Author: Nik

Yesterday morning, I was trying to record a 30-second clip for a product launch. Hoping to use the quiet, pre-9 AM window at WeWork, I went into an empty meeting room and began.

At first, my recording software kept crashing. I couldn’t find an update. Then, I kept rambling for a minute, failing to say what I wanted to say succinctly enough. While I was trying to find the right words, other people started making noise. During my next attempt, ambulance sirens started wailing outside. Needless to say, it was not going well.

After 30 minutes of frustrated attempts, I was ready to throw my laptop out of the window, but then I decided I’d do something else: “Stop. Wait. What you need…is a reset.”

If you’ve ever played one of those wooden ball-in-a-maze puzzles, where you have to tilt the maze from side to side in hopes of maneuvering the ball into the right hole, you know how hard it can be to find balance. Just before the last corner, you slip and the ball falls into the wrong crack. Even when you can already see it racing towards a dead end and try to adjust, sometimes, you don’t make it in time.

Life is like that, too. On some days, the ball will keep going into the wrong hole, and the more you grit your teeth and tighten your muscles, trying ever harder to make it go your way, the faster the ball will run away from you. The more tilted you become, the more you’ll tilt the maze — and on slanted geography, nothing can go in a straight line.

When frustrations run hot, lower your expectations. On days like that, the goal is not to finish first. The goal is to steady the maze — and re-establish balance. Of course, the thing you’re really steadying is yourself. Once you return to your center, let go of anger, and choose calm, your hands will stop shaking, and the maze will steady itself.

As three guys settled in for the day right next to where I was recording, I closed my laptop and walked out of the meeting room. I went to the toilet, made some tea, and sat back down at my seat. I put on my headphones, turned on some music, and started writing. Another 30 minutes later, I had all but forgotten the recording session gone wrong, and it was just another, sunny, productive day.

When your perspective is crooked, don’t lean forward. Look straight, breathe, and steady the maze. Once your vision is level, the path to your destination will be clear — and only if you see where you’re going can you avoid falling into a hole along the way.

There’s a scene in The Matrix where Neo sees a black cat in a hallway, briefly stopping and shaking itself before trodding off — and then he sees the exact same cat do the exact same thing right afterwards. “Huh,” Neo goes. “Déjà vu.”

“What did you just say?” the rest of the team asks and, instantly, we know something’s wrong. “A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.” In this case, the change is that the team is now trapped in the building it’s in, and the algorithmic overlord’s AI soldiers are on their way to exterminate them.

A déjà vu is a memory you feel you’ve lived before. It means “already seen.” It’s a moment of remembrance for which, “despite the strong sense of recollection, the time, place, and practical context of the ‘previous’ experience are uncertain or believed to be impossible.”

When I was nine, I was stuck on Zelda: Ocarina of Time forever. When I finally managed to proceed to the next dungeon, it was as if I had done the entire thing before. I knew exactly where to go, what to do, and which steps to complete in what order. It was eerie.

A few years later, I was sitting in my dad’s desk chair, sorting Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. As I held five of them in my hand, the sunlight fell in through a window on the left, and time seemed to slow down. It was an odd, trance-like moment — and the exact same thing happened again a few years later.

Now, I know there are various scientific, perfectly reasonable explanations for déjà vus, but if you’ve ever felt like you’ve been in “this exact spot at this exact time before,” if you’ve read pages in books where you knew what comes next despite never having read them before, if you just know that you’ve held the cards exactly this way, played the game exactly this way, or had the exact same conversation with that person, maybe you’ll entertain my theory for what déjà vus are: Reminders that we’re old souls in new bodies.

What if there’s only a limited number of souls, and the universe keeps redistributing them? When someone dies, their soul goes back to “the pond,” and when a new baby is born, maybe, instead of a fresh soul off the shelf, it’ll get one that’s been around — and that’s why that person’s life will be full of déjà vus. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, by the way. I think it allows life to accomplish certain missions by sending us, its dedicated agents of fate, on the same course multiple times across generations.

Sometimes, one human life is just too small. Too short. Too fragile. The civil rights movement couldn’t just bank on Martin Luther King, even though his speech might be one of the climaxes of that story. It also needed Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and many others, some of whom lived decades before the others were even born. Perhaps they just knew, even without reading about their predecessors in a book, that they were walking in the footprints of those who came before them — and where they were going was important, so important they had to keep walking.

Whenever you feel like you’ve “seen this before,” maybe it’s not a glitch in the matrix. Not a sign that “they changed something.” Maybe it’s a sign that nothing has changed at all. You’re here — again — and you’re on the same mission others were sent on before. What exactly that mission is only you can tell, but even if you have to stop sometimes and shake yourself before moving on, it’ll bring great honor, pride, and peace to your, and my, and our collective forebears. May your old soul never tire of new bodies, and may we each play our part in our one, shared human story.

There’s that famous line from Isaac Newton about seeing further by “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It’s true, of course: Without the breakthroughs from great minds of the past, we couldn’t keep pushing the boundaries of technology, art, and knowledge.

Where Newton reminds us to be humble, however, I think it is also worth considering a corollary, something to make us bigger rather than smaller: You’re not just standing on the shoulders of giants — you are also the sum of heroes. Every person who has ever inspired you, no matter how small the spark they’ve added to your fire, has left an indelible mark on your soul — and over time, those marks add up.

I am not just Nik. I am Harry Potter. I am Pippi Longstocking. I am Tim Ferriss, Superman, and my incredibly cool neighbor back from when I was 7. I am Walter Isaacson, Liz Gilbert, and every author whose book I’ve ever read. I am my friend Brian, who overcame drug addiction. I am my friend Vici, who learned to be alone. I am the sum of all their little puzzle pieces and a million more — just like you are.

Your particles are different, but the result is the same: You are a hero with a thousand invisible supporters, and you have just as much potential to become one of the giants on whose shoulders the next generation will stand on as anyone of them had when they set out on their greatest quest.

Remember your heroes, but most of all, remember you are one too.

In The Courage to Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga explain a fascinating argument from Adlerian psychology: Trauma does not exist.

The example is a young man who has shut himself in his house and is living like a recluse. He doesn’t work, he doesn’t go out, and he doesn’t take care of himself very well. His parents and friends worry a great deal about him, and even he himself is miserable, but there just doesn’t seem a way out of the situation. What’s going on here?

The book is written as a conversation between another young man and a philosopher, and the young man argues that his friend — the recluse in question — can’t help but be a recluse because of traumas he’s suffered in the past. As it turns out, the man didn’t have a nice childhood. His parents favored his brother and, as a result, did not treat him kindly. Expectations were high, and nothing he ever did was good enough. Of course he is going to give up at some point and stop trying, the youth tells the philosopher.

The philosopher, however, takes a different stance. He claims that the young man can leave his house and “get back to life” at any point. The reason he chooses not to do so is some goal he has, and even is the goal is hidden, perhaps even from himself, the purpose for his behavior is still there. What happened in the past matters only insofar as it affects the goal the young man chooses and the behavior that subsequently follows. Does it suck that he was treated badly by his parents? Absolutely. But the choice to let that suffering make him stay in his room is his alone.

This is the difference between etiology and teleology, two fundamentally different ways of explaining things and, really, looking at the world altogether.

Etiology is the study of causation. The goal is to find reasons for what is going on, and those reasons must, of course, always lie in the past. For most of us, etiology is the only way of explaining life that we know. Cause-and-effect is the number one pattern we are looking for in all things, and we are taught to do so from a young age. “The tide goes out because the moon changes.” “He hit you because you called him a mean word.” “You got fired because you didn’t do a good job.”

It’s hard to even comprehend how pervasive this type of thinking is. This is also the Freudian view of our psyche and trauma. For Freud, everything went back to something that happened in our childhood, usually before we were even self-aware. “You reject love because you weren’t loved as a baby.” “You are looking for the father figure you never had in unavailable men.” And so on.

The reason this line of arguing has become so “popular” is simple: It’s attractive. It turns life into an easy, straightforward, point-and-blame game. You never have to look long or far to find a potential reason for anything, and as long as we have one, regardless of whether it is true, our brains will be satisfied.

“When you treat a person’s life as a vast narrative, there is an easily understandable causality and sense of dramatic development that creates strong impressions and is extremely attractive,” the philosopher explains. Humans are curious. We desperately want to know why things are the way they are, and whatever satisfies that thirst is welcome in our minds — even if it doesn’t align with our true aspirations.

But what’s the alternative? Why else would a young man whither his life away between dust and frozen pizza boxes? According to Adler, there is another way of looking at the world: Teleology.

Teleology is the study of purpose. It tries to assess the destinations of things rather than their origin. Whereas etiology is concerned with the beginning, teleology is concerned with the end. What function or goal does a certain behavior serve? Teleologists believe the goals are the origins — rather than in the past, the reasons for our behavior lie in our present and future! An alcoholic might drink to briefly forget his sorrows in the present, like his job not going well. A customer might yell at a waiter not because the water spilled her drink but because she wants to be angry.

This is a dramatical shift from etiological thinking and, for most of us, unheard of. But it really is just another version of “the ends justify the means,” and it simply indicates that everything we do is a means, and it always serves an end, even if said end might seem illogical. From a teleological perspective, the young man is shutting himself in because it helps him accomplish a goal. Now what might that goal be?

The philosopher has an idea: “If I stay in my room all the time, without ever going out, my parents will worry. I can get all of my parents’ attention focused on me. They’ll be extremely careful around me and always handle me with kid gloves. On the other hand, if I take even one step out of the house, I’ll just become part of a faceless mass whom no one pays attention to. I’ll be surrounded by people I don’t know and just end up average, or less than average. And no one will take special care of me any longer.”

As it turns out, the young man might be staying inside as a way to get back at his parents. He is taking revenge, and the only way to keep savoring said revenge is by continuing to enact it in the now — by continuing to stay inside. At the same time, he now gets all the attention he didn’t get as a child, and that’s another goal of his fulfilled.

These are not great goals, obviously. The young man probably does not even know he has them. But subconsciously, if that’s what’s going on, he is choosing to stay inside not because of anything that happened in the past but because of what he is getting out of this behavior right now. “I doubt he’s satisfied, and I’m sure he’s not happy either,” the philosopher says, “but there is no doubt that he is also taking action in line with his goal.”

I think you can easily see why teleology isn’t exactly a smash hit with therapists, psychologists, and coaches: It places all of the responsibility on you. Instead of having a million causes in the past that you can point to, you must constantly justify everything you’re doing in the present. That’s not only exhausting, it reveals our biggest flaws. Everything is, in one way or another, our own fault.

There is, however, a silver lining: If our behavior is wholly derived from our goals, then if we can change our goals, our behavior will automatically follow! But how do you know what your goals are? And how do we change them? According to Adler, the answer lies in how we interpret the things that happen to us: “No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”

Going back to the young man, he decided that the abuse he suffered at the hands of his parents had to mean that they didn’t love him. They were bad people, people who must be taught a lesson, and as such, he now spends his days keeping them in a constant state of worry and anxiety by doing the same to himself and staying in his house. But what if he’d chosen a different interpretation? What if he believed that, though his parents loved him very dearly, they failed to see how he was different from his brother, and thus they placed the same expectations on him, a setup that never could have worked. What if, instead of bad people in need of punishment, his parents were simply mistaken, and it was his destiny to walk his own path unaffected by their opinion, without need for their attention or approval? A man like that might have chosen to emigrate to another country, pursue a career in art, or travel the world free as a bird. Different meaning, different goals, different behavior.

According to the philosopher, Adler is “not saying that the experience of a horrible calamity or abuse during childhood or other such incidents have no influence on forming a personality; their influences are strong. But the important thing is that nothing is actually determined by those influences. We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences. Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.”

While it might be an overstatement to say “trauma doesn’t exist,” it’s a succinct way of making the point that, under a teleologic view, trauma needn’t exist. As long as we interpret the bad things that happen to us in a way that allows us to move forward productively, to better ourselves, our lives, and the lives of those around us, we are not beholden to our past in any way. We can take any adversity, any obstacle, and make it part of the way.

The next time you’re stuck with a behavior you don’t really want, ask yourself: What’s the point of this behavior? What goal might I subconsciously be pursuing with this? What is the purpose this habit serves, no matter how twisted of an end it might be?

If you want to lose weight but keep eating sweets, maybe it’s not some long-formed addiction to sugar that’s the problem, but the fact that your job is stressful, and every little bit of dopamine helps cope with that stress. Who’d have thought that quitting your job might help you lose weight? Those are the kind of hidden correlations teleology might bring to light, and they are, at the very least, fascinating to consider.

The best part about it, however, is that teleology offers liberation from the past. No, your life is not a long chain of neatly lined up cause-and-effect events. Its possibilities are endless, and the path into the future could fork a million ways depending on what meaning you give to today.

“We humans are not so fragile as to simply be at the mercy of etiological (cause-and-effect) traumas. From the standpoint of teleology, we choose our lives and our lifestyles ourselves. We have the power to do that,” the philosopher says — and if you ask me, that’s more than enough. Don’t let your past decide your future, and don’t set your story in stone while you’re still holding the pen.

“Things never go my way.”

“Something good will happen soon.”

“It always rains in London.”

“I will try my best.”

“No one taught me kindness.”

“When life gives you lemons…”

“It is not over yet.”

“The rich keep getting richer.”

Each of these sentences is more than a statement. Statements become opinions, opinions become beliefs, and beliefs become self-fulfilling. Self-perpetuating. All-consuming.

An entire world lies behind each of these lines. Lifetimes unfolding from just five words. If you can hide worldviews in such tiny fragments of language, what else might lie in its power?

Everything. The answer is everything.

Always choose your words wisely — for words become worlds, and we can only escape the pages of a dark book as long as we remember that we are the ones writing it.

Isn’t it amazing how, when you’re sick for a while, say with the flu, you immediately know when you’re over the hump? One morning, you’ll wake up with perfect conviction: “Yes! This is it! The life force has found me again!”

In fact, you’ll probably feel better than you felt before you got sick. You’ll be elated. You’ll want to rip out trees with your bare hands. While this exuberance is not entirely called for at this stage, it is merely nature’s pendulum swinging back to the other side of the spectrum.

If you think there’s nothing to look forward to when you’re ill, remember a past time when you reached that moment. When the spring came back to your step. No matter how bleak today might look, tomorrow can be a good day — and we can always count on the return of the swing.

I mean, what else are you gonna do? Lie down and wait? That’s a trap. That’s what fear wants you to be: Paralyzed. Staying in place, ruminating, commiserating, thinking about how you landed at rock bottom rather than working on climbing out of it.

In some years, you’ll feel like you can’t do anything wrong. Everyone will praise you at work. Your relationships will thrive. Money will seem to rain from the sky. In others, you won’t be able to catch a break. Your income will get cut in half or go much less far than it used to, your boss will yell at you all the time, and your best friend will move to another country.

No one wants to live through too many of those latter kind of years, but it is those years in which our character forms. “Happiness is good for the body, but sorrow strengthens the spirit,” Bruce Lee once wrote.

When life keeps going sideways, do your best to walk on straight. The wind may sway you from your path, slow you down, or even throw you in a ditch at times — but it still is just the wind, and you’ve got places to be.

At the beginning of what would turn out to be the most popular TED talk of all time, the late Sir Ken Robinson made a powerful assertion: “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” What follows is a passionate, witty, inspiring 15-minute talk on how we’re training children out of their creativity instead of showing them how to use it, and what we must do to change that pattern.

While I don’t have a 15-minute talk up my sleeve, I would like to make a similar, though already often-quoted assertion: A mental illness is an injury like any other, the mental equivalent of a physical ailment, like, say, a broken leg, and we should treat it with the same status.

Treatment, in this case, refers to “societal” more so than “medical.” You can’t put a cast on someone’s brain, and the number and kind of pills will also be different. Some broken legs heal without surgery. Others need intervention. A pulled muscle needs less attention than a torn ligament. Clearly, the rainbow of mental illness is entitled to as many shades and colors as the broken bones category, and so what the therapists prescribe will vary a lot based on what we tell them and what symptoms we exhibit.

No, the treatment I’m asking for is the one that happens in the elevator going up to your office. It happens when someone introduces themselves at your book club or when you pass someone talking to themselves in the street. That’s the treatment we give to people struggling with mental disorders, and it’s important that both we and the victims can talk about it without squirming, without romanticizing, without condemning, and without slowly leaning back in our seat making a “coo-coo” noise in our heads.

“Oh, depression, that sucks. What kind of treatment are you getting for it? Did the doctors give you a timeline for when it should improve? Or are you still diagnosing causes?” Of course being bipolar is not like a broken leg. You know it. They know it. The doctors know it. But writing someone off permanently just because they have an illness we can’t see won’t just not help them heal as quickly as possible — it’s also flat out wrong.

I know it’s hard. It’s hard to know what to say, to find the line between respect and patronizing, to neither belittle nor blow out of proportion, but that’s exactly why it’s valuable (and usually appreciated) when we try our best to do it. That’s our duty. Having to deal with a mental disease is enough. Losing one’s societal footing because of it is entirely unnecessary — but it’s us, the friends, the families, the bystanders, who must make sure that doesn’t happen.

When you encounter mental illness, put on your hat of dry professionalism, even if you’re just an amateur. You can’t identify a broken leg based on crutches alone either, but when someone tells you they have one, you can ask simple, non-dramatizing questions.

It’ll take a lot more than one TED talk to change the cultural standing of mental illness, but if we each do our part, we can make the right treatment as widespread as literacy — and that feels at least as important as making sure our children don’t lose their sense of imagination as they grow up.

In what might be the most emotional scene of all four Sherlock seasons, Dr. John Watson confesses his failings to Sherlock and his wife, or rather, the ghost of his wife, who — spoilers — died protecting Sherlock.

Watson explains that, were it not for his late wife’s prompting, he never would have gotten Sherlock out of a recent, near-fatal quagmire. “That’s how this works. That’s what you’re missing.” Sherlock thinks Watson is “just a good man,” but as always, there is more to the story.

“She taught me to be the man she already thought I was,” Watson says. It is — or was — the presence of Mary that let John aspire to something higher. Not mere virtue or some moral code. Worse, he betrayed that presence, he admits: “I cheated on her. I cheated on you, Mary.” After meeting a woman on the bus, Watson spent his days and nights texting her, even while Mary took care of their little baby. It wasn’t a physical betrayal, but a betrayal nonetheless.

As soon as she hears about the texting, a smile flits across ghost-Mary’s face. She knows what’s coming. “I’m not the man you thought I was. I’m not that guy. I never could be. But that’s the point. That’s the whole point. Who you thought I was… is the man I want to be.”

Shaking her head while smiling in the “it’s about time” manner that seems to be accessible only to strong women with foolish husbands (which, some might say, are simply all women with husbands), Mary only needs one sentence, one final parting gift, to do what she’s always done: Spur on her husband to become a better version of himself. “Well then, John Watson,” she says, “get the hell on with it!”

And just like that, she is gone.

Esteemed psychologist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once gave a lesson to the Toronto Youth Corps in 1972. In it, he explains that he recently took up flying lessons, and his instructor told him that, when trying to fly east with a crosswind from the north, actually, you must fly northeast to reach your desired destination. If you don’t account for the wind, you’ll land lower on the map than you want to be.

“This also holds for man, I would say,” Frankl continues. “If we take man as he really is, we make him worse — but if we overestimate him…” To much laughter and applause, he reveals the full quote which, actually, goes back to Goethe: “If we take man as he is, we make him worse. But if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be.”

This maxim should mark the backdrop of all psychological and therapeutic activity, Frankl demands. It is also exactly the kind of support Mary is giving to Watson — perhaps in death even more so than in life.

There is nothing more powerful than knowing someone believes in you. This belief in others need not, no, must not, just occur between husbands and wives, between fathers and daughters, between mothers and sons. It is a driving force necessary and accessible to all, if only we choose to spread it.

It’s true that, the closer someone is to you, the more sway their belief in you will hold. But an updraft need not be strong to still go up. Even small words can show us the doors we already know we want to go through. Doors to virtue, resilience, and compassion. Doors that could otherwise easily have led us to folly, selfishness, and despair.

I don’t know who you are. But I know you are a good person. You’re trying your best to do your best, and if you keep aiming high, you’ll always land right where you’re supposed to be.

Now get the hell on with it!

There’s a new focus room at work. I love it. It’s explicitly dedicated to working in silence which, in a co-working space full of people stuck in all-day meetings, is a godsend for writers.

When I write something serious and challenging, I go to the focus room. When I want to think, I go to the focus room. And yet, I still don’t want to spend all my time at the focus room.

Noise is rarely a good thing, but for a certain type of work, the kind a bee might do, busily swerving from blossom to blossom, the right level of hum can work wonders. Why do people work in coffee shops? Why do tools like Noisli exist? Because sometimes, you want to know you’re not alone — and the business, the sound, the movement of those around you is the consistent feedback you need to stay consistent.

When I cold-pitch my book to journalists, I don’t need meditative silence. I need energy! Music. The clatter of other people typing. Who are they trying to convince? Regardless, I’m not the only one trying to change minds, and that keeps my mind on task.

Most of the time, noise is a distraction. A detour. A slowly unfolding poison. On just the right days, in just the right places, however, it can be a bed of flowers swaying in the wind — and if you’re a bee on those days, there’s nothing to do but to enjoy the sun and pollinate away.