Author: Nik

Our guest couch isn’t exactly a luxurious bed, but in the morning, our friend still claimed it was the best sleep he’d had in a while. For one, our apartment has proper shutters that close all the way, and for another, he could hear the strong rain we had that night fall against those shutters. London, where he is from, rarely offers either of those things.

“Man, it’s so dark when the shutters are down. It’s great!” he said. He also explained that he sometimes plays “those rain sound videos” on his speakers all night. “But this is the real deal!”

When you pull a fake iPhone out of the box, you’ll immediately recognize your mistake. But not every replacement is obvious. We can go for years without realizing we’ve lost the real deal. We might even forget we’re dealing with a surrogate altogether — but blinds don’t make a room completely dark, and recorded rain sounds are never as vivid as the ones outside your window.

Don’t settle for substitutes. Insist on the real deal.

It’s an oddly specific question, isn’t it? It’s not, “What have you got coming up?” or “What are you doing the rest of the year?” Just, “Next month, what’s on the docket?” It can be downright scary.

When you think about it on a month-to-month basis, perhaps you’ll realize you’re not doing enough — or at least not enough of the things that matter. Sometimes, you may count the events, deadlines, and deliverables, and go, “Damn, this one’s gonna be busy! I need to increase the pace.”

A few years ago, I decided to structure my notes by time frame. I added four folders: one with my ultimate stretch goals and three for anything related to my annual, monthly, and weekly focus areas. Over half a decade later, only the annual goals really stuck. Week-to-week, too many unexpected things kept coming up, and month-to-month planning just didn’t feel necessary.

When I returned to Four Minute Books late last year, however, my girlfriend inspired me to set up a Trello board with monthly columns and milestones. For a 7-year-old business with fully developed arms and legs, it might have been the most useful change I’ve made all year.

I filled in whatever I knew would be needed every month for the whole year. Then, I added some more placeholders which I could later populate with goals wherever I knew work was needed but not exactly what kind. “What are you doing next month?” I kept answering the question, over and over again.

I made some mistakes, of course, but when I glanced at the board once two thirds of the year were over, I was surprised: “Wow! Those are a lot of green boxes.” Simply putting my repetitive tasks on a monthly rotation not just ensured I didn’t miss any of them. For the first time, it also gave me a sense of appreciation for how much I’m getting done — and how that work compounds over time.

If you ask me now, I can tell you exactly what I’m doing next month. I’ll be writing 4-5 book summaries, publishing 4-5 Youtube videos, and I’ll be writing a newsletter for every Saturday. I’ll write weekly promo emails, two “Best of the Blog” editions, and I’ll work on some new content too. Will it always be this way? Probably not. But as long as thinking month-to-month brings me closer to my goals, I’ll keep doing it.

A month is not long enough to derail your entire year if you waste it, and it’s also not short enough to be derailed by a single event, which can easily happen to any given week. It might not be the best time frame for you to plan your life in and around, but if you haven’t given it an honest effort, it sure is worth a try.

So, what are you doing next month?

In my hometown, we have a saying: “Today it only rains once.” It means that, when you look out the window in the morning and see some drizzle, you already know the forecast for the whole day. About 9 out of 10 times, the weather stays exactly as it is early in the day, and that’s both comforting and frustrating.

When I went to study abroad near Boston in 2012, I was first confronted with a new weather-reality for a sustained period of time. On one of the first days I was there, stormy morning clouds gave way to a day so sunny you could spend it at the beach. An early acquaintance there promptly introduced me to the famous saying: “If you don’t like New England weather, wait a minute.”

After my return, when I eventually moved to Munich, I quickly noticed the same pattern: A day that started off looking gloomy might turn around soon enough, and just because it was sunny in the morning would not guarantee you made it home before the rain.

Like its more reliable counterpart, fickle weather is also comforting and frustrating at once. It does, however, offer something steadier climates do not: the potential to change at any moment. It introduces hope to an otherwise foregone conclusion — if the weather can change any minute, it may as well change for the better. At least that’s the version of the future we tend to hold on to, and that optimism alone is worth a lot.

Thankfully, the upside of fickleness does not stop at the weather. If your boss is a moody person, you can find out her favorite drink and turn many a sour conversation sweet. And if your first web comic falls flat, someone can still discover and send it viral six months later. Whatever may be a hard friend to keep around might also be the savior that suddenly jumps to your side when you need it the most.

We want to avoid volatility because our brains crave certainty, but let’s remember: Fickleness is potential — and if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute.

Beautiful stories unfold organically. Then, caring storytellers polish them, trim the frills, and present them in a way we can understand them easily.

But not all stories are beautiful. Some are pushed and prodded along, herded like cattle in a meat processing factory. They are injected with chemicals to make them seem like more than they are. Important events that did happen are left out, while fictional ones are added.

The end result looks a lot like a beautiful story, but it isn’t. The narrative is spun, and if we manage to untangle it, only a few threads will be left.

It’s impossible to identify all corrupted stories, let alone reduce each one to its original, true components. Thankfully, neither is required. All it takes is for you to realize the story has been tampered with. How exactly? That doesn’t matter as long as you stop buying the story as a whole. Once we bring more skepticism to a narrative, much of the damage of falling for a corrupt story has already been mitigated.

When a former president has his mugshot taken — an event that has never taken place in the history of the country — and promptly posts said mugshot to social media along with a link asking for donations, you know there’s a narrative being spun. In politics, almost all narratives are. Does it mean he is guilty? Does it mean he is innocent? No one knows. The important part is that a presidential mugshot is not a good precedent for a country to set, regardless of the reason for the photo. That’s a story headed in the wrong direction, which means it’s time to pay attention and think for yourself.

Watch out for spun narratives. It’s always a good time to tell beautiful stories, but often, half the job is recognizing when a tale has gone off the high road.

There’s a good chance you’ve seen this picture: Set against the backdrop of a wall made of yellow, wooden planks, the young woman jumps high into the air. Striking not only a perfect pose with stretched out arms and legs, she also thrusts her open umbrella straight into the air — all while wearing a smile.

It’s an iconic photograph, first released on Unsplash in 2016. There alone, it has been viewed over 60 million times. Add to that thousands of reuses across the web, thanks to the site’s zero-copyright policy, and I can easily imagine this picture having gone halfway around the world. Personally, I’ve seen it hundreds of times. It’s a writer-favorite on Medium.

Just this morning, I came across it yet again. In a piece about reinventing the umbrella, or rather our lack of success therein, Edouard Bellin placed it at the very end of his analysis. For some reason, he chose the full-screen version, and for some reason, I stopped while scrolling. “Wait a minute! Is she…? She’s wearing braces! Wow!”

I zoomed in. For the first time, I noticed that the young lady’s outfit, including her top and hair, perfectly match the color of the umbrella. I saw in her face that she could be as young as 15 — though just as well up to 22 years of age. And dog my cats, I realized that, indeed, she was actually wearing braces.

You can look at something a million times and still miss one of its most important details. Once we file an idea as a grasped entity in our mental archives, we’ll see it the way we see words or known symbols: We recognize them without thought. It becomes a literal photograph stored in our mind. “I’ve already understood this,” the brain concludes — and thus devotes no further resources to additional analysis.

Unless we force it to, that is. It’s never too late to open our eyes and screen instead of just see. To study what feels familiar yet actually still contains many a mystery. To find the new inside the old.

Don’t just check life against the photocopies in your memory. Perceive it. Analyze it. Engage with it deeply every day — and don’t stop until you spot the braces.

Yesterday, I had slept poorly and too little but ended up having an extremely productive day. Today, I slept longer and better but woke up with a headache. I probably won’t accomplish half as much.

The plot twist is that yesterday, I really needed the energy. I was wrapping up a big launch, and it’s hard to spend six hours writing sales emails when your head feels like a construction site. Today, the launch went well, the sale is over, and it’s okay if I’m on cruise control.

That’s the irony of irony: Sometimes, it makes sense even when you can’t see it. Don’t lament your story before you know the ending. What feels like a pothole when you first drive over it might turn out to be a spring of fresh water; what seems bad today can always transform into good tomorrow.

Having spent all of 2023 working solely on one project, Four Minute Books, I have happened upon several interesting realizations.

First, I did not miss some of my previous business ventures for even a minute. Not necessarily because I didn’t enjoy working on them, but because there was simply so much to do, there was no time to be bored.

Second, while I lost some income from not prioritizing those other revenue streams or shutting them down outright, I more than made up for it by making more money through Four Minute Books.

Third, I still wake up at night sometimes, thinking about all the problems and things that could go wrong. How it could all disappear the next day. No matter how “diversified” I am, that seems to keep happening regardless.

Fourth and finally, I entertained the idea that if I want to be a full-time author of books someday, eventually, I might have to let go Four Minute Books too.

The underlying theme of these insights is that life is full of systems, and systems deserve our respect.

A system is something so big, you can spend your entire life in it and never be done. Writing on Medium was a system, and so was my writing course. They, too, contained endless to-dos and could have provided a lifetime of busyness. I just chose to focus on Four Minute Books.

Focused energy spent in one system compounds. Scattered energy across systems dissipates. I could never have kept growing all three of these projects at the same time. Two of them had already been shrinking. But by putting all of my energy into the oldest, still-growing system that already worked the best, I managed to ratchet up the rewards by far more than I lost in removing myself from the other two systems.

No system is perfect, and every system will always have problems. Whether you wake up at night sweating about getting new business for your one-man painting company, making it to your son’s guitar gig on time the next evening, or whether you closed the living room window doesn’t matter. There’s no magic combination of systems that’ll forever let you sleep peacefully at night.

As that last bit already hints at, we are part of countless systems in our lives. They extend well beyond work and business. However, we also have limited time, energy, and attention to spend on and in these systems. Every now and then, we must decide which ones truly matter to us.

Running a household is a system. Raising a child is a system. Keeping your friend group together is a system. So is any job, business, and hobby. You’ll never get the balance right perfectly, and you’ll dip in and out of many systems without ever deliberately adjusting them in your overall calculation. That’s normal, but it is worth trying to pay attention to the few systems you care about the most.

Do you really want to give up your career in law to pursue one in the food industry? Or is it just a matter of rediscovering, perhaps even reinventing, your love for the system? Are you ready to commit to and really be there for your child? Or should you wait a few more years before firing up the parenting system? Of course, any shift can be managed when it happens. The point is to prevent friction where possible. There’ll be enough in any one system as it is.

The most important takeaway from all of this, however, is that systems deserve our respect. Four Minute Books, like any business, plant, or human, needs care, attention, and love. Without them, it can’t grow. If we can’t give these things to the system we have chosen, maybe we need to choose a different system.

At the same time, Four Minute Books is a system already so vast, I sometimes dream about its tiniest cogs. “I need to change that one word on that one page.” “I should add a PDF download there.” “How can I redo my email signup flow from scratch?” Any system offers millions of questions, challenges, and problems. Only when you really commit to one can you become an expert in tackling perhaps not all of them but at least the ones that matter.

Choose your systems wisely. Give thanks to the ones you’re parting ways with, and respect the ones you decide to embrace. May your gears always turn smoothly, but remember: Unlike when Han Solo powers up the Millennium Falcon, in life, it’s almost never “all systems go!”

I wasn’t expecting to land on The Sixth Grade Times while looking for a source of a quote by Jim Thorpe. Surely an article by a 12-year-old couldn’t offer the information I needed. Or could it? The 300-word piece rounded up the usual information you first find about Thorpe: He was a Native American, raised in nature, astonishingly good in a variety of sports. He also won two Olympic gold medals for the US in 1912, taking the pentathlon and decathlon titles, the only athlete to ever do so.

Infamously, the International Olympic Committee stripped Thorpe of his medals one year later, citing violations of the rules of amateurism for taking expense money while playing minor league baseball. That started a 110-year-controversy which only ended in 2022, when Thorpe was finally reinstated as the sole winner of both events. His medals had already been returned in 1983, 30 years after his death.

While all of this was interesting, Niah Horn, the student behind the article, also couldn’t offer a source for the line in question. There was, however, something even more fascinating about his piece. It started surprisingly eloquently, given Niah’s age. He opened with a clever question. His sentences flowed well. He also used terms like “grief-stricken” — and that’s when I became suspicious.

In the second half of Niah’s piece, his wits seemed to leave him. What started like a piece in the New York Times now turned into, well, an article written by a 12-year-old. He made spelling errors, used clunky phrasing, and started every sentence with “he.” Niah even seemed to forget what he had written before, mentioning that Thorpe was “also an Olympian athlete” in his last sentence — even though he had just told us about his Olympic accomplishments.

In short, Niah Horn only wrote half of his article. My first thoughts went to ChatGPT, but that wasn’t around in December 2021, the date of the newspaper, so perhaps Mr. or Mrs. Horn lent a hand, or Niah simply employed the good old copy and paste. It always makes me sad when someone tries to pass off someone else’s work as their own, especially in writing. Then again, looking at Niah, standing in front of his locker, holding a football and wearing some old-school headgear, I could hardly blame him.

Perhaps Nia, like Jim, is more of a sports guy than a man of culture — and he just needed to get through his assignment for the school newspaper. It made me think about the times I tried to get away with the minimum in high school. I never cheated, but in arts and crafts, I always went with the simplest design possible. Let’s just say my brain works better than my hands.

It’s easy to oppose cheating in all walks of life, but the truth is we all cheat somewhere. Life is big and demanding and stressful at times. Every now and then, we just don’t have the nerve. I constantly fill in administrative forms with whatever information I have rather than all the information I need. Then I hit send and hope for the best. Often enough, it works. I check the box and move on with my day.

Maybe the important part, I realized, is not to never cheat but to not cheat where it matters — and that arena will be a different one for each of us. There’s no reason for me to be sad about Niah’s low writing standards if Niah doesn’t care about writing. It’s only one of many necessary but not interesting tasks on his list. Like me filling in administrative forms, he just wants to check the box and move on with his day, and even to someone who cares a great deal about writing, like me, that is okay.

What I am hoping, however, is that if sports really are Niah’s great calling, be it throwing the football he holds in his hand or any other athletic activity, he won’t cut any corners while playing. When we cheat where we care, our victories feel empty. If music means so much to you, you can’t skip to the crescendo. It won’t just not be satisfying. You’ll actively hurt your own feelings. You’ll let yourself down by not walking upright. There’s no prize for carrying your groceries instead of having them delivered, but the pride of climbing a mountain, winning an Olympic medal, or composing a symphony can only be earned.

It’s a hard balance to strike: Don’t let lesser passions get in the way, but don’t cheat where you care. Sometimes, we’ll miss the line between the two. Still, it is never too late to return to equilibrium. It took the IOC 70 years to admit it had made a less-than-honest mistake and another 40 to finally, fully fix it. I’m sure there are others. But as long as there’s one person on the committee who remembers that sports is the one field where Olympia can’t afford anything but honor and integrity, they’ll always find their way back — just like Jim Thorpe, who, after more than 100 years in historic record–limbo, finally returned to his rightful place as the sole gold medalist for the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games.

While inhaling the mild, sweet yet aromatic smell before taking my first sip of coffee this morning, it hit me: “The beans in this coffee came from Nicaragua. Nicaragua! But where even is Nicaragua?”

No longer the geographical savant I once was, I looked up Nicaragua on the map. Sandwiched between Honduras and Costa Rica, I learned that its capital is called Managua, and that the country is home to some six million people. Producing coffee is one of the main ways Nicaraguans earn their living, and some of them use a special “honey processing” method that leads to the sweet smell in my cup.

I also understood it would take me an 18-hour, 1,000-euro trip to even reach Nicaragua — yet I can buy the capsule that contains my coffee for just 50 cents. Astonishing!

We’re not always in the right frame of mind to realize what a long sequence of events we bring to its conclusion when we press the button on our coffee machine in the morning, but every now and then, it’s worth waking up before we’ve downed our first cup: Someone halfway across the world took care of a coffee plant until it bore fruit. Sometimes, that takes years. Then, they harvested the beans, peeled them, dried them, and carefully processed them until they went on a journey across the oceans. On a different continent, someone received those beans, ground them, and neatly filled them into perfectly portioned aluminum capsules. Those were then packaged, sealed, and, along with 10 other packages with 10 different kinds of coffee, shipped right to my house.

That last bit is, perhaps, the craziest part: When I open my kitchen cupboard, I don’t just see coffee from Nicaragua. I see coffee from Mexico, from Peru, and from Ethiopia. There’s coffee from China, Indonesia, and Kenya. Travel around the world in 80 days? How about in the span of an afternoon?

Every day, we hear about globalization in abstract terms in the news. “Africa’s exports are down.” “China-US relations strained.” We try to understand what they mean and how they’ll affect our future when, actually, we can see and feel the reality of globalization right in our homes.

Open your fridge. Chances are, almost nothing in it was produced within a 50-kilometer radius around your house. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is a debate for another time. So is how many of those 50 cents I pay for my coffee the Nicaraguan farmer actually sees. But it is an amazing feat nonetheless for his beans to make it into my cup, and at the very least that I can respect and appreciate.

Look around you. Stop and smell the roses. Muse about where they came from, and cherish their arrival in your life. Despite everything being available, nothing is self-evident, and even the greatest cup of coffee doesn’t last. Let’s acknowledge it while it does.

Bad sleep can lead to a cascade of consequences. When I wake up late, I feel groggy. I get annoyed that I start work so late, and then because I’m already aggravated, I’m more easily distracted. Another hour of pointless web browsing later I get even more angry with myself, and maybe, hopefully, eventually, after lunch I can reset and get to work. But it doesn’t have to work out this way.

It only takes a minute to go from angry to calm, to stand up and leave the house, to realize more time wasted won’t change the past. This minute, the right minute, can happen anytime.

When we pretend it can’t, our fate feels preordained. Ultimately, however, we’ll go down the wrong path because we chose to walk it. Of course we could have turned around at any point! We only decided not to because we didn’t believe it was possible. That was the only condition we were missing.

It only takes a minute to put out your cigarette and decide that it was the last one ever. That’ll make another minute soon very hard to get through, but neither is worth postponing.

It only takes a minute to lift your son’s house arrest, go to his room, give him a hug, and apologize because, actually, you were wrong. It’s never an easy thing to do, but it might pay emotional dividends for decades to come.

It only takes a minute to close all your tabs, take a deep breath, and start over on the task you actually meant to work on. Lost time always sucks, but no matter how late in the day you turn the ship around, if you do, you’ll go to bed feeling proud of having done your best.

The right minute can happen any time. It is not magic — especially when it most feels like it. You are writing your story, and we are just the audience. Believe in your power to change, and tell it exactly the way you want to tell it — one minute at a time, without ever giving away the ending.