Author: Nik

Have you ever told someone an anecdote from your past, perhaps about one of your youthful indiscretions, and then heard them say, “Really? You did that? I can hardly imagine!” Maybe, you even agreed with them. “Neither can I!”

If not for laughs, then at least thinking quietly to yourself, I’m sure you’ve experienced this. A memory including your former self that, today, feels so far away, it seems unfathomable that the person in the story was you. “Was that really me? It seems like that was someone else altogether.” That’s because it was. You were someone else. But now you’re not.

It’s easy to excuse ourselves from making a change, especially when the change is hard. “I’ve always been bad at running. There’s no way I can get better now.” But you are not “just you,” the same you you’ve always been. From one day to the next, it sure feels that way. But year after year, decade after decade? Almost nothing about you is fixed.

You are not who you were ten years ago, so there’s no reason why you must be the same you you were yesterday either. You are not you. All of “you” is in the past. You are only whoever you choose to be today. That choice can be one that makes people say, “Oh yeah, that totally sounds like him!” but it can also be one that makes them — even you — react with something like, “Really? You did that? I can hardly imagine!”

Whatever your art, chances are, you can look at sad statistics all day long. Your posts don’t get enough views. Your affiliate links don’t get enough clicks. Your invites don’t get enough responses.

Even home life can be dominated by numbing numbers. Your average heating bill is too high. Your bakery keeps raising prices. Your kid’s scores at school are too low.

Don’t get me started on the news. Your country’s GDP is in trouble. The population is aging. Chronic diseases are on the rise. The media is one big rodeo of fear-inducing figures.

You can look at all the numbers in your life, feel depressed, and zone out on the couch, or you can ignore them, put on some pants, and make something anyway.

Life happens one good deed at a time. Numbers are just observations, and without you trying your best, there’d be nothing to observe at all. Focus on the doing, not the tracking. Life is better that way.

Usually, the days when you most wonder why you even continue to do what you’re doing are the days when it’s most important to push through. Not because of the results you’ll generate on that day but because it reinforces a big decision you made a long time ago.

You may no longer be sure whether it was the right decision to make, but if you quit when you feel down, you’ll never know. Only if you re-evaluate from a strong, healthy position can you really adjust course — and to get back to that position, you’ll have to push through. For now, maintain the decision, and live to fight another day.

It is far better, and much easier, to stay on the wrong path a few days too long than it is to reset the counter to zero, warp back to the beginning, and start from scratch only to realize you were right all along.

When in doubt, first, keep going. You can always backtrack later, but on your journey so far, every step has mattered — and perhaps taking a few more is all you need to do to get back on track.

Most people learn early on that music is a great way to process and express our feelings. In high school, boys listen to rock when they’re pumped and metal when they’re angry. Girls listen to sad ballads when they’re heartbroken and pop when they’re in love. But few people ever realize that music can also affect and change our feelings. That it’s a tool we can use to direct our emotions rather than just feel them.

This, too, is a process most of us are familiar with — we just rarely take it into our own hands. As a baby, your parents might have played you soft music to get you to fall asleep. The calming harmonies playing in the background of a spa or massage parlor actively help your muscles relax. And the Super Bowl halftime show isn’t an Adele concert for a reason: It’s supposed to get you amped up for the second half.

I understand the desire to choose music that gives your feelings credence. It’s a useful habit — but only to an extent. You can play sad songs for a while after you got dumped, but if sad songs is all you play for months on end, how are you supposed to get back to happy?

Immerse yourself in music that matches your emotions, but set deadlines for those emotions. Decide to make deliberate breaks where you change the playlist and thus change your feelings. Flip from songs about heartbreak to songs about savoring life to the fullest, or turn a slow, meandering lo-fi beat into a focused, forceful EDM anthem to transform reflective thinking into decisive action.

The roads of mood and music are two-lane streets. Make sure you drive on them in both directions depending on where you’re trying to go.

On the rare few occasions when I ended up in Michelin star restaurants as a young adult, I never quite got the memo. I could see there was a level of sophistication, technique, and presentation not present in normal restaurants, but I didn’t understand what any of that was for.

Almost 20 years later, my understanding may have improved just a bit. On my 33rd birthday, I went to a one-star restaurant, and the dishes all seemed familiar yet entirely new. The menu included veal tartare, some German Brotzeit, duck breast, a piña colada, and an apple donut.

I know, right? Most of these don’t sound much like fine dining at all. But the veal tartare wasn’t just a blob of raw meat on a plate. The apple donut looked nothing like those you can get from Krispy Kreme. And the piña colada actually wasn’t a drink at all — and may therefore best serve to illustrate the point.

Imagine ordering the classic cocktail, but instead of a tall glass filled with cheap rum, greasy coconut milk, and pineapple juice from the can, you get a dessert bowl. At the bottom, you spot tiny cubes of what appears to be pineapple ragout. Smack dab in the middle of it sits a perfectly round circle of coconut panna cotta. That, in turn, is topped with some crispy-looking structure in the shape of a snowflake, and finally, atop the whole creation, rests a spoonful of lime sorbet.

“A piña colada? Really?” you think, but as you dig in, the first bite of this artsy creation immediately removes any doubts: “Wow! Incredible! It actually tastes like a piña colada — except I can taste every single ingredient and the totality of the dish — at the same time!”

You had no idea a piña colada could look like this, taste like this, feel like this, but it does — and that, I believe, is the point of one-star dining. It is meant to reintroduce you to the familiar, to present you with dishes you’ve had a thousand times at your down-the-street pub but show you that those same dishes can be so much more, all without losing any of the characteristics that make them your lovable, affordable, everyday favorites.

Done right, fine dining isn’t a snobby privilege for the wealthy. It’s a perspective shift that’ll both renew your appreciation of your daily meals as they are and help you see the true potential of what they can become with a little more skill, creativity, and design.

I don’t need nor would ever recommend fancy food on an everyday basis, but if you can afford it, try it once every blue moon. Look beyond the plate, and chances are, you’ll see a lot more than just salt, sugar, and fat.

Life doesn’t ask you whether it’s a good time to halve your income, send you a case of back pain, or reveal that your brother has lost his job and needs support. Sometimes, all three might happen at once. Ironically, we’re often well-prepared for more bad news. We may whine and say, “Why me? Why me again?” but since we’re already dealing with one crisis, a second one might just faze us a little less. “Oh well, guess I’ll figure this out, too.”

We half-expect bad fortune to be ill-timed because, well, that’s what bad luck is all about. With good fortune, however, we can have a much tougher time. We’re skeptical of lucky breaks in general, let alone multiple of them occurring in our lives at once. But if we don’t believe we deserve some good luck — and we hardly ever do — we might outright refuse to accept it or, at the very least, talk it down into our current, acceptable level of misery.

“I don’t deserve this.” “This will never last.” “Life is being too good to me.” But good fortune, too, cannot be timed. You must accept and savor it whenever it comes. Sometimes, you’ll find a $50 dollar bill on your way home from a bad day at work. Sometimes, your job search may go nowhere for months, but in the meantime, love will find you. Don’t treat these blessings as glitches in the Matrix. Recognize them for what they are: a stroke of luck at an odd time.

Perhaps, good fortune at a bad time is not meant to remind you of your challenging situation. Maybe, it is simply a reminder that better times are to come again. An auspicious sign that you’re on your way up instead of down — and even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t you much rather interpret it that way?

Choose optimism regardless of what fate delivers in the mail, and then go and apply yourself to it. Sooner or later, your world will lighten up again — and it won’t require any lucky breaks at all.

On my 33rd birthday, I learned that even when your hair is dry, you can still use a hairdryer to somewhat whip it into shape. What an obvious lesson, right? But that’s how it goes. One day you walk into the bathroom, don’t feel like completely washing your hair, and since the hairdryer is conveniently plugged in already, boom, one and one finally come together to make two.

It took me twelve thousand and forty-five days to learn this extremely simple, obvious, everyday lesson — and that is the point: No one knows everything, and no matter how much trite, advanced, or profound insight you’ve accumulated, there is always more of every category to obtain.

Stay humble, keep an open mind, and never stop looking for new ideas to update the old. What’s clear to you can be subtle for others, and either one is worth picking up with excitement instead of judgement when you find it — even if it’s in a place you’ve visited a thousand times before, like your bathroom mirror.

In 2016, after being nominated three times and not winning, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won the Oscar for Best Actor. Imagine if, right in that moment, some random dude walked up to the stage, grabbed the microphone out of Leo’s hand, and said: “Thank you all! Actually, it was me acting in every one of his movies all along.” Worse, Leo would just nod and say, “It’s true! He’s my ghostactor. Couldn’t have done it without him!” Then, roaring applause, and the two walk off stage. What the hell just happened?

What is unthinkable in sports, acting, or the world of business is an everyday occurrence when it comes to writing. Gary Vaynerchuk has “written” 5 New York Times Bestsellers. But actually, he’s written none of them. Donald Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal. Tony Schwartz did.

But even if it’s not plainly obvious that the person on the cover couldn’t write a decent page to save their life, ghostwriting is so common in industry magazines, on company blogs, and now thanks to AI even on personal accounts all over the web, that one can’t help but wonder: How have we arrived at a world where 20%, 30%, 50% of what we read was not written by the person who’s name appears at the top, and not only are we cool with it, we don’t actually care at all?

If you’re the kind of person who demands that other people earn their stripes before you trust them, don’t suspend that principle when reading books, listening to rap songs, or browsing the news on the internet. Ask to get what you pay for, and don’t let the people claiming to have done somebody else’s work get away scot-free.

Every Monday, this blonde-haired kid from New Jersey walks into some company building, sits down at his desk, and does boring accounting stuff for eight hours. Then, he does it again on Tuesday. And on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

But when he goes home to his parents’ house, where he has lived well into his 20s, CoolTrainerRyan can walk down the stairs into his mom’s basement, turn on the lights, and look at a Pokémon card collection worth millions of dollars.

During daylight hours, he is Ryan from accounting. But every night, he opens a few hundred dollars worth of Pokémon boosters for his almost 100,000 subscribers. He curses a lot. He only cares about chase cards. And he never artificially hypes up bad pulls. Ryan is 100% himself, and whether it’s on his channel, in interviews, or as a guest in another, much more famous Youtuber’s video, he never apologizes for it.

Ryan has earned that freedom day by day, income statement by income statement, spreadsheet by spreadsheet. He worked, earned money, and reinvested it into something he understood and believed in. He did it without fanfare. Without the hype of, “Look at me, I’m quitting my job to be an entrepreneur!” Just a young kid, working a regular job, with a hobby he pursued relentlessly until, eventually, it kinda worked out.

I chose a different path, but I still remember the magic of leaving the office without a care in the world. “What gives? All our problems will still be here tomorrow. Now, let me do whatever the hell I want.” Often, this little bit of freedom on the side is all the magic you need, and sometimes, it can even be a faster way to the career balance you seek than grinding your teeth into the same problem 24/7.

Don’t underestimate the power of being a part-time dreamer. We can’t all have million-dollar collections, but we can all be as authentically cool as trainer Ryan — and perhaps, regardless of what schedule we do it on, that is enough.

When you put a snuffer over a candle, the flame loses access to oxygen and dies. Sometimes, life can feel the same. A metal dome seems to descend all around you, and suddenly, you’re in the dark.

The dome could be your company trying to bully you out. It could be a coworker continuously making snide remarks. Maybe it’s a failed pregnancy, a lackluster product launch, or a patron pulling out of your vernissage at the last minute.

Whatever its exact shape or material, the dome’s arrival will shake your confidence. It will make you feel isolated. You will doubt your skills, character traits, perhaps even your values. “What if I actually don’t belong here? Do I deserve this setback?”

No, you don’t. You’re exactly where you’re meant to be — you just need to remember that you’re not a candle. You can do something even the most powerful fire can’t do: supply your own oxygen.

Everything you need, you already carry within yourself. Love. Hope. Confidence. Courage. Honesty. Belief. It’s all there, ready for you to fetch. You need only remember to go and collect.

Even the biggest candle snuffer in the world could not resist that light. Once you find your way back to it, it’ll crack any exterior shell right open. Shoot towards the sky where it belongs, and break any dome of limitation straight in half.

No matter how hard it might try, the world can never snuff you out. You are not a candle. Only you can dim your light — and only you can release it. Choose to dial it up, and shine as bright as you can.