“And for part two of this training, be sure to join my online course,” the creator says on the webinar. Except the course costs $500, and, without it, you can’t really exercise the skill she promised to teach in the free online session.

“I promise, after you’ve read part three of this blog series, it’ll all make sense!” That happens a lot on Substack, Medium, and co these days.

The first season of House of the Dragon contained 10 episodes and ended on a rewarding dragon battle with a tragic death scene. The second season only had eight episodes, and the big battle at the end was cut. All we got was a bunch of characters staring angrily at the sunset with music swelling in the background.

Even back when I was in college, our professors gave us printed scripts which were supposed to include all the material we’d need to pass each subject’s exam. In reality, you had to buy their books to make sense of just half of what was going on, let alone have a chance at a decent grade.

I bought my last iPhone in December 2024. It was supposed to be “ready for Apple Intelligence,” Apple’s long-promised AI improvements to their operating system. Over 18 months later, Siri can still barely tell me about today’s weather, and whatever will eventually arrive will likely require better hardware than mine to unfold its full potential.

Incompleteness is no longer as frowned upon as it used to be. In fact, some people take pride in only shipping half the work. And companies charge for products they haven’t yet delivered.

Big projects take much time and effort because they’re supposed to. If everyone could build a Lamborghini on a weekend, they wouldn’t cost half a million dollars. But just because we can does not mean it’s good practice to ship in pieces what’s meant to be one cohesive unit. At the very least, if you’re going to test the market, make an effort to let each test stand on its own.

For over 1,500 days in a row, every post on this blog has been self-contained. Each is a tiny but complete lesson. You can like it, dislike it, or not have much of a reaction at all—but in every single one, you have a beginning, a middle, and an end you can assess as one complete package.

No blog post is an ad. There are no announcements. That’s what the newsletter is for. Might that change one day in the future? Perhaps. But it feels right that, once a day, I show up, start, and finish a piece of work. Hitting “Schedule” is often the most satisfying part of my day.

Everybody needs to make a living. Good art takes time. But if we don’t routinely ship complete units of work, we’ll eventually forget how to deliver finished projects altogether. Whether it’s in a small arena or by staying patient until the work is done, practice releasing the self-contained.

In my 20s, I always wore contact lenses, even though I spent most of my time staring at a screen. I was never extremely worried about my appearance, but I paid a lot more heed to it than I do now. Part of that was being single, I guess, and waiting for Mrs. Right. But part was also insecurity.

Many years ago, I bought some polarized sunglasses. They’re great and still in use 14 years later, but the lenses didn’t come with any power. For a long time, I believed my only option was to wear contact lenses, then put on the sunglasses. But two years ago or so, I realized: With the glasses I have now, actually, I can just wear my sunglasses right on top of them. This has now become the default.

On close inspection, the getup looks ridiculous. In many photos, you can clearly see the gold rim of my normal glasses peek out from behind the sunglasses. Every time a friend or family member sees me pop on my shades, they break out in laughter. But you know what? I don’t care anymore. It’s functional. It’s easy. And that’s good enough for me.

We’re all quirky if we’re authentic. The only question is how long will it take us until we embrace it? Enjoy the additional courage to be yourself you’ll gain with each passing year—and don’t worry so much about what it looks like.

After 10 years of living here, the list of local restaurants in Munich I enjoy is already quite long. Still, there’s always room for new recommendations. During my sister’s wedding, my cousin made some. She had seen a Youtuber, “Schmiddi Schmeckts,” gather tips from Michelin-starred chefs in the city for a day, then try their favorite casual spots.

At the start of the video, Schmiddi admits to, for once, having actually prepared for the day’s shoot by sending his target chefs messages in advance. Why? “You don’t just randomly bump into a Michelin-starred chef on the street every day.” Except, less than a minute later, that’s exactly what happens.

As we watch Schmiddi approach JAN, the fastest German restaurant ever to achieve three Michelin stars, which it did in just six months, the owner, Jan Hartwig, literally strolls along the sidewalk in front of him. Even Schmiddi can’t believe his luck: “Oh my god, that’s him!” He rushes over, explains his request, and another minute later, he has his recommendation: Weinhaus Neuner, Munich’s oldest wine bar.

For an influencer like Schmiddi, I imagine chance encounters are quite common. Yet, this one caught even him off guard. And since approaching strangers for a living sounds like a personal nightmare to me, I appreciate not just Schmiddi’s public service, but his courage and the timeless theme underneath it: He who dares wins.

Head out, and give the world a try. The odds might be better than you think.

In the fall of 2023, I was three months away from my next chapter.

After many years of juggling different income streams, I had finally doubled down on the one that was working best, Four Minute Books. Everything was going swell. The business had several legs to stand on, and traffic and revenue were growing. It all seemed stable enough at a level that would soon allow me to spend half my days or so writing books while still making good money. That chapter was to begin in early 2024.

But then, in September, Google changed its algorithm, my traffic started plummeting, and everything I had built over the course of eight years basically collapsed within a few months. Oops!

I didn’t expect to spend my 2024 grasping at straws. I certainly didn’t expect I’d be applying to jobs for the first time ever. And if you had told me I’ll have been working a job for 18 months by summer 2026, I’d have called you crazy. Yet here we are.

We usually have an idea of what we want our next chapter in life to look like. But sometimes, that chapter never comes. The question is how will we write the one we’ve ultimately ended up in? Because even when we turn pages we never could have imagined, we are still writing our story. Not alone, but together. With life. With friends. With allies, adversaries, and wholly unexpected characters.

Since watching my mini empire crumble, I’ve had to make a lot of adjustments. But I also have been working more than ever on new books. I’ve even started a novel, which I’d never done before.

The next chapter you had in mind may never arrive—but there will be a next chapter, and it just might surprise you.

The black widow spider is one of the few poisonous spiders you can find in Germany. This morning, I was in for a shock when I spotted one on my living room wall. I went closer, tried to see if I correctly guessed its colored pattern, and attempted to take a picture with my phone by zooming in.

For better or worse, the spider was struggling to stay on the wall, repeatedly almost falling off, making it harder to snap a good photo, let alone catch the beast. I approached with a tissue, but, wedged between the TV cabinet and some electronics, I missed my usually accurate bug snap with three fingers—and plummet to the floor the spider did.

I started scrambling. I removed all of the items in the niche and pulled out the power strip from behind the cabinet. No spider. Uahhh! Eventually, I lifted the power strip, and it dropped to the floor. Smack! Our culprit was caught. Finally!

I plopped down on the couch, uploaded the photo I had taken to AI, and asked it for an analysis. Result? That was not a black widow at all. It was a false black widow, because yes, these also exist and, as successfully evidenced by my scare, their mere imitation of the real villain works wonders to drive off potential predators.

The whole incident cost me a solid 10 minutes. Today, those 10 minutes hurt a little more than usual. I had slept poorly and woken up 10 minutes before my alarm. With a jolt, I’d gotten up and decided to get a head start. That advantage was now gone, and I was feeling cranky.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” goes the 1,000-year-old saying. But of course, venturing comes with the potential to lose, and that’s why we often avoid it. What I realized from my spider-catching detour, however, was that even if we lose, we still also gain. My head start had gone awry, but I had received an education in spiders in return—and that is to say nothing of this blog post.

Every door that shuts in your face opens up new paths. Where do you go from here? Left? Right? To a door along the way from whence you came?

There is no reason not to venture, for even in failing where you hope to go, you’re bound to find new treasure. It may not look or feel like treasure, but it’ll have value nonetheless.

It’s a soothing lullaby for all timid adventurers: something lost, something gained—and even what’s lost can usually be found once more.

A Swiss vendor wrote “can ship from Germany” into his profile. “Amazing!” I thought. He had cheap prices for Pokémon cards, and if he could mail items from Germany, there wouldn’t be the usual hassle with customs, never mind the additional fees. We went back and forth a bit, then I placed an order. A few weeks later, another.

Recently, I went back to this vendor to inquire about the latest set. “Unfortunately, I can’t ship from Germany anymore,” he wrote back. A friend received the same message. The way it read, it sounded almost as if some adversarial event had happened.

I don’t know the true reasons, but at that point, for the first time, it occurred to me this guy may simply have been smuggling Pokémon cards across the border. Plenty of people buy all kinds of items in Switzerland, drive back into Germany, and don’t declare the goods, hoping customs won’t pull them over. Maybe this guy was doing the same. Take his wares, drive to a family member or friend in Germany, and pray at the border crossing.

The mind can be like a bird. Wherever it sees justifications for what it wants to believe, it instinctively pecks at them. “Yum! That tastes good! Why would I consider any other explanation? I like this one!”

When I first discovered my vendor, I automatically assumed he had some official system in place. “Wow, finally someone who’s figured this out!” Maybe he had a special, cross-border business arrangement or stores in both locations. My mind heard what it wanted to hear, then filled in the outline with a few blobs of colors. Nothing too exact, you know? But there was a resemblance of a possible explanation, and that was enough.

Our brains are so used to dreaming up justifications, they can do it while literally dreaming. During last night’s sleep, a friend told me of a mutual college buddy of ours. “You know, he’s actually one of the original five cofounders of Five Guys,” he said. For a split second, dream-me was suspicious: “But that’s an American fast food chain. How could a German guy be a cofounder?” Immediately, my mind came up with an answer: “He must simply be a cofounder of the German branch!” “Oh, sure, that makes sense,” came the answer. There are many Five Guys restaurants in Germany, and that was good enough for my mind. From then on, I was fully focused on my friend’s stories about the guy, from how he was getting married to him moving to Italy afterwards, and how much his net worth was.

After I woke up and had laughed off this strange dream, I realized: I had duped myself! Even while sound asleep, the mind keeps playing tricks on itself. The cofounders of a business don’t change, even once it expands overseas—and our friend isn’t even remotely old enough to have anything to do with Five Guys in its early days.

It’s nice to hear them singing, but don’t get it confused: Your brain is not a bird. Some events can be taken at face value, but most deserve a second look. Invest the time to separate the two. Don’t peck too much at justifications.

The worst part of worse-before-better is not the worse that’s about to come. It’s the time we spend trying to avoid looking the worse in the face.

Once we expect another downturn before we can resume our path back up, the rest is…not easy—but easy enough. You can go back to hoping. To waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel. The fact that it’s dark right now becomes secondary.

Whether you’re going through a tough time at work, losing conviction in an investment that should long have paid off, or having some personal struggles, remember: The hurt comes before the pain and, actually, the worst pain is fear.

Put it back into the small glass where it belongs, peek behind the clouds, and even if all you find is rain, you’ll still see the path forward more clearly.

It’s a good thing Odysseus went literally everywhere before going home, because “everywhere” includes the underworld. Only there could he find out that Agamemnon, his leader and king in the Trojan War, had been dead for a decade, murdered immediately upon his return to Mycenae by his vengeful wife Clytemnestra and her new lover.

Granted, Agamemnon did sacrifice their daughter Iphigenia to the gods without telling her. But the lesson from ghost-Agamemnon to Odysseus stands: “Don’t just waltz back into Ithaca pretending everything is fine.” Thankfully, Odysseus manages to remember this lesson seven to eight years later, when, after a “brief” stint on Calypso’s island, he finally makes it back home.

In Homer’s poem, the goddess Athena disguises Odysseus as an old beggar upon his return. In Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation, all Odysseus needs to do to appear so is wear a ragged coat. Presumably, 20 years of war, voyage, and constant shipwreck have done the rest. Regardless, the camouflage allows him to scope out his home before officially returning to it.

First, Odysseus checks on Eumaeus, his loyal swineherd from years past. Eumaeus treats “the beggar” kindly, as is the rule per Zeus’s law, and Odysseus knows he may have at least one friend left on his island. The second person he encounters is Telemachus, his now-grown son whom he left as a baby. As hard as it must be to not reveal himself, in Telemachus, Odysseus finds the perfect man to help him fully assess the situation.

Our hero pretends to be an old soldier who “fought under your father at Troy,” which allows him to reveal enough information without unmasking himself. After he claims to be a scout sent ahead by Odysseus, Telemachus happily provides all the intel Odysseus needs: Some of the servants at the palace are still loyal to him, and so is his wife Penelope, yet the place is swarming with sinister suitors, all vying for the lady’s attention, all licking their lips in hopes of soon being king themselves.

Clearly, more reconnaissance is needed. Thankfully, Telemachus has just returned from Sparta, his ship loaded with gifts. So what better way to assess everyone at once than to call a big banquet and invite them all? “Never a problem,” Telemachus confirms. “What will you do at the banquet?” “Beg,” the disguised Odysseus says. “The clearest view of a man is from below.”

No sooner said than done, Odysseus quickly learns just how low everyone perceives him to be. At the feast, the suitors are on their worst behavior despite having been entertained by Penelope for years. Not only do they mistreat Eumaeus and Odysseus’ loyal dog Argos, they also mock the newcomer, refuse to give him food, even spit in his bowl. Antinous, chief conspirator and nastiest leech of them all, even throws a chair at him and kicks him once he’s on the ground.

Finally, Odysseus knows all he needs to know: This environment is hostile, and for him to reclaim his throne and wife, all the enemies must die. We can guess what happens next.

It’s a good reminder, this memorable line from the movie. “Xenia,” the Greeks called their obligation to hospitality, and it went both ways: Hosts must be good hosts. Provide food, shelter, and not ask too many questions too early. But guests must also be good guests. Be courteous, respectful, and don’t become a burden. Provide what useful news they can and, most importantly, return the favor in the future.

The philosophy lasted for centuries because it came with a simple argument: You never know who’s a god or goddess in disguise. It was Odysseus’s biggest fear and saddest conviction that, with the advent of the Trojan war—which he had a major hand in—Zeus’s law was broken, and the world would fall into chaos from there. Looking at the Middle Ages that followed, he was not wrong.

Even if it’s not a goddess who disguises you, it’s still a neat trick: If you want to judge the character of others, be someone who can do nothing for them, and see how they treat you—to paraphrase Malcolm Forbes. But of course, the reverse also applies: Don’t look down upon others just because you can. You never know what power is hiding beneath a humdrum appearance. Like another bearded traveler once said: “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” And we do. Take a good look, that is.

The clearest view of a person is from below. Shine kindly from all angles.

Pokémon finally released the product lineup for its 30th anniversary trading card game expansion. The theme will be “day and night.” As a result, the two most prominent pokémon representing this theme will be featured in the flagship product, the Ultra Premium Collection.

Those pokémon are Espeon and Umbreon, two evolutions of Eevee, first introduced in the second generation of Pokémon games. In order to attain them, you had to treat your Eevee well, then evolve it either during the day or at night. The product features them on the sleeves, a coin, a playmat, a deck box, and, most importantly, on a specially illustrated, rare card, along with many other pokémon.

As soon as I saw it, I sighed. “Ahh, what a great time to be an Umbreon collector. And what a terrible time to be an Umbreon collector.”

The collection will already be Pokémon’s most expensive product of that kind ever released, even at the retail price of $200. But the market is hot, so most likely, you won’t find it under $400, maybe even $600. However much it’s going to be, getting this product, even just the card, will hurt my wallet. But, in order to keep my “master set” of all Umbreon cards intact, I’ll need it. Another challenge to grow with.

On the other hand, I already have most other Umbreon cards. And guess which cards are going up in price right now due to the excitement around the new, upcoming collection? So while I’ll have to shell out a pretty penny to keep my collection up to date, the value of my existing collection will also grow. I lose, and yet I also win.

This same dynamic applies elsewhere. If you’ve been into AI stocks for a while, and the latest IPO sends the market soaring, you might not be able to scoop up Wall Street’s newest darling on the cheap. But the AI stocks you already have will also benefit. When you’ve been personally recording a podcast for five years, and now AI makes podcasts easy to manufacture at scale, that will increase your competition. But it also gives you a chance to stand out for being the only human in a sea of robots.

When it feels like it’s always both a good time and a bad time, that’s a sign you’re actually playing the game. You’ve got skin in it, so wherever you benefit, you’ll also have to accept some drawbacks—and vice versa.

Don’t let either side take over your emotions. Enjoy the good, deal with the bad. And focus on what’s most important: You are where you’re meant to be, participating in the arena you belong in.

I once tried to profit off arbitrage in the most literal way possible: I bought a cryptocurrency on one exchange, where it was newly listed, sent it to another, and sold it there for a profit. New coins permeated slowly across the ecosystem at the time, and, for a few hours, you sometimes had a chance to exploit varying prices in different marketplaces.

If I recall correctly, the trade worked for a portion of the coins I bought but not for all of them. By the time I managed to get all of the tokens out from the one exchange, the price had caught up everywhere else. No getting rich quick this time!

There are many other, more sophisticated ways to arbitrage, and I tried several of them over the years.

Some people fly to US, buy Pokémon cards for cheaper dollar prices, bring them to Europe, hope customs ignores them, and then sell them over here for a 30% profit.

Others propagate new technology by porting it from one geography to another while most of the target market is still unaware. In the early days of visual website builders, you could sell website creation as a service even if you didn’t know how to code. Eventually, those tools became cheap and widely available, so there was no need to hire someone anymore. You could now do it yourself in the same time or less.

In 2007, three German brothers founded Rocket Internet, a startup studio whose entire business model exists around copying successful startups from around the world, mostly the US, and establishing European equivalents.

The list goes on and on. There are always an infinite number of arbitrage opportunities at any given time because economies move at different speeds around the globe. Now, with AI, you could offer tons of services to unsuspecting, busy business owners. Create or translate content, build software, speed up processes—all using existing templates, hooked together and sped up thanks to the machines.

There are only two problems with arbitrage.

The first affects any creatively inclined person: It’s boring. You’ve found a loophole in the system. Yay! Now, you must hack at it with the same repetitive steps—over and over and over again. Perform A for B, get paid, find a new client, and repeat. And no matter how automated you make it, in the end, it’ll always be work. To find customers. To convince them. To deliver the service at scale without things breaking. But if you’re already working, why not create something new? Something you actually want to see in the world? That may or may not work, but that actually feels rewarding should it succeed.

The second problem is that arbitrage never lasts. Whatever gap you’ve identified is closing as soon as you’ve found it. After all, you’re never the only one with an idea. Arbitrage always comes with a ticking countdown. Some windows last longer than others. It could be years, months, or only a few weeks. But eventually, once markets have caught up with one another, you’ll have to move on to something else. And again, the same question presents itself: Why not spend that time working on one thing you actually care about? An idea you already know might take decades to come to fruition, but which could pay off not only to a much larger degree but also with more than dollars?

More often than not, arbitrage is the young man’s vain attempt at skipping the game. A cheap shot at early retirement which rarely works out. Some arbitrage businesses genuinely help their target markets, and they’re all part of the force which actually eliminates price differences in the end. But the number of proud arbitragers is tiny for a simple reason: You’re profiteering off everyone else’s lack of knowledge, and that’s not very inspiring.

Life’s too short for chasing arbitrage. Find a candle whose wax won’t run out, and protect its flame for as long as you can.