Month: December 2025

While working, I listen to songs on repeat a lot. I put on an instrumental that fits either my mood, the task, or, ideally, both and get cracking.

Lately, I’ve noticed a pattern: After I finish a session, I often leave that particular music tab open. “Maybe I’ll fire this one up again tomorrow,” I think. But I rarely go back to it. I commonly end up with multiple song tabs I haven’t listened to in days, sometimes weeks, before eventually closing them. There’s no good reason to keep them around. I’m somehow trying to prolong what’s finished.

Clicking the “Close” button on those tabs brings relief but also a pang of nostalgia. “It was a good run.” I remember what I created and how it felt. But the key word is still “was.” It’s over. That working session happened with that mood and song, and it’s okay to start from scratch for the next one.

Don’t overstretch the moment. Each conversation, each cup of coffee, and every focused stint: It all lasts exactly as long as it’s meant to. Make peace with the endings and enjoy the new beginnings.

In 2025, I wanted to reset. “Reset” as in “start over,” of course. It was my first year of working a full-time job, and I would have to not just invent that version of me but also reinvent the entrepreneur and artist. But I also meant it as “re-set.” I knew I’d have to adjust the many small parts that would be pushed out of place as I was making bigger changes.

Here’s how I described my plan:

My work will be reset. I’ve picked up a full-time job, and everything else will have to fit in around the edges. Four Minute Books will be reset. No more ads, affiliate revenue, or any form of monetization that is not me selling my own creations. Perhaps it’ll have to be merged into this blog or disappear altogether. My writing will be re-set. I’ll get a chance to realign on what I really want to write, but I’ll also have to adjust to make time to then do that writing.

So, how did it go? At the end of 2025, is everything back in place? Ha! You must be new here, kiddo. If only that were how life works, eh? But all things considered, I can’t complain.

First and foremost, I did my job, and I believe I did it well. I’m happy with my work, and so is my team. I even shipped some stuff I’m genuinely proud of, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons that’ll help me elsewhere. Even in my personal writing. Cool!

I’m also content to say I didn’t compromise on my art. I didn’t get pulled into any partnerships I knew from the get-go did not align with my long-term goals. I didn’t publish any work I didn’t care to publish. And while the business side took a big hit—I’m not sure it’ll even be profitable for the year—every dollar I’ve made came from me selling stuff I created with my own hands, heart, and mind.

All of this was both hard and easy at the same time. Easy because I had the job to carry me financially. Hard because I want the business to not lose money and, ideally, get paid meaningfully for making art I know can touch people in their hearts. Still, I’m happy, and I 100% intend to carry this attitude forward.

For all the progress, however, I’m far from done with re-setting. As it turns out, you can’t completely restructure a portfolio of online assets you’ve built up over a decade in a day. Apparently not even in a year, even when you throw time at it on the regular.

Granted, finding that time to begin with was hard. I start work at 9 AM on most days. For most of the year, I woke up at 7 AM. That gave me time for my morning routine and anywhere from an hour to 30 minutes to write and work on the blog. Recently, I started waking up at 6 AM Monday through Wednesday. It really helps to have two focused hours in one block.

Of course, none of this frees me from my day-job obligations. So I’ve put in many 10-hour days, plus time on weekends, and so on. It does get physically tiring at times, but thankfully, I have infinite energy for my personal writing, and that makes it much easier. I care a lot, and it barely feels like work. I don’t think I could maintain a purely financially driven side hustle with the same fervor. I’d probably fizzle out after a few weeks. Pick your battles wisely!

Regardless, when you want to write books, essays, newsletters, review books from friends on occasion, and clean up your massive digital footprint of writings, products, and websites, even an hour a day won’t get you too far.

One part of my big re-set, for example, was to get all of the posts I had written elsewhere over the years back onto my blog. Between a handful of guest posts, Medium, Quora, Substack, and a bunch of other places, we’re talking well over 1,000 pieces. And while you could pay someone to do this quickly and poorly, you can also do it properly. Upload all the visuals to your site. Make sure the piece links well to the rest of your catalog. And so on. Guess which route I chose? As a result, I spent many summer afternoons importing work from Medium—until I was done. With a few exceptions, you can now read all 700+ articles I’ve published on the platform right here on this blog. Woo! Alas, now I’m stuck on the Quora section. I’m closing in on the end, but boy, we’re far from finished here. And that’s just one area to clean up.

What else is not re-set? Four Minute Books is still a standalone website. New book reviews and summaries are going into Nik’s Book Notes on here, but it still has traffic, email collection, and its own newsletter. I need to move summaries to this site (another 500+ posts, yay!), reconfigure the email collection on every single post, merge the newsletters, update the store and products—most notably the lifetime membership—and that’s to say nothing of the design for either site, which hasn’t been updated since launch in 2014. Clearly, there’ll be a lot more re-setting in 2026, and that’s okay.

2024 was the year my old work life fell apart. The most important part of 2025 was to feel the ground beneath my feet again. In that regard, I have reset. I’m moving forward, and I have some momentum.

This is the point of setting a theme for your year. It’s not about accomplishing some arbitrary goal but deliberately choosing a direction for your life. Then, the best you can do is start walking. Only the universe knows where you’ll arrive in the end, but movement, movement is what counts—and of course that also means moving on to a new theme each year. May yours carry you on the right path in 2026.

Oh, and me? My theme for 2026 will be “Make”—but that’s a story for another day.

The idea that a cluttered desk indicates a cluttered mind goes back all the way to 1911. By the 1940s, people were so annoyed with this admonishment that a corollary began to form: an empty desk reflects an empty mind. Take that, finger-waggers! “Better to have a messy brain than no brain at all, don’t you think?”

It was a worthy attempt at a clever counter, but it’s unlikely to exceed its joke-status any time soon. Because in the real world, both an ordered and an empty desk are more conducive to getting things done than a disorganized stack of papers, markers, and notes.

The benefit of the ordered desk is obvious. You know what’s where, and you can grab what you need when you need it. But what about the empty one?

First, some definitions. If we take “no mind” to mean someone is unconscious, and “no brains” to mean someone hasn’t got any smarts, then there must be a difference between either of those and “empty mind”—a consciousness which is aware, potentially equipped with vast intelligence, yet not currently occupied with any particular concern.

That’s where an empty desk gets you: You’re forced to approach your every next task from scratch. In the process of doing so, you’ll undoubtedly use whatever you’ve learned and mastered thus far. But before pulling random or even organized threads together from a set of resources in front of you, you’ll begin without any baggage. “Who do you need me to be, and what do I need to assemble?” That’s balance born from emptiness. So if you ask me, I’ll gladly take an empty desk and the power of resetting that comes with it.

Not to mix metaphors too much but: Perhaps both “glass half full” and “glass half empty” folks have targets to work towards. One side can add more joy and happiness, the other can pour our what remains. Sometimes, empty is good—and the most important part is sitting at your desk to begin with.

Technically, doing Pokémon card deals is rarely a good use of my time. As a buyer, I could spend an hour or two just to save ten bucks on a card. From an investing standpoint, it’s much better to pay extra for a near mint copy and have a card that will surely fetch the market price when it goes up in value later.

As a seller, it’s even worse. I’ve only moved a handful of cards, but beyond taking pictures and creating the listing, you have to keep the buyer informed, find the right packaging, organize shipping, and so on.

Still, even if you do your best to not sweat most transactions, some administrative burden is part of the entry price for this hobby. This is where Marthe Troly-Curtin’s famous saying comes in: “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” Because once you spend this “necessary evil” time deliberately, it becomes one of the best aspects of being involved in the Pokémon community.

Recently, someone bought a card from me the day before I had to go on a work trip. It cost eight euros. I’m not even sure why I listed it to begin with. But on the train, I sent the guy a nice message. “Hey, sorry, I’m traveling for work this week. I’ll only be able to ship your card on the weekend. I’ll do it as soon as I can. Thanks for your purchase!”

I’ve received many friendly messages like this. Dented boxes, delayed shipments, a few bonus goodies tossed in with an expensive card—the hobby offers countless chances to make someone’s day, either with a genuine apology, peace offering, or unexpected surprise. And if it comes with a deal that was cheap to begin with, it only makes these small gestures even bigger.

Throw in a freebie. Serve someone without charge. Hand them the better end of a deal. It’s nice to be nice, and that’s a feeling you can best buy with time, not money.

My partner and I used to order from this hidden gem of a New York–style pizza place in London. Sadly, they shut down even before my better half moved to Munich. Needless to say, I was thrilled when I found someone offering New York pizza the other day.

Yesterday, we waited over an hour for one wagon wheel of pepperoni goodness, and it was worth it. As usual, we shared half and half, and I gobbled down mine rather quickly. What? Eating only a buttered pretzel for lunch leaves you hungry in the evening! Still, it was worth every penny.

As I lay in bed at night, I wondered how big of a meal my dinner actually was. “I ate half of a 45-centimeter pizza. Was that the same as me eating a 22-cm one by myself?” I roughly did the math in my head and remembered: The area of a circle is pi times r-squared, and r is half of the circle’s diameter. Since there’s an exponential in that equation, varying the diameter, and thus the radius, will change the outcome pretty significantly. End result? My half of the 45-cm pizza was more than twice as big as a 22-cm one would have been on its own. Fascinating!

I thought about it some more. Maybe life is like this too. The area outpaces the length. You’re focused on the diameter. Every day, you add a few steps to your line. You make it longer, and it all feels rather proportional. But a week, a month, or a year later, you look around and realize: “Whoa! I witnessed so much stuff!” The area you covered was much bigger than the length you traversed.

Your life is not just you. There are time, nature, and connection. Other people weave in and out of your story. Where you walk is important, but what you see also matters. You look left, right, up, and down. Your bit of length most affects you, but the area of life itself is much larger than just yourself.

Take it all in. Make time to process. Enjoy life even when it sends you in circles. Sometimes, it’ll bring you back right to a meal you used to love.

I’ve always had a decent nose for investments. It’s not like I only pick winners, but I pick enough of them to do well—in theory. In practice, I can relate a little too much to Carter Thomas:

“I’ve always bought the right stuff at the right time — I’ve just never held it long enough.”

When I heard it five years ago, Carter’s story about selling his Apple stock too early left me with a big lesson: You don’t get rich by taking profits. I also kept a clip from the show on my desktop to rewatch it every few months.

Half a decade later, I’ve done okay overall, I think, but I’ve still lost more money from selling too soon than I’ve gained by getting rid of stuff that ended up only declining. It makes sense if you’re picking enough winners: Just let the losers go to zero! The home runs will more than make up for it. Maybe, I, too, should adopt the motto Carter wishes he had espoused: “Never sell.”

It’s not like I haven’t been trying. For my cryptocurrencies, for example, I set email alerts a few months ago. If one of my major positions hits a big target, I’ll automatically get an email. No portfolio-checking needed.

Until recently, however, I still had the app on my phone. The reason was purely logistical: I hadn’t tied my portfolio tracker to an email address. If I don’t have an account, I can’t get hacked, and no one would even be able to find out how much I own of what. But without an account, deleting the app would mean I might lose my data altogether. So I spent months stewing in the question. Setting up an account would mean added risk. Keeping the app around would mean I’d keep checking more than I’d like.

A few days ago, I finally bit the bullet. Getting hacked has a lot of ifs attached to it. And besides, there are far more valuable targets in the world of crypto than me—and many of them voluntarily post their numbers online. I connected my tracker and deleted the app. Ahhh, quiet bliss!

When I recap the whole scenario now, it seems obvious: Nik is good at picking and holding assets. He’s patient and has conviction. But the more news he reads, prices he checks, and pretends to want to stay up to date, the more great returns he fumbles. If he would just throw money at assets, then leave them alone, he’d be just fine. Clearly, he should delete all of his trackers and investing apps from his phone.

Are you really struggling with a decision? Or are you just postponing the necessary? Every now and then, the only path to right leads through wrong. Just make sure you walk faster once you can see the light—and try not to sell your winners along the way.

There is just one, and it’s not the one I saw when I opened Substack for the first time in months. The home page feed looked more cluttered than ever. More algorithmically curated than ever. Front and center, I saw note after note with thousands of likes, all “inspo” and feel-good vibes in one form or another.

One proclaimed, with a big picture of simple black text on a white background, to know all the “signs you’re nailing it as an artist.” The joke being, of course, that there was just one: “No one understands what you’re doing with your life.” Haha. Great! Another one! One more cheap chuckle for the road.

Looking at the page, at all the accounts of people posting about writing, competing for likes and attention, it appeared the answer to the implied question was a different one: Apparently, what people really believe to be the #1 sign you’re nailing it as an artist is that you’re popular on social media. That seems to be the part everyone’s trying their hardest at—not the actual writing.

It’s easier, too, you know? Post lots of short, fluffy bits, grow an audience, and ask them for money. Then, send them two to three mediocre, perhaps AI-written pieces each week to allow them to justify their subscription cost, and voilà, you’ve got a writing empire! How hollow it’ll feel once you get there, however, that’s a different story. Good luck crafting funny notes about that.

For a moment, I was tempted to respond to the note. To take a big red marker, cross out the glib nonsense, and furnish the same note with the truth. But that’s exactly what they want you to do, isn’t it? To take the bait and start playing the same game. I took a breath, then logged out.

That’s okay. You and I will always know. There really is just one sign you’re nailing it as an artist. It requires zero popularity or social media presence, and even how you feel doesn’t matter. It’s the first, last, and only part that matters. The one aspect no one can take away from you but yourself: You create every day.

In 1976, the Indian philosopher Osho answered audience questions at his ashram. A man asked about his relationship and profession as a dentist. Was he making the right choices or throwing his life away?

Osho astutely observed that, since these two issues are somewhat diverse yet connected, there must be a deeper problem bothering the man. He was right. The man admitted to a general tendency to be negative and low-energy.

“If you feel a basic low energy, then you cannot make any decision,” Osho told him. “That is the problem for a low energy person, mm? You cannot decide—you go on thinking and thinking and wavering your whole life. But remember one thing: Whether you decide or not, a decision is continuously being taken. Even if you can’t decide—that too is a decision.” That last bit comes straight from Sartre.

Since the man’s inability to decide had led him to settle into what was right in front of him—dentistry for nine years and a certain woman for however long—Osho told him to flip the script. “Don’t give it a single thought again—just get out of it.” For a man who overthinks, more thinking could not possibly be the answer. So Osho told him to step back and see how he feels. Did he actually want to be a dentist? Then he should make a positive, affirming decision to be a dentist. And right now, he couldn’t do that because he had simply settled into the role.

As for the man’s fears of potentially losing both his job and his relationship, Osho only needed one line: “Be realistic: Plan for a miracle!” Still, he graciously elaborated: “There is nothing to worry about. At the most one can become a beggar. At the most death can happen—which is going to happen anyhow, mm? Take courage…and I am coming with you.”

Possibilities work in tandem, Osho believed. They are always connected. “When you close one door, another opens. If you don’t close this door, no other door opens—because it is the same energy which has to open the other door.”

Sometimes, the most pragmatic thing you can do is to throw caution to the wind—because the only way to find out what life truly has in store for you is to stop clinging to what you’ve already bought. So be realistic—and plan for a miracle!

I recently wrote about two AI companies going to court over who gets to sell their users’ data. It was a pot-vs-kettle situation with a big elephant standing in the back: The only ones completely ignored are the people who create all the value yet receive nothing for it.

One reader response surprised me. Rachel said the article better helped her understand the current tech madness. “I avoid AI as best I can. I avoid putting any real writing into any social media, all due to scraping,” she wrote. Her reasoning was straightforward: “It is so wrong for all these creators to not receive any sort of acknowledgement financial or otherwise.”

But it was Rachel’s next and last sentence that really made me think: “I am glad I’ve reached 70 and [am] on the slowdown side of life.”

For one, it beautifully explained why Rachel had such a clear opinion and was comfortable voicing it. Once you’ve reached your eighth decade, you know who you are and what you stand for—and you no longer have enough time to care what other people think about it. That’s one advantage of getting older.

What struck me most about her comment, however, was the sense of gratitude. “I’m happy I’m 70 and slowly riding into the sunset. It’s nice.” That’s what Rachel seemed to say. Most of us are worried about hitting 30 and 40, many outright afraid to reach 60, 70, and beyond. But age brings more than health problems and a lack of energy. If you take the right road to get there, it’ll also bring wisdom, confidence, and appreciation.

Don’t look forward with a frown. It’s still a gift to reach the second half of a century. And if you do, better yet, you can enjoy the slowdown side of life.