Don’t the two go hand in hand? Yes, but the question is what are you growing?

After I finally found a new, simpler, off-the-cuff way to shoot videos for my book Youtube channel, I was so excited, I wondered if I could apply the same mode of creation to another project I was secretly dreaming about: making videos about Pokémon card collecting.

I’ve been a day one Pokémon fan since the late 90s, and ever since getting back into collecting the cards in late 2023, I’ve been sharing occasional lessons about the hobby on this blog. The truth is there are plenty more where those came from, and I’m cautious about not droning on too much about one topic.

Youtube is probably the number one channel for Pokémon coverage as is, and with video, you can get more information out faster. Every day, the idea became a little more appealing. Then, I actually shot a video. It worked well enough, and I’m now sitting on a raw file that would need little editing.

Once I sat down to gear up for the kickoff, however, I paused. I reflected on all the additional effort it would take to not just start but maintain, let alone grow the channel. I looked around, sitting between books, wedding decorations, and Pokémon cards, and realized: This will be a massive distraction. And, worse so, a detraction to my aspirations as a writer.

The main reason everything related to Pokémon feels alluring is that it’s easy. The entire sector is ripe with opportunity, and whatever I touch seems to turn out well from a collecting angle as well as a financial one. Even my occasional posts on Reddit sometimes go through the roof. But opportunity to make a number go up is only one kind of growth—and, often, not the right one.

It sucks that writing and selling books is hard. But if that’s what I want to do, then I’ll have to pay the entry fee. Only there can I find the growth that I need, whatever it may look like. Chances are, it won’t start with big numbers going up fast—but that doesn’t make it the wrong type of growth.

Through my reflections, I realized: I don’t have an end goal for Pokémon card collecting. It’s not like I want to own every card, every set of a certain era, or a Base Set booster box. I don’t dream about meeting the voice actors or famous Youtubers. I don’t care about running a shop. I enjoy everything in Pokémon, but there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for me—except, perhaps, the literal goal of using it to make money, which I can still do as part of being in the hobby. But I don’t care much about being a Pokémon millionaire either.

Books, meanwhile, don’t get me started. Sell 100,000 copies? Yes please! Become a New York Times best-selling author? Ohhh yeah. There are real, tangible goals there—and even without them, I would still die as happy as a claim if I spent the rest of my days mostly reading and writing books.

It’s hard to abandon opportunity for growth—but it’s right. You already know what to do. May you find the resolve to stay on the path of meaning.

In July, a segment of the European Parliament used a procedural loophole to quickly push through a piece of legislation before the summer break: “Chat Control 1.0,” as it’s dubbed, basically enables the scanning of the private messages of EU’s nearly 500 million citizens.

The idea behind it is noble: “Let’s fight the sexual abuse of children online.” The execution thus far is amateurish at best and nefarious at worst. Instead of targeting predators with precise rules, a blanket permission to scan everyone’s texts—even without suspicion—has been set up as an intermediate solution. Some would like it to be permanent, despite the poor results: So far, a meager 0.00000077% of the messages being scanned actually refer to illegal matters.

Perhaps that’s why various motions for Chat Control 1.0 have been swatted down by European lawmakers in the past. But this time, for whatever reason, an absolute majority was required to deny it. So despite more members of the European parliament voting against the measure than for, it still passed for approval. What a world we live in.

A day before the vote, the activist group “Fight Chat Control” encouraged people to message their MPs. I’ve signed various petitions over the years, but this time, the cause was so well-prepared, I tried taking my effort one step further. All it took was copying a prepared message and the relevant politicians’ emails, signing my name, and hitting send. The law passed regardless, and I and many others will likely have to repeat that process several times to make any meaningful dent in its alteration.

Since both the politicians and I were on a roll, I also became active in another matter: a change of the taxation of cryptocurrencies in Germany. For once, AI came in handy while writing. It drafted a quick email for me to review and amend, which I then sent to a publicly available list of members of the German parliament. I didn’t find all active members, but I still caught a good number of them, and the responses were revealing, as was their lack.

With over 600 members, our parliament is one of the largest, and each member is naturally flooded with requests. Political strength of the common folk, therefore, lies in numbers more so than the contents of each individual message. The more mail politicians receive on certain topics, the more attention they’ll pay to them. Yet, there is nuance.

In my case, the only real responses I received came from the AfD, a right-wing, nationalist party currently on the rise. Possibly because they happened to take the same stance on the matter. But each email was different, and some clearly typed by the politicians themselves. Germany’s ruling parties, meanwhile, the conservative CDU and social-democratic SPD, seemed to have less need to engage with their citizens. Zero CDU politicians replied, and from the SPD I only received a handful of automated responses. Their consensus? “I only deal with matters sent to me by the people in my constituency”—which, if you’re elected from a 10,000-people town to a government representing some 80 million, seems a strange attitude to take. The Green party, meanwhile, had their own ideas. Wherever they responded, they did so with the same manifesto extolling fairness as the reason for yet higher taxes in yet another area.

I don’t have a real conclusion. I doubt my voting behavior will change due to one interaction. But there’s a lot to learn from the reactions you get when you actually start poking the people steering the politics of your city, state, or country. If only that, probably, you should voice your opinion more often. A single idea may fall on deaf ears, but a strong take repeated a million times can ring far more than a bell.

Try writing to your politicians. If they’re already busy doing what you didn’t elect them to do, then what have you got to lose?

Despite already being a New York Times best-selling author, in the 1980s, no one in the US really knew Noah Gordon. That didn’t change when he published what would become his most popular work, The Physician, in 1986. The book sold like hotcakes overseas, especially in Germany, Italy, and Spain. But in the US? Crickets, comparatively speaking.

Even so, it took almost 30 years until the novel was turned into a movie. The film was a German production with an English-speaking cast and shot mostly in Germany, with parts taking place in Morocco. It’s hard to depict the 11th-century Persian desert in Thuringia, I imagine.

The story sees Tom Payne as Robert Cole, an English peasant, study medicine, first at home, then in the distant city of Isfahan at the height of a Golden Age. Persians are living peacefully side by side with a minority of Jews, and knowledge is prospering in the city, most notably under physician Ibn Sina, known to us Westerners as Avicenna, played by Ben Kingsley in the movie.

At first, Rob learns a lot and is excited by the much more structured approach to medicine the Persians practice. But when the Black Death strikes Isfahan, Rob’s conviction in the power of healing begins to crumble. He sees the death toll rising every day as he and his fellow doctors can do little but comfort their patients and wait to find out who makes it through.

Despite this, Ibn Sina remains steadfast and urges Rob to treat every patient with the same care, attention, and respect. At one point, Rob asks his mentor: “Do you never doubt your calling?” Ibn Sina can only scoff: “Every morning and every evening.” But as Rob looks on incredulously, the master adds the important part: “In between I work too hard to think about it.”

When Noah Gordon died at the age of 95, he had published eight novels and a collection of children’s stories. I bet he sat at his dinner table with his head in his hands more than once. Before his debut novel came out, perhaps. Surely when The Physician was a flop in the US, and perhaps once again after it took off in Europe. Maybe he didn’t like the movie, or maybe he liked it so much he wondered why he hadn’t structured his book more like the film, which varies quite a lot from the original text.

A calling is something too important to ignore. It’s also too big to come without sacrifice. If our commitment to being a doctor, a writer, a mother, didn’t make us question our life choices at times, how much of a commitment would it really be? Cold feet are part of treading where we can truly make a difference.

Worry is normal. Just don’t worry too much about your worrying. You can doubt your calling twice a day and still be the greatest physician in the world.

When I tried to read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I could not get past the first few pages of Tolkien’s extensive descriptions of Bilbo’s home. “Who spends this much time pointing out what stuff looks like?” I thought. Now, I know better: The backstory is the story, and there’s no such thing as too much detail.

Having recently finished The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time, I’m now off into The Two Towers. One pattern which struck me is how much time Tolkien dedicates towards describing the characters’ surroundings and the weather. If I had to guess, I’d say the former makes up 10-15% of the book. Throw in the latter, and you probably get to 20, maybe 25%. That’s one in every five sentences dedicated to rocks, clouds, rivers, hills, meadows, sunshine, or the moon!

Some readers lament this extensive scene-setting, thinking it breaks the flow of the action. If you ask me, it makes the book rather than breaking it. This is a story that happens in the great outdoors. The environment is beautiful yet often just as dangerous. Snow isn’t something our cast watches through a living room window. It’s an obstacle and, potentially, the difference between life and death. If our fellowship hadn’t turned around near the peak of Caradhras during a snowstorm, they might not have lived to see the morning.

Consistently describing where our heroes are and under which conditions they operate reveals our choices to them without constantly stating the obvious. It explains why Aragorn is moody, why Legolas is prancing around, and why the short-legged hobbits need rest where everyone else could still keep going.

It also sets up how various characters feel and foreshadows upcoming events. If the gang is staring into a dull landscape of barren fields and ash-gray ridges full of sharp rocks, no one expects them to encounter a friendly traveling salesman five minutes later. But, sometimes, they might—yet only the description opens up the opportunity to meet or subvert readers’ expectations.

Finally, and this may be their most important function, the descriptions pull us in. They ground not just the characters in this world unfolding in our heads, but us, too. With his maps and names and great attention to detail, Tolkien went above and beyond in this, but many other books also get us involved primarily by giving us something to look at—if only in front of our mind’s inner eye.

A little stream is trickling down an almost-dry riverbed, and you can hear it. Dark clouds roll in from the East, and you can see them. Nature and the weather are always present in Tolkien’s works—and that’s why we are, too, when we read them.

Who spends this much time pointing out what stuff looks like? Anyone who cares to create a world the rest of us will genuinely love to visit.

A few weeks ago, I finally found the wherewithal to record a new video to put on my Youtube channel. I used to pay someone to create fully scripted, beautifully animated videos with smart editing and background music. Now, I’m employed and the business is barely moving. So I knew I couldn’t do that anymore.

But I didn’t realize how much simpler I would have to make the process in order to get anything out, let alone how long it would take me. It ended up being over a year, and, in the end, everything had to go—except me talking to the camera.

I bought a wireless microphone and tripod, clipped in my iPhone, and scribbled some notes on a scrap of paper. I tore off some more paper bits and used them as bookmarks to highlight sections from a book I had just finished. Then, I sat down in my garden chair, hit record, and shot the whole video in one take.

It was far from perfect. Soon after wrapping up, however, I felt that was the best part about it. I looked at the video in my editing software, but, ultimately, I decided to make no edits, barring a brief intro transition and a title card. The rest remained exactly as it was.

The video went live with a few “uh”s and “umm”s—but not too many. I had to start over when reading out one passage. Yet you, the viewer, get one real, honest, unfiltered take. For those of us who still remember the early days of Youtube, if you think about it, that’s what it was originally for. Just real people sharing real moments. And that’s why no edits might be the best edits.

Nowadays, most videos are overproduced. Perfect lighting, specifically arranged backgrounds, highly polished editing with near-Hollywood-level effects. It’s nice to give your videos a personal touch, but if you’re talking about Pokémon cards, showing a tutorial on your computer, or sharing your thoughts on the latest news, do you really need that? No. What you need to do is bring something unique to the table—and no amount of polish can turn a repetitive, mediocre idea into a viral hit.

Sharing my raw video felt a tad scary, but it was also liberating. As if I was starting a movement to bring back the old Youtube. To bring reality back to social media. Better yet, it made the process of creating a video feel simple and fun. In fact, it was so much fun, I did it again a few days later with an idea for a Pokémon Youtube channel, and I actually feel the format is scalable.

If the alternative is to not share the knowledge at all, I say screw the edits. Give us your raw thoughts, and we’ll decide the rest. Humans are happy to wade through a bit of roughness for exceptional creativity and insight—yet even the shiniest turd still smells like poop.

With only a few days left to the state election in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD, a far-right party, is leading by a large margin in the polls. Percentage points jump from one party to another here and there, but if the last few months are any indication, they could collect over 40% of the votes, potentially even enough to govern the state on their own without needing to form a coalition. But despite its brevity, it is a big word: if.

In 2008, Nate Silver’s blog FiveThirtyEight got a lot of traction. He came up with a new way of aggregating polling data and correctly predicted Obama’s win of the US presidency. In 2012, he and his team even correctly guessed the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, when Obama secured his second term in office.

In 2016, however, they projected that Donald Trump only had a 2% chance of securing the candidacy for the presidency. Yet, he did. They later favored Hillary Clinton with a 71% chance of winning the presidency. Yet, she didn’t. In the end, the blog was sold and resold several times before shutting down altogether in 2025.

Elections. Soccer games. The weather.

A first date. Your next career move. That spontaneous visit to a restaurant.

Statistics and analyses are interesting—yet, even when they get the result right, they don’t tell the full story. You never know until you know. Don’t throw in the towel, odds be damned.

Today, I received two letters from Italy and one from Belgium. They all had Pokémon cards inside.

One of the Italian letters was packaged simply, just the card in some protective sleeves inside a bubble wrap envelope. But the envelope itself was large, yet, the sender folded it in half to cleverly turn it into a smaller-sized letter.

The Belgian letter used a classic trick: Put the card into a sleeve, then a hard plastic “toploader,” then tape it to an A4 piece of paper. But the sender had taped it more tightly to the paper than I had ever seen anyone do it. I had to literally cut it off with a boxcutter. I’m not sure how he managed to do that with just normal cellotape, but it was ingenious.

The second Italian letter was the most distinctive. The store had printed their own little, foldable paper cards. On the outside, there was the store’s logo, a chimera, and name. Once you opened the card, the actual Pokémon card was tucked safely inside.

When you collect Pokémon cards, you’ll naturally get letters from all over the world. Each of these letters originates from a city, a house, a person packaging it and sending it on its way. Every envelope goes through many hands and travels thousands of kilometers before it arrives at my house.

It’s easy to miss these details. To just rip open each letter as if it was yet another box from Amazon, take out the card, and move on. But every now and then, I turn them over in my hands. I smell them and think about the long journey they’ve been on to reach me. And even though I know what I’ve ordered, there’s always a tad of mystery remaining. You never quite know what you’ve got until you open it! That’s true for the card as much as for the packaging and whatever personal touch a seller might include.

Usually, we’re focused on the main event, and that’s as it should be. But almost everything in life comes with beautiful side effects. Notice them before their scent disappears.

“I feel like there’s something there,” my friend Herbert keeps telling me. What he refers to is my knowledge of Pokémon and, particularly, Pokémon cards.

At his suggestion, I started a draft of a book proposal covering Pokémon card collecting. I had a lot of fun and early momentum with it, but, eventually, I started questioning whether it wasn’t just a distraction from other books I cared about writing more. For now, it rests on the shelf.

Since I got back into collecting, I occasionally post on Reddit. Cards I pulled from booster packs, binder pages I put together, rare finds I made a deal on. Several of my posts got way more traction than I expected, and twice now I’ve accidentally caused a shitstorm of epic proportions. 400,000 views, hundreds of comments, the works. There’s always so much to learn from the comments.

Like most collectors, I religiously frequent various Youtube channels for updates on the market, cards that are currently cheaply priced, and the occasional pack opening to watch. Lately, I’m itching to start my own, as it feels like the fastest, most efficient way to get my ideas out there.

Every month, I tell myself, “Okay, I’m done for now. No more card buying, selling products, or investing into new stuff.” But then every month, more amazing stuff happens, and I just keep going. However, it’s not only the hobby itself that keeps pulling me in. It’s that after almost three years of intense study and activity, I have so much pent up knowledge I’m dying to share. It’s as if the universe is telling me, “Yo, you really need to make something here.”

“Make” is my theme for the year. When it started, I was working on a new nonfiction book and a novel. And of course, I’ll never stop writing. But if I want to stay true to my theme, it shouldn’t matter all that much what I make, should it? After more than a year, I finally found a new video format I can try to keep my Youtube channel alive. I released the first one. That, too, was making something.

It’s rarely easy to find the time and right channel, but if you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge and are excited about the possibility of sharing it, don’t wait. Launch small experiments, check if you get traction, and who knows? Maybe a new career is already waiting for you. Or a nice side gig. Or, if your hobby is meant to stay a hobby, you’ll find that out, too.

Knowledge wants to get out there. Share it freely, and see how the world reacts.

My fiancée’s last birthday was a lucky day. After making breakfast for her, giving her my gift, and spending some time together, I opened a lot of Pokémon booster packs I had bought from someone on a local chat group. It was a rare opportunity to get some packs in English from a coveted set, and he sold them slightly below market value, so I figured, “Why not?“

The pulls were what you’d expect until I was halfway through the pile. Before I knew it, it sat there. The “Treekachu,” as collectors endearingly call it. An elusive, special illustration rare of Pikachu standing next to a tree in a forest. Rough market value? 1000 €. It was one of the few occasions when opening packs was actually worth it financially.

Of course, I was over the moon. I showed the card to my partner, friends, and family. I shared it in some online chat groups and forums. What luck to hit the second-most expensive card in an already-expensive set!

A while later, however, as I reflected on my day, I realized that, despite the extraordinary luck I had had, pulling the card had not been the highlight of my day. In the morning hours, I had written my partner’s birthday card. That was an emotional, beautiful moment. So was watching her read the card over breakfast. And then opening the puzzle box in which I had hidden her gift.

There are obvious moments in our lives we’ll remember forever. Beating the odds of 1500 to 1 and pulling this card will probably become one of them for me. But that doesn’t mean these highs will define us, let alone that we must keep chasing them. A tiny but meaningful memory can hold more power than even the biggest win.

The highs are relative. To the lows. To the boring days. And even to one another. Value is what you decide. Choose in a way that’ll bring you both contentment and resilience.

I spent most of my Master’s working. I’d be in the college study room all day, but I rarely began looking at slides and scripts before 4 PM. Minimizing the time I spent studying forced me to focus on the essentials.

I’d go through the material end-to-end, try to capture every page in one sentence, then memorize my four, eight, or ten pages of summary. I walked up and down in the hallway, remembered what I could, then showed up to the exam. Most of the time, it worked well enough.

I sat on the floor a lot, too, in that same hallway. Occasionally, there weren’t any seats left in the study room. I’d just plop down next to a plug, charge my laptop, and go. Back against the wall, feet stretched out. Working.

Right now, I’m leaning against the wooden headboard of a bed in a room in a three-star hotel. I’m attending my best man’s wedding in an hour. It’s a little bit comfier here than on the floor of Munich’s university—but not too much. That’s a good thing.

Sometimes, it’s good to have your back against the wall. Maybe not in an “I have no idea how to get out of this situation”–sense, but definitely in a “there’s not much to work with here”–sense. Reduce the conveniences. Afford yourself the minimum. Eat ramen on purpose.

The thing about a back resting against a wall is that it’s always straight. You can’t slouch, drag, or bend. Your shoulders, your feet, the rules. Posture has a way of carrying through to our minds. He who has little to work with tends to stand up, do his best, and accept whatever result may follow.

You don’t need portafilter coffee to start your day. You don’t need an agent to sell your book to a publisher. And you don’t need to sit in a zen garden to write good stuff. Special is nice, but special is optional.

You can win with your back against the wall. Most likely, you might do so because of it.