“Fruit salad!”
I had to blink a couple times. She couldn’t possibly be serious, could she?
“What do you mean, ‘fruit salad?’”
“I want to create a fruit salad brand. The best one ever! You know, I want to become the Hershey’s of fruit salad!”
My roommate and I were attending a startup event at a reputable VC fund in Munich. Free food, free booze and more hot air than in Richard Branson’s balloon, most of which came straight from the founders’ mouths.
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I like to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. It started in 2014. When everyone else was finishing their theses, I “procrastinated” with an internship. While all my friends optimized their resumé, I started a blog. Whereas most people would long have published a book, here I am, patiently writing for free.
So back in 2014, when Tinder was just two years old and few people in Germany were using it, I thought it was a good idea to jump on. And then I used it in a different way than everyone else. I met an awesome girl and we were together for almost two years. The reason it ended has nothing to do with the way we met. We just reached a gap we couldn’t cross. That’s okay.
In 2017, Tinder feels like the new norm. I now know more couples whose relationships began on Tinder than elsewhere.
I think it’s time to do the opposite. Again.
It was a random moment. Not one you’d celebrate. Or even notice, for that matter.
I was walking along the sidewalk, like every day. Morning snack from the bakery in hand, headphones in my ear, Kygo playing on repeat.
Suddenly, I stopped dead in my tracks.
*Ping!*
The insight hit me like a stun grenade. I actually had to step aside, into a little alleyway, so people could pass me by.
Read More“You will never figure out life. There will never be an end to all the questions. You’ll just get better at dealing with them and learn to do it faster.”
What you see up there is not a CGI rendering from a movie. It’s a real animal. An inhabitant of the Australian desert called the thorny dragon.
Let’s call him Trey. Trey does a few very uncommon things:
Pretty cool, huh? So how come you’ve never heard of Trey? I mean, he’s not the national animal of any country, there are few clips of him on Youtube and he hasn’t been on the cover of Forbes.
However, Trey, much like his fellow thorny dragons, has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, which is an eternity in animal land. A few more evolutionary cycles and they’ll close in on the masters of longevity: turtles.
When we look for success, we usually turn to the commonalities of those, who’ve made it to the top. But what if we’re wrong?
Maybe, the only commonality of making it to the top is to not share many commonalities with others.
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500,000. That’s how many words I wrote in 2016. 1,370 per day. 450,000 of those went into summaries and content on Four Minute Books.
Add to that 12,000 words on this blog, another 15,000 words for Time 2 Read, Medium articles, a few long guest posts, work for clients, copy for landing pages, etc. and the half a million mark falls faster than you can say writer’s block.
Up to a million books are published each year in the US alone, half or more self-published by independent authors. When I first saw how much I’d written last year, I wanted to punch myself.
“Why didn’t you write a book, you idiot? Or 2? Or 5?”
On Monday, I picked up the official lecture notes for my “Fundamentals of German Law” class. It’s 180 pages long. The exam is in exactly four weeks, and I don’t know the first thing about law.
In a slight rush of feelings — mostly panic mixed with determination — I sat down and went through the first half the same day. Before this day is over, I’ll have done the rest. But not before writing this.
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Right this second, someone is recording a Youtube video, grinning from ear to ear, trying to sell you on the idea that if you’re not happy, there’s something wrong with you. Even worse, there’s probably also someone writing an article claiming they can show you how to fix it in seven easy steps.
First off, there is nothing wrong with you. If you don’t want to run around the streets naked right now or aren’t at the verge of a positivity-induced ecstatic breakdown, that’s just fine. What’s not fine is that there is a massive storm of fake happiness going on out there, and it leads to the kind of bad advice and “just be happy” bullying I just mentioned.
Today, you and I will identify, criticize, and debunk fake happiness. You will learn why people confuse happiness and something else, namely optimism. You will understand the true meaning and definition of optimism.
We will also learn how science defines optimism, which traits make a person optimistic, and how you can develop those traits in yourself, no matter whether you are an optimist or a pessimist right now. Let’s start by looking at 200 million pieces of terrible advice.
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“How very wet this water is.” — L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz
Do you ever go “Duuuuh, I could’ve thought of that!” after someone told you something?
Good ideas become obvious after the fact, but that’s the entire point.
After, not before.
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“I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.” — Winston Churchill
When I recently went to the time-traveling mailbox at my lake house, I found this letter from Winston Churchill inside. Apparently, he really took this question on Quora to heart. Here’s what it said.
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When our math teacher in high school introduced a new topic, what happened next would always follow the same pattern:
Steps 3-5 of the pattern would then repeat until the majority of the class understood the new concept and the “More examples!” screams slowly died down. Then we moved on.
Since I was often part of the group who got the gist the first go around, I’d be bored for the remainder of the lesson, waiting for everyone else to get the joke so we could continue. In the meantime, instead of listening, I tried to come up with more of my own examples.
I didn’t know it back then, but as it turns out, I was doing something right.
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