Category: Quora

Pareto’s Law Is the Antithesis of Excellence Cover

Pareto’s Law Is the Antithesis of Excellence

Nik

It’s a sunny day in 1896 in Lausanne. After his morning coffee, Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto takes the usual stroll through his well-tended garden.

An engineer at heart, the new chair of political economy of the University of Lausanne meticulously tracks the performance of his vegetables. Today the peas are up. He grabs a few sample pods from the nearest row of plants and goes back inside.

At the kitchen table, he starts counting. One pod, two pod, three pod, four. Five peas, ten peas, twelve peas, more. As he lines up each pair 45 peas emerge from 15 pods.

Just as Vilfredo is about to pin down today’s observation in his tracking sheet, he pauses. Hm. Those first few pods lie next to an awfully large number of peas…

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If You Secretly Dream About Being A Billionaire, This Is For You Cover

If You Secretly Dream About Being a Billionaire, This Is For You

Nik

I was raised with a lot of privilege. I’m not trying to deny it. But you know what the massive side dish is that comes with privilege? Delusion. You always expect more food to magically appear on your plate, without so much as leaving the table.

One of the most common, yet most dangerous illusions my generation secretly indulges in is the idea of becoming a billionaire.

Go ahead. Feel it. Deep down. It’s there.

“I’ll become a billionaire.”

As if it was just a matter of when. If you just felt a slight tingle, I have a few questions for you. Questions for future billionaires.

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How To Be Mentally Strong: The Magic of David Blaine Cover

How To Be Mentally Strong: The Magic of David Blaine

Nik

David Blaine might be the mentally toughest person on earth.

Here’s a short excerpt of the death-defying feats he’s pulled off over the years:

  • Holding his breath for 17 minutes and 4 seconds.
  • Consuming nothing but water for 44 days.
  • Catching a .22 caliber bullet with a small metal cup in his mouth.

…and, my personal favorite, Blaine standing atop a 100-foot high column for 35 hours with no sleep.

Source

On multiple occasions, David was closer to dying than surviving. His strength to endure these situations is unfathomable.

More so, he has the courage to seek them out repeatedly, all because they fuel his ultimate goal: bring magic to the people.

Here’s what you and I can learn from him:

1. Be curious about enduring things.

When his mother fought cancer without complaint, David saw there’s more to hardship than suffering.

You can learn from it. But you have to wonder what’s on the other side to do that.

2. Hold on to creativity for dear life.

David went to Central Booking, the Manhattan municipal jail, for jumping a turnstile once. To avoid getting his ass kicked by the four buffest guys in the cell, he used the only thing he had left: his creativity.

Source

Eventually, he won the whole block over with his magic and got out.

Hold on to your creativity as if your life depended on it. Some day it might.

3. Have nothing to lose.

David’s mother died in his arms. It almost broke him, but it left him with nothing to lose and everything to gain. We all have things we’re afraid will be taken away some day.

The only way to not let that stop you is to let go before you lose them.

4. Fast.

One of David’s favorite books is Siddartha by Hermann Hesse. When Siddartha practices living in poverty, a merchant asks him what he can give if he has no possessions. To that, Siddartha says:

“I can think, I can wait, I can fast. If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.”

Source

Hunger is the most elementary test of human existence. Take it.

5. Train remaining calm in extreme situations.

Navy SEALs are made comfortable with blacking out under water by having to walk across the bottom of a pool while strapped to 45 pound plates. David held his breath while hanging around sharks so he would know what it feels like to perform under stress.

How calm would you be?

Don’t just practice hard, practice under the hardest conditions.

6. Expose yourself to your worst fears.

Extreme doesn’t always mean dangerous. Blaine was afraid of cockroaches. Yes, bugs. One night, he slept in a little tent in Botswana, which was circled by one and a half ton hippos. Suddenly, the bugs became his friends.

When your brain gets close to the breaking point, it’ll throw your worst fears at you. You have to know they’re not real when the time comes.

Are those lions real?

7. Learn to override your brain.

Not succumbing to your brain’s irrational illusions is just one half of winning the battle. Once you do, you’ll still have to get it to follow you in the right direction.

David likes to trick his mind with numbers. On his 44-day fast, he created a superstition that once he’d get to 22 days, he’d be fine. After getting half, he focused on the next 11 days, and so on.

Pretend arbitrary milestones mean everything and maybe, one day, you’ll master your brain.

8. When you know you’re going to fail, go on.

At the halfway mark during his second world record breath holding attempt, David said he was “100% certain that I was not gonna be able to make this.”

But he figured since Oprah had dedicated an hour to the live TV special, he’d be better off fighting until he blacks out.

Source

After 10 minutes, the blood started rushing away from his extremities to protect his vital organs.

At 12 minutes, his left arm went numb, and he started panicking about having a heart attack.

At 15 minutes, he went into heart ischemia, with his pulse jumping from 150 to 40 and back.

16 minutes in, David is just waiting to have a heart attack. He floats to the top of the bubble, waiting. Seconds float by, feeling like years.

When the doctors pull him out of the water at 17 minutes and 4 seconds, David Blaine has held his breath longer than any human in history.

All because when he had already failed, he kept going anyway.

Most of us don’t have to risk dying to push our mission forward. But it’s the kind of magic worth emulating.

Take these lessons. Carry them with you. Within yourself. Turn them into a system. Whatever it takes to close the gap between your present state and your true potential.

Hopefully, one day, you can live at the edge.

“We are all capable of infinitely more than we believe.”

— David Blaine

Sources

[1] David Blaine’s Personal Website

[2] Tim Ferriss interviewing David Blaine on fear{less}

[3] David Blaine’s TED Talk

The Most Depressing One-Liner Cover

The Most Depressing One-Liner

Nik

I’ve only ever heard this phrase in German, but here’s a translation:

“There is no worse way of missing someone than to sit next to them, knowing they’ll never be with you.”

From 10th grade all the way to high school graduation, for over 3 years, I sat next to a girl in class I loved, feeling exactly like that. Let’s call her Jamie.

I didn’t know Jamie very well before, even though we had been in the same class for years, but somehow, we ended up sitting next to each other that year. Before I knew it, we were best friends. Classic.

She was beautiful. Still is. I didn’t know how to talk to girls. Still don’t.

But she had a boyfriend for ages. And then another one. For ages. So all these years, we sat next to each other, and all I felt I could do was to watch her relationships pass by, waiting for a train that might never arrive.

We were always side by side. On the bus during field trips. In class. In the car. Outside the club on the curb. On our couch at home. On her bed when she cried over her first breakup. And her second.

Three months before we graduated, I’d finally had enough. On Christmas 2010, along with her gift, I gave Jamie a letter, explaining everything. She was single then. But she never responded. Sort of…ignored the issue away. Classy.

Except that I was pissed. Maybe I needed that. Made moving on easier.

I still think about her. Sometimes, she pops up in my mind and I think to myself:

“Hey Jamie…what if?”

And then I remember that life is still beautiful. That being able to even feel this pain is a gift. That I was lucky to sit next to someone so awesome for so long.

But I also always remember that feeling of sitting next to her, knowing “this is never going to work.”

I’ve had that feeling many times since then. But it never felt quite the same way.

PS: Here’s the original phrase in German: “Die schlimmste Art, jemanden zu vermissen, ist die, an seiner Seite zu stehen und zu wissen, dass er nie zu einem gehören wird.”

The 3 Best Study Hacks for College

Nik

While getting my Bachelor’s degree, I’ve tried every mode of study you can imagine. Go to all the classes, go to some classes, go to no classes. Self-study, group study, teaching, being taught, you name it, I’ve tried it.

All I ever got was Bs.

(Our grade scale goes from 1–4, 1.0 being the best)

So when I decided to go back to school, I thought why stress myself. I’ve been hacking college since the day I got here.

1. Hacking classes.

In Germany, most classes aren’t mandatory. Since all we have is one final exam for most subjects, you can stay home all year, study for yourself and then ace the class.

Here in Munich, most classes are even recorded to watch at your own leisure, yet most of my fellow students still go for one reason: they’re lazy and they feel bad if they don’t.

Last semester, many of them went to all the lectures, did not pay attention, watched the replays, did not pay attention again, and then tried to study the slides.

What I did was to go to every class once, see if the professor does nothing more than read off the slides (most of them did), and then summarized the slides myself instead.

For every single slide, I wrote down what it meant in one sentence. This way, I’d end up with 6–12 dense pages of notes for each class. All I had to do then, was study them.

Study Hacks Summarizing
Yeah, yeah, my handwriting sucks, we’ve been over this.

The goal of summarizing is to reduce the amount of information your brain has to hold.

You’ll do a lot better by knowing 80% of the material in detail, rather than having an idea of 100% of it, but not really knowing what you’re talking about.

When I was all done with my summary, I would try to create a tree structure of the material on one or two pages, so I could have the entire class on one piece of paper.

Study Hacks Memorization
(doesn’t have to be fancy, as long as it works for you)

Bonus tip:

Minimize the number of classes you take by going for those with the highest credits on average.

In my program, 6 credits per class is solid. 3 aren’t worth your time, 5 fall one credit short when adding up to modules (you need 12, 18, 24, etc.), and 8 are usually a ridiculous amount of extra work.

2. Hacking exams.

Everyone I know struggles with studying for several exams in parallel. So whenever you have three in a week, shit hits the fan. You spend way too much time studying for the first and are only left with the time between exam 1 and 2 to study for the latter, and so on.

So the first thing I did was to pick classes based on exam dates, which were spread far apart.

Only two of my exams fell in one week, and those classes were mandatory. The earlier in the semester an exam, the better. Classes started in October, my first exam was in December. This not only meant it was far away from all the others, but also that there was less material to study.

My first exam.

The second thing I did was to improve my exam schedule as I went along. That December exam I only found out about in November, so I adjusted.

Same thing with a required law class. It was scheduled right between the two mandatory exams, but then the professor opened another slot for it three weeks earlier.

Was it a hassle to study the material in one week rather than three? Sure, but this way, I probably spent more time focused on law than I would have, if I’d had to study in parallel.

(that is one big ass law book)

The best thing you can achieve when structuring your exams is peace of mind as you move towards them.

Every minute you spend in a hasty state of worry is a minute of studying lost, so optimize your schedule as best as you can.

3. Hacking assignments.

In one statistics class, we were eligible to get an additional 20% of the exams points as a bonus for completing a report. Had I known this would turn into a 50-page paper about energy drink consumption, I probably wouldn’t have done it, but oh well.

(You can download the paper here, if you’re interested)

We started from scratch and went all the way from designing our own questionnaire, to surveying a sample of people to analyzing the data with SPSS.

However, nowhere does it say you have to do assignments like this the hardest way possible.

  • Instead of designing our survey in Word, we used Google Forms, to make collecting data easier.
  • Instead of annoying 10 of our fellow students to complete the thing, I sent it to my email list and we collected 100 answers in 24 hours. You could also use a service like Pollfish and just pay for people to fill out your survey.
  • Instead of formatting the 2,000 data points in Excel to let us import them to SPSS, I hired someone to do it for $20 on Freelancer.com.

You might think outsourcing work as a student is ridiculous, but consider this:

Would you pay $10 or $20 for 3–4 hours of focused study time?

Not including the stress from fretting about the tasks and delays you encounter. Sometimes, your time really is worth more than the return of a menial task. Even, if you’re a student.

Of course, there is one big disclaimer to all the above: none of these hacks work if you don’t.

Ultimately, I put in just as much, if not more time into studying than I did during my Bachelor’s. But thanks to these hacks, it was a lot more fun to do so, because I could focus on the parts that mattered.

And I did it all while writing articles like this one, every single day. If I can find the time, why not you?

Nobody Likes You, But Nobody Is Just 30% Of The People Cover

Nobody Likes You, But Nobody Is Just 30% Of The People

Nik

“Nobody likes you around here” is one of the nastiest weapons of negative workplace communication.

It hits right in the heart, gets you worked up and ready to lash out yourself, but worst of all, you start to wonder if they’re right.

So how do you respond to that phrase when it’s thrown right in your face?

Here’s the response I’ve come up with:

“Yeah, but nobody is just 30% of the people.”

This’ll startle them and they’ll scratch their head. In the meantime, you can go on to explain what I’m about to tell you.

There is a great story in James Altucher’s book Choose Yourself, which I will never forget.

He alludes to it on his blog as the 30/30/30 rule. James kept using images from the same woman doing yoga poses for his blog posts without giving her credit. Eventually, she messaged him and they started talking.

She told him that she found over the years, whatever she did, 30% of people loved her for it, 30% hated her for it and 30% just didn’t give a damn.

In my experience, that’s pretty accurate. So why not spend your time on those that love you?

“No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care. Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.”

— James Altucher

And if they don’t buy this wonderful story, or point to the logical flaw of the remaining 10% missing, because we’ve used 30%, not 33%, nothing takes the wind out of their sails faster than a good old…

“Now what?”