Author: Nik

In The Comfort Book, Matt Haig relates the story of the gold-saddle goatfish, a beautiful, golden fish with two large barbels, home to Hawaiian waters.

Local divers started noticing a fish of similar color, albeit much bigger. As it turns out, “when divers swim right next to this big fish, it stops being a big fish altogether, breaking up into eight or so standard-sized gold-saddle goatfish:” The fish had learned to swim in perfect, fish-looking formation in order to appear larger and scare away potential predators.

Besides an increased sense of inner peace and less resistance to change, be it elected or forced upon us, dropping our identity like a fish would drop its birth certificate has another benefit: When we’re not occupied with our own labels, we can focus on what we all have in common. We can join a cause and serve it selflessly. We are free to mingle with the crowd, no matter how diverse or unfamiliar it might be. “Oh, you like samosas? I like samosas!”

Life is better when we swim together. Not just to fend off external threats, but also to feel less alone. We are rarely the only ones chasing a certain goal or having a particular dream. Why not seek together instead of getting picked off by some predator along the way?

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle defines tragedy as follows:

“If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call it John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and two minutes later he gets eaten by another fish – that’s tragic. But it’s only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none.”

The fish doesn’t care about its name. It is a fish and will forever behave as such, until nature takes it back and replaces it with another fish.

The interchangeability of fish does not make any individual fish less valuable. In fact, it is the interchangeability of not just fish amongst each other but between all things – stones, flowers, rivers, mountains, meteors, planets, humans, and, yes, fish – that makes life an invaluable whole and each individual a precious representative.

We would never go to a river and write birth certificates for all the fish in it. What for? The fish have no use for them! They do not aid them in the business of being a fish.

While we might occasionally need a birth certificate, for example to become president of the United States, we should afford ourselves more of the freedom we give to fish, be it the ones in the river or the ones in our aquarium at home: Don’t project more of an identity onto yourself than you need to manage your daily affairs!

Don’t make the impermanence of life more tragic than it is by covering yourself in layers upon layers of history. “I am a CEO, working mom, skier, Starbucks-lover and ventriloquist.” The more of these labels you try to hold, the sadder you’ll be when one falls down and breaks.

I use the phrase “you are not X” a lot. You are not your job. You are not your money. You are not your thoughts. It’s an important reminder, one we need often, but what happens if you play this game all the way to the end? What is left if you take away everything external? Well, you. You’ll still be you. In fact, you might be you for the first time. Your true self, the one that requires neither name nor birth certificate.

Loss, change, evolution – these things are not tragic. That’s merely nature continuing on the same eternal path it has always been on. The real tragedy is identity. That’s our source of self-inflicted suffering.

By all means, name your fish if it brings you joy, but don’t tell yourself too much of a backstory about who you are. You are you. You are valuable. And you have everything you need to be human.

Last week, I had a great editing session while listening to a particular song. It’s been several days, but if I crank up the same tune and afford myself some time, I’ll be back in the same flow soon enough.

When we drop an activity for a long time, we often want to begin from a different angle than the one we last approached it from – but why? There’s no rule that says you can’t continue right where you left off, even if the leaving-off part happened a considerable time ago.

Hemingway did this with his writing, and granted, it’s a little more obvious when you do it from one day to the next. But who says you can’t practice the same song on the piano you last played when you were 17? Who says you can’t write invoice #143 after two months of not looking at your taxes?

“I have been out of this for quite some time. Therefore, it must be a struggle to get back in.” That’s a lie your brain tells itself to keep you from doing any work. Just pick up where you last ended. The struggle will reveal itself should it be needed. You’ll be surprised that, often, it is too lazy to reappear – and you’ll be off to the races much faster than you’d imagined.

When new students of witchcraft arrive at Hogwarts in Harry Potter, they are assigned to one of the four houses of the school. The chief selection officer? The Sorting Hat. Placed on a person’s head, the Sorting Hat comes to life. It is a confident, talkative, opinionated being – but it is rarely wrong.

Beyond its assignment duties, however, the hat makes several appearances at critical points throughout the series. In one instance, it presents himself to Harry as he is trying to fend off a basilisk, a deadly, snake-like creature that turns whoever looks at it to stone. In a magic trick as proverbial as it gets, Harry manages to pull a famed sword out of the hat and beat the creature with it.

How handy would that be? A magical hat from which to pull whatever you need to deal with any situation. Well, if you ask Eckhart Tolle, you’re wearing that hat already. In The Power of Now, he writes: “You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future – nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.”

If you reduce whatever daunting, impossible-seeming challenge you might face to “right now,” it becomes incredibly small. Definitely small enough to be manageable.

Do you have to pay back $100,000 in debt? How about right now? Oh, you’re sitting at breakfast? Well, I’m sure you can handle that. One step at a time. And whenever the next repayment is due, I’m sure you’ll find a way to survive that day too.

Whether you’re trying to write a book, juggle family responsibilities, or run a 100,000-person organization, if you go back to what is needed right now, you’ll see it’s never the challenge as a whole. The challenge as a whole doesn’t exist – nor need its weight on your shoulders – for even Stephen King, a stressed dad, and Google’s CEO live their lives one day at a time, one page, diaper, and email after the other.

You already have everything you’ll ever need. Your best source of confidence, creativity, and accurate snap judgments is already inside. Or should I say on top? Your Sorting Hat is always on your head. Whatever you need to deal with the now, all you have to do is pull it out.

There was a photo album in one of the AirBnB’s kitchen drawers. The host family had made it in 2013. Inside, hundreds of photos documented the adventures of the couple and their five kids.

Just from looking at this album, you would learn that the host mom has a sister, and that she plays in a band. You would see the husband playing ice hockey, mining for gold with his eldest son, and remodeling the garden of their home. There are hiking trips, birthday cakes, and friends and family everywhere.

As I was flipping through the pages, I couldn’t help but think: Every family, even every individual, has a story as rich as this one. It might not always be one filled with laughter and holidays, but it is a story you cannot capture in even a million pictures.

We can’t see this story when we interact with a stranger at the coffee shop, but the world is a better place when we trust that it’s there. Choose kindness.

When my girlfriend and I went to a Thai restaurant while on holiday, they had several appetizing pictures on their menu cover. We were wondering about one dish in particular, and, after scouring the menu for a good while, we both made a guess, but neither of us was certain.

So, to make sure, when the waitress came around, we pointed at the dish in question and asked: “Which one is that?” She showed us in the menu, and I was happy to find out I had guessed the right one – but the lesson here is not the guessing, it’s the asking.

In the past, this might have been the kind of situation in which I would be too shy to ask or tell myself it wouldn’t really matter, pick another dish, and move on. But why? When children want to know something, they just ask. They never concern themselves with the appropriateness of the question, let alone if it might sound embarrassing.

The thing is that, even after we’ve grown up, most questions are still appropriate, and almost none of them are embarrassing. It’s only in our heads that every tiny bit of ignorance seems like a big deal.

If you want to know something, just ask. And if you can’t guess the food from the pictures, just point to them and ask: “Which one is that?”

It took me 12 years and about 10 flats, rooms, and other sleep-damaging living situations to learn this lesson. The chain of causality is simple: If you don’t sleep, you won’t be healthy, and if you’re not healthy, you can’t do anything, least of all enjoy it.

Now, I can’t speak for the people deliberately going out of their way to avoid sleep because I don’t really know what that’s like. Besides the odd stretch of waking up early here and there, I’ve never been able to resist a good snooze, and although I’m not a nap man, I do try my best to get 7-8 hours every night, which seems to be ideal for me.

If you don’t sleep because you can’t, however, that’s a different story. Maybe you’re a light sleeper like me. Maybe you have sleep apnea or another condition. Whatever it is, address it, and do it sooner rather than later.

The older I get, the more I realize how unconducive big cities are to sleep and, frankly, happiness as a whole. The main thing humans do when they get together is make noise.

I’ve lived in flats where neighbors were yelling, flats where people rearranged furniture at odd hours, flats where drunks sang football anthems on the street, flats where people watched TV on full blast at 2 AM, and flats where my neighbor left town for two weeks without turning off his 6 AM alarm.

I have also lived in flats where the snow plow came on at 5 AM every morning, flats where I could hear sirens over 30 times a day, flats where the wind caused a nearby crane to make a horrific alarm sound for two hours straight, flats in front of which people preferred to show off how loud their exhaust system could get, and flats where construction noises where so ever-present, you felt as if you lived on the site itself.

It is either people making noises or people operating (or mis-operating) machines that make noises, and given the great variety of places and locations I have lived in, I now must come to the sad conclusion: It is never the flat that’s the problem – it is the fact that you live in a place where noise is the norm.

I’m sure there are some quiet places, even in a town like Munich, and I swear I’ll try my best to find one. But overall, the main rule for how much quiet you’ll get seems to be how far you can get away from the city center.

Case in point: My parents’ house is in a village of 1,400 souls – and it is sleep heaven. Who knew that putting 1,000 feet between you and every neighbor would help so much? That and the fact that, in a village, people actually sleep at night. When I go there, almost without fail, I wake up to the birds singing after a deep slumber.

I guess I’m just getting old. Then again, even as a 20-year-old I didn’t love it. All the mingling and clubbing and wasting the day away in favor of exploring the city at night. I had more important things to do, and I’m pretty sure you do too.

Sleep is more important than money. If you have to spend more on a place that allows you sleep better, do it. How rested you are before you go to work each day will directly affect how much money you can make. It is much easier to earn the extra money and then some when you’re well-rested than it is to cope with any meaningful workload while sleep-deprived.

Sleep is more important than work. If your boss is making you lose hours, you should probably lose your boss. Any boss in their right mind will tell you to get exactly as much sleep as you need to function at your best. No more, no less. Again: Without proper sleep, you can’t do proper work. That’s the only argument anyone should ever need.

Sleep is more important than making everyone happy. The temptation to stay up to meet this person or that one, to play one more game, to hang with your roommates will always be there, but none of them are worth it the next morning. In fact, when your sleep is impaired, you’ll start resenting them. If you need to cut a bunch of cords to get your sleep life in order, do it. You won’t regret it in the long run.

Sleep is your most important habit. Do yourself a favor and treat it with the respect it deserves.

On a particularly busy day, piano tuner Thomas Sterner decided that, since he couldn’t get a day off, he would at least go slowly. Just for the day. When he arrived at the concert hall, he walked to the grand piano slowly. He took his tools out slowly. He even tuned every string with deliberate slowness.

“Trying to work slowly creates funny feelings,” Sterner wrote about the experience. Your inner voice screams at you to speed up. Anxiety builds around all the work that lies ahead. “That is because working slowly goes against every thought system in today’s world.”

Unsurprisingly then, at first, Sterner struggled to slow down. “We spend so much time rushing everything we do. Rushing had become so much of a habit that I was amazed at the amount of concentration it took to work slowly on purpose.” He had to take off his watch and focus intensely on each small task.

By his second piano of the day, however, Sterner noticed a shift in his inner state. “No nervous stomach, no anticipation of getting through the day, and no tight muscles in my shoulders and neck. Just this relaxed, peaceful, what-a-nice-day-it-is feeling.” “Blissful,” he even called it.

As it turned out, “anything you can do in a rushed state is surprisingly easy when you deliberately slow it down.” When you’re not frantic about finishing, you can gift yourself the time you need to complete any challenge – no matter how daunting – by simply taking it one step at a time.

The ultimate revelation, however, came when Sterner finished work on the second piano. He wrapped up his tools one by one. He walked to the parking lot slowly. He returned to his truck, and when its clock came on, he was dumbfounded: “I had cut over 40 percent off the usual time.”

Sterner could not think of any logical explanation, except perhaps the special forces mantra that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Still, the time savings felt extreme, especially given Sterner was doing a job he had done for many years. Needless to say, he no longer bothered trying to speed up.

“When you work slowly, things become simpler. If you want to simplify something, break it down into small parts and work more slowly at each part.”

When we work slowly, a whole host of negative self-talk disappears. Your inner critic needn’t remind you that “you’re not good enough” or harass you to go faster. No. You’ve decided: You’re doing the work slowly, and you’re doing it right. It’ll take how long it takes, but both while working at it and once you’re done, you’ll feel good about it. Chances are, you’ll also do each task just once, and you might save a whole bunch of time in the process.

Who knew? The easiest way to accomplish your goals faster just might be to slow down. It’s true that if you drive half as fast, you’ll still get there on time – but apparently, you might even reach your destination with plenty to spare.

If I gave you the choice between flying or teleportation as your superpower, which one would you choose?

Flying has been a fan-favorite for decades, but teleportation does seem to one-up even Superman. I mean, why fly for hours if you can just zippity-zoom anywhere in the world? Compared with teleportation, flying feels like hard work.

But you know what’s funny? Without the skill of flying, the ability to teleport is not all that helpful. In fact, it is probably dangerous. You miss your destination by two stories, and you’re toast.

The real problem is that, when considering this choice, we imagine teleportation to include flying as a free bonus. After all, that’s how all the superheroes are portrayed, no? Dr. Manhattan can do both. The Ancient One can do both. So can Black Adam, Shazam, Darkseid, Apocalypse, and a whole barrage of other heroes and villains just pop up wherever they want to, then chill in mid-air. But that’s not the choice we were offered, is it?

In the movie Jumper, Hayden Christensen demonstrates what a life with just teleportation could look like. Still awesome, sure, but very different from what you might have had in your head, and definitely very dangerous.

The point is that in life, we often want to teleport before we can fly. We want the big reward, the big stage, the big opportunity. In reality, we would fail miserably if we got it because we’re not ready.

What good is a fast car if you’ve barely driven a slow one (or don’t even possess one at all?) Would you really crush the presentation in front of senior management, or would you just wet yourself because you’re out of your depth? If you now have 1,000 followers, you wouldn’t know how to handle 1,000,000 if they appeared on your account overnight.

Even Superman had to learn flying. It takes effort, and he must navigate well not to crash. But with every next flight, he is earning that power, and if one day, he can teleport, he’ll be prepared.

There’s an apocryphal story about Google’s founders, saying they were never worried about their early user numbers. If you were not using their search engine today, you’d have the chance to use a better version of it tomorrow.

“I will be better tomorrow.” That’s the spirit! After all, what good is arriving at the top of a mountain if all you’ll do is fall right off it? With “I’ll be better tomorrow,” you’ll need neither flying nor teleportation – but should you ever be lucky enough to attain them, I’m sure you’ll be ready.

It takes Sherlock Holmes a long time to warm up to Dr. Watson as more than an accessory, but eventually, the two form a deep friendship.

Initially, Holmes barely uses Watson as a sounding board, for there is nothing the latter could tell him that he doesn’t already know. Eventually, however, he realizes Watson has traits to offer that go beyond mere perception and assembling a chain of undeniable logic. Watson is loyal to a fault, never refuses help when it is needed, and will, if need be, go beyond the law to ensure true justice is served.

It is heartwarming to see a cold, calculated Sherlock turn into a human being over the course of the BBC show, and it is of course at the very end of it that it culminates in Holmes throwing many of his principles overboard to be there for and do right by his friend.

In one of the show’s final moments, a new police officer spots Holmes standing across the street. He asks inspector Lestrade, who has witnessed Holmes’ transformation from beginning to end, whether he really is looking at the famous detective.

Lestrade asks the officer if he’s a fan, and the officer says, “Well, he’s a great man, sir!” Lestrade looks at Holmes and says, “No, he’s better than that. He’s a good one.”

Many an empire has fallen because good people lost themselves in trying to be great. Greatness inspires delusion, greed, fear, arrogance, neglect, and a whole host of other problems.

In Holmes’ case (pun intended), it is his incessant need to show off his skills, his restless mind requiring drugs if there is no case to solve, and his complete lack of empathy in handling the human consequences of what may be a perfectly logical crime.

For Holmes, letting go of these behaviors to help, and in some cases save, his friend is not an easy feat – and that is the point: A good person will make sacrifices for others where a “great” person won’t, because the “great” person is so obsessed with the grandeur of their vision that the only acceptable sacrifices are the ones furthering the cause, not human life in general.

When you have a choice – and we almost always have a choice – choose good instead of great. Great might last a century or two, or even a millennium, but the spirit and impact of goodness, like a person choosing to not abandon their friends, will ripple through the ages forever.