How To Leverage Your Survival Instinct in the Modern World Cover

How To Leverage Your Survival Instinct in the Modern World

Nik

When your phone rings and it’s work, your first thought is “what did I do wrong?” Within a split second, your mind races from “I screwed up” to “I’ll be fired” to “I will be homeless” to “I’m going to die.”

We treat even the tiniest of stressors as potential death threats because we always have. It’s the survival instinct that got us here. But today our instant-anxiety-button is ruining our lives. We simulate the worst future we can imagine to then decide whether we take flight or fight.

But there’s something else here. Right when your brain starts processing that it’s your boss’s number on the screen, you freeze. Ex-FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro explains:

“One purpose of the freeze response is to avoid detection by dangerous predators or in dangerous situations. A second purpose is to give the threatened individual the opportunity to assess the situation and determine the best course of action to take.”

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Public Speaking for the Rest of Us

Nik

The man above is Ray Dalio, giving a TED talk. In 1975, Ray founded his own investment company, Bridgewater Associates, out of his apartment. 43 years later, it is the largest hedge fund in the world, with over $160 billion assets under management. Ray built this company from zero to leading over 1,700 employees and became a billionaire in the process; one of the 100 richest people in the world.

And yet, about 30 seconds into the talk, we can spot something that doesn’t fit that description at all.

Source
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Imagination Is the God of Change Cover

Imagination Is the God of Change

Nik

Cobb puts his sunglasses into his jacket’s inner pocket.

“So, Arthur keeps telling me it can’t be done.”

Eames can’t hide a smile, playing with the peanuts in his hands.

“Hmmm, Arthur…You still work with that stick-in-the-mud?”

“He’s good at what he does, right?”

“Oh, he’s the best. He has no imagination.”

“Not like you.”

“Listen, if you’re gonna perform inception you need imagination.”

Who’s Cobb? What’s with the sunglasses? Who’s Arthur? And Eames? Why is he eating peanuts? And what the hell is inception?

Even if you recognize the fragment above, you don’t have complete answers to these questions. Except you do. Because whatever inception is, if it requires imagination, it means you need ideas. Creativity. Curiosity, and, of course, the will to believe a new version of the truth. You have all those things. And you can use them to fill in the gaps.

Inception is a task of the mind. And how you use it makes all the difference.

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Death Will Be an Interruption

Nik

19 weeks into their pregnancy, Keri and Royce Young found out their daughter suffered from anencephaly. It’s a rare, prenatal disease, which prevents the child from developing a big portion of its brain, skull, and scalp.

The odds of survival are zero. Lives with anencephaly are counted in hours, days at most. After 48 hours of deliberating the impossible decision to lose a child or a pregnancy, they decided to go through with the pregnancy, so they could donate their daughter’s organs and save another human being.

“We decided to continue, and chose the name Eva for our girl, which means “giver of life.” The mission was simple: Get Eva to full-term, welcome her into this world to die, and let her give the gift of life to some other hurting family. It was a practical approach, with an objective for an already settled ending point.”

As pragmatic as it looks in a paragraph, think about how much respect this choice deserves. Such a noble decision, one most people could never bear. But decisions, good or bad, have no say in how time works.

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” 
— Woody Allen

Right when Keri hit the two-week window for Eva’s birth, the baby’s brain functions gave out. After life had cheated them out of their initial plan, death cheated them out of the backup. No daughter, no hello, no organs to donate, no goodbye.

In a lucky turn of events, Eva’s eyes helped save someone else’s sight, but the story just goes to show: we can’t prepare for the unpreparable.

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124 Startup Lessons From Staring Into a Fireplace

Nik

On March 28th, 2018, I boarded a plane that would take me to a magical place. After we landed, our local host picked us up and another 2-hour drive down the rabbit hole of rural Romania later, we arrived at the cabin. The next 48 hours were dedicated to our first in-person retreat as a mastermind group.

Next to yours truly, there’s Franz Sauerstein who helps WooCommerce stores earn more and Ovi Negrean, who runs the social media automation startup SocialBee. Between exploring the local cuisine, tossing rocks into a lake — you know, just guy stuff — and learning about the country, we took turns brainstorming our most pressing business or career issues. We settled on one issue each and then broke it down in a 90-minute deep dive.

Whatever mountain you want to scale in your life, occasionally, you just need to stop, stand where you are and stare up the mountain. Reassess the chosen path. To think you need time, but you also need space. Sometimes, it helps if that space is in the middle of nowhere at the other end of the world.

The cabin, the woods, the lake, the food, it all sparked our creativity and got us into the right mindset. But the most fascinating element? The fireplace. Temperatures were still low, especially at night, so all of us were responsible for keeping the house warm and smoky around the clock. On the last night before we left, we sat around it, poured ourselves some wine, and stared quietly into the glimmer for some time. As the flames started dwindling, Ovi picked up the poker, turned one of the logs, and voilà, the fire rose again.

“Ha! Nothing like a good old pivot to shake things up. Just like a startup,” he exclaimed. “I guess,” I said, “and if you don’t keep adding logs, eventually it’ll die. Also like a startup.” Our faces lit up the way only those of buzzed creatives can. “100 things we learned about startups from a fire?” Franz opens his laptop in the background. “Let’s do it!”

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How To Survive as a Writer

Nik

Being a writer is hard. In an interview, storytelling legend and screenwriting teacher to the stars, Robert McKee, explains:

“Your job as a writer is to make sense out of life. Comic or tragic and anything in between, but you have to make sense out of life. You understand what that means? Making sense out of life? And this is why most people can’t do it. Because they can’t make sense out of life, let alone make sense out of life and then express it in writing.”

As writers, it’s our duty to live in our heads. And there’s no place more enticing, more exciting, yet at the same time more dangerous and more terrifying than the human mind. Time and again, we have to venture into this place from which some never make it back. Whatever we bring home we have to process, to shape, to form. Until somehow, something worth saying emerges, which often never happens. And so we have to go back.

For the times we do go “oh, that’s interesting,” we then have to chisel an arrow out of the marble block of messy information. An arrow loaded with emotion, dipped in reason, and wrapped in gold. Because otherwise, it’ll never land in the reader’s heart. And at the end of it?

After all the turmoil, the struggle, and the pain, the best we can do is fire the arrow into a sea of dark faces. Because even if we don’t play for the applause, in the end, our fate lies in the hands of the audience. Always. So the best we can do is show up, shoot, and pray.

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The Most Important Lesson From Stephen King Is Not One About Writing

Nik

In the early 70s, Stephen King had just graduated college with a teacher’s degree. He was recently married, had two kids, and no money. Unable to find a teaching job in small town Maine, he worked at New Franklin Laundry. In On Writing, part memoir, part writing advice, he shares what it was like:

“The greater part of what I loaded and pulled were motel sheets from Maine’s coastal towns and table linen from Maine’s coastal restaurants. The table linen was desperately nasty. When tourists go out to dinner in Maine, they usually want clams and lobster. Mostly lobster.

By the time the tablecloths upon which these delicacies had been served reached me, they stank to high heaven and were often boiling with maggots. The maggots would try to crawl up your arms as you loaded the washers; it was as if the little fuckers knew you were planning to cook them.

I thought I’d get used to them in time but I never did. The maggots were bad; the smell of decomposing clams and lobster-meat was even worse. Why are people such slobs? I would wonder, loading feverish linens from Testa’s of Bar Harbor into my machines. Why are people such fucking slobs?”

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The Strange Law of Love Cover

The Strange Law of Love

Nik

I met my ex-girlfriend on Tinder. We matched, we met, we were together for almost two years. We broke up two years ago and I haven’t been with anyone since. What I learned is that even when you feel ready, you can’t skip to the end.

You cannot find love by looking for it.

The moment you start searching, you’ve already twisted yourself into a pretzel that’s nothing but a poor copy of the awesome you you actually are. That’s why online dating rarely works out in the long run. Because from the beginning, something felt ‘off.’

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Habit Tracker: Which One’s The Best? + 100 Habits To Track

Nik

“What gets measured gets managed.”

That’s a quote from Peter Drucker, considered the father of modern management. Contrary to what you’d think, he wasn’t a big fan of complex business models or convoluted strategies. He mostly talked about habits. Businesses are run by people and people run on habits. That’s why managing our habits is important. Measuring them, however, is hard.

That’s where habit trackers come in. Read More

The Cost Of Being An Employee Cover

The Cost of Being an Employee

Nik

“Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world.” That’s Archimedes. It would take us another 2,300 years, but eventually, we invented the lever. The internet has changed our economy and society more than any other technology before. In The End of Jobs, Taylor Pearson explains how it’s transformed the job market in the past 20 years.

The book is divided into five sections, the first two of which describe the demise of traditional jobs; the last three make a case for being an entrepreneur. To me, it creates a picture of a scale that’s slowly moving from very imbalanced to almost tied, maybe even slightly tipped towards the new side. As such, I think the central message is this:

The gap between entrepreneurship and traditional jobs is closing.

Broadly speaking, Pearson describes this gap in three aspects:

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