On the 14th of May, 2012, one of my best friends, Paul, sent me an article by James Altucher.
In it, he described his daily practice of improving a little bit, every single day, in four areas:
I thought: Let me try that. So I started tracking it on this free website James had made: The Daily Practice.
Read MoreOptimism. Unrelenting optimism. Not delusion. Or dreaming. But optimism.
Here’s a snapshot of the first year of traffic on Four Minute Books, my passion project for 2016:
Every single one of those spikes represents a day in the journey. As you can see, very few of them have been great days, some have been good days, but the far majority have been mediocre or even below average days.
Read More400,000,000,000,000 : 1. The odds of you being born. 400. TRILLION. To ONE.
Do you know how much money is out there in the world? In total?
$75 trillion. And that includes all the institutional money of funds and what’s wrapped up in bonds and other long-term investments no one can really access.
Imagine you took over 5 times this amount, more than 5 times as much as all the money in the world, and piled it all up in one place in $1 bills.
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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.
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Be stoic.
This question is an open invitation to lengthy discussions about emotions, empathy and inner strength to brush things off.
Don’t take it personally, but I’m not gonna go there. Stoicism is much more practical than that.
Here’s how stoics don’t take anything personally in just two steps:
Whatever you “take” personally is something you first have to receive and accept. It could be criticism, negative feedback or an unlucky event. It could happen naturally or be manufactured by other humans.
But if you recognize the label on the box that says “negativity,” before it’s even handed to you, you can deflect it by declining to take delivery.
This has two huge advantages:
When you’re stoic, you’re not worried about how you take things, because those that don’t serve you, you won’t take at all.
“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”
—Marcus Aurelius
Here’s a picture of me when I was 16:
That year, I went to England. All by myself, in a foreign country, for the first time ever away from home. I spent two weeks in a language school, parts of which looked like Hogwarts.
It was the year the last Harry Potter book came out. The camp supervisors took a couple of kids into London to get their copies on release day. I missed it. One day later, one of the guides brought me one. I read it in 3 days.
It was the best year of my life.
Read MoreJames Altucher posted this on his Instagram 2 days ago:
Reposting it made me really uncomfortable – because I think it’s exactly true for a lot of people I know.
The only times in my life when I was bored were the times when I rested on my laurels.
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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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All of these are important at times, but self-esteem is the one you truly want. Of course the three are all tied to one another, but work on different levels.
“Choose not to be harmed, and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.”
— Marcus Aurelius
