How Should 20-Somethings Spend Their Time?

One day, you will wake up and be 75 years old. It happens to all of us. We blink and life passes. The question is whether it passes us by.

When you do get up on that fateful morning, look in the mirror, and realize you’re not happy, or that you’ve wasted too much time, it’ll be because right now, you didn’t properly answer life’s three big questions.

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Minimalism Will Not Make You Happier Cover

Minimalism Will Not Make You Happier

I’ve been a minimalist since 2012. At first it wasn’t a choice. When I moved into my 60 sqft room on a US campus, there simply was no space, regardless of how much or how little I owned. So, for the first few weeks of the exchange program, I lived out of my suitcase.

Shortly after, I found The Minimalists and their 21-day journey. Josh helped his friend Ryan pack up all his stuff, as if he was moving, and then he only unpacked what he needed for three weeks. They learned that we don’t need all that much and that trashing, donating, and selling material possessions doesn’t hurt. To the contrary, it’s often liberating:

“Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around. Real freedom.”

From that moment on, I was hooked. “I want freedom,” I thought. And so, to this day, the places I’ve lived in all look somewhat like this:

Some say it’s clean, some say it’s boring, but for me, it’s just normal. Without a doubt, minimalism has added tremendously to my happiness over the years. But not in the way you’d think. It wasn’t the money I made from selling all the excess stuff, nor the money I saved from not buying more.

It wasn’t even the freedom from all the clutter.

Even that only gets you so far.

When Freedom Hurts

One of my favorite ways of learning is to watch people who are 2–5 years ahead of me. What challenges do they face? How do they deal with them? Then, I mentally prepare for their current and my future problems. It doesn’t matter if, when, or how I get there. As long as I’m prepared.

The most fascinating thing I’ve observed so far is what I call ‘the void. It’s the hole people fall into when they achieve financial freedom. Most people never get to the point where they can live indefinitely off the assets they’ve built, so all their lives they’re used to trading the majority of their time for money.

For the few who do, apparently, waking up one morning and realizing they don’t really have to work and don’t owe anyone their time isn’t exactly bliss. It’s scary. Part of the problem seems to be that the tools they used to get there were a means to an end. Once they reach that end and look back, it turns out the means weren’t all that meaningful. Nat Eliason explains:

“As long as I needed an income, it was easy to ignore that I wasn’t working on anything important, but once I stopped needing the money, I had to start asking myself more seriously if that was what I wanted to spend my time on.”

Sometimes, freedom hurts. Free or not, if you fall into the void, you have to claw your way back out. Minimalism is a bit like that. If you only do it so your house is empty, then you might not like what happens once you sit in that empty house.

Maybe that’s why the mega rich sometimes pile up cars, jets, houses, yachts, and lots of other stuff. To counteract the freedom they have. Because it’s too much.

The question, then, is not so much “how do I get more freedom?” It’s about what you’re going to do with that space once you have it.

Room to Think

At the start of the last semester, my roommate came back from his home town, where he’d already done a bit of studying. He wasn’t happy about returning to the study room, where we usually go during the day.

“It’s so narrow and crowded. Back home, our library is huge. If you go to the top floor, you can see the whole city. It has a lot of room. Room to think.”

Remembering all the libraries I’d been in, I agreed I too liked the ones with large, open spaces best, but I didn’t put two and two together. Now I know, it’s also why I like minimalism. Whether you look at a sparsely filled apartment, closet, or contact list, you’re always confronted with the same thing: lots of room.

Room to think.

“What can I do in here?” In my room, I’m limited to sleeping, reading, working, or watching a movie on my laptop. “Who’s the most important person I can call?” “What outfit does this event require?” These are good questions, but without room to ask them, we’ll never come up with good answers.

It’s not just that you can’t walk straight in a room full of clutter. You also can’t think straight.

That’s way more important than freedom.

Bigger Than Happiness

In an over 30-year-old comedy routine, George Carlin talks about our ridiculous obsession with collecting things:

“That’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it? Trying to find a place for your stuff. That’s all your house is. Your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much god damn stuff, you wouldn’t need a house.”

Like all great comedy, his monologue is hilarious because it’s profoundly true. However, in this last sentence above, he and I disagree. A house with few items can have tremendous value, because it now offers room for lots of other things. Experiences, memories, but most of all room to think.

Who do you want to stick around in your house? Who shouldn’t come back? When you leave your house, what are you tending to? Is it really important?

Minimalism isn’t about being free like a bird, or at least, not just about that. Rather than providing a path to happiness, it creates the space you need to deal with life’s toughest challenges. Physical separation for mental reflection.

Subtracting stuff only matters if you add meaning, so maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of history’s greatest thinkers led neither very happy, nor very free lives. Like Epictetus, a slave immortalized for the clarity of his mind:

“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

Something to think about. If you have room for it, that is.

3 Simple Words Will Set You Free Cover

3 Simple Words Will Set You Free

When Robin Williams died in 2014, the world lost a legend. No scene better encapsulates his brilliance than what must be one of the greatest monologues in entertainment history: the park scene in Good Will Hunting.

After being horribly verbally assaulted by his patient and boy genius, Will, therapist Sean makes one last attempt at getting through:

“So if I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.

If I asked you about women you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.

You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably — uh — throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.”

What Williams’s character is doing, though it may not seem like it at first, is giving Will a chance. A chance to say “I don’t know.” An opportunity to admit that he’s scared and talk about his feelings.

We can see that it’s working, because Will, for an on-screen eternity of four minutes, does not say a word. He just sits there, petrified. Here is a scene in which the main character doesn’t do a thing, yet it is pivotal, not just in the movie, but also for our lives.

Whether you show this scene to someone born ten years before the movie came out, or ten years after, they can relate. We, too, have been given plenty of chances to say “I don’t know” in our lives so far.

But, like Will, we keep missing them. This makes us miserable deep inside.

Why?

The Shattered Self

Maybe it happened after you graduated college. Or entered. Maybe when you started your first job, or even after high school. But at some point, you had a terrifying epiphany:

“I don’t know anything about life. I have no clue what to do and I can’t see how the hell I’m going to figure all of this out.”

It’s one of those moments where you can feel the metaphorical glass shattering, because your view of the world forever changes. The shattered self is something all humans go through, but, according to Simon Sinek, there is a group that experiences this traumatizing, but important event very early in their lives: millennials.

The reason my generation stands out is not because of our age, but because of how we react to this event.

We choke.

A Different House of Cards

As Sean continues his speech, Will’s expression hardens more and more.

“I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid.”

Terrified Will Hunting

He gulps. He can’t even look at Sean now. In an instant, the house of cards that was his sense of confidence collapsed. For many of us, entering the real world feels exactly the same.

Once we’re burdened with the full weight of responsibility for our own lives, we quickly realize we have no confidence. I see two reasons:

  1. We haven’t accomplished much worth being confident about.
  2. All of our lives, we’ve been told the exact opposite by our parents.

The first cause is normal. A history of achievements needs history as much as it needs achievements. But the second one isn’t. More and more, helicopter parents keep sheltering their children and it turns them into incomplete adults.

I’m not saying those were your parents, or my parents. The point is there are parents who do these things to their children and, worse, they think they’re making the right choice.

Having not had enough time to build it, and with no foundation for our confidence to rest on, it only takes a brief, lonely moment of clarity as we grow up for it to crumble. Faced with reality, we’re forced to unlearn what’s not true and feel like an impostor, mortified at the idea of being found out.

Unfortunately, unlike Will, we don’t all have a therapist to catch us as we fall.

ICQ

What compounds this suffering of low self-esteem is that we suffer it in silence. Not only did we not learn confidence, we also chose the wrong coping mechanism to deal with the fact that we have none.

Going through adolescence, we untie our self-worth from our parents and attach it more to our peers. This is an important change that helps us integrate in the real world: we learn to rely on our friends.

Enter technology.

When I was 13, everyone in my class started using a service called ICQ. It was the first standalone instant messenger and instantly, we messaged. Outside of school, I spent more time on ICQ than anywhere else. Most of us did.

We chatted more than we called, more than we hung out in person, more than we went outside. Teenagers enjoy chatting less, but because of its dopamine-inducing nature, they get addicted anyway. So no, we did not learn to rely on our friends. We learned to rely on technology.

You can replace ICQ with many other things — Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, WhatsApp — the year changes, the outcome remains the same. Instead of learning to control our mood with serotonin, or what it feels like to be loved with oxytocin, we go on a dopamine-only diet. Gambling, alcohol, sex, most addicts find their drugs as teens. So did we, it just didn’t have the label on it.

Thus, when our self is shattered, we have no one to turn to. We’re alone with our devices. We look at our peers through 4″, 12″ and 50″ screens and all we see is everyone’s highlight reel.

“They’re doing so well and I don’t. I can’t talk about that.”

So we gulp. We swallow. And we remain silent, staring at the letters. ICQ.

You know what it stands for? “I seek you.”

What Kind of Choice?

Seeing Will crack, Sean must twist the knife:

“And if I asked you about love y’probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever.

Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sittin’ up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term ‘visiting hours’ doesn’t apply to you.

You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.”

The result of all this, the lack of confidence, the false images, the weak technological replacement for true friendship, true love, is that we keep spinning in circles.

As we reach the end of our 20s, and 30s, then 40s, we begin to live in a world in which everyone is too scared to admit that they’re scared and so we all remain lonely and clueless about feeling lonely and clueless.

When we constantly grab our phones, we don’t do it to procrastinate. We do it because we’re terrified of being alone. Every day, every second. We’re not even chatting just to chat, we’re chatting to feel less discomfort.

We fundamentally lack the ability to express our feelings in the company of other people.

The third most common cause of death for people aged 15 to 24 is suicide. One in ten adolescents is depressed. 64% of millennials feel overwhelmed at work every day.

The best way we can express how we feel is a two-word cry for help: “I’m fine.” Our careers, our love lives, our friendships, it’s all fine, and then we die.

What kind of a choice is that?

Like a Freakin’ Rainbow

Social media, digital communication, online entertainment, these things aren’t bad, it’s just our usage that’s off. We depend on devices, not people. It’s not solely our fault either. Technology found us way too young and we could never let go.

What we can let go of is our fear of opening our mouth and speaking our truth. Yes, we still don’t know jack shit about life. That fact will never change. Not at 20 and not at 85. But all the irrational fears surrounding that fact? Those are imaginary.

It’s okay to say how we feel. Anywhere. Any time.

Even right here, right now. Try it. Say it. “I don’t know.” See? You’re free to express who you are. You don’t need anyone’s permission. The rest of us is just waiting for it too.

This does not make our challenges any easier, just easier to bear. We must remember why we use technology to communicate.

  • What’s this app for? Who do you talk to with that? Why?
  • Does this platform build your confidence? Or destroy it?
  • Is what you see real? Or are you just assuming it is?
  • If you can’t say it in person, is it worth saying at all?

We also need to put boundaries on digital communication.

  • When you sit at a table with other people, even ones you don’t know, who deserves your attention more? The Facebook friend you don’t really know far away or whoever is right there?
  • If you go out with your friends, why do you need a phone? Take one phone. Or no phone. You’ll be fine for a few hours.
  • Yes, that video you sent your friend was funny, but how much more fun would it have been if you’d waited until you could watch it together?

None of these will be easy, but through all of those trials, you can show us your true colors. We’ll adore you for it like a freakin’ rainbow.

Why Are We Here?

Every time you swallow important feelings, you rob the world of the chance to learn something from you. But that’s the main reason we’re here. We’re all waiting for it.

Even though everything Sean has thrown into Will’s face is true, he’s still willing, still curious, to learn from his fellow human:

“I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.”

Usually, it’s not a therapist sitting next to us on the bench. Just some random dude. Or a young mom with her child. But isn’t that enough? What if, unlike Will, we didn’t let them walk away?

Go back all the way to that moment. Back to that shattered self. How did it feel? What if you hadn’t swallowed it? What if, in that minute, you’d had the guts to reach out and say: “I have no clue. Can we talk about that?”

While that first one may have defined much of who we are today, the truth is that, in life, we all have many of these moments. Again and again, we realize we’re scared, lonely and we don’t have the answers.

Neither do our phones. Or Twitter. Or our coworkers. So in reality, we’re free to admit it any time. We know this is good for us. One of the most popular quotes in the world is a 2,000 year-old line from one of the wisest men ever:

“I know that I know nothing.” — Socrates

Imagine how liberating that must’ve felt. Every single thing you’ve ever been dying to say, but never dared to — every feeling, every thought, every question, every idea — it all starts from here.

You don’t need to look so tough. You can tell us how you feel. Because we don’t know anything either. We have no opinions. We, too, don’t want to be judged.

When you want to be curious, let yourself be curious. Say “nice shoes” or “what’s that mean?” or “how’d you do your hair like that?” If you feel like laughing in the middle of a crowded place, laugh. And when you don’t know what to do, let us know.

The man who taught us this lesson, Robin Williams, lived it both in character and in life. He played jokes on live TV in front of millions and talked openly about his problems with alcohol and depression.

Like Will, he leaves us with three words that carry all the hope in the world:

“Your move, chief.”

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How To Learn Faster In 4 Simple, But Not Easy Steps

I’m 100% done with my economics class for this semester, even though only 1o out of 24 lecture recordings have been uploaded so far. Each month, over a million people view my answers on Quora, though I started writing daily on there only on January 1st, 2017. I’m building an app with two friends on the side, yet I don’t know how to write code in Swift.

The list goes on. I’m always dabbling in at least 3–5 projects, all with varying degrees of experience and success. The one thing I refuse to let myself be guilty of is not learning fast enough so each of them won’t at least have a shot at working out.

This week, I thought about my learning process and asked myself what I could share with you about how to learn faster. I found four steps. Read More

The 3 Best Study Hacks for College

While getting my Bachelor’s degree, I’ve tried every mode of study you can imagine. Go to all the classes, go to some classes, go to no classes. Self-study, group study, teaching, being taught, you name it, I’ve tried it.

All I ever got was Bs.

(Our grade scale goes from 1–4, 1.0 being the best)

So when I decided to go back to school, I thought why stress myself. I’ve been hacking college since the day I got here.


1. Hacking classes.

In Germany, most classes aren’t mandatory. Since all we have is one final exam for most subjects, you can stay home all year, study for yourself and then ace the class.

Here in Munich, most classes are even recorded to watch at your own leisure, yet most of my fellow students still go for one reason: they’re lazy and they feel bad if they don’t.

Last semester, many of them went to all the lectures, did not pay attention, watched the replays, did not pay attention again, and then tried to study the slides.

What I did was to go to every class once, see if the professor does nothing more than read off the slides (most of them did), and then summarized the slides myself instead.

For every single slide, I wrote down what it meant in one sentence. This way, I’d end up with 6–12 dense pages of notes for each class. All I had to do then, was study them.

Study Hacks Summarizing
Yeah, yeah, my handwriting sucks, we’ve been over this.

The goal of summarizing is to reduce the amount of information your brain has to hold.

You’ll do a lot better by knowing 80% of the material in detail, rather than having an idea of 100% of it, but not really knowing what you’re talking about.

When I was all done with my summary, I would try to create a tree structure of the material on one or two pages, so I could have the entire class on one piece of paper.

Study Hacks Memorization
(doesn’t have to be fancy, as long as it works for you)

Bonus tip:

Minimize the number of classes you take by going for those with the highest credits on average.

In my program, 6 credits per class is solid. 3 aren’t worth your time, 5 fall one credit short when adding up to modules (you need 12, 18, 24, etc.), and 8 are usually a ridiculous amount of extra work.

2. Hacking exams.

Everyone I know struggles with studying for several exams in parallel. So whenever you have three in a week, shit hits the fan. You spend way too much time studying for the first and are only left with the time between exam 1 and 2 to study for the latter, and so on.

So the first thing I did was to pick classes based on exam dates, which were spread far apart.

Only two of my exams fell in one week, and those classes were mandatory. The earlier in the semester an exam, the better. Classes started in October, my first exam was in December. This not only meant it was far away from all the others, but also that there was less material to study.

My first exam.

The second thing I did was to improve my exam schedule as I went along. That December exam I only found out about in November, so I adjusted.

Same thing with a required law class. It was scheduled right between the two mandatory exams, but then the professor opened another slot for it three weeks earlier.

Was it a hassle to study the material in one week rather than three? Sure, but this way, I probably spent more time focused on law than I would have, if I’d had to study in parallel.

(that is one big ass law book)

The best thing you can achieve when structuring your exams is peace of mind as you move towards them.

Every minute you spend in a hasty state of worry is a minute of studying lost, so optimize your schedule as best as you can.

3. Hacking assignments.

In one statistics class, we were eligible to get an additional 20% of the exams points as a bonus for completing a report. Had I known this would turn into a 50-page paper about energy drink consumption, I probably wouldn’t have done it, but oh well.

(You can download the paper here, if you’re interested)

We started from scratch and went all the way from designing our own questionnaire, to surveying a sample of people to analyzing the data with SPSS.

However, nowhere does it say you have to do assignments like this the hardest way possible.

  • Instead of designing our survey in Word, we used Google Forms, to make collecting data easier.
  • Instead of annoying 10 of our fellow students to complete the thing, I sent it to my email list and we collected 100 answers in 24 hours. You could also use a service like Pollfish and just pay for people to fill out your survey.
  • Instead of formatting the 2,000 data points in Excel to let us import them to SPSS, I hired someone to do it for $20 on Freelancer.com.

You might think outsourcing work as a student is ridiculous, but consider this:

Would you pay $10 or $20 for 3–4 hours of focused study time?

Not including the stress from fretting about the tasks and delays you encounter. Sometimes, your time really is worth more than the return of a menial task. Even, if you’re a student.


Of course, there is one big disclaimer to all the above: none of these hacks work if you don’t.

Ultimately, I put in just as much, if not more time into studying than I did during my Bachelor’s. But thanks to these hacks, it was a lot more fun to do so, because I could focus on the parts that mattered.

And I did it all while writing articles like this one, every single day. If I can find the time, why not you?

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How To Compete With People Who Are Better Than You

If we get on the treadmill together, there are two options: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die.

Will Smith

But who are you running against? For most of your life, the person on the other treadmill is yourself.

Right now, the field might be crowded. Many people are ahead of you, and you can’t see who leads the pack. But once you start running faster than everyone else, you’ll soon be the only one left in the race.

  • You’ll be the only one left in the study room at school at 7 AM.
  • You’ll be the only one left who sends emails at 10 PM.
  • You’ll be the only one left working, while your friends are out partying.

Very few people have an outstanding work ethic. That’s what makes them outstanding. But it also means it’ll get lonely.

You don’t want what your friends want. You want what you want. So you shouldn’t care about winning against them.

Your true competitor is also your greatest fan.

(Barack Obama on 20th of January, 2009, about to take the oath of office)

Look at Will Smith again. He could’ve long stopped running. There’s no one for him to beat any more. As of 2016, his movies have grossed $7.5 billion at the global box office.

Why does a guy like that turn around and go straight to making more films?

When people like Will Smith glance at the other treadmill, they see a different version of themselves. One that’s not as good, as generous, as humble, as disciplined, as honest or as dedicated as they are.

That’s who they’re running against. Running from. Before long, you’ll be running against yourself too. You’ll have to, in order to keep going.

When you get there, I hope you’ll do what Will Smith does: keep running anyway.

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The Most Important Thing to Do in Your 20s

Learning how to pay for your own shit. You’ve spent enough time sponging off your parents. It’s time to start living in the real world.

One of my biggest “I wish’s” is “I wish my parents had forced me to take a job when I was younger.” I never had to work for anything growing up. If I wanted an Xbox, I could just wish for money for Christmas or my birthday and boom, there it was.

It’s not that I was horrible with money – I knew it was limited in supply. But I had no idea just how limited.

One time I remember trying to get a paper route. It would have meant delivering papers for 8 hours a day, twice a week – for 200 bucks a month. That’s a little over $3/hour for hard, manual labor.

In the end, my parents told me not to take it. I wish I had. Because after that, I would’ve learned an incredible valuable lesson: It’s fucking hard to make 200 bucks. And I never want to do it this way again.

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