If You Want to Be Happy, Learn to Love the Little Things Cover

If You Want to Be Happy, Learn to Love the Little Things

I’ll never forget the day I got to drive my friend’s Ferrari. I had been staring at Ferrari posters in my bedroom since I was five, so it was a dream come true.

I’ll also never forget what he told me a few years later: “The car now means absolutely nothing to me. I’ve grown 100% used to it. It’s sad, isn’t it?” He sold it soon after that.

The only car I’ve ever owned was a first-generation BMW 1 Series. Here’s a picture from the day I picked it up:

For many people in Germany, even people my age — and even back then — a car like this was nothing special. But to me it was.

I still remember the unique government program that made it affordable, the sound of the handles when opening the doors, and the feel of the materials inside. I remember the whirring of the engine, the vibration of the tires rolling around a corner, and the click of the locks opening as I pressed the button on my remote control key.

It was always a good moment, approaching the car. I saw it standing there, always in the same corner of the square in front of our house, always ready for another adventure. I knew we were about to embark on a new journey together, and that made me happy. Would it be a short trip to the gas station? A long drive back to college? Whichever it was, I knew I had my Bavarian companion to rely on. Music on, sunroof open, gears falling into place.

I only owned that car for two years, but I never got tired of it. I always enjoyed climbing into the driver’s seat once again. How can one person grow completely indifferent to a Ferrari, while another cherishes every second with their tiny BMW? “Well, you’re a car nut, Nik! It’s easy for you to enjoy any car,” you might say, and to that I can only respond, “You’re probably right.”

Then again, I’ve had that same, joyously-approaching-the-car-feeling many times since selling my BMW — and that was ten years ago. Therefore, I have a theory: I think I’ve learned to love the little things.

Read More
Don't Set Goals Cover

Don’t Set Goals This Year

The more New Year’s resolutions you set, the faster you’ll feel like a failure.

I used to pick five, seven, ten new goals each year. Sadly, making it from New Year’s Eve to January 1st never turned me into Superman. I was still the same old me, still hopelessly overwhelmed with trying to change too much all at once. Within a month or so, I failed and had to start over. Smaller. With lower expectations.

For a few years, I gave up on resolutions entirely. Then, instead of a barrage of targets, I tried setting one goal, and that worked a lot better. The real game-changer, however, was using a different concept altogether. That concept is a theme.

Read More
5 Lessons I Learned From Meditating for 800 Days in a Row Cover

5 Lessons I Learned From Meditating for 800 Days in a Row

Two years ago, I finally began to meditate. Inspired by Naval Ravikant, I managed to turn a decade-long aspiration into an actual habit.

For the first week, I did an hour a day, and, ironically, the sheer size of that commitment helped. I learned several things from my experience, the most notable being that I should continue to meditate, no matter how much.

As expected, life happened, and for a while, I only managed to meditate five minutes a day. Nowadays, I’m back up to 15.

When I say “meditate,” I mean “sit comfy yet straight, close your eyes, and wait.” That’s all meditation is. Beyond a timer, there are no apps, no music, no neural-activity-tracking headbands or wonky gadgets of any kind. Those things cause stimulation, which is the opposite of meditation.

Looking at my habit tracker, I see today marks my 825th consecutive day of meditation. What an appropriate day to share a few more lessons, don’t you think?

Read More
Routines vs Rituals Cover

Protect Your Routines, Not Your Rituals

When I don’t leave the house, I won’t get much done. That’s the deal my brain has struck with itself. Little of my best work has happened at home. I’ve always been most productive when I separated the two, and being self-employed while living in a studio apartment has only confirmed that trend.

It doesn’t matter when I leave the house. As long as I do and arrive at an office, a Starbucks, literally anywhere with wifi, productivity will follow. The other day, I went to WeWork at 6 PM on a Saturday to shop Christmas gifts. It worked! Even a task as trivial as booking a train ticket, I’d rather do “at work” if you gave me a choice.

Lately, my mornings look like this: I wake up at 7, drink water, and brush teeth. I do some push-ups, some sit-ups, and shower. I meditate for 10–15 minutes, get dressed, grab a banana or prep some food, and go. That’s a lot of stuff. The part that matters, however, is that I leave the house. I could skip all the rest, and sometimes, I do. I might meditate at work or shower at night. I’ll move my workout or get food on the way.

The point here is that some habits deserve protection, whereas others do not. To determine which is which, I like to separate them into two categories: Routines vs rituals.

Read More
What Makes You Attracted to Someone?

What Makes You Attracted to Someone?

Why do you keep dating douchebags? How come you can’t you get over your ex? Why do some relationship feel effortless, while others force us to try very hard? The answer to all of these questions lies in understanding attraction.

I’m not talking about sexual attraction, although what I’ll share will, to some extent, explain that too. I mean attraction as in: “Oh, I like that guy!” The kind of attraction that’s natural, effortless, and that you might feel towards a great deal of people, even if you don’t have any agenda involving them whatsoever.

It’s a good thing, this attraction. It allows humans to get along, which, in a world this crowded, becomes more important by the day. When you easily hit it off with others, you can seamlessly navigate thousands of relationships, no matter how microscopic their role in your life may be. Which do you prefer? A queue at the bakery in which everyone gives each other the death stare, or one with light banter and the occasional, “No way, I always go for the chocolate-frosted ones too!”?

As we shall discover, this last bit of “me too” is a key element of attraction: Likeness breeds liking. I mean, it’s in the word, isn’t it? “Josh likes Trina” indicates that, in one way or another, Josh and Trina are alike. This phenomenon is so universal, it lets Seth Godin explain marketing in a single sentence: “People like us do things like this.” For now, let’s remember that since likeness is easy to find, so is attraction — and that turns our superficial chemistry into a double-edged sword.

If you quickly relate to others, beyond forging genuine friendships, you’ll also connect with many people that, ultimately, don’t belong into your life. Sometimes, that connection extends far beyond a brief encounter at the bakery, and that’s when things get complicated: A shared love for jello shots becomes a six-month stint of endless arguments. A brutal assignment survived together makes you cannon-fodder for your coworker’s quest to get promoted. That’s attraction leading us astray, and the consequences hurt.

While it won’t prevent you from ever falling for the wrong person again, understanding why attraction forms is the first step towards getting better at knowing when to trust your attraction and when to double-check your gut.

“Knowing” is the key word here. That’s where the answer to the seemingly simple yet surprisingly complex question of “Why are we attracted to people like us?” begins. Given humans have been trying to understand each other since the dawn of time, it might come as a little less of a surprise that that answer can be found in a 2,000-year-old book.

Read More
As the World Reopens, Don’t Forget To Empty Your Cup Cover

As the World Reopens, Don’t Forget To Empty Your Cup

I. Pagliacci

In the movie Watchmen, the character Rorschach tells the following story:

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor…I am Pagliacci.”

The uncertainty the poor clown feels closing in around himself is a major theme of the movie — an exploration of existential dread and how to live with it. Ozymandias, the main antagonist and smartest man on earth, banks on the world seeking the doctor’s prescribed treatment for his plan to succeed:

“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.”

Ozymandias uses and reinforces people’s desire to escape by selling them a vast array of consumer products, for example a perfume called Nostalgia, which in turn fund his master plan — and boy, would Ozymandias have loved coronavirus. He’d have thought it to be ripe with opportunity.

What did you do when the crisis first hit? How did you react? Regardless if you buried yourself in work, parenting, hobbies, or distractions, chances are, you buried yourself in something, and thus, your head ended up in the sand. Depending on the crisis, this may — surprisingly — be a healthy thing to do. Six months into the pandemic, however, Tara Haelle explained why you might have suddenly felt tired — your “surge capacity” was depleted:

Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.

“How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty?” Haelle asks. The answer is you don’t, at least not just once, and so irrespective of whether you initially rallied around safety measures, home workouts, getting a promotion, assembling IKEA furniture, or watching movies like Watchmen, your rallying never could have lasted.

A response meant for catastrophe won’t do for a new status quo, and so no matter how deep we may bury its tip beneath the surface, that massive iceberg of uncertainty is still there, still hiding underneath, and when it comes out — and it will — it might crush us like an elephant stepping on an ant.

Tell me you haven’t asked yourself any of the following: Will we get a third wave? A fourth one? What about oxygen? What about shortages? When will I get my vaccine? How much protection will it give me? How long will it last? Will it be required? Directly? Indirectly? What will I be able to do with it? How will “doing stuff” work? When will it reopen? The cinema? The swimming pool? The museum? The office? And what will it be like? This, my friend, is the tip of that iceberg, so if you’re anything like me, PCSD — post-corona stress syndrome — has already crept in. The elephant has long been in the room.

Questions, questions, questions without end. Where those about the virus stop, the existential ones merely begin. We are uncertain about our health, uncertain about our jobs, uncertain about our retirement. We have doubts about the school system, the financial system, definitely the political system, and, really, any system of any kind. We no longer trust in people, for those could be infectious. We never fully trusted the machines, for those are prone to our own errors. And do we trust ourselves? However much you used to, don’t tell me there’s not a crack in that armor.

All in all, that’s a lot to process, and you know what? It’s okay to be scared. I know I am. I’m crapping my pants over here. Not literally, but, metaphorically, on some days, I’m all poop emojis. And not the smiling kind.

Of course, what we should have done over the past year is learn to accept uncertainty. It really would have been a good time. To “live in the question,” as poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said, and “have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.” Instead, most of us have become paranoid, seeking reassurance at every turn. We double-stitch every scratch when a band-aid would do, and then we still go up in anger when the backup of our backup plan fails — and, like in Ozymandias’ great master plan, that’s exactly what uncertainty wants to achieve.

Uncertainty wants to make you tired before you’ve even begun. Its goal is to keep you in place, and, for the past year, uncertainty has had a field day with you. Stay! Good dog. Don’t move a muscle! Breathe shallowly, and wait. Wait for what, however? Until you die? Listening to uncertainty is a fool’s errand. If you don’t move, nothing will happen. Without action, no real errands will get done. And yet, that iceberg looms ever larger, its shadow becoming more paralyzing with every sunset.

There’s another character in the Watchmen movie. His name is Dr. Manhattan. Think Silver Surfer meets Superman, a sorta-naked, blue demigod who can teleport, read minds, see his own past and future, travel between dimensions, disintegrate people on thought, and lots of other fun stuff. Dr. Manhattan tells Ozymandias: “The world’s smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite.” The great irony is that, at that point in the movie, Ozymandias’ threat has long been fulfilled — and he tricked everyone, including Dr. Manhattan, into helping him accomplish his quest: sacrificing millions of lives in the hopes of preserving billions more.

In what can’t be a coincidence, Ozymandias calls his plan “the greatest practical joke in human history,” and the message it sends is clear: Even the best of the best can’t fully escape uncertainty. We’re all Pagliacci, and so from time to time, inevitably, we’ll all burst into tears.

Read More
Don't Forget to Inhale Cover

Don’t Forget to Inhale

Living is exhaling.

You wake up, jump out, and make your bed. You brush teeth, get dressed, and race to the breakfast table. Phew!

You work. You type. You work harder. You type faster. Pheeew.

You buy groceries. You sort your bills. You tuck your kid in. Pheeeeeeeew.

You watch Netflix. You doomscroll. You listen to a friend yap for hours. Phew, phew, pheeeeeeeeeeeew.

By the time your head hits the pillow, you are exhausted. You’re wheezing.

What happened? Simple: You forgot to inhale. That’s also living.

Read More
Unwind Your Mind Cover

Unwind Your Mind

Your mind has many layers. All day, you keep jumping from one to another.

There’s the work layer, which contains your to-do list, your career goals, and a million process workflows.

There’s the organization layer, which reminds you to do grocery shopping and keep your adult life together.

There’s the social layer, which sends a friend’s joke into your ear mid-lunch and prompts you to call your mom.

Each of these layers breaks down into a million smaller sheets, and you’re Tarzan, trampolining from level to level inside the bouncy castle of your mind. That can be exhausting. When it is, it’s simply time to take a break.

Read More
Acceptance Is Better Than Discipline Cover

Acceptance Is Better Than Discipline

When a fly lands on your nose, your inclination is to swat at it. Shoo! Go away! There are several reasons not to do it.

For one, even though it only takes a second to wave, it might not be much longer before the fly sits in the same spot again. She can play this game for hours! Can you?

This leads to the second reason: You’re not in the business of fly-swatting. Whatever job you actually have in the moment, it’s much more important than squashing a pesky bug — especially one that means you no harm.

The third and final reason is that if your job happens to be driving a vehicle, working at height, or giving an all-important presentation, losing focus could be of lethal consequence — in two cases literally, in one metaphorically.

The fly can be a stand-in for any number of unexpected unpleasantries, but the point remains the same: It pays to stick with what matters, even when the going gets tough.

Read More
The Current of Life Cover

Are You Swimming With or Against the Current of Life?

In his book The Cafe on the Edge of the World, John Strelecky tells the story of a man in a hurry.

The man, a busy professional also named John, is stuck in a massive traffic jam en route to his much needed vacation. When he tries to circumvent the roadblock, he gets lost and, running out of fuel, energy, and growing ever hungrier, turns in to a cafe in the middle of nowhere — The Cafe of Questions.

Read More