Digital Settler: The Healthy Alternative to Being a Digital Nomad

Nik

“If you need to take a vacation, never come back.”

— Joel Salatin

It feels almost weird to acknowledge it: I make a full-time income using nothing but a laptop and an internet connection. I wasn’t born to be an entrepreneur, so growth’s been slow, but for the past four years, I’ve made a very livable amount of money for a single dude in his 20s.

I first learned about this new-rich, digital lifestyle in 2012. Back then, I painted the same picture in my daydreams that must decorate millions of desktop backgrounds around the globe: a chair on the beach, an ice-cold drink, and a laptop on my lap. But then, something interesting happened: I got the travel without the work.

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This Question Will Make You Immune To Failure

Nik

On Monday, a guy cut in line at the hairdresser. Not the grocery store, the hairdresser. Where you already wait for some 30 minutes and each person’s treatment takes forever. But just as I was about to get angry, I finally got sick of my own bullshit.

I was angry a lot over the past three months. At people, at events, at myself. Often for valid reasons. But having a good reason to be angry does not make being angry a good reaction. It almost never is. I remembered a Buddhist quote:

“Anger is a hot coal you’re holding, waiting to throw it at someone else.”

Since I had a little more time to pass, I started digging: Why was I holding so many coals?

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The Highest Form of Self-Control

Nik

In 2014, a few other interns and me had the honor of helping out at The M Festival. It’s an annual event BMW M holds at the 24 Hours Nürburgring race for VIP customers.

We chauffeured around the big bosses in M cars, attended new car presentations, and even got to watch the race. To remember what a privilege it was, how much fun I had, and because I’d like to own an M car one day, I decided to keep wearing the bracelet all participants got.

That was four years ago.

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What Is the Most Damaging Advice People Can Give to Children?

Nik

“Because I said so.”

On Wait But Why, Tim Urban deconstructed Elon Musk’s thinking once. I learned a lot from it, but the biggest lesson had nothing to do with being smarter at all. It was about what kind of parent I one day want to be.

“When parents and teachers tell a kid to do XYZ and to simply obey, it’s like installing a piece of already-designed software in the kid’s head. When kids ask Why? and then Why? and then Why?, they’re trying to deconstruct that software to see how it was built—to get down to the first principles underneath so they can weigh how much they should actually care about what the adults seem so insistent upon.”

Toyota, the Japanese car company, has a long history of asking ‘Why?’ five times in every matter. We call that a brilliant business strategy, but when our children naturally do this, we smack them down.

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Why It’s Important to Say No to Free Stuff

Nik

Last week I got hoodwinked. Walking out of the school canteen, a friend and I passed a guy standing next to his car’s open trunk, handing out free drinks and note pads. Except they weren’t free. As soon as he’d offered us his ‘gifts,’ he made us sign trial subscriptions to a newspaper. To his credit, we didn’t need any payment info and he was a nice guy.

But he still blindsided us. Most of the time, however, I do it to myself.

Free Lunch All Over the Place

Whoever says there’s no free lunch has never been to a German college. We don’t pay insane tuition, yet there are still more freebies than anyone could handle. Drinks, food, events; young people will build the future and these are the things they covet. But that doesn’t mean we want our lives to be a 24/7 pitch fest in which we’re the prize.

So when yet another poor devil hands out flyers, the result is often the same: trash cans full of paper, littered floors, and shreds of parchment flying through the streets. 19 out of 20 times, 19 out of 20 people aren’t interested. And yet, we end up with an ad in our hands anyway. Why is that?

Sometimes, we get blindsided. We’re too startled to say no and boom, we agreed. Sometimes, we don’t want to be rude. And sometimes, it’s straight pity. It speaks volumes about your product if the best buyer motivation you can hope for is people wanting to eliminate some of the inherent discomfort in your sales process. A friend says she often takes flyers to make the other person feel better and help them get on with their unrewarding job.

That’s a noble goal, but I think there’s a hidden price we pay for it. Because now, the joke’s on us.

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This Is Why Most People Will Never Be Rich

Nik

If you even remotely entertain the idea that one day, you might be rich, I want you to answer this question right now:

Which decade of your life are you going to sacrifice?

If you don’t have a clear answer sitting in your gut or can’t even look at the question with a straight face, I’m telling you right now: Find that spark deep down and extinguish it, because you’re lying to yourself.

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The 4 Isms That Ruin Your Life

Nik

Imagine you could replace all your attitudes with awareness and all your beliefs with just being. Ambition, disappointment, confidence, desire, frustration, pride, it all goes out the window. Instead, you’re present. A curious observer, who refrains from judgement.

Though we can never quite reach it, striving towards this state is what mindfulness is about. Most detrimental to this struggle is a set of attitudes and beliefs so powerful, we’ve bundled them up and given them their own vocabulary: ideologies. An ideology is any set of rules and guidelines within you can think and make decisions without ever feeling uncomfortable. They’re vetted and have a black and white answer for any question.

One way you can recognize ideologies is to try and describe whatever situation you’re faced with with a word that ends in -ism. Sexism. Racism. Egoism. Heroism. Baptism. Realism. Fascism. Optimism. Altruism. Modernism. Nihilism. Capitalism. Individualism. The list is endless.

Whenever you can pin an -ism to an event, chances are many of the involved parties view it only through one lens, including you. That’s the opposite of observation. Poor judgement. But the most dangerous -isms are those we practice in our relationships with others.

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What Is Something You Haven’t Experienced, Yet Many Already Have?

Nik

Here’s a picture of me getting ice cream with my parents:

Nothing special about it. Except 1 in 3 children can never take this picture.

Right now, 20 million kids under the age of 18 live in a single household or with no parents at all. And that’s just in the US, one of the most developed countries in the world. The divorce rate of couples is around 0.32%, but with only 0.69% even getting married, roughly half of all newlyweds end up alone – children or not.

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A Strong Vision Is the Best Way To Be Productive

Nik

Last week, some girl at school knocked over her juice and killed the power for a whole group of tables. As a funny result, I get to enjoy my friends’ confused looks whenever they enter the library, because they’re startled not to see me in my usual seat. I might as well carve my name into it, because every week, Monday to Friday, from 7 AM to 7 PM, I practice Charlie Munger’s version of assiduity: I sit on my ass and do stuff.

And yet, barring a few mini jobs, I never worked a day in my life until I was 19. You could say I’ve come a long way with productivity — or that I’ve become a workaholic. But I’m neither proud nor ashamed of either of those things. Because what’s changed even more in the past eight years than how I approach productivity is my perspective of what it means.

I’d like to share some of that perspective with you. Hopefully, it’ll help you find the right balance at the right time.

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