You’re reading this post right now, but I wrote it some six weeks ago. Initially, the 30-day buffer was meant for sick days and other unforeseen events, but so far, I haven’t missed a day — 500 and counting — and so it has even grown a little over time. There’s a lesson in here about some days offering enough creativity to write two, three, even five blogs, yet no day offering so little that you can’t write even one, but the one I just learned is this: Delay has value.

If I had to post every blog the second I type the last word, there’d be no time to change a headline or cut a sentence. Even if I rarely do, the lag not only makes reflection possible but comfortable. It’s easy. I’m not in a rush. I don’t have to stress. Maybe I’ll change my mind. Maybe I won’t. But for six weeks, I can let the post simmer, and if it resurfaces in my mind, perhaps it’s time to revisit.

A friend of mine just got his new electricity bill: 51 cents per kWh. That price, however, is also delayed. It resembles the peak of the German energy crisis, and since then, prices have already come down. My friend observed this delay and already switched to a power company where he pays roughly half — a more forward-looking energy provider. That adds another shade to this lesson: For delay to be valuable, it must be deliberate. It’s easy to look at current gas prices and say, “Oh, no problem, the electricity price will also come down” — but only if you know there’s a lag between the two. If my friend hadn’t known about a lagging but impending price increase, he couldn’t have switched providers. Awareness is what makes the delay useful. Without it, you’re just ignorant or procrastinating.

If you think six weeks is a long time to shelve a piece of writing, that’s exactly how much time Stephen King recommends between two drafts of a novel, and it’s also how long it takes until I look back on each month’s output for my twice-monthly “Best of the Blog” email. But if your deadline for the slides is the end of next week, an extra day or two will do. If you’re hoping to marry whoever you just moved in with, however, perhaps another six months are in order. Different situations require different amounts of delay, but almost every situation warrants some kind of suspension.

Choose your wait times wisely, and you’ll never hit send too soon.

On the outside, it doesn’t look like we did too much on our last family vacation in Italy. We didn’t hit up a different town of the Piedmont every day. We only went to one wine tasting. And there was not much shopping done either. We did, however, use the pool every day.

In total, I swam 350 laps in the 15-meter-basin. I did 100 on the first day, but after that? Nothing crazy. 50 laps here, 40 laps there. Some days I skipped entirely. Still, by the end of the trip, I had racked up over five kilometers of swimming distance. 35 laps a day — 525 meters — on average. Not bad for someone who currently does no regular endurance training.

The first reason you should be content with average performance is that average is the default — and on most days, that default is more than enough. The second reason is that, while mostly unglamorous on a day-to-day basis, in hindsight, the average will look a lot kinder than your subjective experience.

You’ll have some bad days, sure, but if you plod along most of the time, that and some positive outliers will make all the difference in the end. In my case, I happened to have a good run early on, and so I did nearly 30% of my swimming on day one. After that, it almost didn’t matter how many laps I did. As long as I kept showing up, I’d get a decent result.

It’s easy to feel bummed when things are only going okay, which, most of the time, they are. Even the high of a good day will barely last through the week — but that outlier will still drag up your average for months to come. It’s hard to feel in the moment, but easy to see once you look back.

The good kind of average is not the so-so feeling you have at the end of each workday. It’s the realization that, wow, over time, your efforts genuinely added up. Persist through the bad days, savor the good ones when you can, and soon enough, you’ll find you’re back on land even though it feels like you just left the shore.

How often do you look at the moon? What do you think when you do? Here’s what comes to my mind: You can see the craters on the moon with your bare eyes. Those craters are 400,000 km away. That’s 902,000 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of one another.

If you duplicated Earth again and again into a long chain of giant marbles, you’d have to copy and paste it 29 times, then jump from Earth to Earth, in order to reach the moon. Given the Earth’s diameter of about 13,000 km, that’s a long flight. Think Sydney to LA, a 15-hour trip, then imagine doing it 29 times in a row. If you took one a day, that’s almost a month of daily plane rides from hell to get to the moon.

Or, you can look at it right from your backyard. No telescope needed. You can see Copernicus, Tycho, and Aristoteles, all craters dozens of kilometers wide, named after famous astronomers. Sometimes, you can even see the edge of the 2,500 km–wide basin at the South Pole, an impact hole so big the entire European Union would fit into it. Worth blinking a few times, don’t you think?

If you ever feel down, or uninspired, or lost in the minutiae of everyday life, remember: Miracles are all around us — but only if we stop and notice them. When we’re too busy to look up, we don’t just miss out on wonder and awe. We feel as if the wonderful and awe-inspiring doesn’t exist at all.

It’s nice to shoot for the moon when you feel on top of the world, but whenever you don’t, it’s enough to just look at it.

Before Facebook, there was Wer-Kennt-Wen, at least in Germany. “Who knows whom?” That was the question at the heart of the social network. My entire high school was on it.

As 15-year-olds, however, we were mainly obsessed with customizing our profiles for maximum self-expression. Instead of joining groups to participate in them, we created new ones with funny names that would then show up on our pages. Imagine a long list of “Describe yourself in slogans.” I’ll never forget some of the hilarious one-liners.

Here’s one I instantly added: “Rather carry it all at once and risk dropping everything, instead of making multiple trips.” That was me. That’s still me, by the way. But actually, most of the time, making several runs would be a lot faster.

Since I don’t have the initial patience to walk back and forth multiple times, I jeopardize my entire grocery-stack on one slow-motion shuffle. I have to walk at a snail’s pace, and even then, success is all but guaranteed. Chances are, I’ll be scraping cheese slices off the floor sooner or later — and that further delays my fridge being refilled. Meanwhile, had I made two brisk runs with fewer items, I’d already be done.

That’s the thing about patience: It never feels like it in the moment, but it actually makes you faster. Like the Navy SEALs say, “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

I can start slogging out a post at 10 AM and still only be done halfway at 12 PM, or I can sit and wait until 11, and as soon as a quick idea strikes, I type it down in five minutes flat. You can mow your lawn in a hurry, realize the grass is still too long, and have to make a second run, or you can push your lawnmower across the green only once but properly. You can race through a set of bicep curls without feeling anything, or you can slow your roll and savor the muscle-building burn.

And if you’re Facebook, you can worry about every competitor the minute they appear, rush a half-finished version of your network to a new country, and likely shoo away millions of users, or you can wait four more years, polish your experience, and capture 100 million German-speakers in one fell swoop — which is exactly what they did, putting Wer-Kennt-Wen out of business by 2014.

Life is not a go-kart race. You might feel you’re in eighth place, but unlike on TV, you can never tell. A slow today might make for an earlier arrival tomorrow. Have patience.

I still remember him standing outside our front door, cigar in his mouth, lighting firecrackers and throwing them into the big snow field on the empty plot next to our house. He was 18 years old. It was around then that my friend began developing a taste for the exquisite things in life. Not exquisite as in “expensive” — at least not necessarily.

13 years later, he has sunset some of his suits and former whiskey carts in favor of his “Hunting Home.” He goes out into the forest on the regular, and he is completely rebuilding his lodge together with his wife. Antlers grace the walls and chandeliers. Fur carpets and ancient art make for fitting decor. Every element, they painstakingly build by hand — and they love it.

My friend never strayed too far from home. He didn’t move to NYC or pursued some crazy dream halfway around the globe. That hasn’t hurt his education one bit. During the day, he works as a consultant. He’s up to speed on day-to-day affairs. He knows his tech and business lingo. Yet, he’s not striving for a big stage — he has everything he needs right where he is.

My friend is a man of the world who just happens to live in a village. You don’t need to travel the cosmos in order to be cosmopolitan. He elevates his life through his habits and views, and therefore, he doesn’t need to reach some high place for his life to be elevated.

Be who you want to be where you are. You’ve already got everything you need. All you have to do is combine your ingredients, and you can make a cosmopolitan even in the smallest of towns.

It’s almost always a good time to think — as long as you’re thinking about the right things.

A visit to the dentist is a good time to think. It’s a good time to think about how grateful you are that it’s a sunny day, that you drove there in a convertible, or that your family is healthy. It’s a good time to think about which words to use in that email you need to send out this afternoon, which piece of content to produce next, or how to adjust your overall business strategy. It’s a good time to think about almost anything except how worried you are that your treatment might be painful, that there’s something wrong with your teeth, or that your dentist might make a mistake.

In choosing your thoughts, you will choose your state of mind — and in choosing your state of mind, you will choose your state of heart, mood, and happiness.

It’s almost always a good time to think. The only question is: What should you be thinking about right now?

Darlene has been a creator since before the term was cool. She’s grown multiple five-figure followings across various social platforms, but she’s not happy on any of them. Every few months, she finds something new to gripe about. One time, it’s the algorithm. Another, it’s the company ignoring her requests.

Regardless of that month’s flavor of crisis, whenever the waters get tough, Darlene starts venting her frustration. She posts a few rants, interspersed by a few silver linings. “This isn’t working, and I hate it.” “This is better now, I think we’re over the hill.” Inevitably, the crisis doesn’t magically resolve, or at least not the way Darlene hoped it would. The result? Darlene dramatically quits, proclaiming her future now lies with another, newer, perhaps currently a little shinier platform…and the cycle begins anew.

Platforms, like people, change — and not always for the better. Can you accept changes you don’t like? Can you adjust to them? You change too, you know? Why should Facebook make sure your stuff is always popular? Does Twitter owe you an audience? As a creator, it’s easy to believe your chosen theater should compensate for your failures, but then you, too, must compensate for the platform’s mistakes.

You can also yell and leave, of course, but as in any relationship, what good is that going to do? What better thing might follow? I’ve made the mistake of giving up too early several times, but I’ve never written off any one place with a scathing public letter. You never know. If you keep oiling a heavy door, one day, it might reopen. A forest turns into a desert, only to bloom once more as soon as it rains. Opportunities can reappear, but if you’ve burned the bridge, you’ll no longer have access to them.

If you find scorched earth wherever you go, perhaps your feet are just too hot. Cool down, my friend. Not every slow day is a personal slight designed to make you angry. Don’t up and leave over one botched conversation. Settle in. Figure out what’s not working. Adjust. Be the focused paladin riding out the storm, not the leaf getting blown away by the first gust of wind.

You might be a digital nomad, but if, inside your screen, you don’t choose a hill and take a stand, your hard work will never compound into the creative freedom you so desperately crave.

As I was walking to work, Worakls’ song Caprice continued to swell in my earbuds, and when the 5:11 masterpiece hit its crescendo at exactly 3:48, I saw it: A magnificent dragon rising from behind a cliff, slowly ascending, drawing breath to spit fire — and then incinerating everything in its path for the next 17 seconds. The piano starts playing, the song peters out, and as quickly as it came, the mental image was gone. That’s the power of a great crescendo — but it only works if you don’t skip the climb.

The other day, as I was driving, I remembered that random but epic moment, and I fast-forwarded the song to its big drop. The music was there, but the feeling wasn’t. Without the build-up, the breakthrough just doesn’t hit the same — not in music, and not in life.

If someone promoted you to CEO on your first day as an intern, you wouldn’t celebrate for a minute. You’d panic and lose the job as quickly as it came. If you’ve spent 20 years of your precious life doing your best for a company you genuinely want to see succeed, however, the pop of the champagne cork will be the best sound you’ve ever heard.

Whether in mountaineering, investing, or listening to your favorite song: Don’t skip to the crescendo. Victory only feels sweet when you’ve earned it, and you can’t learn to ride a dragon in a day.

When I started this blog, it was all about comfort zone challenges. I ate a whole lemon, went vegan for a week, and threw out three quarters of my wardrobe.

On one day, I tried only using my left hand. It was hard and mostly inefficient, but today, eight years later, I still turn my socks inside out with my non-dominant hand as a result. For the 100 activities that didn’t work as well as they usually do, this one actually worked better.

That’s one reason why, occasionally, silly little challenges make sense even when they don’t: You never know what you will find. Just like we can literally swap seats for a change in perspective, we can swap hands for a change in experience. It might not be the experience you were looking for, but it might be the one you need.

Since that time, I’ve done many comfort zone challenges, most of them less physically challenging but a lot more spiritually meaningful. That’s another reason why tiny dares matter: They give us the courage to dare bigger and bolder.

Brush your teeth with your weak hand. Take the passenger seat instead of the wheel. Say something you wouldn’t normally say, and watch what happens. Shake your snow globe before it falls off the shelf, and by the time a real storm hits, you’ll be slightly more prepared. Never seasoned, but always ready. Ready for the kind of challenge you’d never set out to do on your own accord — and those are the ones most important for us to pass.

For our first big family vacation in a decade, we rented a small villa in northern Italy. Everything is slightly less shiny than in the pictures. The coffee machine doesn’t work. Neither does the AC. The rooms are somewhat dirty. But we’re still in a villa! In Italy! We can either complain, run around, and try to fix everything, or we can laugh it off, sit back, and relax by the pool.

It’s understandable but ironic: Because we spend months anticipating a trip, we charge it with even higher expectations than our everyday life. By the time we’re finally on the road, the best we can hope for is that our experience is up to par.

But why go on vacation if you’re going to bring your stressed self with you? It’s a time to let go and flow with the current, not to apply your usual patterns to a new environment.

My family’s standard for cleanliness, for example, is very high. But if we were to bring our AirBnB up to that standard, we’d spend most of our vacation cleaning instead of recharging.

In day-to-day life, it’s common to have rules that separate your productive self from your recovering self. “I will work from 9 to 5, and I won’t listen to music. After 5 PM, I will turn on some music, and I will relax.” These rules are helpful for balancing different aspects of life while the lines are blurry, but on a vacation, the priority is clear: Rest. Everything else should go out the window, or else, your vacation quickly will.

If you arrive at your destination and start thinking along your usual lines, you might say, “I can only relax when all the dishes are clean and dry.” Suddenly, you find yourself doing dishes for two hours instead of enjoying the sun beds on your veranda. Is that really the point?

You can obsess over emails, clean dishes, and the perfect cup of coffee all day long when you’re at home. Most of the time, that’s part of your job, perhaps even what makes you especially good at it. On vacation, however, more of the same will only get you, well, more of the same — not the restoration you seek.

Then again, that’s the main reason unwinding on command is difficult: You are still traveling in your own company. Even Socrates already faced this challenge: “Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels.”

You may not always succeed in leaving your old habits at home when you go on the road, but it sure is an attempt worth making. Even vacations cost time and money, and though we rarely control how they turn out, it is mostly up to us whether those days and dollars will be well spent.