When Cassian returns from a dangerous heist in a dangerous place to a home he’s no longer welcome in, a planet crawling with the spies and soldiers of the Empire, most of whom are looking for him, he makes an uncomfortable discovery: Despite finally having all the money in the world, his adoptive mother Maarva won’t escape with him from this wretched place.

Maarva is old and tired, but she’s also tired of waiting. She chooses to stay and fight, to help the Rebellion however she can. Gracefully, however, she does not try to hold Cassian back. “You have a different path, and I am not judging you. Take all the money, and go and find some peace.”

It is then that Cassian realizes the money never really mattered: “I won’t have peace. I’ll be worried about you all the time.” And to that, Maarva only says: “That’s just love. Nothing you can do about that.”

When my girlfriend is out late at night, I am worried. When she takes a plane, I am worried. When my dad has a doctor’s appointment, I am worried. And when my sister is ill, I am worried. That’s just love.

The price of love is worry. You’ll worry about your partner drinking one too many, about your kids’ bus ride home from school, and about your best friend’s happiness at work. Love is the purest admission of caring there is. Without caring, there can be no love, but wherever there’s caring, there’s also worry.

When it comes to love, worrying is not a sign that something’s wrong. It’s a sign that everything is going right. You should be worried about your loved ones, and there’s nothing you can do about it — except learn to accept it.

The next time you wake up at night, fretting about someone you love, don’t let your brain run off into some horrific fantasy. Appreciate that worrying means caring, that life is big and you’re small, and that, wherever they are, whatever they are doing, deep down, they’ll always know their love is with you — and that is, always was, and forever will be enough.

Some will hit you. Others won’t. Even if a thought misses you by only half an inch, it’s still an idea you’ll never have. A sentence you’ll never write. An apology you’ll never make. And the ones that do make contact with your brain? They’ll be a potpourri of potpourris — and you’ll have little say in its ingredients.

The only thing we know for sure about rain is that, eventually, it is going to end. These thoughts, too, will pass. Meditation is learning to stand in the rain without running from it. To not need to find shelter. When you meditate, you bathe in the awareness that thoughts are temporary and that, for every single one, we have a choice whether to engage with it or not.

When a raindrop falls on your skin, you can feel it. Its physical impact is undeniable. But whether you get upset at it, whether you lean into the feeling that “you’re cold” or “wet” or “there’s now a stain on my favorite sweater,” that’s up to you. You can’t deny the impulse — but you can choose how you’ll react to it.

Sometimes, the rain keeps falling longer than we’d like. When that happens, as in that song lamenting this very phenomenon, we can either yell at the sun for “sleeping on the job,” or we can admit that we’re “never gonna stop the rain by complaining.”

Whether it takes you a week of meditation, a decade, or only a little thinking, once you see that thoughts are as temporary as everything else in this life, you’ll also conclude that, “crying’s not for me — because I’m free, nothing’s worrying me.”

We have a saying in Germany: “At the end of the money, I had so much month left!”

On a day-to-day basis, our brains are often the same. When you’re out of brain at 4 PM, you have there options:

1. Fight the trend, and do shoddy work for another three hours.
2. Kick yourself for not being able to focus anymore for three hours.
3. Go home and get a head start on recovery — of about three hours.

Most of the time, we choose some combination of 1 and 2. I do it all the time, but actually, I’d be much better off with option 3.

When, at the end of the brain, there’s still a lot of day left, use it for something that doesn’t require your brain as the star of the show! Close your laptop, and write off the rest of the brain budget — sometimes, it just isn’t there. Then, get on with your day, and try again tomorrow.

It’s true that our brain power often runs out before we’d like it to, but it also almost always recovers fully overnight. Those two magic tricks go hand in hand, but, as with any performer-in-training, it’s up to us to know when and which card to play.

Have you ever had a busy period at work where, after a lot of toiling and long hours, you finally felt like you’re in the home stretch, only to be taken out by the flu a day later? It’s maddening, isn’t it?

The worst part is not even when you’re sick. It’s when you’re almost recovered but not quite ready to go. You’re already chomping at the bit, dying to get back out there, but you know you can’t — or that if you would, you’d probably be right back where you started two days later.

I’ve paced through my flat more than once, wishing the recovery would speed up. On a bad day, I’ll spend half my time fretting over when I can get back to work and what I’ll have to do. On a good one, however, I’ll just remember a song: Die Gedanken sind frei.

Written over 200 years ago, this German folk song has been a place of refuge for generations. “The thoughts are free,” it stipulates. “No person can guess them. No hunter can shoot them. It is thus and always will be: The thoughts are free.”

In 1942, Nazi resistance member Sophie Scholl played the melody on her flute, standing outside the wall of her father’s prison cell. In 1948, over 300,000 Germans sang it in Berlin, protesting the Soviet occupation of their city. And in 1989, thousands of protesters joined in on the lyric as the East German Republic was about to collapse.

Now, I’m not saying having the flu is the same as being oppressed. Not even close. I have no idea what that’s like, and the less frequently people have to hum that song in such scenarios, the better.

That said, I think you know what it feels like when an illness “holds you down.” Heck, for more than a year, a disease kept all of us in our apartments regardless of whether we had it or not! And in times like that, when you’re stuck in something, be it a health issue, your flat, or a bad situation, it helps to remember that, well, your thoughts are free.

Perhaps I can’t take a walk outside, but I can still fly around the world in my mind. I can’t shoulder my backpack and trek to work, but I can imagine myself typing, thinking, looking at the eventual end result, and take some comfort in that. Maybe I can’t eat the pizza I usually enjoy so much, but I can still remember its taste.

Even if your suffering is harmless, sometimes, it doesn’t do just to belittle it. It may be small in historic comparison, but if it hurts right now, then right now is when you need a way of handling it. Today, more oppression happens in human minds than to human bodies — and a lot of it is self-inflicted.

Wherever it comes from, don’t let the madness get to you. Your thoughts are free, and so are you — as long as you remember it.

Eckart von Hirschhausen is a German writer, comedian, and TV personality. Actually, he is a physician — or used to be. Von Hirschhausen studied in Heidelberg and London, graduated magna cum laude with his PhD, and practiced as a doctor in Switzerland, South Africa, and Germany, before eventually transitioning to writing, journalism, and later hosting talk shows and performing live on stage.

Asked in an interview what brought about his remarkable transition, von Hirschhausen recounts a story. Once upon a time, he went to a zoo in Norway. Looking at a penguin waddling around his enclosure, he thought: “Poor bastard. He can’t fly, he’s fat, and the creator even forgot to give him knees.” But then he went down a flight of stairs, and suddenly, his penguin swam by behind a glass window, looking at him, and von Hirschhausen thought: “Wow. Now, this guy is pitying me.”

“If you’ve ever seen a penguin in water,” he recalls, “you know they can fly — as soon as they’re in their element. In fact, with the energy you’d get out of one liter of fuel, they could travel 2,000 kilometers. That’s more efficient than anything humans have been able to come up with — and yet, here I was, thinking this guy is a total case of faulty design.”

Von Hirschhausen learned two things from this experience, he says. The first was about how quickly we judge people, even if we’ve observed them in only a single situation, and how wrong we can be in those assessments. The second was this: “Your strengths only shine when you’re in your element.”

“If you’re born as a penguin, even seven years of therapy won’t turn you into a giraffe. It doesn’t matter how much you’d like to have a really long neck. What matters is: Who are you? What can you do? And what do you want? And if I’m a penguin and find myself in the desert, then I needn’t be surprised why things aren’t going well. And in that case, it’s not important how I got there or whose fault that was. The question is: How do I get out of here? Back into my element.”

As a doctor, von Hirschhausen struggled with doing things in a set order, time and time again. He wasn’t good with routine, and in a hospital, routine keeps both you and your patients alive and sane. What he was good at was coming up with new insights on the fly which, when you’re giving patients a diagnosis, also doesn’t help. In other words, von Hirschhausen was a penguin in the desert — and he needed to get out of there.

Nowadays, through his books and public appearances, von Hirschhausen brings questions of health and wellness to a broad audience. He uses comedy and stories to make science more accessible, and that too is a service, just a different one than treating people one-on-one.

Who are you? What can you do? And what do you want? Don’t obsess about fixing your shortcomings. Find your element. Get out of the desert. Dare to jump in at the deep end. Risk a dive into the water, and sooner or later, you will find: “I may be a penguin — but I can still fly.”

I will never be a great snowboarder. For various genetic and non-genetic reasons, my knees are barely capable of surviving a three-hour hike, let alone the landing after a 1080.

In fact, I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all, given my orthopedist told me to stay away from anything that’s heavy on the knees, “like tennis, skiing, or, say, snowboarding,” as long as 15 years ago. It sucks. I’d love to take snowboarding lessons. Alas, all I can do is watch videos of people doing sick stunts, living vicariously through GoPro’s Youtube channel.

When I first found out, for a good while, I was really upset about this. “How dare life take that from me!” I often imagined what would happen if I went big on snowboarding anyway. That there must be a way for me to fix my knees enough to succeed, and, to be fair, there probably is. But at some point, I realized that life is big but also short.

When asked “What’s one experience you hope we’ll share in the future?” ex-Bachelor star Sharleen Joynt tells her husband: “It’s hard. I want to do everything with you. There’s not enough time.”

You know what else I’d like to do besides becoming a great snowboarder? I want to learn kung fu. I’d also love to be a lot better at video games, get my Yu-Gi-Oh! hobby back on, and become at least fluent enough for everyday conversation in oh, I don’t know, eight more languages.

Meanwhile, back down on earth, I’m self-employed. I spend most of my time working, and when I don’t work, I try to be with my girlfriend, or family, or friends. It ebbs and flows, of course, but over the last few weeks, I’ve barely managed to make time to read, let alone pursue other, second-tier hobbies.

Even if I won the lottery tomorrow, however, I doubt there’d be enough time. There’s never enough time. If Death excused me for a few hundred years, I’d definitely take it.

And yet, somehow, the more years go by, the more rarely I watch snowboarding videos. My imagination runs wild less often, and when it does, it comes with smiles more so than bitterness. “It’s okay. Leave the snowboarding to others. You are a writer. You have things to do where you are, and that is enough.”

Use your imagination. Sometimes, dreams can just be dreams. They needn’t all come true to feel satisfying. Watch videos. Read books. Spend time with the heroes you’ll never meet. Whatever you do, don’t get angry at your unlived dreams. Extend a hand. Make peace.

We only get to sample a small taste of everything life has to offer, but in choosing deliberately, we are doing the most important job we were brought here to do.

Sometime in 2022, I spent my billionth second. Even if I live to 90, more than a third of my time is gone. That’s kind of scary. It’s also kind of liberating.

A third of my life is over, but I am still here. Still happy, at least on most days. I have goals to complete, challenges to face, and things to experience. I’m not going to run out of meaning any time soon.

Are you supposed to feel anxious when you realize a large chunk of your life has already passed? Is that what 30th birthdays are meant to do? I definitely feel like I have a lot more accomplish. Some things I worry I might not finish in time. Overall, however, the nagging “do more” feeling is rather small.

In contrast, what I have done feels quite astonishing. Not in a grandiose, “Look at me and my achievements” sense but in a “Wow, so this is how much life you can fit into three decades” sense. Sometimes, I remember a high school field trip, a late night college studying session, or a music album I listened to 17 years ago, and I’m surprised that a.) I’ve held so many identities and b.) my brain still retains all of them. Nothing is ever lost.

Are you still a time billionaire? How do you feel about the seconds you’ve spent? Do they feel like a loss? Or does everything seem to be in its place? Regardless of how you feel about your past today, fretting away tomorrow’s seconds is not the answer.

The most important billion is not the one you fail to make but the one you fail to spend — with a purpose, that is. Seconds are worth more than dollars. Here’s to your next billion!

Every year, I set a theme. In 2022, it was “Joy.” My goal was to enjoy every day, to find joy at work, and to prioritize the experiences and people that make me happy.

About ten months into the year, I somehow felt that I had failed. The pressure of the recession was getting to me. Money wasn’t great. Nothing I tried at work seemed to work. I wasn’t as present in my relationships as I would have liked to be.

Eventually, I resigned. “Okay, Joy has come and gone. Now it’s time to Focus.” I had some responsibilities to take care of, and it was time to face them head on. Wake up early. Work hard. Do whatever was necessary to ensure a good future. That sort of thing.

One day, while I was sad that I hadn’t lived up to my theme, I thought back through the year, and I realized: I hadn’t failed at all.

I went on four trips with my girlfriend to some far-away and close-by places. I showed my sister around London and met with two longtime friends in France. I did my first escape room. I wrote my second book. But those are just the big, obvious things you can see. The ones where it’s obvious that they came with some (or a lot) of happiness.

More than that, though, I did a lot of small things, and that’s where a theme really becomes a theme. I made time to read almost every day and, as a result, read over 30 books. I worked every day on my book, a project that wasn’t going to make a ton of money, but that was important to me — and I took as much time as I needed to complete it properly. I deleted most of my social media, and while I still waste a lot of time on various apps and the internet, I do feel a lot more calm and less frantic. Plus, finally, for most of the year, I didn’t let my money woes get to me — and that too is an accomplishment.

It’s easy to throw the whole cake into the trash when the frosting looks a bit off. To be your own worst critic and dismiss even the obvious feats you’ve clearly accomplished. It takes work to look for the silver linings in the remains of a sand castle. To find the pieces of gold you hid along the way, and remember why you put them there. But that’s work worth doing. It gives us a more accurate picture of reality and, more importantly, the fuel to keep going — to pick up the shovel and build another castle.

Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, and don’t forget your successes just because you can no longer feel them.

After 18 months of writing, I looked back and realized: I had done a lot of different things, but none of them were all that great. I guess it’s common for young people starting a career, especially a self-employed one. Still, I lacked focus. And, like Seth Godin, I concluded that “average is for losers.”

If I wanted to build something truly meaningful, I couldn’t just jump on every side project suggestion or idea that sounded vaguely fun or promising. For the rest of that year, I prioritized Four Minute Books, the project that felt the most original and, thankfully, it worked out financially speaking. Had it not, I would not be here today.

Of course, the first thing I did once the site paid comfortably for rent and food was to…lose focus. I went right back to doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and just a tad of something else too. For a while, that seemed to work out on paper, but this year, more than five years later, I once again had to conclude: I did a lot of average stuff, and average is for losers.

So now, once again, I’m prioritizing Four Minute Books — with one key difference: I think it’s okay to be average. I fully expect myself to be a loser.

The thing about average is that it’s just the default. By definition, most people will always be closer to average than extraordinary, whether it comes to money, books read, sprinting time, or social media followers. Without average, extraordinary wouldn’t exist. It’s the average that makes outliers matter — two sides of the same coin, one the yin to the other’s yang.

Therefore, average is nothing to feel miserable about. It’s not something to feel anything about at all. Average is just normal and, even if you’re trying to make something great, you’ll spend many days doing boring stuff until one day, maybe, you’ll become an “overnight success.”

When you accept average, you don’t need to change the world in a year. You don’t need to make a gazillion dollars, and it’s okay if your website relies on annoying ads so you can pay the bills. Without average, there’d be nothing to work towards. No desirable future that you must assemble brick by brick.

I feel a lot better about Four Minute Books now than I ever have before. I don’t have a big five-year vision about how we’ll revolutionize the book industry. Maybe that part might come later. Maybe never. For now, I’m just happy that we can save a lot of people a little bit of time each day. That we can give people permission to read, even if they only have a few minutes to spare. That we can help people learn where, otherwise, they might just have watched another cat video on TikTok.

The website has a good amount of users, but other than that, it’s pretty average. It looks average. It has ads on it. We send out a normal newsletter, and often, we promote products that lots of other people promote too. That’s not to say that those things will never change. In fact, I’d like them to. I’d love to have a stellar looking website, zero ads, and the best, fully fan-supported newsletter in town — but right now, that’s not where we’re at. We’re at average, and that’s perfectly okay.

Accept that you’re starting from average, and you can focus on the daily work required to turn a 5 into a 6, a 6 into a 7, and a 7 into an 8. No delusion, no dramatization. Just good old hard work and the hope that, one day, you might cross the finish line of great — and on most days, that — average — is more than enough.

If you asked me for my best writing tip, there’s really only one that I’ve never seen elsewhere, at least not in that form: Write on the edge of your seat.

I don’t mean whipping out a sharpie and scribbling on your office equipment, of course. What I mean is: Go where the tension wants to lead you. And, yes, how you sit on your chair is a great indicator as to where that is.

When I park my whole behind on the seat and lean back, I’m way too comfortable. I might sluggishly type along or mentally shut down. When my butt barely stays on the chair, I have to lean forward, lean into the story, and really “get in there” to see what’s going on — and what needs to happen next.

That’s what we do when we’re interested. Intrigued. Brimming with curiosity. At one point in King of Queens, Douglas makes an enticing proposition to Arthur, his live-in father-in-law, and with a twinkle in his eye, Arthur says: “Well, to that I say, I will lean forward with interest.”

That’s exactly what happens in the cinema, isn’t it? You’re not nestled into your chair when Batman is hanging off a cliff. You’re holding on to the rail or seats in front of you, ready to jump into the screen! That’s the spirit in which we should make art.

A lot of writing advice will claim to tell you how to “keep your audience on the edge of their seats.” Actually, it’s really simple: You have to be on the edge of your seat while you’re writing. Or recording. Or drawing. That’s whose level of involvement you should worry about. If you’re 100% engrossed in the story, your fans won’t be able to help it: They’ll also lean forward with interest.

Whatever you do in this life, stay on the edge of your seat.