed up all the time. As a result, my friend Tejendra, I, and Mr. Davis often spoke at length about all kinds of things. The differences in education systems. Entrepreneurship. Books. Life.

Crucially, it was also professor Davis who first told me about Tim Ferriss, an entrepreneur-turned-author, and his book The 4-Hour Workweek. Via Ferriss and his book and podcast, I ended up finding plenty of other inspiring people, like Ramit Sethi, Noah Kagan, and more. And that’s how I fell down both the entrepreneurship and self-help books rabbit holes, both journeys I’d stay on for, so far, the rest of my life.

While drafting my welcome message, I realized I’d never thanked Mr. Davis. I saw he still taught at the same school, grabbed his email, and typed out a few paragraphs. I told him where life had taken me since his class, from setting up and running many more Wordpress blogs to writing basically every day for ten years to, at one point, running the most popular free book summary website on the web. I said I appreciated his class, approach, and candor in sharing his ideas with us, and that he really made a difference in my life.

Less than day later, I received a response. Surprisingly, Mr. Davis said he remembered me and our discussions very well, and that he was still telling his students about some of our takeaways. “Congratulations on all your achievements and positive energy,” he wrote. What a guy!

I’m happy about his response, but really, sending the email was enough. I just wanted him to know.

Thank your teachers. Much of life passes by before we can acknowledge it. Someone changing your trajectory for the better should not be one of those things. Plus, you never know who needs to hear a few nice words today.

Many chances in life are singular. Nothing has made this clearer to me than getting back into collecting Pokémon cards two years ago. Some cards that cost 50 cents back then now go for $30. Others have shot up from $10 or $50 to $200. At the same time, some cards I had to buy for dozens of dollars cost only a buck or two a few years before I rejoined the hobby. Now, new cards are cheap and affordable. They, too, will likely cost a lot more in a year or two.

That’s the good news for collectors: There’ll always be more deals. But the same deal? Nuh-uh. This is more pronounced in physical assets, especially limited ones, like paintings or collectibles. If the company only prints a limited amount, eventually, the entire supply that’s out in the wild will start to dwindle. Pokémon cards get lost. Kids destroy them. Parents accidentally wash them in the laundry or throw them away. If the available quantity can only go down, and people still want the item, the price can only go up. Often, new market rates retrace a little bit after a card has run up, but they rarely go back to the same price from a few months before.

In many other asset classes, the same opportunity repeats. Stock charts from so-called gaps, which the price often revisits. The first time a stock breaks, say, the $50 mark, is rarely the last time you’ll get a chance to buy it at that price. Cryptocurrencies swing even more drastically. Silver is only now getting close to its all-time high from 14 years ago. These opportunities will arrive on your doorstep time and again—but the chance to buy a particular card, collectible, or painting? A job offer, severance package, or ask to be featured in a magazine or score a book deal? These will come, then go. Their successors might rhyme, but they likely won’t repeat.

Know which lucky breaks are once-in-a-lifetime, and jump on everything you’ll regret to have let pass. Meet opportunities when they arrive, and be careful which ones you tell to come back later.

Do I want this thing because I genuinely feel like it, or do I want it because I believe it’ll put my anxious mind at ease? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Last Friday, I had my first coffee after a month or so. It was a treat. A pumpkin spice latte on Halloween? Full of sugar, cinnamon, and whipped cream? Oh yeah. I didn’t feel low-energy. I wasn’t looking for a boost. Just for a small reward for ending the week strong. As a result, the coffee was easy to enjoy, and I didn’t crave another one the next morning. It didn’t pull me back into the caffeine cycle.

Today’s hot chocolate? That one I’m not sure about. I frequently get one with my pretzel for a light lunch on workdays. But I also was feeling anxious. I hadn’t slept well, work had a potential, last-minute speaking gig looming—any writer’s worst nightmare—and the rest of the day was busy and meh as well. So was that hot chocolate part of my routine, or was it an anxiety blanket? I don’t know—but I try my best to stay aware when whatever I’m about to do feels like a crutch I’d like to lean on. And then, if I can, make do without it.

Music, caffeine, food, sex, alcohol—it’s astonishing how many crutches we have access to on a daily basis. And how many of us run on some combination of them permanently without realizing it. I, too, am relying on these things more than I need to, and sometimes more than I’m even comfortable admitting.

For brief moments, I’ve been crutch-free altogether. It’s amazing how you feel and what you can accomplish when your only inputs are enough good food and sleep, and then it’s just you and your mind against life every day. This isn’t to say treats aren’t nice or appropriate at times. But when treats are no longer optional, well, they’ve become crutches. And those are two very different things.

Think about it. Is this a treat or a crutch? And remember you can fly even without wings.

On a productive day, I’ll be up at 6 AM, workout and meditation done by 6:40, writing finished at 7, and I’ll still have two hours to write or work on my blog before going to work. Today, it’s 9:17, and I’m still typing.

You can’t be the first out the gate every day, but a slow morning doesn’t have to mean you’re off track. In fact, it might be the very pattern break that keeps you on it.

I did a live presentation yesterday. It was a big deal for me. I stressed about it. I practiced the whole thing twice in full beforehand. The event went well enough, but afterwards, I could feel my brain needed to decompress. So did my body.

I gave myself this morning to catch up. I slept a little longer. Stretched a bit more. Worked out a tad more slowly. I watched a Pokémon card podcast. Through all this, I could feel my mind and body resetting. The adrenaline and emotions from the event have slowly passed through. Now, a little excitement to return to work is flaring up.

Whenever you can, allow nature to run its course. Let the pattern play out, then continue. Give yourself the gift of slow mornings.

The art you’re making. The business breakthrough. The lifelong relationship you hope to build. They all can wait. They’ve got nowhere to be. No strained relationship with time. They’ll gladly exist at just the right moment if you’ll let them, but they won’t mind if they don’t. Only you will—but can you wait?

I used to rush my essays out the door as soon as the digital ink was dry. Write, polish a bit, hit publish. Now, I write, and then I wait. I edit, and then I wait some more. I ask one friend what they think, wait again, ask another. Writing is like wine: It can age a long time and only get better. It takes more years than most writers have patience before it begins to spoil.

I started drafting my latest essay around a month ago during a long flight. Two weeks later, on the way back, I finished that first draft. I did one round of edits. It still didn’t feel finished. “Can you take a look?” I asked my friend Nick Wignall. He had some great feedback, so two days ago, I edited it again. Now, I need to shorten it. The piece is nearing completion. When will it be done? Six weeks in total? Two months? What does it matter if the end result is the best I could have possibly made it with my current skills?

Rushing the big stuff is like teleportation without flying: alluring but dangerous. Let it take as long as it takes.