Habits Archives

28 Things Japan Does Differently

May 28, 2026May 28, 2026 Nik

“You travel where your values draw you,” I explained my new theory to an old friend in a voice message. I was taking an evening stroll through Kyoto, a place we had first visited 12 years ago together — and been gushing over ever since. “We’re introverted, resourceful, detail-oriented Germans. Of course we love Japan! They do everything we’re supposedly known for, except better and more consistently.”

It was a bittersweet insight. When I talk to international friends here in Munich, they frequently comment on train delays, boundless red tape, and the impossible-to-understand tax system. “What’s that about?” they say. “I thought you Germans are super efficient!”

The truth is Germans can be many things — fast, precise, accommodating — but we often choose not to be, especially if there’s no immediate payoff. On the other hand, we can also be stubborn, pedantic, and impatient — even at the same time. It’s common to deal with a bureaucrat who insists on a rule that doesn’t make sense, have a person cut in line at the bakery, or hear someone argue with their neighbor over a meaningless spat.

German culture is paradoxical in many ways. This is a country where some night clubs are open more than 24 hours, but you can’t mow your lawn on a Sunday. Where sex is a taboo topic, but you can totally tan yourself naked, and in most saunas, clothes are actually forbidden. We also have a strong sense of separation between public and private life. In other words: Our values shift a lot depending on the context.

A German manufacturer, for example, could produce the best door hinges in the world — but what happens if the people making those hinges check their work attitudes at their offices’ smooth-swinging doors when they go home? The same person who calmly assembled complex machinery 15 minutes ago might suddenly yell at their doctor’s receptionist over a silly little consent form. This is why what makes German products beautiful often doesn’t translate to people’s everyday life.

During my recent two-week trip, it struck me that, compared to Germany, experiencing Japan feels more consistent. I believe this, too, goes back to people’s values. Being friendly, patient, and reserved, for example, might be something most Japanese people simply are, be it at work or at home — and that’s why you can see these traits shine through wherever you go.

Of course, humans are humans, exceptions prove the norm, and no country is perfect. Work culture in Japan can be brutal, with long hours and high expectations. Ridiculous bureaucracy can also pop up there in places, for example when doing your written driver’s license exam. Gambling is huge and permeates everything. I walked into one of many multi-story slot machine halls, where hundreds of retirees seemed glued to games with unfavorable odds. Claw machines, lucky draw figurines, Pokémon card mystery packs — it’s everywhere.

Problems aside, however, I still noticed many improvements I would have loved to put in my suitcase and bring right back to Germany. As author Laura Huang writes: “Different isn’t always better, but better is always different.” Here are 28 cases where, in Japan, it’s both.

12 Great Books Written by People I Know and Admire

March 1, 2026March 7, 2026 Nik

In the mid-90s, the Russian artist duo Komar and Melamid conducted an interesting experiment. They hired research firms in 11 countries — including the US, Russia, France, China, Turkey, Iceland, and Kenya — to interview 1,000 people each and ask them: What do you most want in a visual work of art? Then, they painted the results. Here they are:

What was supposed to be a beautiful exploration of human diversity turned out to be, according to Komar, “a collaboration with [a] new dictator — Majority.” 30 years later, the duo’s People’s Choice series merely seems like the tip of the iceberg.

When opening his viral essay “The Age of Average” with their example, designer and strategy director Alex Murrell concludes: “The landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live. […] Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”

Murrell’s article about our statistical convergence mostly deals with the visual, but books do make an appearance. First, for their titles, which, among other trends, seem to love swear words these days, and second, for their lack of breadth in authors. Murrell quotes Adam Mastroianni: “In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 [of bestsellers] had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.”

While I’m still waiting for my first top 10 bestseller, let alone repeat visits on those coveted lists, even being an aspiring self-published author has its benefits. Namely, you get to know other aspiring authors. The ones who haven’t quite made it yet but are taking their craft seriously. So, for today’s book recommendations, I have the incredible privilege of sharing titles written 100% by people I personally know and admire. Some of them, I’ve worked with. Others are old friends. But all of them are awesome writers.

ChatGPT would never suggest these books to you. You likely won’t find them on the New York Times Best Seller list or at the next airport bookstore any time soon — not that they don’t deserve it. But if you want to pick up some unique ideas from underrated people, look no further than these books.

Here are 12 great reads that’ll help you break out of the age of average.

5 Lessons From Reaching My Mid-30s

February 22, 2026February 22, 2026 Nik

A few days ago, I turned 35. When I was 28, that number felt inconceivably far away. Now, those seven years seem like the blink of an eye.

On my birthday back then, I noticed the trend of racking up ever more life lessons as we get older — a trend I wished to break. Instead of the expected 28, I wrote down 14 lessons for myself, wondering if even those were too many. “Less is room for more of what’s not there yet” was one of them.

Here’s another lesson I learned around that time: Aging won’t magically free you from stupidity. Only learning will. Wisdom is not guaranteed.

Unless we reflect deeply and continue to improve our habits, we’ll keep making the same mistakes. And while it looks smart if you share more and more life lessons on paper each year, you could argue what’s happening is actually the opposite of learning. If you truly got wiser, surely you wouldn’t need ever more reminders!

Even if we try our best, we’ll have to learn many lessons twice. What better way to create more space in our minds than to distill our knowledge as time goes on? The longer I live, the more I want to condense the sum total of my experiences into a few principles I can easily remember and live by.

So, rather than list 165 individual insights, here are five big-picture lessons from making it halfway through my 30s.

How To Set Yourself Up for a Successful 2026 in 30 Minutes

December 31, 2025December 31, 2025 Nik

What does it mean to “be successful” over the course of a year?

In my early 20s, I believed success meant setting lots of New Year’s resolutions and then maintaining all of them throughout the year. But I kept failing at that. So at some point, I started thinking success might be about hitting certain milestones. “Get 10,000 email subscribers.” “Make $100,000 in revenue.” “Sell 10,000 copies of my book.” And so on. But I kept failing at those, too. Even when I reduced my goals down to just one ambitious target per year, I still kept failing.

Eventually, it dawned on me that goals might be a bad way to define success — and thus, to some extent, my happiness — altogether.

As soon as you set a goal, you’ve declared a void in your life. “Until I achieve this outcome, I won’t be happy.” It’s a choice to fight against some self-inflicted lack until it’s fixed, and once it is, you’ll quickly move the target further away. Goals are a great way to exact pressure and make yourself feel inadequate. That can work in the short term, but if it’s your only strategy in the game of life year after year, you’ll be miserable most of the time.

Once I was fed up with arbitrary numbers, I took a break from goals for a few years. But my life still needed direction. Over time, I slowly built a new process. That process involves a short annual review, a yearly theme, and a few simple experiments. It has just the right balance of ambition, contentment, and flexibility.

Thanks to this process, my big-picture happiness no longer depends on whether I hit some goalpost or win a trophy. “Did I have fun?” “Have I been learning and growing?” “Am I moving towards where I truly want to go?” These are the kinds of questions I ask myself when I look back at the end of a year. Answering them with an enthusiastic, genuine “Yes!” — that’s what having a successful year means to me.

If you’d like to measure yourself against healthier, more sustainable yardsticks too, here’s how you can do it. It only takes two tools, one commitment, and absolutely zero goals. Oh, and you can do it in the next 30 minutes. Let’s begin.

Infinity and Eternity

March 2, 2025March 2, 2025 Nik

Infinity asked his sister Eternity: “Do you ever get bored?” “All the time,” Eternity said. “How about you?”

“Never,” Infinity replied. “How could I? There’s so much to do! So much to see, feel, and experience! I want to climb Mount Everest. I want to be a drummer. I want to live in a monastery. Don’t you want to try them all?“

“I did,” Eternity said, “and I can tell you that, after a while, they’re all the same. There is nothing new under the sun.”

“What? How can you say that?!” Infinity looked incredulous. “Flying a plane, surfing a wave, kissing the love of your life, how could these possibly be the same?”

“Oneness lies not in what you do, little brother. It lies in who you are underneath, and whether you can bring them to any occasion. When you live every day from the shining light that is your true self, how you spend your time no longer matters.”

Infinity had never heard his sister talk like this before. “Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. What are you even saying? Who is this ‘them’ you are talking about? And what does it mean to ‘live from the shining light?’ Why have you not told me about any of this until now?”

“You know, Infinity, I’ve waited a long time,” Eternity said. “In fact, I’ve spent endless lifetimes waiting. I just figured today is as good a day as any to see if you are ready.”

28 Lessons From 5 Years of Meditating Every Day

December 23, 2024December 24, 2024 Nik

I started meditating on August 29, 2019. I haven’t missed a day since. That’s over five years — almost 2,000 days — of sitting with my eyes closed for at least five minutes, usually 15, without fail.

I originally started meditating for two reasons. First, I felt called out when I heard Naval Ravikant say in an interview that meditation is “one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does.” I was already a mindful, self-aware person — but noticing is not the same as processing. Instead of just realizing that I was, say, biting my nails, I wanted to feel calm and present enough to actively stop, too.

Second, in that same interview, Naval actually provided a doable way to meditate. “It is literally the art of doing nothing,” he said. “All you need to do for meditation is to sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens happens. If you think, you think. If you don’t think, you don’t think. Don’t put effort into it, don’t put effort against it.” Freed from all the gurus, gadgets, and distractions of what has since become a $5 billion industry, I could finally start meditating right then and there, without complications or expectations. So I did.

After my first, intense week of meditating for an hour each day, I wrote down some initial lessons. Then, as my habit became smaller but stayed consistent, I reflected some more on day 800. Since then, I’ve shared the occasional, individual insight on my daily blog.

For my five-year anniversary, I figured why not round up all lessons, organize them, and present them in a way that makes sense? So that’s exactly what I’ve done. This way, you can get a comprehensive overview in one post but also dive deeper into any particular idea that interests you.

Here are 28 lessons from five years of meditating every day.

Balance Is a Verb, Not a Noun

September 7, 2024September 14, 2024 Nik

“All I want is work-life balance.”

How often have you had this thought?

In theory, it makes sense: We strive to spend our lives well. That means directing the right amounts of time, effort, and attention to life’s many domains, from the necessities to taking care of ourselves to what’s most important to us.

Therefore, if we could allocate our limited resources perfectly, we’d achieve the ultimate equilibrium — and with it calm and happiness, right?

I don’t think so. In fact, I believe work-life balance doesn’t exist — and I can prove it to you with a single question:

What does perfect work-life balance look like, in detail, in your very life?

There Is Nothing in My Phone That I Want to Look at Anymore

July 17, 2024July 24, 2024 Nik

I entered the tram and sat down. I allowed the little paper bag and my umbrella to graze the floor, but barely. You know when you don’t want your stuff to get dirty, but you also don’t want to hold it, and so you sort of just let it dangle with enough support so your hand doesn’t get tired? That’s what I was doing. It was a hot summer day, and I was on the verge of breaking a sweat, but in Munich, you never know.

I took out my phone and tapped in and out of a few apps. My emails. My portfolio. WhatsApp. There was nothing in any of them that I didn’t already know.

I had caught up with my emails a few hours ago. As always, many remained unanswered.

I already knew the markets were flat. How much does any given stock portfolio move in a day anyway? 1%? 2%? 5%? It’s not like I’ll suddenly be able to retire. Why look at it every day to begin with?

WhatsApp has its moments, of course, but to be honest, that, too, can feel like a chore. Like I’m behind on my homework. Especially after a long weekend away. So many good people. So many kind messages to get back to. Just…not now, perhaps?

After a bit of mindless scrolling, the most noticeable aspect of which were the zooming animations as I darted in and out of each app, I found myself staring at my “App Library” screen, which looks innocent enough but shows no less than 46 potential apps I could click on. Then, time stopped for a second. In a moment of profound clarity, a thought crept into my mind:

“There is nothing in my phone that I want to look at anymore.”

The Plus-and-Minus Theory of Living Happily

August 11, 2023August 11, 2023 Nik

On most days, I don’t shower to not feel dirty. I shower to feel clean. It may not sound like it, but there’s a difference.

Have you ever wasted away in bed for a few days until, at some point, you couldn’t stand your greasy hair anymore and lugged yourself into the shower? If so, by turning on the water, you took care of what Frederick Herzberg would have called “a hygiene factor” — pun present but not intended.

In his 1959 book The Motivation to Work, Herzberg, a clinical psychologist and professor, introduced a model of motivation called “the two-factor theory.” It stipulates that in order to feel happy in our jobs, two conditions must come together: a lack of dissatisfaction and a presence of satisfaction.

My 12 Favorite Nonfiction Books Most People Have Never Heard Of

June 30, 2023November 22, 2025 Nik

Imagine a city with one million inhabitants. It has everything you would expect from a city of that size: some skyscrapers, a decent transport system, and all the usual public and social infrastructure.

There is, however, a catch: Everyone in this city can only read the same 10 books. It’s a simple literary restriction, but what consequences might it have? If all of those books are mainly concerned with inequality and societal problems, chances are, the city’s citizens will spend most of their time bickering and fighting. But what if those books are instead filled with stories about community and kindness? Probably, people will be inclined to help one another, and everyone will get along on most days.

Regardless of their effect and how strong you believe this effect might be, however, with only 10 books, the people in that city will inevitably stop learning. Thinking, creativity, innovation — eventually, these pillars of progress will come to a screeching halt. Why? Because the pool of ideas is too limited! Try as hard as they may, the best those citizens can do is to rehash the same ideas from the same 10 books, over and over again. Sooner or later, to create more and better output, they’ll need more and better input. The same is true for you as an individual.

Haruki Murakami famously wrote that “if you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

Popular books are usually popular because they’re agreeable. They’ll get you social credit and remind you of what’s common sense, but they’ll rarely truly stretch your brain. There’s nothing wrong with reading these books, but they shouldn’t be the only ones you consume. If you and your friends all read the same few bestsellers each year, and you all agree on their premises, none of you will learn anything new! Where’s the discussion? The thinking? The sparring of ideas? If you all read different books, however, everyone has something to teach to everyone else.

Over the last ten years, I’ve read hundreds of nonfiction books. Without fail, the lesser known ones have been the most satisfying in terms of new ideas, memorable lessons, and, yes, I’ll admit it, making me look smart in front of my friends. So for more than one reason, I agree with Murakami: Don’t run the risk of becoming like the people in that city — set in your ways, a rusty thinker. Read the obscure, the questionable, the forgotten. Read what no one else is reading.

Here are 12 titles I believe will fit that mark. Even if you’re an avid nonfiction reader, I’m confident you won’t have heard of most of them. But if you give them a try, maybe they’ll enter the ranks of your all-time favorites. They sure have done so for me.