Category: Daily Blog

One of the first lessons I’m re-learning after deciding to make 2024 “The Year of No More Bullshit” is that it’s better to do nothing than something that makes no sense. Not just sometimes, but often. Almost always, in fact.

To someone with plenty of motivation, doing is the easy part. Busy is the default, and there’s always another project to complete, another person to meet, another hobby to pursue, game to play, or cool event to organize. But if you only take breaks when you need them, you’ll have no time to ask whether what you’re up to actually adds up. Usually, that’s exactly what we want: to escape the emptiness rather than face it. Why sit and wonder when you can just keep going?

The problem with not looking where you’re driving is that if not off a cliff, at the very least, you’ll drive yourself mad or into the ground. The alternative is tolerating nothingness. Which one is easier? That’s hard to say. But sooner or later, everyone gets tired of being tired. Perhaps dropping the external fight for an internal one is worth it. Sit. Meditate. Learn patience. Filter everything through your excellent bullshit radar, and whatever smells funny, let it float right by — like a piece of driftwood on the river of time.

It can be hard for me to sit and watch. To complete only two tasks in a day and accept that it was still a productive one. To watch a movie without taking notes or thinking about some work issue. Occasionally, however, I receive a reminder that it only takes a few good moments per year to make the progress you’d like to make. Some amount of daily increment on the right priorities, sure, but beyond that, more carefully chosen, deliberate bursts of effort than a constant stream of wasted busyness.

I’ve worked less since my traffic took a hit, but my revenue hasn’t moved all that much. I’ve had small investments made years ago blossom into good chunks of money much later. And sometimes, people message me out of the blue to compliment me on a piece I published years ago.

Doing more only wins when what you’re doing is essential to your mission. You’ll never be able to filter out all the noise, but if you’re unsure about a task’s purpose, chances are, it doesn’t have one. Choose nothing over nonsense, and learn to convert emptiness into inner peace. Whether you use the extra space for more reflection, family time, or simply to enjoy the moment, in the long run, we tend to regret running around more than sitting around — especially if the latter happens with the right people, and the former is done at the behest of the wrong ones.

The first installment in the Kingsman movie franchise more than earns its subtitle — “The Secret Service“ — via lots of spy action and cool gadgets, but its most honorable and indeed hidden service it performs for us, the watching public: Though Eggsy and his agent-friends are impeccably dressed at all times, they remind us that manners are what “maketh man,” not clothes.

In shifting our attention from one well-known idiom to another, the film teaches us a lesson we seem to keep forgetting: It’s not the outfit that matters, but what’s underneath.

Reader Sue, a Honolulu realtor now in her 70s, had to insist on this lesson many times throughout her life. From sewing her own clothes as a young agent — albeit a real estate rather than a secret one — to being scanned head to toe by local newspaper writers, one experience sticks out above all others.

When she was ten, Sue attended a military function with her parents. Literally there to shake hands with the bigwigs, one well-dressed woman asked her while doing so: “And who are you?” Sue gave the only answer she knew, which, to this day and forevermore, for everyone from Honolulu to Hiroshima, is the only answer that makes sense: “I’m me!”

You are neither your Gucci t-shirt nor your worn-out flip-flops. Be nice, shake hands, but never apologize for your uniqueness. That way, whenever someone asks you, “And who are you?” you’ll have something better to say than, “The guy in the tuxedo” — perhaps even a line as daring as “I’m me!”

If a steel sword is to exhibit the right balance between hardness and flexibility — to be well-tempered, as a blacksmith might call it — it must be heated to the right degree, then allowed to cool. Depending on the tool being made, the process might even be repeated multiple times. Crank up the temperature too much, and you’ve ruined your previous work. Heat it too little at the wrong end, and your sword might break upon first use.

The human body works in equally fickle ways. Walk outside when it’s -10 Celsius wearing only one glove, and even if just your right hand is freezing, you’ll shiver from head to toe. It only takes a single, ill-tempered part for the whole system to shut down — including your brain. Hold your icy hand under warm water, however, and within seconds, everything will recalibrate into equilibrium. This, too, is a process we must repeat many times.

Temperature is an underrated tool because we can’t see it, but if you’ve ever tried to sleep in a room that’s too hot or work in an office where your fingers are frozen to the keyboard, you’ve already witnessed its power to make or break our day. Stay well-temperatured, stay well-tempered. Adjust your clothes, drinks, and the thermostat, and you, too, shall maintain the right harmony between toughness and pliability.

If you’ve ever paid $10 for a bad drink at an overcrowded bar, you know there’s a difference between making something people want and making something people will buy. You’ll cough up the money because you’re already there, and so are your friends, but if there was a better or cheaper drink available, you’d choose either over what you’re currently stuck with.

If 90% of your customers are sourced from paid acquisition, you don’t have a business. You have a marketing machine. Would anyone buy your product if you didn’t bribe them? Will they return after you’ve done so? Turn off the money faucet on the front end, and you’ll quickly find out.

It’s easy to make something people will tolerate. Something agreeable, or at least not objectionable enough to cancel the subscription. “Look, dear investors! For every $1 you throw in, you’ll get $1.10 at the end. What an ingenious machine!”

Choosing to create value is ten times harder, but also ten times as magical when it works. Multiplying dollars is only fun for so long when, at the end of the day, you’re still playing a zero-sum game.

Don’t waste everyone’s time — including yours — just because everyone will tolerate having their time wasted up to a certain point. Give us what we really want. Chances are, it’s the very thing you want too, and that way, there’ll be far more winners than just your bank account.

You, like all of us, probably have a certain picture in mind — and yet, actually, there are no rules. Criminals can be pretty, and every dictator still has a mother. Oscar Pistorius is a Paralympics sprinting legend. He also shot his girlfriend dead. Did he do it on purpose? We might never know, but it’s important we allow ourselves to ask the question.

Jeremy Meeks is a committed felon who was convicted of gang violence and grand theft. He’s also rather good-looking. His mugshot went viral, and he emerged from prison with a million Instagram followers and a professional modeling contract. Can a person redeem themselves? Of course. But are fame and money the first two things we should hand someone who clearly has a lot to make up for? Another question worth asking.

When the author who made him famous, Ariadne Oliver, is the first to appear at yet another murder scene demanding Hercule Poirot’s legendary detective-skills, she finds herself at the end of the master’s piercing gaze. “Don’t you dare look at me like a murder suspect,” she says. “We’re old friends.” Rational as ever, Poirot only knows one response: “Every murderer is somebody’s old friend.”

Sometimes, things are exactly as they seem at first glance, and sometimes, they are so far from anything you could even have imagined, you’ll find it hard to blame yourself for misjudging them. The important part is to not give too much importance to the seeming. Let “seem” seem as it may. Watch, wait, and place a question in the middle of the room. You might have to stew in it for an hour or for a year, but eventually, the truth will emerge.

Appearances aren’t always deceiving, but don’t take everything your eyes — or any other sense, for that matter — transmit at face value. Not all gangsters have scars, and not all homeless people are alcoholics.

Open my to-do list at any given time, and you’ll likely find a hundred tasks, waiting to be completed. Sometimes, I knock out a good chunk in a week, but often, for every one I cross off, I add two more.

Usually, I’m quite enthusiastic about most items, and not just when I put them on the list. Some, of course, I wish I didn’t have to do at all, but by and large, I’m excited to make things, to complete projects, and to improve existing work for fans and readers.

Every now and then, however, I wake up, and my gut says: “No. Not today.” It might be because I’m ill. It might be because I just shipped a big project, and I need to inhale. After I posted my longest essay ever, I needed two full days of emptiness to recover. But sometimes, I don’t even know the reason. I just know I need a break — so I fire up the Nintendo Switch, let emails be emails, and watch the day unfold.

When you’re not motivated to do anything, the challenge is to find something inspiring. When you’re motivated to do everything, the trick is to not burn out — for regardless of how many activities you complete, you’ll never do more than scratch the surface of the endless lives you could possibly live.

It’s okay to take a break from infinity. Pause when you need it, not when it’s convenient, and sooner or later, your well will be refilled, more boxes will be checked, and the energy will flow again.

One day, my Google Analytics broke. For some reason, it just showed zero traffic. I went on Upwork and messaged the guy I had recently hired to do some loading speed optimizations. He promised to fix it for a fee, and off we went. There was only one problem: While he was in expert in website speed, he had no clue about data and analytics.

We ended up going back and forth for days. He asked me many questions. He told me to change this or move that, and for the life of him, he could not get my analytics to work. My gut told me this whole thing couldn’t possibly be this complex, and so, after much wasted time, I said: “Stop. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

I posted a new proposal on the platform explaining my dilemma, and within minutes, I had someone else ready to tackle the challenge. I reviewed their credentials, they explained their approach, and I gave them the go-ahead. About five minutes later, I got a message: “Done. It works.”

After breathing a big sigh of relief, I started to laugh. How long had this problem been on my mind? Two weeks? How many hours had I wasted with the other guy? And all of that for this? A five-minute fix? It was comical — but also a great lesson in getting help, especially the paid kind: When you enlist someone to do a job, do it once but properly. Especially if it’s a job you can neither do nor explain yourself.

If you hire the wrong person, you’ll just have to hire the right one later, and you’ll end up paying three times: Twice in cash, and once in time.

If it’s a task you can do yourself, it’s only a question of whether outsourcing is the right thing to do. You show the work, you explain the procedure, and you’ll know exactly if what you’re getting is the real deal. But if it’s something you need help with because you don’t understand it, you’re better off slightly overpaying for an expert than underpaying for an acquaintance who’s keen to help but unable to.

In working as in hiring, do it once but properly — and when you’re about to sign on to a new venture, remember that an honest “No” can be a bigger favor than a merely hopeful “Yes.”

“If you look at every medical drama on TV, who gets the hero buttons?” Julia Hubbel asks. Answer: “The ER doc who saves the victim, the guy who let a disease progress way too far.” It’s true: Healthcare has incentive problems. And though ego boosts and savior complexes might only make a small portion of doctors act against their patients’ best interests, money interests everyone — and that holds even more of the same power.

If big pharma succeeded in curing every disease, what would big pharma do afterwards? From a profit-perspective, it’s better to just sell drugs treating symptoms, because symptoms can continue to be treated as long as the patient remains sick, which, if that’s all you do, they certainly will. Despite the obvious flaw in its setup, this is not an easy problem to fix.

Imagine the government offered a reward of $1,000 for every person who never gets diabetes. That sounds lovely, but it pales in comparison to tens of thousands of dollars of insulin payments. Plus, you’ll have to wait for them to die to arrive at your conclusion. And which company gets the money, anyway? Prevention is the most efficient medicine, but unfortunately, it isn’t all too profitable.

In healthcare, this dynamic affects millions of people, and you’d think that’s bad enough. When it comes to the climate, however, it affects literally everyone — yet here, too, we seem to insist the heart rate monitor go flat before rushing to…where exactly, actually? That’s climate change’s unique problem: There won’t be an ER to stitch up the planet in by the time it goes into cardiac arrest.

Carbon credits are the 21st century’s letters of indulgence. “We’ll pay someone else to offset our emissions” sounds like a nice idea, but if the ultimate goal must be to reduce the totality of our carbon wastage, it’s simply a paid permission to pretend to hand off a responsibility that, in the end, no one can get rid of. Every company is passionate about reducing all emissions but their own. “Ours are special! Important! Necessary!” Even if the certificates are costly, they’re not exactly existential motivation to think about better ways of operating. But if we don’t all come up with those ways soon enough, eventually, our carbon sins will be impossible to pardon. If only the church sold a letter guaranteeing our entry into heaven…

Planting trees is a better, albeit still too run-after-the-bus solution, for it comes with a 40-year-delay we might not be able to effort. By the time each new tree absorbs enough CO2, we’ve long produced a thousand times the emissions. Let alone will we find the time and space to each plant 200 trees per year.

When prevention is the only thing that works yet not well-incentivized, perhaps it is easier to bring sexier incentives to the task than to try and force productivity despite their absence. If Tesla can make electric cars cool and desirable, surely someone else can do the same for solar modules, green production, and living without grid reliance.

As for being healthy? That’s always been cool — and so is telling people how to brush their teeth correctly, make a habit of light exercise, and eat well enough to avoid insulin injections. If you’re one of the few renegades taking extra time to do so after you’re done writing prescriptions, drawing blood, or changing a patient’s pillow: Thank you. Thank you for your service.

And if you’re “just” one of all of us affected by the dilemma, know it’s never too late to take the first step into the right direction. Prevention might not be profitable, but if money was all we sought, humanity would have gone extinct a long time ago. Let’s choose kindness one more time, and see where it leads.

“When I was a kid, I had a dog named Bean,” Lily tells her friend Robin after the latter has just explained how she’s finally over her ex-boyfriend, Don. “Whenever he made the face that you’re making right now, you just knew: He pooped somewhere in the house. Where’s the poop, Robin?”

At first, Robin pretends not to know what Lily is talking about. A few “Where’s the poop?”s later, however, she finally admits: She called her ex in a drunk stupor and left a nasty message on his voicemail. In what’s becoming my favorite How I Met Your Mother episode long after the show has ended — for it holds so many lessons — time and again, Robin will pretend everything is fine between her and Don — and time and again, Lily will call her out on her bullshit. “Where’s the poop, Robin?”

In my quest to root out the poop in my life, I find it a helpful question. When someone presents a deal that looks too good to be true, I can ask myself: “Where’s the poop?” When a project is not going as planned, I can sniff around: Was it some external barrier I failed to see? Have I made a mistake? Or did I just not work as hard on it as I thought I did? And when someone’s way of doing things seems like the perfect solution to all my problems, I can wonder what downsides they might incur because of it. After all, little in life is as it seems, and even roses need fertilizer in order to grow. Poop, in other words.

When you go through Lily Aldrin’s bull-detection school, most of the time, your poop-seeking questions will point outward. This is natural and required. We’re all bombarded with more crap than we could ever produce on our own, and it’s the world’s stinky stuff we’d like to filter out. However, every so often, probably at least once a day, you’ll have to turn the excrement-extricating question on yourself: “Where’s the poop, Nik?” For one, even after you identify them, in the end, it’s on you to not step into the turds other people leave behind. And for another, in the long run, it’s our own bullshit that hurts us the most.

If you’re lucky, you have a good friend like Lily, who will occasionally remind you to clean up after yourself when you drop something unsavory into your life. But no friend is perfect, and so even without outside help, we’ll have to learn to take care of our own messes. “Where’s the poop?”

Thankfully, smelly as it may be, at the end of the day, poop is just poop. Like our loyal canine friends, we all make doo-doo from time to time, and though it might take more than a plastic bag — forgetting your ex’s phone number, perhaps — with the right attitude and a little courage, our carpets will be crap-free again soon. Who knows? Maybe one day, when our best friend asks us, there’ll truly be no poop to report. After all, a dog can dream — and humans can fix their mistakes.

Writing a master’s thesis isn’t hard for a writer. What might be hard is admitting that it’s the right writing project to take on. In my case, it meant agreeing with friends and family that, despite my decent start as an entrepreneur, I should finish my traditional education — and that’s the part I struggled with. Once I allowed that idea to sink in, the rest was easy. I finished a month before the deadline.

The word “admit” means “to concede” which, in turn, is synonymous with “surrender.” Nobody likes giving up. It’s not a nice feeling. But “admit” also means “to let in.” To make room for something for which there was no space before. Often, that’s the very aspect that makes us feel like we’re giving up.

Most of the time, you know the exact steps necessary to handle a challenge. You’ll know them from the moment the challenge appears. A thesis needs an advisor, a topic, a structure, an experiment, and a certain number of words. A drop in revenue needs an analysis, a few options on how to fix it, and then for those options to be executed one by one until some remedy works. And a calendar that’s too full needs honest reflection — and then for you to simply stop engaging with the tasks and people who aren’t actually important.

Once you get rolling on the steps, no problem is as bad as it looks. It’s tossing the boulder down the hill that makes us stop in hesitation. After all, as soon as we start working on it, we admit we have a problem. We concede that we were wrong or made a mistake. And we must let go of the person we were before the struggle. That is the struggle, actually. We solve problems all the time. But the ones that threaten our identity are harder to admit. To let in. Once they’re in the door, there’s no turning back.

Actually, that’s not true. If one challenge forces you to change in a certain way, who’s to say another can’t change you right back? Every day, you’re a new person — and with that, naturally, you’ll get new problems to solve. The faster you can admit what’s necessary, the more progress you’ll make, and the less friction in forward-movement you’ll perceive.

When you feel stuck, look for the truth your heart is resisting. Allow a new reality to come in. Admit it. As soon as you step up to the mat, the game can truly begin — and what is life if not an adventure for us to play?