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How To Improve Your Writing With 6 Questions

September 23, 2017February 28, 2024 Nik

A writer’s job is to bring order to chaos. It’s our duty to descend into the cluttered world of ideas and then structure whatever insight we manage to wring from its hands.

Therefore, writing is by definition a messy process. The goal of this post is not so much to get you to adopt my version of it — although I will give you the tools if you wish to do so — but to get you to examine your own.

When I recently did, I found I constantly ask myself six questions about writing. Before, after and during. All the time. They’re definitely not a checklist. More of a blurry circle my mind spins in.

I want to show you those questions. Show you you’re not alone. Seeing my lose structure should help accept your own. Then, you can set out to find the little that’s there. So you can build on it. That’s the plan.

Let’s go.

The Most Important Rules to Break Are Your Own

September 8, 2017February 28, 2024 Nik

When I first began learning how to live a better life, I decided to watch a video every day. After 67 days, I branched into more specific habits. With every individual habit, I took the same approach: do it every day.

When I stopped drinking, I didn’t drink for two years.
When I started writing down my priorities, I did it every day for a year.
When I quit coffee, I didn’t have any for 100 days.

Once I started coaching people and helping them with their habits, I found a tool called The Habit Tendency Quiz. I’m an Upholder. The creator of the quiz, Gretchen Rubin, says Upholders are great at picking up and letting go of habits for one reason: they play really well by the rules.

Whether I set them for myself or am handed a guidebook, once I know what the expectations are, I’ll work my ass off to live up to them. But this is also the dark side, Gretchen says:

“Upholders are too driven by getting the Goldstar. They look for the rules beyond the rules. It’s too important for them to know what the rules are. They’re almost boxed in by the rules. They don’t know what to do when there aren’t any.”

Pareto’s Law Is the Antithesis of Excellence

August 24, 2017August 8, 2023 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…

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

August 2, 2017September 17, 2023 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.

How To Treat Both Failure & Success for True Perseverance

July 24, 2017August 10, 2023 Nik

One month ago my friend Calista heard Casey Neistat speak at Hustle Con. This weekend she told me the recording was out. The final question Casey was asked was the most important one:

Host: What’s been the biggest failure so far for you?
Casey: The biggest failure was celebrating success.

How To Be Mentally Strong: The Magic of David Blaine

July 14, 2017September 27, 2022 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

2 Lessons From My First Job That I’ve Used at Every Job Since

July 6, 2017September 25, 2023 Nik

You know how sometimes, celebs forget to remove the price tag on their shoes and then the world goes nuts?

Like the time Anna Kendrick forgot to remove the price tag from her $600+ Casadei Blade pumps. How dare she?

First, I hate to break it to you, but she’s not paying a damn cent for those shoes and second, I apologize: some of those incidents might be on me.

Jerry Weintraub: How to Be Persistent in the Face of Failure

June 30, 2017May 7, 2022 Nik

Jerry Weintraub was one of the most influential talent agents and film producers in the history of Hollywood.

You can thank him for any concert you’ve attended in a large arena, a concept he came up with in the 70s. He managed tours for Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and Neil Diamond.

But what can the late producer of the original Karate Kid and Ocean’s 11 teach you? What if you’re not in the show biz?

Well, no matter if you’re a writer, manager or art merchant, we all need one thing. Something without which, we’ll never reach our goals:

Persistence.

On The Art of Being Timeless

June 23, 2017June 15, 2021 Nik

I’ve kept this line in my mind for a long time:

“Things of quality have no fear of time.” ~Unknown

Yesterday, I had a late dinner with one of my best friends, Matt. Matt is an architect and Munich is full of history, so when we met at Königsplatz at 9:30 PM, as usual, he had plenty stories to tell.

“King’s Square,” as you would translate it, is a huge, open space, housing several museums, one of which is the Glyptothek.

Commissioned by the Bavarian King Ludwig I to house his collection of Roman and Greek sculptures, this building is a piece of art in and of itself. Like so many others in Munich, it casually rests in its place, timeless. For 200 years, many have stood awestruck before it, long before Matt and me and long after we’re gone, many a soul will.

Matt and my conversations are always very philosophical in nature and as the evening continued, so did its theme: what makes something timeless?

If I Could Give You Only One Tip to Improve Your Life, This Would Be It

June 20, 2017October 29, 2023 Nik

If you want to feel like a superhero, like the star of your own movie, for the rest of your life, do this:

Learn to keep the promises you make to yourself.

It’s the stuff of all brilliant movies, of all great books, of any good story ever told, written or lived. Think about it.

Category: Work