Category: Productivity

Don't Wait Cover

Don’t Wait

Nik

If you want to learn the piano, press one key today.

If you want to write a book, write one paragraph today.

If you want a better relationship, make one confession today.

Whatever you do, don’t wait. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Not again. Not now. It’s time. Take the gloves off. This is it. One life, one time. No do overs. Don’t wait.

If you want a new job, learn one new thing today.

If you want a big money cushion, save $1 today.

If you want to feel inspired, study one inspiring person today.

Objects can’t move without momentum. You have to be in motion to stay in motion. It doesn’t matter how small — it only matters that it’s there.

Imperceivable growth now brings exponential growth later. You have to trust the imperceivable. Do the small things first. Do what feels ridiculous. You must crawl before you can run — but you must not wait.

If you want to run a marathon, run for ten minutes today.

If you want to be a chef, make scrambled eggs today.

If you want to teach children, help one child today.

Urgency isn’t coming. No one will kick your butt in gear. Urgency isn’t the postman. It’s not reliable. It won’t show up each day at 3. But if you’re already checking the door, you might as well go for a run. You show up at 3.

You must be the one to bring the urgency. You must understand that life is finite. You have to allow for that to click. And you have to do that today.

If you want to start a business, send one email today.

If you want to make friends, ask one person to have coffee today.

If you want to be a thought leader, post one idea today.

Regret is a sneaky bastard. Always late to the party. When regret shows up, it’s time to go home. Too late already. “Nothing to see here folks, just another human on a trip down misery lane.” Ugh. You again. Regret. Asshole.

If you want to read a book, read one page today.

If you want to paint a mountain, make one stroke today.

If you want to bury the hatchet, call one relative today.

The river of time carries all of us away. Redemption makes for a nice story, but it’s not guaranteed. The only promise you have is today. Don’t wait. Use today.

If you want to find freedom, choose peace of mind today.

If you want to make history, take a stand today.

If you want to be a better human, do one thing differently today.

Whatever you do, don’t wait. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Not again. Don’t wait.

How To Type Faster Cover

Learn Touch Typing in 4 Minutes

Nik

Here’s some simple math: If you type 30 words per minute, then a 300-word email will take you 10 minutes to write. But if you can type twice as fast, you can crank it out in five. That’s a lot of minutes saved if you write a lot of emails — or do anything else that requires you to type words on a screen.

With all the productivity hacks out there for managing your time — simplifying your inbox, time blocking, optimizing your meetings — typing faster seems like the obvious, low-hanging fruit. But it’s fruit that many people aren’t reaching for. As the MIT Tech Review has noted, touch typing has fallen out of favor and many schools are no longer teaching it. You probably type at the same speed that you did when you were in high school, and you assume that it’s working out for you just fine.

Trust me, it’s not. Your slowness is costing you. Dearly. You just never realized it. You don’t see the person at the other end of your email typing at twice your speed and therefore getting more done. But that’s what’s happening. When it comes to small tasks at work, speed matters.

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How to Not Waste Your Life Cover

How To Not Waste Your Life

Nik

If you’ve wasted your whole life, can you make up for it in a single moment?

This is the question at the heart of Extraction, Netflix’s latest blockbuster and, at 90 million viewers in the first month, biggest film premiere ever.

Following Chris Hemsworth as a black market mercenary trying to rescue the kidnapped son of India’s biggest drug lord, the movie is full of car chases, gun fights, and a whopping 183 bodies dropping at the hands of Thor himself.

At the end of the day, however, it is about none of those things. It’s a movie about redemption.

After freeing his target, 15-year-old Ovi, from the hands of a rival Bangladeshi drug lord, Hemsworth’ character Tyler shows true vulnerability in a brief moment of shelter.

When Ovi asks him if he’s always been brave, Tyler claims he’s “just the opposite,” having left his wife and six-year-old son, right before the latter died of lymphoma.

Sharing the kind of wisdom only children tend to possess, Ovi replies with a Paulo Coelho quote he’s read in school:

“You drown not by falling into the river, but by staying submerged in it.”

You’re not an ex-special forces agent. Your life is not a movie. There will be no obvious signs. No excessive violence. No rampant drug abuse.

Just a slow, steady trickle of days, each a little more like the last, each another step away from your dreams — another day submerged in the river.

The river is pressing “Ignore” on the reminder to decline a good-but-not-great project request. The river is saying, “When I’ve done X, I’ll start writing.” The river is postponing asking your daughter about her dance hobby because today, you’re just too tired.

The river is everything that sounds like a temporary excuse today but won’t go away tomorrow.

Trust me. I’ve been there. It really, really won’t. No matter how much you’d like it to.

At first, it doesn’t feel like you’re drifting. You’re just letting go for a bit. You’re floating. The river carries you. It’s nice. Comfortable. Things happen. Time passes. It’ll keep passing.

Eventually, the river leads into a bigger river. You’re in new terrain. You’ve never seen this place before. Where can you get ashore? Where will this river lead?

Soon, you don’t know what’s ahead anymore. You can’t see what’s next. The river could become a waterfall. It might send you right off a cliff. You’ll stay submerged forever.

There won’t be a big shootout at the end. Just a regretful look out the window. A relative visiting. “Oh yeah, that. I never did it. I can’t tell you why.”

All rivers flow into the sea. If you don’t push to the surface, if you don’t start swimming, that’s where you’re going.

No one is coming to save you. You won’t get an extraction. No one will beat you into writing your book or asking her to marry you or being a good mother. No 15-year-old boy will serve you the answer in a quote from a book.

The only way to not waste your life is to do your best to not waste today.

Write a sentence. Make a hard choice. Pick up the phone.

We all fall into the river from time to time. But we can’t stay submerged in it. Don’t let small regrets pile up in silence. Take one step each day. One stroke towards the surface.

You’re not a soldier, and no single brief can save you. No standalone mission will define your legacy.

Don’t hope for a shot at redemption. Redeem yourself with your actions.

Redeem yourself every day.

How to End an Email Cover

How to End an Email: Which Sign-Off Most Likely Leads to a Response?

Nik

For all the energy you put into your mails, you’re neglecting the one element that’s most crucial in determining whether you’ll receive a reply: the ending.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’ve spent hours deliberating over your email subject line and its content. Will this word get them to open my message? Am I rambling? How can I get my request across in the most concise and considerate way?

You’ve worried about the first sentence, the second, and you’ve re-written both of them a dozen times. And then? Then you hit ‘Send’ without spending one thought on which words your recipient will read right before they decide if they’ll respond or not.

It’s easy to understand why your email’s subject line is all-important: If it doesn’t get the receiver to open your message, all hope is lost. Similarly, it’s clear that if you waste the first few seconds of someone’s attention, they won’t give you any more of it. What’s less obvious but also true is that if your email leaves a bad taste in someone’s mouth at the end, that person won’t reply.

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Learn Structured Thinking in 3 Minutes Cover

Learn Structured Thinking in 3 Minutes

Nik

The best way to learn structured thinking is to ask pointless questions.

How much toilet paper is sold in France each year? How many miles of train tracks are there in Germany? What’s the height of the building across the street? If you take one job interview in the consulting industry, you’ll inevitably face such a brain teaser. Most people don’t understand them.

“What’s the point of guessing the answer to a question when I can just google it?” The point is to structure your thinking. To use logic, practice deduction, and build a big answer by asking many small questions.

Structured thinking turns you into a person who methodically breaks down problems — and then solves them piece by piece rather than worrying, guessing, or raising their shoulders in absolute cluelessness.

“You can learn the gist of how to do it in a minute, and you can use this kind of logic for the rest of your life,” Hannah Yang says in a short tutorial. Here’s an example: How many customers visit your favorite restaurant every year?

I live in Munich. My favorite restaurant is called Lemongrass, a Vietnamese place around the corner. I’ll start with big numbers and move into smaller ones, but you could also do the opposite. Starting on either end helps.

Then, you ask one question: What do I know? I know 1.5 million people live in Munich. I’ll assume two thirds live in the city center. That’s one million. Is this accurate? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that making an assumption allows you to further break down the problem. Then, you iterate from there.

  • There are about 10 neighborhoods in the city. That’s 100,000 people per neighborhood — and that many live reasonably close to Lemongrass.
  • If you eat out every meal not counting breakfast, that’s 14 times per week. Knowing myself and other young professionals, 10 times isn’t a stretch. Older people and families don’t do so as much, however, others don’t eat out at all. A conservative average is 3. That’s 300,000 meals eaten in restaurants in my neighborhood each week.
  • There are about 100 restaurants in our area. If meals were spread equally, that’d be 3,000 meals per restaurant. Now, some vetting is necessary.
  • Can Lemongrass serve 3,000 people per week? The restaurant is open 12 hours/day, 7 days a week. That’s 84 hours. The place holds 25 people, and the food is served quickly, within 5 minutes on average. At 100% capacity, they could serve 125 meals per hour or 10,500 per week. Even if the place is full only 30% of the time, serving 3,000 customers per week is doable!
  • Let’s say Lemongrass is closed 2 weeks of the year, be it for vacation, illness, or else. At 50 weeks, that’s 150,000 customers per year.

Is this answer 100% correct? Definitely not. Is it in the right order of magnitude? Probably. It’s also a question to which you can’t google the answer — which is exactly what makes structured thinking so valuable.

Based only on your limited experience, you can learn from extrapolations. For Lemongrass, we could now estimate their revenue, operating costs, find potential problems — and maybe even solutions to those problems. And this isn’t limited to business. Creative chains of questions work in all areas of life.

Neil deGrasse Tyson once told a story about two job candidates being asked to estimate the height of a building. One happened to know the answer. The other went outside, measured the building’s shadow against her own, and gave a rough estimate. “Who are you gonna hire? I’m hiring the person who figured it out. ’Cause that person knows how to use the mind in a way not previously engaged.”

The word “structure” makes it sound like you’re removing the creativity from your thinking process. Actually, the opposite is true: You enable it. Creativity thrives on rules. Within boundaries, your thoughts can roam freely and then slowly build on top of one another.

Structured thinking isn’t just smart, it’s innovative. As such, you can become an innovative problem-solver in just three minutes — and you’ll benefit from that ability for the rest of your life. After all, as Tyson put it:

“When you know how to think, it empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.”

One Day, You Will Be Enough Cover

One Day, You Will Be Enough

Nik

I don’t know why you can’t let go. Why you have to keep pushing. I know it upsets you. Deeply. Why do you love excellence so much? Why can’t you be normal? Just chill out. Just for a month, pretend work doesn’t matter. Wishful thinking, that is. Of course it matters. Deeply.

You’ve gained a lot from it. You can look back on so much. Every time you do, you’re proud. You know you’ve come far. You just don’t look back enough. You should turn around more. All this reaching high, falling down, it messes with your neck and back. Stay on the ground for once, will you? Ha, as if.

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Creativity & Breathing Cover

To Stay Creative, Remember to Breathe

Nik

“I sometimes disappear for weeks or even months at a time. When I do this, I’m not abandoning my work or being lazy. I’m just trying to breathe.”

So writes Matthew Inman, creator of the web comic The Oatmeal, in a post titled Creativity is like breathing. To explain the analogy, Inman writes: “When you make stuff, you’re exhaling. But you can’t exhale forever. Eventually, you have to breathe in. Or you’ll be dead.”

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Take the Stairs, Not the Escalator Cover

Take the Stairs, Not the Escalator

Nik

When there’s an escalator with stairs next to it, which option do you take? I take the stairs. It seems like a small thing, but it’s a big deal. Embedded in this little, seemingly innocuous decision — do you walk or do you stand? — is a whole way of looking at the world.

People on the escalator lose time, momentum, and energy. They choose to wait then they could be choosing to do something. Of course, at times waiting is the right choice. Sometimes, you can use a bit of rest. Or enjoy the moment of quiet with your partner.

Most of the people on the escalator, however, don’t stand because it makes sense to stand right now. They stand because it’s their default to wait. They stand because they hope the world will magically carry them to where they want to go.

Meanwhile, the people taking the stairs know every minute counts. They see a set of steps that leads up a mountain and say, “Okay, bring it on!” They take the obstacle head on and do what they can to overcome it. Instead of losing momentum, they build more. They charge — and their metabolism kicks in.

Of course, there are times to slow down. To assess the challenge ahead, weigh your options carefully, and form a plan together with others. Nothing is black and white, but the question remains: What is your default?

Even if you do your very best, you might not get what you want. So actually, your very best is the least you can do.

Zig Ziglar once said, “There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.” It’s cheesy, but it’s true. There is also no escalator. If there is, it’s going the wrong way — and you have to run up to get to the top.

Casey Neistat once put it like this: “Life is like going the wrong way on a moving sidewalk. Walk, and you stay put. Stand still, and you go backwards. You have to hustle to get ahead.”

Taking the stairs instead of the escalator may seem like a silly little decision, but the mindset shift may last forever. Whatever uphill battle you’re currently facing, which one is it going to be? The escalator? Or the stairs?