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Four Principles That Helped Me Go From 0 to 56 Read Books a Year

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Simple mindset shifts I see not many readers following.

Source: Canva

Each January, people pledge it will be the year they will read many books. Each December, the majority wonders why they didn’t.

In 2016, I was among the millions of people who said they’d read many books — but I didn’t read a single one. Yet, in the years that followed, I gradually transformed from a reading-muffle into a book-binger.

How I went from 0 to +50 read books a year. (Source: Screenshot from Goodreads).

Books are the cheapest but most impactful way to gain more skills, meaning, joy, and contentment in your life. For an average of $9, you can receive years of someone’s wisdom, distilled to some hundred pages that can be read in a few hours.

Reading 50 books a year is way easier than you might think. You don’t need to compromise on sleep, relationships, or work. In fact, you can even elevate these aspects by reading more.

Caveat: Reading is often treated as an intellectual status symbol. The more books you read, the smarter you are thought to be. It’s tempting to focus on reading as many books as possible - but it comes at the cost of depth and enjoyment. This article doesn’t encourage you to speed up your reading practice. Instead, it's an inspiration to read more (and yet slow, joyful, and thoroughly).

1) Break Up With Your Perceived Hierarchy of Books

If you’re reading this, you likely grew up with a very narrow definition of knowledge.

The existing paradigm, also prevalent in schools, is left-brain centred. Logic, reasoning, and quantification are more respected than creative expression, imagination, or emotions.

We rate knowledge sources based on this binary scheme. Many people would agree that reading for knowledge is the best reason to open a book.

Of the 102 books Bill Gates recommended over eight years, 90 were non-fiction. And from the 19 books Warren Buffett recommended in 2019, 100% were non-fiction.

But this knowledge hierarchy comes with limits. Social critic Minna Salami wrote: “The idea that calculable reasoning is the only worthy way to explain reality through is one of the most dangerous ideas ever proposed.”

Books don’t exist in hierarchies. Non-fiction isn’t superior to fiction.

Again, Salami: “We need an approach to knowledge that synthesizes the imaginative and rational, the quantifiable and immeasurable, the intellectual and the emotional. Without feeling, knowledge becomes stale.”

Luckily, there are books that can make you feel and know.

When you read Tara Westover’s memoir, you’ll feel how it’s like to grow up in a Mormon family in off-grit Idaho. Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel helps you understand what it was like to break free from social expectations in the 1940s.

Through stories, you elevate your levels of empathy for people outside of your cultural community. You learn not only to see the world from the perspective of others but also to share their feelings of pain, fear, and joy.

What to do:

Expand your definition of ‘knowledge’ and break up with the fiction versus non-fiction hierarchy.

Pick the book that sparks your interest, and forget whether this book will make you ‘smarter’ in a traditional sense.

“
.a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable — books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.”

― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

2) Read Books You Love Until You Can’t Stop Reading Because You’re In Love With Books You Read

The first book I picked up for my reading goal in 2016 was Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’ It was on top of any bestseller list, and my university professors praised it.

Yet, whenever I read a page, I fell asleep. Ultimately, I stopped opening it altogether. Kahneman’s pamphlet became my ultimate reading killer.

I was too proud to stop. I wish I could’ve told my younger self to stop forcing yourself through books you don’t enjoy.

If your goal is to read more, quit the books that slow you down.

You might have to quit several books before you open a book you can’t stop thinking about.

What to do:

Knowing what you want to read is essential, but so is its inversion — knowing what you don’t want to read.

You’re the only person who can judge whether what you’re reading is best for you now. Read the genres you cherish, the content you enjoy, and the authors you admire.

Don’t feel guilty to start with the ‘bad stuff.’ A few hundred books in, you will become a more critical reader and anyway gravitate towards the good stuff.

Better to waste 9$ than 4 hours of your lifetime. Books aren’t created equal — millions aren’t worth your time.

As a rule of thumb, remember the following: If you don’t look forward to continuing reading the book that’s on your shelf, skip it.

“Books are tangible objects of myriad textures — aged, hardback, hand stitched and so on. They are mentally stimulating, therapeutic, and they potentially transform your deepest thought patterns. They affect you entirely.”

— Minna Salami

3) Make your phone your reading-ally

Desired behaviour isn’t solely tied to your willpower. Self-control and self-discipline depend on your environment, as Nobel-prize winner Thaler discovered.

Phones hijack your self-control: The red notification badges, Apple introduced with its Mac OS X years ago; the pull-to-refresh slot machine mechanisms that we refresh in unconscious hope of a quick dopamine shot; the infinite scrolling design, that in Nir Eyal’s words, is “the interaction design’s answer to our penchant for endlessly searching for novelty.”

The average person spends over four hours a day on their device. If you spent half the time reading, with a reading speed of 250 words per minute and an average book length of 90,000 words, you’d finish more than two books a week.

When it comes to grabbing your attention, books can’t compete with phones.

The equation is simple: The less time you spend on your phone, the more you’ll read.

Tristan Harris said: “Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn’t choose, wouldn’t we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens?”

What to do:

Disable all notifications. Use airplane mode whenever possible. When you start reading, put your phone in a different room.

Keeping your phone away from your bed is one of the hardest habits to break. But the work is worth it. I replaced my phone with an alarm clock and stopped taking my phone to the bed two years ago. In bed, I can either sleep or read.

This is what will give you plenty of time.

Make reading the obvious choice. Put your book on the pillow when you make your bed in the morning. Thereby, reading in bed becomes your default option. Not having to use willpower will set you up for a regular reading habit.

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

— Naval Ravikant

4) Have an Antilibrary

Do you ever feel guilty about the book staple you haven’t read? You shouldn’t — unread books increase your motivation and capacity to learn.

When you just read a few books in your life, you’re likely aware of what you don’t know. But once you’ve read through some hundred books, you tend to become ignorant.

You might be too confident, too sure, and less aware of the things you don’t know. That’s where antilibraries come into play.

The books you haven’t read (and will never read) assemble your antilibrary.

They represent unknowledge and are the best cure for overconfidence.

“You will never read all those books,” friends say when they look at my want-to-read list. The list grows by 2–3 books every day. They are right. Even if I continue reading 1–2 books a week, I will only get through some of them.

But that’s the point: My antilibrary is a constant reminder of what I don’t know. It helps me stay curious and humble.

Psychologist Adam Grant writes: “No matter how much brainpower you have if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.”

When you’re convinced you know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind. The best motivator to continue reading your book is a long list of books you want to read after finishing.

What to do:

Don’t ever feel discouraged by the books you haven’t read. Instead, see them as a reminder to be humble and curious.

Whenever somebody recommends a book (and you should ask the people that inspire you the most for their top 3 book recommendations), add it to your reading list (if you haven’t one, check out Google Keep, Wunderlist, ToDoist, or Goodreads and settle on your favourite list).

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In Conclusion

Reading is liberating. Freedom means choosing from a set of options. The more options you have, the freer you are. And that’s where reading kicks in. It helps you explore options you never knew existed.

No therapy session, university lecture, or coaching session has had a bigger impact on my life than reading books. Books change your life; they change the way you think in unimaginable ways.

While each of the above principles can change how you read in one way or the other, they only serve as inspiration, and you certainly don’t need to implement every single one.

Choose one or two you like, but screw the rest. Only one person should define your reading journey — you.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

This Trap Prevents Most People From Clear Thinking

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How to stop clouding your judgment.

Photo by Niloofar Kanani on Unsplash

In his book ‘Stillness is Key,’ Ryan Holiday wrote:

“Wisdom is [
] the ability to rise above the biases, the traps that catch lazier thinkers.”

I disagree.

Mental traps not only catch the lazy thinkers — they snag all of us. Because cognitive laziness is how our brains save energy.

Among the most common pitfalls is our tendency to stick to what we believe. Warren Buffett said:

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

Cognitive psychologists call this confirmation bias. It means we select and favor information aligned with our beliefs and values.

We can’t eradicate this thinking trap. But this article will equip you with tools that help you think better.

The Bias That Clouds Your Thinking

“Many startups fail because founders disagree,” my professor said. It was June 2017, and I listened to one of my last business lectures.

He continued explaining the specifics, but I had already stopped listening.

I just founded my first company and thought, “This doesn’t apply to us. We chose the right people.” I continued daydreaming.

Little did I know that wishful thinking would cost me loads of money and energy. Yet, I’m not alone in this. Many others tend to ignore disconfirming evidence.

In 1979, three researchers at Standford divided study participants based on their opinion on death penalties. One group included all believers, the other all skeptics.

Both groups read articles with evidence on death penalties. Half of the people in both groups read studies that disproved the death penalty efficiency. The other half read conforming studies.

Did the evidence influence the participants thinking?

It did. But not in the way you might imagine.

Evidence reinforced preexisting beliefs. No matter which of the two studies they read — both groups were more convinced of their initial opinion.

We do not change our opinion based on research. Instead, we interpret the facts in a way to supports our values and beliefs.

“ In an attempt to simplify the world and make it conform to our expectations, we have been blessed with the gift of cognitive biases.” — Sia Mohajer

How to Rise Above the Confirmation Bias

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson stated in 1789. But he was wrong.

Facts don’t make humans better thinkers or citizens. Often, they make us more ignorant.

“What we believe depends on what we want to believe,” Adam Grant said. “We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt.”

Here are four strategies that help you see what you don’t want to see so you can think clearer.

1) Seek Contradicting Evidence

Test your hypothesis. If you read a book, use red post-its to highlight contradictions to your worldview.

Juvoni Beckford says: “If you read a book and there are very few red flags, then there’s no real reason to keep on reading the book. If you understand everything, why are you reading the book?”

2) Dare to be wrong

The enemy of learning is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge — the things you think you know.

When you’re convinced to know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind. Overcoming your ego is one of the big challenges for better thinking.

The further you’re in your career, the stronger you’re desire to be right. But this desire prevents you from seeing the truth. Embrace intellectual humility. Dare to be wrong.

3) Ask open-ended questions

If you google “Is Green tea better for my body than coffee?” you will see results that highlight the advantages of yoga. If you phrase the question in the other way, “Is coffee better for my body than green tea?” you will see the opposite tendency.

The search engine will show you what you asked for. By using open-ended questions (“Which beverage is best for my body?”), you’ll get closer to an objective answer.

4) Become a critical thinker

At age 21, Franklin gathered smart people in his city to form a mutual improvement club. Each Friday evening, the club’s members brought an interesting conversation topic. Once every three months, the members wrote essays on the topics they discussed.

Learning researcher Anders Ericsson writes about it: “By creating the club Franklin not only ensured himself regular access to some of the most interesting people in the city, but he was giving himself extra motivation (as if he needed any) to delve into these topics himself.”

As research shows, accountability increases your motivation to think critically. If people around you ask you to justify your thinking, you’re likelier to overcome confirmation bias.

Evaluating your worldview is exhausting. It requires mental energy. Even if you’re not lazy, your brain likes to take shortcuts.

Yet, confirmation biases can harm us in the form of misjudgments and bad decision-making.

The best recipe against unconscious biases is self-awareness. Now that you’re aware of our collective mental laziness, you’ll have an easier time overcoming the mental trap. Step by step, you’ll be able to think better.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to the weekly The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This evidence-based newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you become a lifelong learner.

3 Specific Ways to Benefit from the Zeigarnik Effect

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How interrupting your tasks can boost your creativity.

Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash

Have you ever felt guilty about not finishing a task?

My parents used to tell me “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” (German: Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen.)

I grew up in the mindset believing anything that can be done today should be done today. Whenever I procrastinated on a thing, I felt bad.

But not finishing can be a good thing. Here’s a brief explanation of the Zeigarnik effect and four ways to reap the benefits in everyday life.

A brief explanation of the Zeigarnik effect

In the 1920s, soviet researcher Bluma Zeigarnik discovered people remember interrupted or uncompleted activities better than completed ones.

She observed the effect in waiters. They remembered orders only so long as the order was open and forgot it as soon as it was served.

As a scientist, Zeigarnik started experiments to test her observation. She asked probands to complete 15 to 22 tasks such as solving a puzzle, stringing beads, folding paper, or counting backward.

She let half of the participants complete all of their tasks while she interrupted the other half before they finished.

Zeigarnik then tested how many unfinished tasks the participants would remember. The experiment’s results were significant. Participants were twice as likely to remember incomplete tasks than complete ones.

You likely know this effect from earworms. When you stop listening to a song halfway through, your brain will start the song repeatedly to complete it. The music will be stuck in your head.

The Zeigarnik effect has also been explored more recently by two researchers from Florida State University. Baumeister and Masicampo discovered people did worse on a task when they were interrupted finishing a warm-up activity — because it is still stuck in their working memory.

created by Eva Keiffenheim vie Canva

How to use the Zeigarnik effect for you

Luckily, the Zeigarnik effect also comes with upsides. You can use it to improve your creativity, memory, and much more.

1) Better recall through interleaving

Learning scientists agree unfinished things stay longer in your memory. If you interrupt a learning session and resume later, you’ll likely remember more of the content.

Researchers call this learning strategy interleaving: “In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete. If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better.”

So the next time you’re trying to remember information, schedule strategic breaks in the middle of your learning session.

2) Boost your creativity with this trick

Creativity doesn’t work with willpower. You can’t sit down and force your best ideas to come to your consciousness. Creativity works better in your brain’s diffused mode.

This mode feels like daydreaming and enables new neural connections. When you let your mind wander without actively thinking about the problem, you likely come up with a solution you hadn’t thought about.

Adam Grant writes in his book Originals: “When you’re generating new ideas, deliberately stop when your progress is incomplete. By taking a break in the middle of the process, you’re more likely to engage in divergent thinking and give ideas time to incubate.”

The Zeigarnik effect can help unlock your best ideas. Start thinking about a topic or an unsolved problem. Write the question down and bring it to your mind. But then, do something unrelated where you can let your mind wander, e.g., washing the dishes, cleaning the apartment, going for a phone-free walk.

“These were all situations which occurred to me-while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk and which I eventually turned into books.”

— Steven King

3) Get people’s attention with cliffhangers

Ever binge-watched a series? Likely, every episode finished unfinished with a story thread that hadn’t been resolved.

But even if you don’t write a playscript, you can increase people’s interest with informational teasers.

When you give presentations, for example, the Zeigarnik effect can help you retain your audience’s attention. Tease a piece of important information early on, but don’t reveal it until the end.

The next time you feel guilty about not finishing a task, remember the Zeigarnik effect — a strategic break can actually help you be more creative, improve your recall, or get people’s attention.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

What I Learned from Meditating Every Day for 2193 Days

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Training your mind can transform your life.

Image created by the author via Canva.

It’s winter 2013, and I’m twenty years old. I’m walking through a corridor at university, heading towards my very first psychologist appointment. I’m hopeful because I don’t know yet that the doctor will diagnose severe depression and ask me to quit my studies.

It’s in this moment over my hopefulness that I wonder how I lost control over my life. I hate my job. My roommate just kicked me out, and my boyfriend left me. I feel unworthy, lonely, and lost.

“Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with time,” Edith Eger wrote. Weeks went by, but I still wished to get sick, so I had a reason to stay in bed. I had no courage for any kind of introspection.

Today, like most mornings this year, I woke up smiling. I love my life.

Meditation is a powerful way to heal. Here’s what I learned from meditating every day for six years.

Expect unexpected benefits

Athletes meditate to improve their focus, stock traders to circumvent cognitive biases, and CEOs to quieten their minds. I meditated to feel better.

People try meditation for various reasons. Most benefit from it beyond their expectations:

  • A meta-analysis with more than 1,200 adults found meditation can decrease anxiety.
  • In a randomized controlled trial, researchers found that mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness and enhances social interactions.
  • A study from the University of North Carolina showed individuals who completed a meditation exercise had fewer negative thoughts when seeing negative images.
  • This 8-week study showed workers who did daily 13-minute meditations reported better well-being and less distress.

The most unexpected benefits for me were better sleep, a constant feeling of inner calm, and being able to let go of the things I can’t control. I’m less stressed because I understand stress is the difference between reality and how I want reality to be.

Your experience will vary. But no matter your reasons, meditation will help you advance in life and improve your well-being on surprising levels.

“It’s not an escape from reality. It’s getting in touch with reality at least for two hours a day. I actually observed reality as it is, while for the other 22 hours I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens and Homo Deus.”

— Yuval Noah Harari in an interview with Tim Ferriss

Training your mind equals mind transformation

Long before learning from Eckhart Tolle, Tara Brach, ThĂ­ch Nháș„t HáșĄnh, Sadhguru, Deepak Chopra, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, I watched a TED talk by Buddhist monk and Dalai Lam interpreter Matthieu Ricard. He said:

“It’s more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that’s going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives.

We are ready to spend 15 years achieving an education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful.

Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most — the way our mind functions — which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience.”

One year from my psychologist’s diagnosis, my circumstances had changed. I had an exciting job in New Delhi and fell in love with a boy who will become my husband.

Yet, my inner state of mind hadn’t changed as much as I thought it would.

You can land a prestigious job, earn tons of money, and find a wonderful partner — if you don’t change your mind and the lens through which you look at life, none of it improves your well-being.

Once you’ve meditated for a few months, you can see and interrupt thought patterns before you chase them down the abyss. You can see worry and let it go without sticking to it all day.

Research shows your brain physically grows when you meditate. Gray matter concentration changes in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective-taking.

When you train your mind with meditation, you rewire your brain for well-being. Again Matthieu Ricard:

“Well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. [
] Now, it takes time because it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well.

But that’s the only way to go. Mind transformation — that is the very meaning of meditation.”

Meditate first thing in the morning

Even with the clear intention to meditate during the day, skipping the practice is easy. Meditating never feels urgent, and timebound to-do’s get in the way.

When your mind is in full-speed working mode, pausing becomes harder and harder. Once you’re in the monkey mind zone, it’s tough to zone out into the zen mode.

I agree with Naval Ravikant, who said: “Everyone says they do it, but nobody actually does. The real set of people who meditate on a regular basis, I’ve found, are pretty rare.”

My six-year experience taught me: If you don’t sit down first thing in the morning, you likely won’t meditate all day.

Here’s how you can trick yourself into sitting down every morning: Put your phone on flight mode before you go to sleep. Turn it on only after you meditated.

Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, a psychiatrist, says: “Immediately turning to your phone when you wake up can start your day off in a way that is more likely to increase stress and leave you feeling overwhelmed.”

If you have an old device (I use my old phone), install nothing but your meditation facilitator (YouTube, a timer, or a meditation app). Alternatively, you can download whatever you need to meditate on your current device to have it available offline.

Get out of bed, brush your teeth, drink a cup of water, and sit down on a pillow (not in your bed; you likely fall back to sleep).

“All of humanity’s problems stem from people’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal

Happiness is the absence of desire

Before I meditated, I thought happiness is something you attain. I thought I’d be happy once I had a specific income or spend a vacation in Bali.

But the opposite is true. You’re truly content and happy when you’re mind is free from desire. You’re full of bliss when you stop wishing you’d rather be somewhere else, doing or having something different.

Happiness is a by-product of complete presence.

You’re truly happy when you silence your inner chatter. You feel content when you stop judging what you’re experiencing and just experience.

“When we do not expect anything, we can be ourselves.”

— Shunryu Suzuki

Never skip two days in a row

As with all new habits, building a meditation habit is hard first. It requires the willpower to sit down every day instead of keeping yourself busy.

Meditating is like running or weight lifting. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the rhythm.

What helped me to build a habit was a 30-day challenge. I set the intention to meditate every day for 30 days using Headspace. The duration didn’t matter. I started with 3-minutes and ended with 10-minutes.

I didn’t like it at first.

But I loved the effects the training had on my everyday life.

Life’s Only Constant is Change

When you sit still and scan through your body, you notice all kinds of sensations. Itchy toes, lungs expanding with air, the cold air flowing in through your nostrils. With every moment, your sensations change.

While meditating, you feel life is a constant state of change and that this change is okay.

In 2019, I went to a 10-day silent meditation course. During a Vipassana training, a Buddhist term that often translates to “insight,” you wake up at 4 AM and meditate for 10 hours every day. You don’t talk, write or speak.

The days were tough. I went to the course expecting relaxation and flow states. Instead, it felt as if I was nonstop working and doing tough inner work. But this practice helped me develop equanimity.

Instead of instant reactions, meditation helps you notice whatever is going on, become aware of it, label it, and then act.

Don Johnson, a meditator for 49 years, writes: “The purpose of meditation is not to control the mind. A quiet mind happens as a result of a connection to an inner experience of peace.”

Regular meditation is a mental tool that will allow you to deal with any hardships of life. By applying this technique, you’ll achieve and share true happiness with others.

You Need Thoughts to Do Your Mental Pushups

For a long time, I believed freedom of thought was the ultimate goal of meditation. So I talked myself down every time thoughts crossed my mind and thought my mind wasn’t made for meditation.

I was wrong.

The goal of meditation isn’t to get rid of thoughts. In fact, you need your thoughts to meditate. Without thoughts, you wouldn’t have any object of practice.

Thoughts are the weights in your mental gym. Your job is to return your attention away from them and back to your breath (or any other point of focus like a candle, a mantra, or a body part).

When I meditate, I follow my breath — inhales and exhales. Sometimes my mind will wander to thoughts or feelings. And when it does, I acknowledge them and come back to my breath.

This is the core of meditation. Catching yourself while being distracted. The more you practice, the better you’ll get at noticing when you’re unfocused.

Now I think of thoughts as mental push-ups. The more thoughts I have, the more opportunities for exercise.

Thoughts can be contradicting, harmful, wonderful, or crazy. But you are not your thoughts. They are the vehicle that carries you through life. When you meditate, you become the driver.

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

— Mark Twain

In Conclusion

Meditation is a highly effective tool to train your mind. A regular practice can help you let go of fear and anxiety, focus on the present moment, and find inner calm. Meditation is the entryway to a more fulfilled and joyful life.

When building a practice, it’s important not to be too hard on ourselves. Skipping meditation once in a while doesn’t matter. What matters is consistency. You’ll only return to your practice if you don’t judge or push yourself too hard.

Most importantly, it’s your practice. Your habit can look different from mine or the guru’s recommendations. But once you find a ritual that works for you, stick to it.

Use a facilitator to get started. Meditation apps like Calm, Headspace, Waking Up, or Insight Timer can support you in building a robust habit. You can also start with guided meditations on YouTube, such as this one or this one.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

5 Quick Fixes for a Calmer, More Focused Life

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How to *not* be distracted all the time.

Image created by the author via Canva.

Do you ever feel time runs like sand through your fingers?

If you’re struggling to live a more present life, you likely focus on the wrong things. Improving your inner peace is about what you do less of, not more of.

Taking a moment to integrate these quick fixes can help you find an inner state of calm while staying on top of things.

None of these suggestions should take you more than three minutes to set up, but every single one will help you reach more focus and presence.

1) Change Your Social Media Passwords

Without your active consent, social media’s persuasive design tricks you into screen time with severe consequences.

Different research attests to a relation between social media usage and mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and even suicide-related thoughts.

Not knowing your password is one of the most effective ways to spend less time on social media. I follow this technique since 2017, and it has given me weeks of time. I created a threshold that prevents me from impulsive social media checks.

How to do it:

Go to all social media you use regularly and change your password to a random combination you can’t remember.

Don’t save the new password in your browser. Instead, write it on a piece of paper. Then log off your social media platforms and place the paper in some drawer.

2) Don’t Consolidate Messaging Apps

Self-labeled productivity apps like Shift or Franz sound tempting. It seems convenient to aggregate all communication channels in one place.

Yet, these apps lead to context switching and thereby destroy your focus.

Cal Newport says: “Switching your attention — even if only for a minute or two — can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow.”

Once I deleted Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and Franz from my desktop, I focused better on one project at a time.

How to do it:

Delete all messaging aggregators from your computer. Anytime you need a specific communication channel, open it in your browser.

Instead of being surprised by new messages, you actively decide when to open and read the messages.

3) Delete Mail from Your Phone

I used to check my email when walking up the stairs and while waiting in a line. My mind revolved around work even while I wasn’t at my desk.

But our brains need off-time. To get maximum focus during working hours, we need enough time away from work. Plus, boredom brings benefits.

How to do it:

Pick your phone and delete your Mail app. Nothing is so urgent it can’t wait until you’re back at your desk.

“Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

— Marcus Aurelius

4) Use Site-Blockers

Compulsive social media checks will make your thoughts bounce around like a ping-pong ball. A study from Irvine University found it takes 20 minutes to refocus after distractions.

Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook executive, says: “We were not evolved to get social approval being dosed upon us every 5 minutes.”

For better productivity, fix your environment. If you don’t want to get distractions, use a site-blocker.

How to do it:

I use this free chrome extension to block LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mail from 9 PM to noon.

Block all sites that dilute your focus. You’ll be surprised how much more you can achieve in less time.

5) Charge Your Phone Outside Your Bedroom

If you charge your phone in your bedroom, you’re likely poisoning your mind with trash at the most important times of your day — before you sleep and after you wake up.

Here are the three of the most damaging effects of using your smartphone in your bedroom:

  • You lose time
  • You lose focus
  • Your sleep quantity and quality drops

By abandoning your phone from your bedroom, you can implement new bedtime and morning rituals such as reading, meditating, journaling, or letting your mind wander.

Keeping my phone out of my bedroom was the single most effective habit to read more books. Since I managed my phone habits, I have read one book a week for almost three years.

How to do it:

Get an alarm clock and stop waking up to your smartphone’s alarm. When you sleep with your phone in another room, you don’t need to exert your willpower first thing in the morning. Instead, you’ll start your days with a clear mind and ease into a distraction-free morning.

Often, anxiety and hurry are caused by distraction. These quick fixes help me live a calmer life that’s full of focus. I hope they do the same for you.

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Three Books That Prevent You from Forgetting Cruel History

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana

Photo by Frederick Wallace on Unsplash

Last week I visited Auschwitz, the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers.

Looking at the piles of hair, I felt anger, sadness, and shame. I think about most parts of my countries recent history in disgust. I lack the words to talk about the Nazi time.

As a German, ignoring the past hundred years seems easier than facing them. Yet, I feel a responsibility to call these atrocities to our minds. So, here are three books to not forget our past.

1) Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

At the age of 39, Viktor Frankl was sent to a concentration camp. During imprisonment, he lost his brother, mother, and wife.

His memoir depicts the daily camp life and how the cruelties affected the mental state of its inmates who endure dehumanizing conditions. With the odds of 1 in 20, Frankl survives Auschwitz.

The book is hard to bear as it contains descriptions with graphic detail. When reading, you witness what concentration camp inmates have gone through.

“Human kindness can be found in all groups (camp guard or prisoner), even those which as a whole wit would be easy to condemn. “ — Viktor Frankl

2) The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

This book is about Bruno, a young son of a Nazi officer, who lives in a house near Auschwitz. On his daily strolls, he meets another young boy behind a fence who turns out to be a Jew, imprisoned in the concentration camp.

One day, the Jewish boy asks his German friend for help to find his father. Bruno puts on a “Striped Pyjama” to disguise himself as one of the prisoners and enters the campground. Both boys will die in the gas chambers.

When I read this book as a teenager, I cried for hours. It made me care about history more than any high school lesson. Yet, there are flaws and plot holes about this story that you might want to consider before you decide whether to read it.

A 9-year-old boy would not survive over a year in a Nazi camp. After arriving on a cattle train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, officers sent children to the gas chamber.

This Holocaust survivor wrote about the book: “I was once myself a boy in striped pajamas and am a survivor of six German concentration camps. This book is so ignorant of historical facts about concentration camps that it kicks the history of the Holocaust right in the teeth.”

“What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?” 
— John Boyne

3) The Choice by Dr. Edith Eger

At age 16, the Nazis came to Edith Eger’s Hungarian hometown. They deported the Jewish family to an internment center, then to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Joseph Mengele sent her parents to the gas chamber.

Edith Eger and her sister Magda survived multiple death camps. In 1945, American Troops found them barely alive in a pile of corpses on the camp’s liberation.

The book consists of four sections: prison, escape, freedom and healing. It’s a mixture of the holocaust, a personal memoir, and psychology.

She works through her terrible experience in Auschwitz and takes us through a journey of her healing. By drawing on her patients’ personal cases, she derives wise and powerful life lessons.

Unlike the previous two stories, Dr. Edith Eger’s historical description is uplifting. While Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ carries profundity and a deep understanding of human psychology, Dr. Edith Eger, who has been 20 years younger than Frankl and one of his students, adds warmth and life experience.

‘The Choice’ is one of the most inspiring books I have ever read.

“We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.” — Dr. Edith Eger

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This Quick Mental Model Can Improve How You Navigate Life

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Understanding entropy changed the way I think.

Photo by DesignClass on Unsplash

“With every birthday, life gets more complicated,” my wise friend said last Sunday. When I asked why he replied:

“When I was a child, I thought the world made more sense the older you get. But with every year, the world becomes more complex. Life feels like a growing puzzle while you’re struggling to put the pieces into the right places.”

His words lingered with me long after the weekend. Does life get messier the older we get?

Murphy’s law says, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” But once you research further, you find a deeper truth.

While pieces might just fall into the right places, most of the time, they don’t. And that’s not bad luck.

This quick read will help you regain trust and support a calmer and happier life.

What You Should Know About Entropy

According to Dan Brown entropy is just a fancy way to say things fall apart. I disagree. Entropy is more than that.

Imagine you open a big puzzle and dump the pieces on your floor. What are the chances every piece will fall into the right places?

Theoretically, it’s possible. But the likelihood is close to zero. Unless you hit the jackpot probability, the pieces won’t fall in perfect order.

There’s a single state where everything falls in order but nearly infinite states in disorder. Congrats — you just grasped entropy’s quintessence.

Entropy is a measure of disorder and randomness for even smaller units than your puzzle pieces.

Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann says entropy is a measure of the number of possible arrangements of atoms and molecules of a system, that comply with the macroscopic condition of the system.

Entropy is about probabilities. And as time moves forward, more possibilities emerge.

The second law of thermodynamics confirms what my wise friend felt: entropy will always increase over time. Life gets more chaotic when you grow older.

“The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.”

— Stephen Hawking

Believing life gets less messy with age is a waste of energy. The English scientist Arthur Eddington said: “ If your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”

Now you know about entropy’s existence. But what does it mean for you?

What This Universal Law Means for Your Life

You can’t go back in time. You can’t reverse entropy and reduce complexity, uncertainty, and chaos. Entropy is present in every aspect of life.

Here’s a helpful metaphor by Tom Stoppard: “When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before.”

For every step you take, most scenarios won’t bring you to your desired destination. Nevertheless, you can’t go back in time and reverse it.

A tidy room gets dirty; your computer breaks, your relationship ends, you lose a piece of your life’s puzzle. In all of these cases, life isn’t against you. It’s entropy at its best.

The question isn’t how to stop entropy. It’s how you navigate through life despite its existence.

“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”

— Steven Pinker

How You Can Use Entropy to Your Advantage

Adopt John Green’s mindset: “Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m going to fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re going to fall apart.

The cells and organs and systems that make you — they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”

Don’t expect things to stay the way they are. Don’t feel like life’s against you when things become chaotic or complex.

Any disorder or chaos isn’t your personal mistake. It’s the universe’s default. Any order is unnatural, temporary, and subject to change.

Sounds scary? When you imagine the opposite, you see it shouldn’t. In a world without entropy, everything would always stay the same. Rooms wouldn’t get dirty, things wouldn’t break and people wouldn’t change.

Life would become predictable.

In a world without entropy, creativity and innovation wouldn’t exist.

Whether you run a business, have kids, or look for meaning in life —the next time you face a problem, know that life doesn’t work against you.

Once you know disorder is the default, you can decide how and where you want to use your energy to create stability.

Use attention and care to foster your relationship, clean your house so it won’t get messier, build an emergency fund so you’re forearmed against unpleasant surprises. Use energy to create your desired state of order.

Final Thoughts

My friend was right. Things get more complicated. With every birthday, the degree of disorder and randomness increases. Statistically, more things turn out different than your version of “right.”

But life doesn’t conspire against you. It’s only entropy doing its job.

This mental model helped me reach my goals and stop being so hard on myself. I hope it does the same for you.

Want to join a community of lifelong learners? Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. My newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Mastering the Diderot Effect Can Help You Stop Wanting More

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How to get off the consumer escalator

Photo by Victoria Borodinova from Pexels

Have you ever wondered how your life would change if you received $50,000?

Denis Diderot, a French philosopher, had lived his previous 52 years in poverty. But in 1765, when an Empress of Russia wanted to buy Diderot’s books, everything changed.

From one day to another, Diderot got $53,000 plus a monthly income to spare. And so he did what any good philosopher would do — buying a new scarlet robe. And that’s when things started going wrong.

How the Diderot Effect Makes You Buy Things, You Don’t Need

Diderot’s new clothing was beautiful. In fact, it was so beautiful; everything else he owned looked misplaced. In his words: “All is now discordant. No more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty.”

So he bought things that matched his new robe’s beauty: a stunning rug from Syria, unique sculptures, a shiny kitchen table, and a magnificent mirror.

When you have money to spend, you see what Diderot calls “a void disagreeable to the eye. There was a vacant corner next to my window. This corner asked for a writing desk, which it obtained.”

Diderot’s behavior coined what we now know as The Diderot Effect. Buying new things can lead to a spiraling consumption of complementary goods. As a result, you crave for more and more things to feel happy and content.

Photo by Jeff Sheldon on Unsplash

Unlike Diderot, I never lived in poverty, but everything changed when my income quadrupled in 2020.

From one day to another, I had money to spare. While I followed my mentor’s recommendations and invested most of it, I also bought a lot of stuff. I upgraded my desk with a new monitor and noise-canceling headphones.

For the monitor, I also needed a better webcam. And for the webcam, additional cable clips, and sockets, so everything looked clean. I was trapped in a vicious consumer circle.

But even if you don’t get an unexpected sum of money, you likely feel other possessions should match your new possessions:

  • You buy a new suit and have to get a belt to match.
  • You buy a new phone and suddenly need insurance, a protective case, new headphones, or a second charger.
  • You upgrade a part of your home and suddenly need the new decor to match it.

Juliet Schor, a professor for sociology, compares the effect to an escalator:

“When the acquisition of each item on a wish list adds another item, and more, to our “must-have” list, the pressure to upgrade our stock of stuff is relentlessly unidirectional, always ascending.”

How to Get Off the Consumer Escalator

There are a few things you can do to break free from The Diderot Effect.

Awareness. If you realize you’re in the consuming spiral, you reclaim your decision power. Once you understand marketing mechanisms, you’ll likely stop buying luxury brands. Not because you’re wasting your money but because you’ll feel foolish doing so.

Self-imposed restraints. Voluntarily change your environment. Stay away from malls, catalogs, online shops, or shopaholic friends.

Durability. Buy things not because of novelty but in terms of how long they can help you. Once you are emotionally attached, it’s harder to replace them with new stuff.

Additional costs and tradeoffs. Before you buy something new, think about the implications and consequences. Does your current software run on a new computer? What else do you need if you acquire that thing you want?

Downgrading exclusivity. New things don’t reflect prestige but ignorance. As Juliet Schor says: “What if, when we looked at a pair of Air Jordans, we thought, not of a magnificent basketball player, but of the company’s deliberate strategy to hook poor inner-city kids into an expensive fashion cycle?”

Final Thoughts

Buying new things can make you dissatisfied with what you have. You’ll end up in a spiraling consumption pattern that has severe psychological and environmental impacts.

As Denis Diderot once said:

“My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.”

If you’re serious about breaking the consumer spiral, start with the suggested steps and free yourself from the shackles of ever wanting more stuff you don’t need.

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How To Unlock the Promise of Meditation

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The benefits of meditation don’t come instantaneously—here’s how to make it a long-term habit and see real results

A woman smiles while sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat, meditating.
Image credit: Deagreez.

“When we do not expect anything, we can be ourselves.” 
— Shunryu Suzuki

Making meditation a daily habit was one of my goals for 2014. But a few months in, I still hadn’t managed to do it for more than two days in a row.

I was sitting in the middle of my room, eyes closed, trying to meditate. But my mind was racing, and my head hurt. I hated the silence. I tried this over and over again, but it never worked. I felt like a failure. In June 2014, I stopped forcing myself and ditched the goal altogether.

It wasn’t until I saw a TED talk by Matthieu Ricard about a year later that I considered a second attempt. Ricard earned a Ph.D. in molecular genetics but abandoned his scientific career and became a Buddhist monk and an interpreter for the Dalai Lama.

If you can spare 20 minutes, I recommend watching his talk on the habits of happiness. But if you can’t, here’s the quintessence:

“Well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. [
] The experience that translates everything is within the mind. [
] Now, it takes time, because it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well. But that’s the only way to go. Mind transformation — that is the very meaning of meditation. It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation which our being and our consciousness is. [..] It’s more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that’s going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most — the way our mind functions — which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience.”

Ricard’s words touched me so much I gave meditation a second try. But like before, I struggled. A lot. I didn’t find the time, didn’t enjoy it, and couldn’t see the benefits the monk was talking about.

But this time, I didn’t quit. Ultimately I figured a practice that works for me. This article can help you find yours.

During the past six years, I meditated almost every day. My headspace app logs 15,500 minutes, and that doesn’t include the time I’ve meditated without using the app. I also once completed a ten-day silent meditation course where we meditated for ten hours every day.

Minutes meditated on the Headspace app.
Minutes meditated on the Headspace app. (Source: Author).

Meditation has changed many aspects of my life, such as:

  • Relationships. Meditating gave me more mental space, and I’m more present with the people around me. I feel more gratitude and empathy. I became a better partner, daughter, and friend.
  • Self-talk. I can let go faster of destructive thoughts and judgment. These thoughts still come, but I don’t get carried away by the train of thought. I can escape negative loops and choose most of my thoughts.
  • Mind-body connection. I can better read my body signals and have the mental space to follow them. I can differentiate whether it’s my ego talking or my body. For example, I can differentiate when it’s time to take a break vs. my mind wanting to quit.
  • Work. I can work for longer stretches of uninterrupted focus. I don’t procrastinate anymore. When I don’t want to do a specific task, I likely find the reason and act on it. I am also less reactive, which leads to better decisions.
  • Contentment. Meditation helped me let go of the things I can’t control. I’m less stressed because I understand stress is the difference between reality and how I want reality to be.

But there’s more than my personal account. A meta-analysis with more than 1,200 adults found meditation can decrease anxiety. Another study from the University of North Carolina showed individuals who completed a meditation exercise had fewer negative thoughts when seeing negative images than the control group.

But starting and sticking with a daily meditation habit is easier said than done. My impression is similar to Naval Ravikant: “Everyone says they do it, but nobody actually does. The real set of people who meditate on a regular basis, I’ve found, are pretty rare.”

So how can you build a meditation habit you stick with? This article will show you six mind shifts that helped me make it a habit for life. This is the article I wish I had read before trying.

What you get are the key insights from my long-term practice and the things I learned from books on meditation by Eckhart Tolle, Tara Brach, ThĂ­ch Nháș„t HáșĄnh, Sadhguru, and Deepak Chopra as well as Jon Kabat-Zinn’s masterclass.

1. Transform Your Phone From Enemy to Ally

Whenever my phone isn’t on flight mode, I’m doomed to fail. Willpower doesn’t help. Red notification badges, infinite scrolling, and tiny dopamine shots make me check my phone impulsively.

Whenever I woke up and used my phone, I’d always end up in my emails. To-dos plopped into my head, and I’d grow too impatient to meditate. These mornings ultimately ended in self-judgment.

Environments shape our behavior. By checking our phones first thing in the morning, we condition our minds for self-interruption. Notifications and messages make thoughts bounce around like a ping-pong ball.

Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, a psychiatrist, says: “Immediately turning to your phone when you wake up can start your day off in a way that is more likely to increase stress and leave you feeling overwhelmed.”

Once you’re in the monkey mind zone, it’s tough to zone out into the zen mode. A study from Irvine University found it takes 20 minutes to refocus after distractions. That’s why meditation and impulsive social media checks don’t go well together.

Leaving your phone switched off will feel hard at first because it’s easier to indulge in the comforting noise and distraction. Your ego will fight back, whispering you should know what’s going on early in the day.

“The vast majority of push notifications are just distractions that pull us out of the moment,” Justin Rosenstein, the co-creator of the like button, said in an interview with Vice. “They get us hooked on pulling our phones out and getting lost in a quick hit of information that could wait for later, or doesn’t matter at all.”

What to do:

Put your phone on flight mode before you go to sleep. If you have an old device (I use my old phone), install nothing but your meditation facilitator (YouTube, a timer, or a meditation app). Alternatively, you can download whatever you need to meditate on your current device to have it available offline.

Don’t let your device get in your way. By keeping your phone on flight mode until you’ve finished your meditation, you’ll have the inner freedom and mental space to sit in silence.

2. Meditate First Thing in the Morning

In my first and second attempts, I learned that if I don’t meditate first thing in the morning, I won’t meditate all day.

Even with the clear intention to meditate during the day, skipping the practice is easy. Meditating never feels urgent. Any timebound to-do (even doing the laundry, in my case) can seem more important. When your mind is on full-speed working mode, pausing becomes harder and harder.

The earlier you meditate, the fewer the excuses to skip it. With your phone on flight mode, almost nothing can distract you. Over the years, I’ve met a few people who meditate every day, and all of them meditated in the morning.

What to do:

Think about the exact steps you will make tomorrow morning before you sit down to meditate. For me, it’s getting up, opening the window, oil-pulling, brushing my teeth, drinking a big glass of water, a full-body stretch, and then sitting down on my meditation pillow no matter what.

For you, the exact steps might look different, and that’s OK. Just make sure you know when you’ll sit down to train your mind.

3. Start With 3 Minutes a Day

When I started meditating, I set a timer for 20 minutes and forced myself to look at a candle. I tried to concentrate so hard, my head hurt.

If I had to name a single reason for quitting in my first attempt, it’d be trying too hard. Every session drained my energy and made me feel unwell, so I avoided meditating altogether.

No runner newbie pushes themselves through a 30-minute sprint. My goal of meditating for 20 minutes was unrealistic. I failed because of the goal rather than my willpower.

What to do:

When you start, 3 minutes can feel like a long time. Don’t push for more if you don’t feel like it. Take your time to extend the time to 5, 10, 15, or even 20 minutes of silence.

Even though I’ve meditated over 2,000 times, 15 minutes can still feel prolonged. Start small. Consistent baby steps are better than a single big leap.

Use a facilitator to get started. Meditation apps like Calm, Headspace, Waking Up, or Insight Timer can support you in building a robust habit. You can also start with guided meditations on YouTube such as this one, or this one.

4. You Don’t Need to Like the Practice

I don’t meditate for the sake of meditation or to become a better meditator. I meditate to enjoy my life and all the moments in full presence. I think of meditation similar to this quote by Abraham Lincoln:

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”

Did he like sharpening the ax? Probably not. It’s a tiring activity that doesn’t really reward you while doing it. But when it comes to chopping the tree, you’ll be grateful you did it.

In the first two years, I almost always wanted the silence to be over. I thought about all the stuff I had to do instead of wasting my time. I remembered stupid things I said to someone some time ago. I felt a lot of impatience and regret.

But when the time was over, I often felt better than before. In the first years, meditating was a painful way to release pressure.

What to do:

Don’t expect to enjoy sitting down and meditating. Sharpening your mind can feel hard. We’re used to noise and a constant stream of input that sitting in silence can feel very hard.

Meditating is not about how you feel while doing it. It’s about the changes you feel during the rest of your day.

5. Thoughts Will Help You Practice

For a long time, I believed freedom of thought was the ultimate goal of meditation. Absolute inner silence. Zen.

I talked myself down every time thoughts crossed my mind. I felt like something was wrong with me. I thought my mind wasn’t made for meditation.

I was wrong.

The goal of meditation isn’t to get rid of thoughts. A wandering mind is human. In fact, you need your thoughts to meditate.

Without thoughts, you wouldn’t have any object of practice. They’re the weights in your mental gym. Your job is to return your attention away from them and back to your breath (or any other point of focus like a candle, a mantra, or a body part).

When I meditate, I follow my breath — inhales and exhales. Sometimes my mind will wander to thoughts or feelings. And when it does, I acknowledge them and come back to my breath.

This is the core of meditation. Catching yourself while being distracted. The more you practice, the better you’ll get at noticing when you’re unfocused.

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” 
— Mark Twain

What to do:

Think of thoughts as mental push-ups. The more thoughts you have, the more opportunities for exercise. Meditation helps you notice whatever is going on, become aware of it, label it, and then deal with it.

6. Practice for 3 Months Before You Look for Benefits

Do you go running three times and expect to be able to run a marathon? Nope. I didn’t get to experience any of the benefits five, ten, twenty, even thirty sessions in.

If you notice the upsides of meditation early, then congratulations! I’m happy for you. But if you don’t see any results, don’t quit.

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert shared a lesson from her favorite meditation teacher Pema Chödrön. According to Chödrön, the biggest problem with people’s meditation practice is they quit just when things are starting to get interesting.

Progress is slow and steady. Your mental muscles will grow day by day, but the results are invisible for quite some time.

What to do:

Be patient with your progress. Don’t quit because you don’t notice a change a few weeks in.

Whenever you feel like quitting, read inspiring meditation stories like the one of Yuval Noah Harari. In an interview with Tim Ferriss, he said without meditation, he wouldn’t have written his books.

“It’s not an escape from reality. It’s getting in touch with reality at least for two hours a day. I actually observed reality as it is, while for the other 22 hours I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens and Homo Deus.”

In Conclusion

Meditation is a highly effective tool to train your mind. A regular practice can help you let go of fear and anxiety, focus on the present moment, and find inner calm. Based on my experience, I’m convinced daily meditation is the entryway to a more fulfilled and joyful life.

When building a practice, it’s important to not be too hard on ourselves. Skipping meditation once in a while doesn’t matter. What matters is consistency. You’ll only return to your practice if you don’t judge or push yourself too hard.

Most importantly, it’s your practice. Your ritual can look different from mine or the guru’s recommendations. But once you find a habit that works for you, stick to it. If you do, you’ll feel the benefits within various areas of your life.

Feynman’s Favorite Problems Will Help You Discover Meaning in Life

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And how I use a Roamkasten to work with mine.

Photo by javier gonzalez from Pexels

With 24 hours a day and limited days before you die, you’re facing a trade-off between how you spend and not spend your time.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was well aware of this dichotomy, and he developed a framework that helped him navigate through life.

If you ever wondered whether you’re using your time for the right things, this timeless idea will help you direct your attention to what matters most.

Richard Feynman’s Mental Framework

While most people find problems inconvenient, Feynman took a fresh approach. Through his lens, problems can give your life meaning and purpose. He once wrote:

“My approach to problem-solving is to carry around a dozen interesting problems, and a dozen interesting solutions to unrelated problems, and eventually, I’ll be able to make connections. [
].

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state.”

What Feynman intuitively described, learning scientists now call the diffuse modes. Without actively thinking, your subconsciousness works on problems.

It not only helped Feynman become a highly respected physicist but also other world-class performers, such as Stephen King.

King says he found the best ideas for his novels during diffuse mode thinking: “These were all situations which occurred to me while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk and which I eventually turned into books. [..] It’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects.”

Once you know your favorite problems, you don’t need to work on them constantly. Your mind will look for answers while you’re focusing on something else.

In essence, your favorite problems are questions that help you get into an explorer mindset. When you read through other people’s ideas, you’ll unconsciously make connections to your favorite problems. Day by day, you’ll make progress on finding solutions.

“Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”

— Richard Feynman

How to Find Your Favorite Problems

Your favorite problems can be anything — related to your work life, scientific questions, your love life, your health, wealth, or humanity as a whole.

The only important thing is to settle on problems you can contribute to. In a letter from 1966, Feynman wrote to his former student Koichi Manom:

“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. [
] No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.”

To find twelve worthwhile problems for your life, consider the following questions:

  • What are you curious about?
  • What have you always pursued?
  • What puzzles you about life and society?
  • Which problems you can’t stop thinking about?

Most of your favorite problems won’t have a single solution. The goal is not to be done with them. Your questions will stay with you or evolve, sometimes for years or even decades.

How I Work With My 12 Favorite Problems

To serve as guiding principles for your life, you’ll want to revisit your questions regularly.

I work with my problems by using a Zettelkasten with Roam. The Zettelkasten was invented by socioligist Niklas Luhmann. Thanks to the method, he published 70 books and 500 scholarly articles.

I’ve been using a digitized version of Luhmann’s system for four months. I can already see how it’s improving my writing, thinking and helping me find answers to my 12 favorite problems.

Understanding and implementing the system takes about five to ten hours, but here’s the quintessence of Zettelkasten’s notes hierarchy:

  • Fleeting Notes
    Fleeting notes are ideas that pop into your mind as you go through your day. They can be really short, just like one word. You don’t need to organize them.
  • Literature Notes: 
    You capture literature notes from the content you consume. It’s your bullet-point summary from other people’s ideas. I create these notes for all books, podcasts, articles, or videos I find valuable.
  • Permanent Notes: 
    When you create permanent notes, you think for yourself. In contrast to literature notes, you don’t summarize somebody else’s thoughts. You don’t just copy ideas but develop, remix, and contradict them. You create arguments and discussions.

My 12 favorite problems serve as a filter for my permanent notes. Whenever I develop my opinion, I think about how it relates to my favorite problems.

Here’s a snapshot of my current permanent notes page on my first favorite problem — How can I help education evolve so it ignites kid’s curiosity and creates a lifelong love of learning?

Permanent notes in Roamkasten for my first favorite problem. (Source: Author).

By using your favorite problems as guiding questions for your permanent notes, you will start to get answers. Plus, you’ll revisit your questions regularly.

In Conclusion

Writing your interests as a dozen questions will help you clarify what you’re truly after and making better decisions.

By keeping a list of problems, you can decide what you want to read, watch, or listen to. Feynman’s framework can work as a system of filters and turn consumption into contribution.

All you need to do is write down your 12 favorite problems and keep them in the back of your head, e.g., through integrating them in your Zettelkasten.

As you capture information to find answers to your favorite problems, you will start to see patterns of interest and find more meaning in life.

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7 Signs You’ve Internalized Capitalism

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Societal structures have shaped the thoughts we tell ourselves about productivity, rest, enjoyment, relationships, and growth.

Photo by Keith Lobo from Pexels

Do you ever lay down thinking you didn’t achieve enough?

If you worry about being worthless, it’s likely because you’ve adopted a toxic thought pattern — often without realizing it. As Dr. Emilia Roig writes:

“Capitalism is to us like water is to fish. We do not notice that it surrounds us.”

If you’ve internalized capitalism, you‘ll never come to a point where you feel like you’re good enough. Your hard work won’t lead to happiness.

The following list will help you know if you’ve internalized capitalism — and what you can do about it if you want to change.

1) Your self-worth is tied to your productivity.

When was the last time you watched Netflix without feeling guilty?

Society values busyness and productivity. It’s easier to measure your worth by what you do instead of who you are. Your self-worth depends on your performance.

Psychologist Nikita Banks writes: “It is this idea that to be unproductive is sin, and as such, this idea that you must always be producing is in direct relation to your worthiness.”

With the internet full of productivity porn, it’s hard not to judge yourself for being unproductive. But when you equate your self-worth with productivity, you will never experience inner peace.

“The glorification of hustle culture reinforces the belief that being busy and productive is the key to happiness.”

— Lee McKay Doe

2) You feel guilty when you do something enjoyable.

Do you do things purely for fun? I feel guilty whenever I do something without any productivity goal. I have the inherent fear that pleasure will wreck me.

When you’ve internalized capitalism, you always put aside pleasure and focus on making the most out of your time. Daydreaming is for losers. You’re on the eternal quest for the next achievement.

But being busy is not better. With productivity as a default, more productivity isn’t the right way to go. When work is all you do, it ultimately becomes meaningless — overwork for too long, and you’ll ultimately burn out.

Many workaholics I know have eating disorders or addiction issues. They seek energy from external resources like food or drugs to keep running. But short-time highs only throw them further out of balance, and they crave for the next high.

I’m not against hard work. Yet, too much of it comes at a high cost. A balanced life is a happy life. And to live in balance, we need enjoyable tasks as much as we do need work.

“Hard work is important. So are play and non-productivity. My worth is not tied to my productivity but to my existence.”

— Glennon Doyle

3) You prioritize work over health.

Have you pushed yourself to work when your body was recovering from an illness? A capitalist society holds people responsible for their well-being. If you can’t work, it’s your fault.

You feel unproductive when you go to the doctor. You’re mad at fluctuating energy levels and work out to be more productive. You expect to work like a robot. There’s no room for ups and downs.

Only prioritizing health when it prevents you from working is a clear signal for internalized capitalism. You only take care of your health to avoid not being able to function.

I’m unlearning that doing more, faster, and better makes you happier. I try to stop sacrificing my health and striving for ‘high-performance’. But despite I know faster-better-more isn’t the key to a fulfilled life, my inner voice still asks, is it?

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

― Howard Thurman

4) You equate rest with laziness.

I grew up in a hard-working German middle-class family and internalized sentences like:

  • Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. 
    (Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen.)
  • Work hard, play hard.
    (Wer abends lange feiern kann, kann morgens auch schaffen.)
  • “You can’t make something out of nothing.”
    (Von nichts kommt nichts.)

Many people normalized and remember these thoughts as if they were our natural behavior. We even stopped questioning them.

You force yourself to keep productive while your inner world tells your body sends the signals it’s enough. You only deserve a break when you’ve worked so hard that you now deserve it.

You have to earn your downtime. You judge everybody who doesn’t work hard enough. You think it’s your own mistake if you struggle to achieve your tasks.

5) Activities exist in hierarchies.

Reading a historical fiction book vs. taking an online course — which one do you find more valuable?

Capitalism offers opportunities to individuals — but only to those who work hard enough. Dr. Emilia Roig compares capitalism with a race where people compete against each other under the same conditions.

The race is unfair. There are people who, no matter how hard they work, can’t reach the finishing line. “Everyone can do it” is an easy excuse to make by people who had privileged starting conditions.

Internalized capitalism downgrades all activities that don’t make you win the race. What doesn’t contribute to making money or improving yourself is a waste of your time.

You’re trapped in a logic of material productivity and competition. Things and actions that value love, enjoyment, empathy, mindfulness, understanding, and care have less value.

6) You prioritize work over relationships.

Individualistic orientation is at the heart of advanced capitalism. You are responsible for yourself. With an entire society valuing self-sufficiency, most people don’t allow themselves to need people or ask for help.

Researchers confirm what we instinctively feel. Robert Waldinger, psychiatrist and former professor at Harvard Medical School, shared in a TED Talk how relationships are essential for a healthy, happy life.

Yet, many people don’t put their relationships first. They work long hours instead of caring for their friends. Forgetting a text message once or skipping a friend meet-up twice doesn’t matter.

But if you always put work first, it’ll pile up. You’ll lose friends one after another. Working instead of fostering friendship decreases wellbeing.

It’s human connection that adds meaning to our lives, not accomplishments.

“Many relationships and moments of inner peace were sacrificed on the altar of achievement.”

— Ryan Holiday

7) You optimize for personal and monetary growth.

Almost everything we see in life should be optimized. A look on the scales is a hint for working on your weight. The look in the mirror a reminder to improve your skin. The number of daily steps a hint to walk more.

Whatever we see is an invitation to optimize.

As Hartmut Rosa writes, “Mountains are to be climbed, exams to be passed, career steps to be taken, lovers to conquer, places to visit, and taking photos (‘you have to see it’).”

In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes suggested people stop striving for more as soon as their needs are met. Once they reach this point, they prefer to live the good life.

But his theory was wrong. Even though economies reached all-time highs, people don’t work less. In ‘How much is enough?’, Edward and Robert Skidelsky describe how the rich world has so much less leisure than Keynes suggested.

Why? Material desires are limitless. Accumulating capital and optimizing our well-being is a cornerstone of capitalism. You see your growth trajectory, and you want more.

In Conclusion

Societal structures have shaped the thoughts we tell ourselves about productivity, rest, enjoyment, relationships, and growth. This article is not about anti-capitalism or praising any other economic system. Instead, it’s an invitation to question the status quo.

I won’t lie — it’s difficult to unlearn internalized capitalism. Even when you’ve accepted productivity, money, and achievement won’t make you happy, changing your thoughts and behavior is tough. Yet knowing these signals will raise your awareness.

Whenever you spot internalized capitalism, remember that you’re enough — no matter what you do or don’t do. You’ll find yourself living a happier, healthier, and freer life.

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My Life Became Richer the Day I Stopped Chasing Passive Income

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It’s worth questioning the beaten track.

Author at an EU conference about innovation in education. (Source: Heinnovate, 2018).

“You’re never going to get rich renting out your time,” Naval Ravikant says. “Earn with your mind, not your time.”

And it’s true: people can become wealthy by establishing systems that make money independent from time. They build products with no costs for selling additional units such as books, online courses, media, movies, and code.

And so I did. When I became self-employed last summer, I said no to trading my time for money. I declined freelance gigs and job offers from previous clients and focused on building scalable online income streams.

Within a few months, I made 4x the amount of my previous full-time teaching job. Yet, something felt odd. After two months of a $10,000+ income, I felt less happy than before. Passive income didn’t make me as happy as I thought it would. Here’s why my life became richer the day I stopped optimizing for passive income.

Activities exist in hierarchies.

When you focus on building passive income, your time becomes your most valuable resource. Pretending your time is worth $1,000 can make you 100x more productive.

You hire freelancers and focus on the strategic tasks that push your business forward. You evaluate how you can use your time in the best way to multiply your returns without putting in more hours — but it comes at a cost.

Chasing passive income will downgrade all activities that don’t push you towards your goal. You’re trapped in a logic of material productivity, competition, and greed for money. Things and actions that value love, enjoyment, empathy, mindfulness, understanding, and care have less value.

You won’t be able to enjoy a hobby such as reading because you’ll become obsessed with work.

“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Passive income makes you greedy.

In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes predicted that people stop striving for more as soon as their needs are met. Once they reach this point, they prefer to live the good life.

But his theory was wrong. Even though economies reached all-time highs, people don’t work less. In ‘How much is enough?’, Edward and Robert Skidelsky describe how the rich world has so much less leisure than Keynes suggested.

Why? Material desires are limitless.

Once you make a few thousand bucks a month, you don’t retire and live the good life. You see your growth trajectory, and you want more.

Maximum income ≠ maximum impact.

The people most in need are not the ones who drive your sales. By focusing on and optimizing for your target audience, you overlook those who need help but can’t pay for it.

In ‘I spend, therefore I am,’ Philip Roscoe argues that the justifications of economics make you set aside any social or moral obligations. Instead, you act within a limited, short-term definition of self-interest.

This mindset is responsible for the gravest problem we face: the empathy gap.

The ones who belong to the dominant groups — white, heteronormative, without disability, cis-gender — don’t learn to develop empathy for those who do not belong to the norm.

And maximizing income with digital products widens this gap. You lose touch with reality. You’re not challenged to question your worldview. Instead, you remain in a neat online bubble.

When I think back on my best workdays, they don’t include screens or income. The happiest moments always happened with people around me — helping the local community or doing things nobody wanted to do.

Passive income delays doing what you want to do.

When you’ve built passive income streams, you can do whatever you want with your life. But why not do what you want in the first place?

Oh, yes, right. You first need to ‘achieve it’ before you can allow yourself to do what you love.

Optimizing for passive income is like taking a consultancy job. You take it because of the promises that await you after you made it. But taking any job is not about what you’ll get as a result. It’s about who you become on the way.

Chasing after passive income is just another way for delaying the most important question: How do you want to spend your life?

Once I answered this question, my priorities shifted. I work 5–10 hours a week for an education NGO without earning a cent. I traded time for money and accepted a part-time project for fostering entrepreneurship education at schools.

Does that mean I don’t know the value of my time? On the contrary — I know what I want to do with my life: improving education.

You tie your self-worth to your net worth.

With internalized capitalism, it’s easier to measure your worth by what you have instead of who you are. Your self-worth depends on your performance.

The online world celebrates people for making a specific amount of money a month. But when you seek external confirmation, you lose sight of what really matters.

Instead of running in the corporate hamster wheel, chasing promotions, you’re chasing the next number. You built the very hamster wheel you wanted to escape. In the pursuit of passive income, it’s easy to forget what you truly live for.

On days I made $400+, I felt great. On the other days, I didn’t. And in both cases, I looked for ways to accelerate monetary growth. But as Edward Abbey says:

“Growth for the sake of growth is the motto of the cancer cell.”

In Conclusion

Do I want people to stop chasing passive income? No. But we should stop idealizing it. The passive income chase can be destructive. It can make you self-centered, greedy, unhappy, and possessive of time.

Focus on finding a job you genuinely enjoy. And if that means working in a kindergarten — by all means — please do it. You’d be my hero.

True heroes are the ones who are generous with their time. The ones who give back to society without expecting anything in return.

Whether your goal is passive income or not, it’s about you finding your own way. But I bet you won’t lie in your death bed regretting the dollars you didn’t earn. What you might regret is supporting a system that discriminates against minorities.

My life became so much richer the day I stopped chasing passive income. I hope yours will too.

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How Better Non-Fiction Books Would Look Like

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Using learning design to make knowledge stick with us.

Ali Pazani/Pexels

By inventing the printing press in 1440, Johannes Gutenberg made books scalable. Since then, our means to record, store, and access text information haven’t changed much. The 1993 invention of PDFs and the 2010s commercialization of e-books didn’t innovate the medium itself. Books still consist of words forming paragraphs and chapters.

I love reading. In the past months, I explored evidence-based reading strategies and avid readers’ habits like Bill Gates, Richard Feynman, and Ali Abdaal. It wasn’t until I discovered Andy Matuschak’s blog that I grasped the limited nature of the medium itself.

Andy Matuschak is a software engineer, designer, and researcher who helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy. He works on technologies that expand what people can think and do. After reading his evergreen note systems and his exploratory ed-tech solutions, you might agree with me on his humble brilliancy. The quotes in this article are from his essay on books.

Why Books Don’t Work

Books are designed on the flawed assumption that people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. Your own experience might show learning doesn’t work that way.

How much can you truly remember from your last read non-fiction book? What can you recall from ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ ‘Sapiens,’ or ‘Good Economics for Hard Times’? Andy describes what we often recognize in conversations about non-fiction books.

“But just as often, as I grasp about, I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea in question, though I’d certainly thought I understood when I read the book. Indeed, I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment. “

He describes what cognitive scientists call the illusion of knowledge. Often, we feel like we understood something, while in truth, we barely grasped a concept. Many of us fail to connect the dots to facilitate deep understanding. Reflecting on his inability to remember content from non-fiction books, Andy writes:

“All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.”

So, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey are wrong when they praise books’ power? Don’t we expand our minds by reading through pearls of wisdom of philosophers, business leaders, and humble geniuses?

We might. But we aren’t as effective as we wish.

When we look at how humans learn, we find books don’t work in our favor. Words on paper build on a concept called transmission — the idea that knowledge can be directly transmitted from pages to the reader’s mind.

No idea could be further from the truth. Our brains don’t work like recording devices, and we barely learn through consumption.

This isn’t the mistake of authors who don’t write great content — it’s the nature of the book medium itself. What helps us better understand and remember what we read?

How to Make Books Work For You

Thinking about thinking helps readers understand and better remember new knowledge. Here’s how meta-cognition while reading would look and sound like according to Andy:

“The process is often invisible. These readers’ inner monologues have sounds like: “This idea reminds me of
,” “This point conflicts with
,” “I don’t really understand how
,” etc. If they take some notes, they’re not simply transcribing the author’s words: they’re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing.”

He describes a truth we often forget. Learning is not visible and works best when it feels slow and difficult.

Non-fiction books don’t have built-in learning mechanisms. Readers need to plan, execute, and monitor how they think and engage with the book’s ideas and principles. They have to do the meta-learning work on their own.

Thinking about thinking is challenging. It tasks time, practice, and effort. And as this peer-reviewed study shows, many people struggle to meta-learn while reading. Adults overestimate their reading comprehension. Andy states:

“When books do work, it’s generally for readers who deploy skillful metacognition to engage effectively with the book’s ideas.”

How Better Books Would Look Like

Books that work for us would build on existing insights from learning theory and cognitive science. How can we design mediums to nudge us into meta-learning habits?

We know that effective learning strategies include retrieval, elaboration, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing, and reflection. A better medium would design the user’s journey around it.

Andy’s book “Quantum computing for the very curious” is the first effort towards a better composition. Reading his medium doesn’t feel like reading a book. The explanatory text is tightly woven with brief interactive review sessions to exploit the ideas they introduced.

“Reading it means reading a few minutes of text, then quickly testing your memory about everything you’ve just read, then reading for a few more minutes, or perhaps scrolling back to reread certain details, and so on.

Here we have self-testing, a tool that helps you overcome the illusion of knowledge. Spaced repetition is also part of the book’s design:

Reading Quantum Country also means repeating those quick memory tests in expanding intervals over the following days, weeks, and months. If you read the first chapter, then engage with the memory tests in your inbox over the following days, we expect your working memory will be substantially less taxed when reading the second chapter.

Lastly, Andy’s book also includes the practice of interleaving — a switch of a topic before a completed task. Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it facilitates forgetting, a process needed to make information stick to our long-term memories.

What’s more, the interleaved review sessions lighten the metacognitive burden normally foisted onto the reader: they help readers see where they’re absorbing the material and where they’re not.”

While this is an interesting idea towards improving written information, the future of books is still unresolved. Current books don’t work in favor of human memory and learning. So, how do you change your reading game to make non-fiction books stick?

Ethos, Pathos, and Logos Can Help You Win Any Argument

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How Aristotle’s rhetoric helps you get what you want.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

When was the last time you tried to persuade someone? Whether you’re pitching your business, convincing your kid to do their homework, or negotiating a better deal — persuasion is all around us.

And while most people assume that their either naturally bad or good at it, winning arguments is a skill you can learn. What follows are the most valuable principles I learned in my first year of philosophy studies.

Around 2300 years ago, Aristotle wrote about the three drivers of persuasion: ethos, logos, and pathos. Most rhetoricians regard his work as “the most important single work on persuasion ever written.”

Here’s what these three appeals mean and how you can use them to master the art of persuasion.

“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker [ethos]; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind [pathos]; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself [logos].” — Aristotle

Ethos: Your Attributes and Credibility

Let’s assume two non-menstruating men want to sell you a menstruation product. As a menstruating person, would you trust them?

Probably not. (When this happened in the German version of Shark Tank a few weeks ago, the guys went out of business soon after that.)

If your audience doesn’t find you trustworthy, likable, or knowledgeable, your words don’t matter. When trying to change someone’s opinion, you have to be credible.

Ethos, a Greek word meaning character, is the verbal equivalent of all your degrees and years of working experience.

As a speaker, your character should reflect your credibility. According to Aristotle, this can happen through phronesis (useful skills & practical wisdom), erete (virtue & goodwill), and eunoia (goodwill towards the audience)

How you can do it:

Give examples of why listeners should trust you. Do you have relevant credentials or experience? If so, talk about it early on.

Your appearance can also improve your ethos. Dress professionally and use your clearest and most confident voice.

Lastly, listen to the other side. Show empathy and really try to understand. When you do, stress your common ground before you get into the next part.

Pathos: Your Words’ Emotional Dimension

Humans connect with emotions, not facts. That’s why emotions have the power to change opinions. Your audience is likelier to believe what you say when they care.

Pathos means a speaker should deliver their message in the right emotional environment. In Aristotle’s words, speakers should be “putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind.”

But doing it is easier said than done. According to the philosopher, understanding the goals of your listeners is essential for deciding which emotion you want to evoke.

How you can do it:

First, learn as much as you can about your audience. What do they care about? What triggers them? What are their hopes, their fears?

Once you know, add the emotional dimension to your message — through storytelling, striking pictures, or emotionally charged words.

Logos: Your Message’s Logic and Presentation

If your argument doesn’t make sense, has no supportive evidence, or a coherent structure, persuasion is out of reach.

A good argument follows the rules of composition. Logos appeals to the argument’s sense and rationality.

“If ethos is the ground on which your argument stands, logos is what drives it forward: it is the stuff of your arguments, the way one point proceeds to another as if to show that the conclusion to which you are aiming is not only the right one but so necessary and reasonable as to be more or less the only one.”

— Sam Leith

How you can do it:

Whenever possible, substantiate your arguments with logic or evidence. Do your homework before you’re trying to convince someone.

Aristotle had an extra tip for using logos effectively. Your reveal will be even more convincing by encouraging your listeners to reach their own conclusion (moments before you come to the same one).

In Conclusion

One of the best ways to get better at winning arguments is by borrowing this concept that stood the test of time.

Good arguments rely on one or two of these appeals, but the most effective ones use all three.

Knowing ethos, logos, and pathos is one of the most useful ways to change your listeners’ opinion. But there’s more: knowing them will also help you identify weak or manipulative arguments.

If you really want to become a better persuaded, these are the three steps you want to remember:

  • Ethos — establishing your authority to make an argument.
  • Logos — making a logical point.
  • Pathos — connect with your audience emotionally.

These principles are powerful. Use them wisely. The most brilliant people I know keep an open mind, listen and change their opinions when proved wrong.

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The Butterfly Effect: How Tiny Changes Massively Impact Outcomes

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Embrace the chaotic nature of life.

Image by Pixabay on Pexels

Have you ever wondered how things would have gone differently if you tweaked your starting condition just a tiny bit?

Tiny changes can lead to entirely different results.

In 2013 I failed my undergrad studies’ most important exams by 0.25 points. I had to wait for six months before I was allowed to retake it. I was furious and disappointed. I doubted my aptitude and looked for things to do instead of studying.

I paused my studies for a year and worked for a startup in India, a German bank in Shanghai, and an education project in Argentina. These experiences shaped my drive for education and entrepreneurship — the things I work for now.

But what if I hadn’t failed the exam? I would have followed the beaten track, doing an internship at KPMG or PWC and pursue a corporate career. A minimal change in the starting conditions (such as 0.25 points in an exam) can have a tremendous effect on the outcome.

Understanding the butterfly effect can alter your perspective on decision-making and predictability.

The Butterfly Effect — And Why Nobody Can Accurately Predict the Weather

“You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby â€Š changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Many people have heard of the butterfly effect because of the American science fiction film from 2004. Ashton Kutcher travels back in time to change his troubled childhood.

But only a few know that the movie misinterprets the effect. The storyline suggests you can calculate the effect with certainty, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The butterfly effect is about the unpredictability of specific systems.

The concept is called the butterfly effect because a small act like a butterfly flapping its wings and cause a typhoon. And while the metaphor is exaggerated, small events can be a catalyst depending on starting conditions, as Lorenz’s discovery shows.

Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, mathematician, and professor at MIT, discovered the Butterfly Effect while observing his weather prediction model in the 1960s.

He entered initial conditions slightly different from each other into his computer program (0.506 instead of 0.506127). As a surprising result, these tiny differences led to completely different predictions. A tiny change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

“I found that the new values at first repeated the old ones, but soon afterward differed by one and then several units in the last decimal place, and then began to differ in the next to the last place and then in the place before that. [
] The initial round-off errors were the culprits; they were steadily amplifying until they dominated the solution.”

— Edward Lorenz in The Essence of Chaos.

A small error at the start can magnify over time (Source: Created by Author).

“It’s impossible for humans to measure everything infinitely accurately,” says Robert Devaney, a mathematics professor at Boston University, in an interview with the Boston Globe. “And if you’re off at all, the behavior of the solution could be completely off.”

So what Lorenz showed is that even if we think we have precise initial conditions, certain systems aren’t predictable. That’s why meteorologists can’t predict the weather beyond a few weeks.

Lorenz concluded that most weather predictions are inaccurate because we never know the exact starting conditions. In essence, the butterfly’s wing is a symbol of an unknown change.

Examples of the Butterfly Effect that Changed the World Forever

But there’s more to this effect than my statistics exam and inaccurate weather predictions. The butterfly effect can change history, and knowing these examples helps will help you be more realistic about forecasts and decision-making.

Franz Ferdinand

In 1914 a gunshot reshaped the world. It was June 28, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand had just escaped a bomb attack aimed at his car. To save Ferdinand from further attacks, the driver was supposed to change the route — yet he didn’t get the message and took a wrong turn. Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed, which set off a chain of events that led to World War I.

What if the driver would have gotten the message?

Covid-19

The World Health Organization supports the hypothesis that the Covid-19 outbreak started through a transmission from a living animal to a human host.

What if there were no living animals in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market?

Adolf Hitler

In 1907 and 1908, he applied for art school but was rejected twice. Historians and scholars argue that these rejections formed him from an aspiring bohemian artist to the human manifestation of evil. We don’t know how things would have gone, but for sure, humanity would have been better of if Hitler spent his lifetime drawing watercolors.

What if the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna accepted young Adolf Hitler as a student?

Final Thoughts

Even though we love to think we can predict outcomes by our actions, the butterfly effect shows we can’t. Seemingly insignificant moments can shape entire destinies.

We want our world to be comprehensible, but nature proofs us wrong. Our world is chaotic and can change from moment to moment. We’d love to use science to make precise predictions and get clear answers about the world we live in — yet science suggests we can’t.

Science can help us understand the universe, but as the butterfly effect shows, it does so by unraveling the limits of our understanding.

Yes, we can aim to create excellent starting conditions, but we don’t have the power to predict the outcome.

Small imprecisions have a significant impact — our world is unpredictable. If there’s one thing to be learned here, it’s that we can stop obsessing over outcomes.

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A Former Facebook VP Shares Lessons to Manage Your Team Better

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Ideas that can help every entrepreneur achieve more.

Photo by John Ray Ebora from Pexels

Most management books are self-help fluff by people who’ve never done what they’re preaching. So when a fellow founder recommended Julie Zhuo’s The Making of A Manager, I didn’t expect much.

Turns out I was wrong.

Zhuo’s book is a bible for entrepreneurs who want to help their team achieve better outcomes. I wish I’d read this book before founding my first company. Reading it would have helped me avoid many pitfalls.

What follows are the top four lessons from the book with actionable questions on how to use them.

Use these 3 pillars for stellar 1-on-1 meetings

These meetings are an essential lever to building healthy relationships with your team. Zhuo recommends doing a weekly 1-on-1 with every person that reports directly to you.

These 30-minutes should feel a bit awkward — because that’s how you realize you’re in the meaningful zone. Strong relationships don’t arise from superficial small talk. Instead, talk about mistakes, confront tensions, and share your fears and hope.

But meaningful conversations don’t arise naturally. You need to prepare, or as Zhuo writes:

“It’s rare that an amazing conversation springs forth when nobody has a plan for what to talk about. I tell my reports that I want our time together to be valuable, so we should focus on what’s most important for them.”

When you prepare, think about your report’s top priorities. How can you help? Moreover, list the feedback that will help your co-worker succeed. Lastly, sharpen your understanding of what ‘great’ looks like.

The main goal of these 1-on-1 meetings is to help your report. What would help them be more successful in what they’re doing? Don’t look for status updates but focus on topics that are hard to discuss in a larger group. Once you’re in the 1-on-1, three pillars will make them valuable.

Identify:

  • What’s top of mind for you right now?
  • What priorities do you think about this week?
  • What’s the best use of our time today?

Understand:

  • What does your ideal outcome look like?
  • What’s hard for you in getting to that outcome?
  • What do you really care about?
  • What do you think is the best course of action?
  • What’s the worst-case scenario you’re worried about?”

Support:

  • How can I help you?
  • What can I do to make you more successful?
  • What was the most useful part of our conversation today?”

Appreciation can work as fuel. Make sure also to reinforce good behavior. Kind words about your co-worker’s unique strengths will help both of you achieve your goals. You know you’ve held a great 1-on-1 if your team member found it highly useful.

Transform average meetings into great ones

Even as an entrepreneur, most meetings suck. They’re part of any work culture, no matter how small or large your company might be. Yet, most meetings are highly unproductive.

“Meetings are a blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. [..] walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it’s obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave; it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time”

— Elon Musk in an email to his staff

While most of us can’t simply walk out of meetings, we can be more respectful of each other’s time. Zhuo’s tips transform average meetings into great ones.

Great meetings should be simple and straightforward. They have a clear purpose and lead to clear outcomes. But having a meeting agenda is not enough. Besides, you need a picture of the desired outcome.

If you schedule a meeting to make a joint decision, make sure every attendee can give their opinion (either through speaking, commenting, or voting). Focus on making the time valuable for everyone involved but don’t get lost in details.

In my team’s last meeting, I put “decide on communication tool for teamwork” on the list. I estimated 10 minutes for this discussion. Yet, two co-workers held strong opinions about the different tools, and it became clear that we wouldn’t reach an agreement. At the same time, the other four team members involved were indifferent.

Instead of letting this discussion take up the entire meeting time, I asked the two for a brief get-together after the meeting. By removing anything from the agenda that didn’t concern all of the attendees, your co-workers will know you respect their time.

Another way to make your meetings more valuable is by being vulnerable. A way to foster opposing opinions is by acknowledging that you don’t know everything, Zhuo writes.

Acknowledging your shortcomings with your team will foster a growth mindset. Dare to say when you don’t know an answer and ask for your team’s ideas. Apologize when you made a mistake. Share your learning goals with your team.

Lastly, think about which meetings can be replaced by a call, an email, or a shared document? When Zhuo realized her weekly stand-ups were repetitive, she replaced the meeting with a weekly e-mail.

Use reflection to manage yourself better

The key to managing yourself is understanding your strengths and weaknesses. And a great way to do this is by reflecting — the active decision to think about your past. Or, as researchers put it:

“Reflection is the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.”

We don’t have to be visibly active to learn. Progress starts with self-awareness. If we aren’t aware of a problem, we can’t improve.

I do a yearly reflection every December and another every month, but Zhuo’s input inspired me to do it more regularly. Here’s a checklist of questions you can ask (and my answer to them):

  • How would the people who know and like you describe you in three words?
    inspiring, thoughtful, empathetic
  • Which three qualities are you really proud of?
    open-minded, generous, mindful
  • When you remember your last success, what were the traits that enabled you to succeed?
    getting-things-done mentality, reflection, vision
  • Which positive feedback have you received most commonly from your co-workers or chef?
    growth mindset, motivating, efficient
  • Whenever your worst inner critic sits on your shoulder, what does she yell at you for?
    wanting to make it right for everybody, holding back my opinion, not trying hard enough
  • If you could ask a fairy for three gifts you don’t have yet — what would you ask for?
    persuasiveness, patience, courage
  • What are the things that trigger you?
    people with overconfidence and inflated egos, not being accountable, the ideas other people don’t appreciate my work
  • What are the three most common pieces of advice from your team or boss on who you can improve?
    dare to disagree with popular opinions, share achievements with others, be less direct

If you’re unsure about your strengths and weaknesses, ask the people around you for feedback. Once you have your answers, you can work best with the resources you have.

In the words of American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey:

“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

Moving Forward

As with all business advice, pick the lessons that best help you in your situation. Focus on the principles that make a difference in your company.

  • Use the three pillars of identifying, understanding, and supporting to make every 1-on-1 meaningful.
  • Transform average meetings into great ones by removing the ones you don’t need and welcoming contradicting opinions.
  • Get better at managing yourself by using reflection as a learning tool.

Without application and action, the best advice is worthless. If you, however, apply one principle at a time, you’ll realize how these small decisions accumulate and lead to changes in your company.

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7 Questions to Ask Yourself If You Seek More Meaning in Your Life

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Start by defining what a great day means to you.

Photo by Kun Fotografi from Pexels

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

― Howard Thurman

Do you ever lie in bed thinking you ticked off so many to-dos but still didn’t have a great day?

If you don’t really feel alive, it’s likely because you focus on the wrong things. And the most dangerous thing is to measure your day based on the level of your productivity.

Doing a lot of exciting work is good. But being too busy to feel alive isn’t.

Stop numbing your mind with work. Here are seven better metrics to judge your life. Using some of them will transform your days from good to great.

1.) Did you do something meaningful?

For a long time, I believed the only purpose of life was happiness. What other reason is there to go through life’s ups and downs if not to be happy?

But chasing happiness is the fast-track to an unhappy life. Happiness isn’t something you can catch. That’s why neither things nor achievements can make you happy.

The first time I felt long-lasting happiness was after meditating for ten days, eleven hours a day.

Because happiness is the freedom from desire, you can let go of desire when you detach from what you think you need.

Apart from meditation, there’s another way to let go of desire and feel happiness: stop making life only about yourself. Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

You don’t need to work at an NGO to do useful, honorable work. You can find it in tiny actions such as:

  • Create a meaningful gift for a person you love.
  • Take your parents on a day trip.
  • When somebody says they’re having trouble with something, find a way to help.
  • Write an article about something you learned and share it with a group.
  • Go food shopping for a neighbor that’s in need.
  • Do something at work that’s outside of your responsibility.

Now you might argue that these things bring you away from what you want to achieve. That you will waste time and not be productive. But this over-optimization is what prevents you from feeling alive.

Life is no chase. There’s nothing to catch. If you want to feel alive and happy, do something meaningful and compassionate.

2.) Did you spend time in nature?

It’s easy to get lost in front of our screens. When we feel busy, we feel like making progress.

Yet, our laptops will never make us happy. You won’t find a single person on a deathbed mumbling, “I wish I spent more time on the internet.”

Don’t focus on the laptop life. Focus on the natural life. Hours spent outside, surrounded by water and forest, is the best thing you can do.

Japanese scientists have proven the health-promoting effects of the forest in several studies. Just looking at the forest lowers your blood pressure, slows your pulse, and decreases the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol.

Nature makes people healthy all by itself. The rustling of the leaves, the scents of the trees, birdsong, and the splashing of the streams heal people and strengthen their health.

“Natural stimuli are fascinating,” says Dr. Anja Göritz, professor of psychology in an interview with the German Times, “They captivate people and attract their attention. The mind is pleasantly occupied.”

To move your day from good to great, spend time outdoors. Go for a walk after lunch. Plan a weekend trip to the next national park. Make camping trips during summer. Start measuring your days by the time spent outside.

3.) Did you learn something you didn’t know before?

Knowledge is power. That’s why learning can improve any life. Yet, only very few people make learning an ongoing habit.

Reading is the easiest way to learn every day. Books expand your mind. They make you discover truths about the world and yourself. Page by page, they help you live a happier life.

Use your curiosity as a guide. How much do your days engage your curiosity? If the answer is “not much,” consider changing something.

This study followed aging individuals while tracking their curiosity levels. They found that people with high levels of curiosity were more likely to live five years longer.

Plus, curiosity drives discoveries. There’s strong evidence curiosity makes you better remember new knowledge. The more curious you are about a topic, the more it’ll stick with you.

So, read outside of your typical field. Say less and ask more and better questions. Spend time with children. Let curiosity guide you to learn something new.

4.) Did you feel your mind-body connection?

My boyfriend has worked out almost every morning for five years. Before COVID, he jumped out of bed at 5:50 AM and biked to the gym. Now he exercises at home. He doesn’t listen to music. He’s fully present in his body.

I always admired his willpower. But he says he doesn’t need willpower anymore. Once you feel your mind-body connection, you want to feel the connection between your brain and your body.

My boyfriend in October 2020. (Picture by Victoria)

And while I’m not yet where he is, doing yoga every morning helps me grasp what he’s talking about. When I connect with my body through movement, the day gets a new quality.

Throughout centuries, philosophers and scientists have hypothesized about the mind-body connection. There’s no consensus yet. We have been left with what many refer to as the mind-body problem: What is the relationship between mind and body?

And while neither philosophy nor modern science has given a clear answer, I just witnessed how it can transform my days from good to great.

5.) Did you sharpen your mind?

The body is one part of the equation. The mind is the other half. Yet, most people don’t prioritize mental health. They chase around, trying hard to take care of the world and, meanwhile, forget to take care of their mind.

“If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.”

— Arianna Huffington

Meditation is the most effective way to take care of your mind. Mind training tackles different topics such as dealing with a monkey mind, letting go of fear and anxiety, and returning to the present moment after distraction.

Scientists attest to the manifold benefits of meditation. This meta-analysis with more than 1,200 adults found meditation can decrease anxiety. Another study discovered that individuals who completed a meditation exercise had fewer negative thoughts when seeing negative images than the control group.

Meditating is one of the most powerful habits you can build.

Your meditation muscle will grow day by day. By seeing your thoughts as thoughts and letting them go as they arise, you’ll let go of inner chatter. As Mark Twain said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

6.) Did you have time to think for yourself?

Whenever I have a spare moment, I try to fill it. I listen to podcasts, read books, have a conversation with my beautiful boyfriend, answer messages, or hop to the next task in my bullet journal.

And while these activities can be enjoyable and add energy to my life, they have a marginal return on thinking utility. After a certain point, every additional minute of doing decreases the ability to think for yourself.

When we’re so busy doing, we don’t spend single second thinking. Entire days go by without a single deep thought. At the end of your life, you realize you’ve lived the life of others.

An easy fix is to eliminate distractions that take away your time. Get an alarm clock and ban your phone from your bedroom. Leave your phone turned off until lunch. Disable all notifications and use your time to think and connect the dots.

7.) Did you spend undivided attention with fellow humans?

Two friends met at a party. It clicked; over a few months, they enjoyed their time together — until she fell back into her old beliefs. She prioritized her physics research and became a sloppy communicator. At one point, he ended it.

Many people struggle to put their relationships first. Ryan Holiday found great words for this:

“Many relationships and moments of inner peace were sacrificed on the altar of achievement.”

During quarantine, many people have first felt the true benefit of relationships. Human connections give us energy, a sense of belonging, joy, and a feeling of oneness.

Researchers confirm what we instinctively feel. Robert Waldinger, psychiatrist and former professor at Harvard Medical School, shared in a TED Talk how relationships are the most important ingredient for a healthy, happy life.

This is probably the most important point of the entire article. Because if you don’t get your relationships right, having great days is almost unattainable.

Every hour working is an hour without friends and family. Eric Barker cites a study where one of the top five regrets of people on their deathbed is “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

Care for your friends. Trait working time for people time. A great day for me always includes deep human connection.

All You Need to Know

Now, most people on this planet don’t have the luxury of transforming their days from good to great. But as you’re reading this, you belong to the privileged people who do have a choice.

Start by defining what a great day means to you. Consider using some of the above metrics as inspiration:

  1. Did you do something meaningful?
  2. Did you spend time in nature?
  3. Did you learn something you didn’t know before?
  4. Did you feel your mind-body connection?
  5. Did you sharpen your mind?
  6. Did you spend undivided attention with fellow humans?
  7. Did you have time to think for yourself?

Don’t make these things other achievement items on your to-do list. Pick what you like and screw the rest.

Making time for some of these things is one of the greatest gifts you can give to your future self. Repeat it often enough, and you’ll find yourself lying in bed being grateful for all the great days in your life.

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It’s Hard to Hear Yourself Think When You’re Surrounded by Noise

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How to think for yourself

Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

“Most people are other people,” Oscar Wilde once said. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

A lot of people believe things without questioning them. That’s how brands and job titles become valuable. A shared belief system makes them desirable.

Did you pick your job because you truly thought for yourself? Or did you choose it because of society’s perception of that job?

We’ll never know. Yet, I’m sure Kant would kill himself if he woke up to all the fluff that says how to live your life. Around 1780 he preached we should trust no authority except our own reason. Here’s how to do it in 2021.

Consume Less Conventional Media

For many people, the default option is to scroll through their newsfeeds and fill their minds with other people’s chatter.

80 percent of smartphone users check their device every morning within the first 15 minutes after waking up. Before they can even think about their day, their brains are flooded with external stimulants.

When you start your day with your phone, you don’t have the slightest chance to think for yourself. You condition your mind for distraction. Notifications and messages will make your thoughts bounce around like a ping-pong ball.

There’s a simple solution most people will never try.

Don’t turn on your phone before lunch. It’s simple, but most people won’t even try it because it’s incredibly hard to deviate from the norm. But if you do, you’ll be rewarded with clarity and your own thoughts.

When you’re less aware of what everybody else is thinking, you can’t follow their thoughts. Step by step, your thoughts will become more independent.

Make Thinking Time Non-Negotiable

Whenever I have a spare moment, I try to fill it. I listen to podcasts, read books, have a conversation with my partner, answer messages, or hop to the next task in my bullet journal.

And while these activities can be enjoyable and add energy to my life, they have a marginal return on thinking utility. After a certain point, every additional minute of doing decreases your ability to think for yourself.

When you’re so busy doing, you don’t spend a single second thinking. Days, weeks, even years go by without ever having a single deep thought. At the end of your life, you realize you’ve lived the life of others.

When was the last time you used your spare time to just think for yourself?

Thinking, ideas, and insight need input. You don’t need to hide away for 9 years as Montaigne did. A few hours each week can suffice.

If you want to think for yourself, schedule time to think. While it might seem like it’s slowing you down, the opposite is true. Block time in your calendar. Turn off your phone, your computer, and your wifi. Take a pen and a piece of paper to your hand. Then, think and write.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

Learn How to Think Critically

Education systems teach obedience. The most successful students are those who understand what teachers want and follow the rules. It’s hard to become a critical thinker when grades reward conformists.

Luckily, critical thinking is a behavior you can learn. An HBR article writes critical thinking requires three steps:

  1. Question assumptions. Challenge everything you hear with questions such as: How do you know that? You don’t need to say this loud. But whenever you hear something, ask yourself whether it’s true.
  2. Reason through logic. Seek whether arguments are supported by evidence: Do arguments build on each other to produce a sound conclusion?
  3. Seek out the diversity of thought. Engage with people outside of your bubble (see the next point).

Find Other Independent Thinkers

As most people don’t think for themselves, the chances are low that you have a ton of independent thinkers in your network.

A great antidote is meeting different types of people. Don’t stay in your bubble. Go to university libraries from different faculties and start conversations. Go to another part of the city and speak to people you normally don’t talk to. As Matthew Dicks writes:

“I prefer to write at McDonald’s because I like racial and socioeconomic diversity as opposed to cashmere and American Express.”

Most people learn too late in life that seniority or university degrees are no indicator of self-directed thinking. Don’t let social prestige blend you. Instead, connect with independent minds.

If you’re part of different bubbles, you start to think for yourself by combining ideas from one bubble to another.

Borrow the Brains from Dead People

Go beyond demographics, occupations, and locations. Expand your circle of influencers across time. To do so, read from great thinkers who have lived before you. Follow Schopenhauer’s suggestion:

“Only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.”

And once you read books from other centuries, don’t just look at what happened. Try to really get into their heads and ask questions like:

  • Why do they think that way?
  • How did the world appear to them?
  • What made them change their opinion and why?

Conclusion

To live a life filled with meaning and happiness, it’s not enough to do what everybody else is doing. Dare to think for yourself.

  • Spend less time in front of your newsfeeds.
  • Block thinking time in your calendar.
  • Challenge everything.
  • Connect with independent thinkers.
  • Read the books from past centuries.

Oh, and by all means, please don’t copy everything I said. Question everything. Don’t trust blindly. Make Kant proud. Sapere Aude! — Have the courage to use your own reason.

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Albert Einstein Was a Genius, but a Terrible Husband

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How his life can change the way you look at productivity.

Photo by Taton MoĂŻse on Unsplash

Albert Einstein is one of the most genius contributors to science. At age 26, he discovered light exists as photons and laid the basis of nuclear energy. At 34, he published the general theory of relativity.

He was considered so brilliant that the pathologist who inspected Einstein’s dead body even stole his brain. Nowadays, when you google genius definition, you find Einstein’s name in the explanation.

But what made him a genius in the first place? When asked, Einstein replied,

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work.”

And while that’s the story we continue to preach, it’s only one part of the equation. Einstein’s insane productivity came at high emotional costs for the people close to him.

Einstein treated his wife as an employee he can’t fire

When studying in Switzerland, Einstein fell in love with another student named Mileva Marić, the only woman in his physics classes at ETH Zurich.

And while their first years of marriage are told to be romantic, things changed soon. According to biographer Isaacson Einstein said, “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire.”

Specifically, Einstein handed her a list of martial demands and only remained together if she agreed to the following conditions.

A) You will make sure:

— that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;

— that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;

— that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B) You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

— my sitting at home with you;

— my going out or travelling with you.

C) You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

— you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

— you will stop talking to me if I request it;

— you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D) You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

The irony of Einstein’s popular life lessons

For preparing this article, I read through primary sources, like his letters and more recent articles on his life. And while his work is undoubtedly a great scientific contribution, we should be wary when it comes to his life lessons.

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.” — Albert Einstein

Really, brother? Do you say your marriage contract is based on understanding and has not much to do with emotional force? Dude, it’s 1913. For the sake of your two young children and her own social standing, your wife can’t just leave you.

“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” — Albert Einstein

Bro, I absolutely agree with your powerful quote. But here’s the catch: Are you aware that because of your marriage demands, your wife couldn’t take her exams and finish her physics studies? You treated her like a personal servant. You limited her intellectual growth.

Now what?

Historians argue Einstein also erased Mileva Marić’s contributions to the Theory of Relativity. Plus, Einstein cheated on Marić with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal whom he would eventually marry (and also cheat on).

When you remember the third point from the martial demands, you can put this into perspective: Einstein would sleep with whomever he wanted, and Marić shouldn’t expect any intimacy from him.

If there’s one life lesson he preached and practiced, it’s the following:

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” — Albert Einstein

Isaacson wrote about Einstein that “he worked as long as he could, and when the pain got too great, he went to sleep.” He even died while working.

In his biography, it says, “One of his strengths as a thinker, if not as a parent, was that he had the ability, and the inclination, to tune out all distractions, a category that to him sometimes included his children and family.”

Einstein was able to become an insanely productive monomaniac because he sacrificed his relationships.

The point is: For every successful genius, there are broken relationships we rarely hear about. So before reading the next article on Einstein’s, Musk’s, or Darwin’s productivity routines, ask yourself:

Do I see the full picture or only the productivity’s shiny side?

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This is Exactly How Reading 197 Books Improved My Life

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Naval Ravikant: “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

Picture by Author.

Do you ever open a book and worry whether reading can really change your life?

If you feel like reading is a time-waster, it’s likely because you haven’t reaped the rewards yet. As Naval Ravikant once said:

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

You don’t see the desired results within weeks. If you stop too early, you’ll never get where you want.

But once you read for years rather than weeks, you see it’s the shortcut to get where you want without trial and error. You simply borrow the brains of the greatest minds and apply their nuggets of wisdom.

Through the 197 books I read, I learned from some of the best thinkers. Here are three specific ways reading has improved my life.

1.) Automating Your Path to Financial Freedom

Financial literacy is inherited. If your parents aren’t smart about money, you don’t learn the essential investing principles unless you read.

Books taught me wealth isn’t about how much you make. It’s about how much you save. Don’t save what is left after spending but spend what is left after saving.

Your paycheck won’t make you rich. Your investments will. Ramit Sethi uses 50–60% for Fixed costs (rent, utilities, debt), 10% for Investments (401(k), Roth IRA, ETF saving plans), 5–10% for saving goals (vacations, gifts, emergency fund) and 20–35% for guilt-free spending money (dining, drinking, movies, clothes).

Reading made me set up my investment plan. Right now, I invest 25% of my income. From my paycheck, 15% go to ETFs, 7% to cryptocurrencies, and 3% in lower-risk assets like bonds. On top of this, I sometimes cherry-pick stocks. But stock-picking is gambling. Here’s why.

Risk and return are interrelated. If you want to invest successfully, you can’t eliminate risk. The money market rewards investors with interest in the risks they take.

Smart investing isn’t about avoiding risks. Instead, it’s about diversifying your risks. But with stock-picking, you’re betting on a single company.

Here’s another insight that altered my path to financial freedom: You’re never going to get rich by renting out your time.

Wealthy people built systems that make money independent from time. They sell products with no marginal cost of replication — things like books, media, movies, and code. You can multiply your returns without working more.

As Nicolas Cole says:

“The way that people build true wealth for themselves is they see money differently than everyone else. They don’t see it as something they ‘have.’ They see it as something they deploy, and use to build and grow from there.”

2.) Cutting Workdays from 11 Hours to Five Hours

I used to work long hours. I worked hard to get what I felt was a success in life, including building my own companies next to a purposeful 9–5 job, my Master’s degree, a handsome fiancĂ©, a specific amount of workouts and books per week, a number on the scale.

I was on an eternal quest for the next achievement. I never paused.

But one book after another, my life changed. Eckhart Tolle made me redefine success. John Strelecky revealed my life priorities. Brené Brown transformed my inner voice. Cal Newport helped me build deep work habits.

My workdays averaged 11 hours. Now, they‘re down to 5. The time spent is less. But my focus is higher. The equation for knowledge work is as follows:

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

The more hours your work, the harder it is to focus. Working 11 hours a day with zero focus leads to zero high-quality work. That’s why there’s a diminishing return on input working hours. Putting in more hours can worsen your results. And your life’s quality.

I get up around six. After an hour of meditation, yoga, journaling, and whatever feels good, I write for about three hours. Then I read and add notes to my Roamkasten. At 11, I workout. Then, I take a long lunch break with my partner. Only after lunch, I turn on my phone.

My afternoons vary. I go for a walk with a friend. I take a bath. I have another deep work session for one of my clients, record an interview or volunteer for my NGO. But whatever I do, I make sure my phone and computer are switched off at 8 PM.

I still have workdays where I work too much. But whenever I do, I keep Glennon Doyle words in mind:

“Hard work is important. So are play and non-productivity. My worth is not tied to my productivity but to my existence.”

3.) Learning How to Learn Anything You Want

Learning is the only meta-skill you need to master because all other meta-skills depend on your ability to learn.

If you know how to learn, picking up philosophy or graphic design, or coding is so much easier. If you don’t, learning new skills is a daunting path.

In the first years of my reading journey, I ignored learning. Whenever a conversation revolved around a book I read, I could never remember much. I thought forgetting is my personal flow. But it isn’t.

Forgetting is essential for learning. Spaced repetition, one of the most effective learning strategies, allows some forgetting to occur between sessions. Thereby it strengthens the cues and routes for faster retrieval.

We learn something when we try to access it at different times (spacing) and in distinct contexts (variation). We learn when we connect existing knowledge to what’s in front of us (elaboration) and when we recall what we learned (retrieval).

Here’s how to remember anything you want from books:

  • Elaboration. Think while you read. Pause to make notes on how and when you could use this new insight. How does it relate to anything you already know? Write it down.
  • Retrieval. After you finish a book, think about what you want to remember. Recall from your mind what you want to stick with you. Write it down in your favorite tool — a journal, GoodReads, Notion, or RoamResearch.
  • Variation. Share what you learned with your friends. Talk about your insights in a mastermind group or use the Feynman technique and teach it to somebody else.
  • Spacing. Browse through your old book notes. Look at the title and test yourself on what you remember. This process feels slow and frustrating, but that’s how meaningful learning works.

When I first learned about the process, I fear it’s a time waste. But it isn’t. In Sönke Ahrens words:

“Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time”

Final Remarks

I could go on indefinitely because reading has also improved my life on so many levels (10-day fasts, slow sex, nose-breathing, psychedelic experiences, etc.). But I’ll stop for now and leave you with one powerful thought.

Reading is liberating. Freedom means choosing from a set of options. The more options you have, the freer you are. But most people don’t know about all their options. And that’s where reading kicks in. It helps you explore options you never knew existed.

“One cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply.”

— Robert Sternberg

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19 Things You Should Say ‘No’ to for a Happier 2021

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How to become the person you want to be in life and business.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Most people think happiness is a skill, something you can build and train with the right habits.

And while this is partly right, there’s a deeper truth about living a life full of meaning that a lot of people miss: Improving your happiness and well-being is often about what you do less of, not more of.

Often I don’t feel happy for the things I do, but for what I don’t do. Last year, I said ‘no’ more often. I focused my time and energy on things and relationships that mattered most. I became self-employed, spent weeks with my parents, and proposed to my boyfriend. 2020 has been one of the happiest years of my life.

What follows are 19 things that I said no to. Not everything will apply to you. But eliminating some of these can improve your happiness and well-being in 2021.

1. Say No to Distractive Environments

1.1 Your phone in your bedroom.

Get an alarm clock and stop waking up to your smartphone’s alarm. When you sleep with your phone in another room, you don’t need to exert your willpower first thing in the morning. You’ll start your days with a clear mind.

“Because it’s my life and it’s ticking away every second. I want to be there for it, not staring at a screen.”

— Ryan Holiday

1.2 Social media on your phone.

Social media’s persuasive design distracts you and takes away your time without active consent. I bet there’s no single person on this planet who will be lying on death bed wishing they spent more time with their phones.

Researchers continue to link social media usage to mental and physical illnesses like back pain, depression, anxiety, and even suicide-related thoughts. If you’re trying to live a happier, healthier life, deleting your social media apps is a great start.

1.3 Phone notifications.

Turn off all alerts. Your lock screen should almost always be blank. If you turn off notifications by default, you won’t see any red circles that nudge you into more screen time. That way, you stop conditioning your mind for distraction.

“What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore, play in defining the quality of our life.”

— Cal Newport

1.4 Distractions on your computer during deep work sessions.

LinkedIn? Block. Slack? Block. Online Games? Block. Unblock these sites once you finished your deep work block. You’ll be surprised how much more you can achieve in less time. The equation for knowledge work is as follows:

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

1.5 Consuming the news.

A 2017 report by the American Psychological Association showed 95% of American adults follow the news regularly, even though more than 50% of them say it causes them stress. Delete your news apps. Stop reading the news. If you still want to know what’s going on in the world, start reading books.

“Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

— Marcus Aurelius

2. Say No to Destructive Habits

2.1 Finishing mediocre books.

Not all books are created equal, and most books aren’t worth your time. You don’t have to finish every book you start. Instead, read the books that make you want to read more.

“Life is too short to read a bad book.”

— James Joyce

2.2 Consistently working more than 40 hours a week.

It’s nice if you love your work and don’t mind working a lot. But numbing your mind with work is your fast-track to an unhappy life. Life is best enjoyed in balance.

We all have 24 hours a day. People who spend most of their awake time working don’t have much energy left for their health, relationships, and play.

”The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

2.3 Sugar.

Sugar is the biggest culprit for chronic inflammation today. Going sugar-free first feels like recovering from drug addiction (because sugar is a drug). Say no to sugar for a week, and you’ll feel the positive effects on your mood.

2.4 Doing what everybody else is doing.

Don’t read what everybody else is reading. Don’t believe what all of your friends are saying. Foster a healthy criticism and think for yourself. Sapere Aude! — Have the courage to use your own reason.

2.5 Quitting too early.

Everything sucks at first, but only a few things suck forever. The Dip teaches us that there is a time of struggle between start and success when we should either aim for excellence or strategically stop.

Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with it right now. Follow through with your side hustle. Publish 100 articles before you quit and reap your thoughts compound interest.

3. Eliminate Toxic Relationships

3.1 People (mostly men; sorry bro) with big egos.

I was one of the women who learned to sit patiently and smile. But once I learned about patriarchal culture’s influence on women’s behavior, I quit mansplaining situations.

Financial analyst Laura Rittenhouse evaluated leaders and how their companies performed. Eric Barker, citing her findings:

“Want to know which CEOS will run their company into the ground? Count how many times they use the word “I” in their annual letter to shareholders. [
] Me, me, me means death, death, death for corporations.”

3.2 Bad listeners.

You are the master of your life. Choose whom to surround yourself with. When someone doesn’t listen to you, you don’t need to continue listening to them. Relationships are mutual.

“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.”

— Mark Twain

3.3 Other people’s agenda.

The world isn’t as simple as just givers and takers. But if you give to everyone who asks, you won’t have much left for your own pursuits. Follow Melinda Gate’s mum, who always said to Melinda as she was growing up:

“If you don’t set your own agenda, somebody else will.”

If you don’t fill your calendar with important things, other people will do it. Say no to things that don’t align with your goals.

3.4 Naysayers and maybes.

All decisions in life should be a clear yes or no. Stop saying, maybe. If you feel hesitation towards meeting a group of people, say no.

Follow Mark Manson and Derek Sivers with their crystal clear, yes, and no’s, and watch your satisfaction levels rise.

4 Quit Harmful Mindsets

4.1 Using negative self-talk to motivate yourself.

If I had to pick one single thing you should let go of, it’d be this one. Once I stopped judging myself (thanks, BrenĂ©), quitting destructive behavior became easy.

You don’t need to be hard on yourself to achieve what you want in life. Psychologist Nick Wignall writes, “People are successful despite their negative self-talk, not because of it.”

4.2 Complaining when you can change things.

Complainers curse cold weather while they can wear warmer clothes. They complain about bad teachers while they can change their learning path. They grumble about their negative friends while they can change their relationships.

Complaining is choosing victimhood while we still have a choice. Or, as Holocaust survivor and brilliant writer Dr. Edith Eger put it:

“No one can make you a victim, but you.”

4.3 Downplaying your strengths.

Don’t excuse yourself for your personal strengths. You’re capable of almost anything. Carol Dweck says: “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Don’t apologize for things you can’t do. Replace “Sorry, I can’t” with “How can I?”

“Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses”

— George Washington Carver

4.4 Focusing on results.

Lasting progress isn’t about being consistently great; it’s about being great at being consistent.

Focusing on the results will make you impatient. Ultimately, you’ll give up. Don’t focus on the outcome. Focus on the process.

4.5 Wasting your time on perfection.

Perfection is destructive. It has nothing to do with self-improvement. Perfection is, at its core, is about trying to earn approval.

Let it go. Make your deadlines tighter, and don’t work on your stuff after your time runs out. Aim for consistency instead of perfection.

“Perfection is the enemy of progress.” — Winston Churchill

Remember improving your happiness and well-being is often about what you don’t do. Saying no feels hard at first. But it will get easier every time you do it.

Ultimately you realize saying no is a skill you can learn. Once you dare to say ‘no,’ all that follows becomes easier and easier.

So, what are you waiting for? You can do it.

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage — pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”

― Stephen Covey

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Avoiding These 6 Things Will Help You Tell Stories People Want to Hear

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How to create a cinema for the mind.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Humans connect with emotions, not facts. So the best way to put your ideas in the world is by telling stories.

Yet, many people don’t know how to captivate an audience. They recite a list of events, get lost in abstractions, or take away the surprise before even starting.

As a result, the audience feels bored and doesn’t listen. Instead of wondering where a story will take them, all they care about is when it will finally end.

My dad is the best storyteller I know, but I didn’t inherit his skills. My stories sucked. And while I was convinced you can learn most things in life, I thought storytelling had more to do with innate talent than learnable traits.

Turns out I was wrong.

Storytelling is a skill you can learn. After completing a TED masterclass, studying Matthew Dicks, and practicing in public, I discovered a pattern most bad storytellers have in common.

1) They recite events in chronological order

When asked about their vacation, we all know people who give a list of locations and activities. “Well, our first stop was in a beautiful hotel in Paris, where we went to Louvre and blah, blah, blah.”

Listeners don’t want to hear meaningless lists. I’m sorry for all of my friends who had to listen to my backpack stops through South America and whether I liked the hostels.

The problem is: People can’t connect with things. Instead, they connect with emotions and moments of insight and transformation.

What to do:

Think about a blockbuster moment: A transformational insight that forever changed the way you think about a specific topic.

One single incident in a seemingly meaningless setting can mean so much more than the best holiday scenery. People connect with stories they can associate with, not with the stuff that has never happened to them.

Don’t talk about a Machupicchu marathon, but share the moment where you found trust in humanity because a stranger returned a lost wallet. Don’t share details about hotel facilities but about the moment you felt homesick because you realized relationships matter most.

To find these meaningful moments, ask yourself: When did you feel angry, loved, surprised, moved, or in awe? Then, recreate the build-up towards the emotion.

Great storytellers guide through the transformation from one feeling to another. The best stories reflect change over time.

2) They tell stories about their heroic self

Would you rather hear about how a failed exam and bad breakup led to chronic depression and my six-month escape to India or about the time I sent only one application and landed my dream job?

Me too. Perfectionism is boring. Nobody wants to hear about the time something ran down smoothly. Especially not if the story has a bragging undertone.

Ego-centeredness leads to bad stories. We don’t want to hear a flawless hero’s journey. We want to see other people struggle as we do. World-class storyteller Matthew Dicks wrote:

“Failure is more engaging than success.”

What to do:

Dare to be vulnerable because this is what moves listeners emotionally. We love to listen to people who truthfully share their struggles. Honesty is freaking attractive.

Share the times you’ve failed and your lessons learned. The times you desperately wanted to achieve something, but you didn’t.

Being honest with each other allows us to strengthen our social bonds and form deep, meaningful connections.

3) Bad storytellers don’t know when to be quiet

Dr. Brené Brown once wrote we should be as passionate about listening as we are about wanting to be heard.

Many of us feel the urge to say something, to at least share their opinion, but hardly anyone is ready to listen.

Bad storytellers don’t pay attention to the space they occupy. They don’t realize when they’ve said too much. They don’t sense when it’s time to be quiet.

Whenever I listen to a person who loves his own voice just a little bit too much, I think of this quote by Mark Twain:

“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg crackles as if she has laid an astroid.”

What to do:

Ask questions but don’t listen to reply. Instead, listen to understand. You connect with others when they feel heard and valued.

Don’t bother about what other people think about you. Instead, use your energy to be the best listener in the room.

Whenever you’re in doubt whether you’re saying too much and listening too little, pause and be quiet.

4) They forget to create a cinema for the mind

An audience wants to connect visually, but bad storytellers don’t give any visual information. They get lost in abstractions and don’t act as a person who is physically moving through space.

The bigger the abstraction, the harder it is for an audience to connect. While sentences like ‘certainty is the enemy of growth’ and ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’ work on paper, they don’t work in stories.

People can’t identify with concepts. They’re not relatable, and in stories, they lead to boredom. Just like Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

What to do:

Matthew Dicks sums it up:

“The simplest stories about the smallest moments in our life are often the most compelling.”

Rather than focusing on the big concept and blurring the overall takeaway, aim for details and specificity.

And don’t get lost in the land of nothingness. Great stories are a cinema for the mind. They contain details that make a scene highly sensory—information about the setting, physical location, feelings, events.

A physical location in every scene helps your audience create a vivid picture in their mind.

5) They kill any surprises

Let me tell you about the time I felt outraged and almost left my startup. Wow. I killed any surprise. So do starter phrases like:

  • “You won’t believe it.”
  • “You can’t imagine what happened to me.”
  • “Yesterday, I met the most interesting person ever.”

Stories live by unexpected twists. That’s what makes them interesting in the first place. But if you predict the outcome and raise the expectation bar, your story can only disappoint.

What to do:

Don’t start with a summary. There’s no need to give a disclaimer or summary. Start with the story.

The best place to start your story is by starting at the end’s opposite. Want to tell a story about regaining trust in humanity? Start with a scene when you had the least trust. Thereby, you reinforce the change that happened in you.

And if you need a thesis statement, put it at the end. Because surprise is what creates emotions. Again, Matthew Dicks, who makes his audience laugh hard before he makes them cry:

“You need to build surprise into your stories. There must be moments of unexpectedness so that your audience can experience an emotional response to your story.”

6) They repeat what has been said before

Bad storytellers are often unoriginal. Margarete Stokowski gives a perfect example: It’s like shouting through a megaphone: “We all have to think for ourselves!” And a crowd of a thousand people repeats: “We all have to think for ourselves!”

It’s the tenth article about Elon Musk’s first-order thinking. It’s people who quote Kant’s “Have the courage to use your own reason,” and then happily continue giving more and more quotes.

Bad storytellers repeat what has been said a thousand times. They cling to stories and beliefs that aren’t contradictory or bear any controversy.

What to do:

Take a stance and a statement. Support a thesis. It’s easier to not have an opinion than it is to have one. Don’t be the one who doesn’t have one. Be the one who does.

Use other people’s ideas as a stepping stone. Copy thoughts, but then add a twist and make them about your view of the world. Use your experiences to create a unique story out of them.

If a friend went through a story you would love to share, tell your story’s angle. Don’t ever copy something just because you feel people will like it.

“Be quoatable. Your job is not to recycle but to create something new.”

— Matthew Dicks

All You Need to Know

Great storytellers aren’t born that way. They become great by following these rules:

  1. Don’t give time-stamp listicles of events and facts. Instead, build your story around one emotionally transforming moment.
  2. Don’t make any story about your best self. Show vulnerability and imperfection. Talk about the lessons you learned along the way.
  3. Don’t take too much space. Allow others to take the stage and listen carefully.
  4. Don’t get lost in abstractions. Be as specific as you can, include physical locations, and create a cinematic mind experience.
  5. Don’t take away the surprise. If you need a thesis statement, use it in the end, not in the beginning.
  6. Don’t repeat what has been said before. Dare to be original.

In the end, people don’t make decisions based on numbers or facts — it’s stories that make all the difference. No matter where you are in life, storytelling can help you achieve your goals.

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Philosophical Books that Can Still Improve Your Life Today

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Stop buying from bestseller lists.

Photo by BERK OZDEMIR from Pexels

If you look at humanity’s timeline —what are the chances that the truly great books have been written in the past 20 years? Approximately zero, right.

Still, many people buy the latest books instead of the greatest. Here’s what that leads to:

“A public that will leave unread writings of the noblest and rarest of minds (
), merely because these writings have been printed today and are still wet from the press.” — Schopenhauer

Common problems have been the same throughout all centuries: happiness, morality, power, justice, and love. That’s why the wisdom from great philosophers is still so applicable.

Here are eight books from great minds that you don’t find on current best-seller lists.

1. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Even though the title sounds complex, reading the Tao Te Ching is easy. The book helps us understand Taoism, which literally means ‘the way.’

Like Stoicism, Taoism also focuses on simplicity. But it also contains human values like patience and compassion. Stoicism is Jordan Peterson, Taoism is Brené Brown. I much more prefer the latter.

When you read through the 160-page short book written in 4th century BC, you feel trust and self-compassion rushing through you. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

“Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.”― Lao Tzu

2. Zhuangzi by Zhuangzi

If Tao Te Ching explains Taoism’s theoretical concepts, this book is its workbook. It shows us how to put Toaism into practice.

Zhuangzi gives us applicable guidance, like “A path is made by walking on it” or, “Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.” In sum, the book is a how-to guide for living a simple and natural but full and flourishing life.

It’s an ancient and even wiser version of Naval Ravikant and a great read for anyone who wants to bring more happiness and wisdom to their life.

3. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

The main goal of Nicomachean Ethics is learning to achieve eudaimonia, a Greek term with deep meaning. Philosophers say there’s no accurate translation for eudaimonia. But if we had to find a word, it’s happiness.

To achieve this kind of happiness, a person must first reach a state of inner balance. And to achieve personal harmony, there are two things you should do:

  1. Investing in your education, reasoning, and thinking.
  2. Cultivating important character virtues.

In the book, Aristotle explains how to build a virtuous character. First, by learning the difference between virtuous and not virtuous actions. Second, by creating habits that allow you to form a good character.

That’s how Aristotle goes one step further than James Clear. Before he tells you how to form habits, Aristotle gives you a decision guide for future actions.

4. Five Dialogues of Plato

When I started studying philosophy last fall, reading Plato was one of the first reading assignments. Different characters debate topics like justice, death, and virtue. They mostly try to find a conclusion (even though they can’t always find one).

What I love about Plato is his philosophy in dialogue form. The dialogue makes reading interesting.

The asking protagonists are the reader’s voice. They ask questions you will have. And this book contains 5 of the most important Platonic dialogues.

“Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” — Plato

5. What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant

Now, this isn’t really a book but an essay. But Kant is hard to read. And better to read a hard-digestible essay than not to read Kant’s work. It still contains the quintessence of his writings.

Kant popularized the idea that we should trust no authority except our own reason. He would sigh when looking at all the coaches, self-help books, and online courses that suggest how to live your life.

He’d say: Use your own reasoning and, by all means, dare to be wise.

So, this essay is excellent for anyone struggling with trusting their own beliefs. For writers who feel scared to form opinions. And for insecure overachievers.

Kant’s words are a great reminder of whom to trust making any decision in life — you.

6. PenseĂ©s by Blaise Pascal

The Penseés is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes, and essays. Pascal explores the contradictions of human nature from a psychological, social, theological, and metaphysical perspective.

While this collection is slightly pessimistic and tries to convince atheists of God’s existence, it’s still worth the read. You will realize the fundamental human problems were the same in 1670 as in 2021.

“Man’s condition: Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. But take away their distractions and you will see them wither from boredom.” — Blaise Pascal

7. The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne

Just like Bill Gates, Michel was one of the wealthiest men of his time. And just like Bill, Michel appreciated ‘thinking time.’

Yet, Michel’s thinking time far exceeded Bill’s think week. He isolated himself for 9 entire years to find what it means to be human.

Frankly, his essay’s topics seem random. They cover wide arrays and range from friendships to the imagination, to laughing, and more.

Reading his essays is not too difficult. But the sum (1344 pages) is daunting. If you decide to get this book, here is a selection of his most-discussed essays. Yet, when you choose, remember to use your own reason (see 5).

  • On Friendship
  • To philosophize is to learn how to die
  • Apology for Raymond Sebond
  • On Experience
  • On Solitude

8. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Betty Radice

What I dislike about most booklists is they don’t include female authors. Yet, I didn’t know that finding ancient female writing is a true research project.

HĂ©loĂŻse was a philosopher of love and friendship. Plus, she was important for the establishment of women in science. Her controversial thoughts about genre and marriage influenced the development of modern feminism.

HĂ©loĂŻse, a 12th-century woman raised in a convent, expressed her sexuality with such openness our generations can learn from.

“No one’s real worth is measured by his property or power: Fortune belongs to one category of things and virtue to another.” — HĂ©loĂŻse

In Summary

Learning from the greatest thinkers who have ever existed doesn’t need to feel like a burden. On the contrary — it can be fun and worthwhile.

Your life, your reading list. Use your own mind and pick the ones that resonate with you. Then, screw the rest. When in doubt, remember Schopenhauer’s suggestion:

“Only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.”

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The Apeiron Blog — Big Questions, Made Simple.

We know that Philosophy can seem complicated at times. To make things simple, we compile together the best articles, news, reading lists — and other free resources to guide you on your journey. To continue with us, follow us on Medium and sign up to our free mailing list.

3 Quotes by Yuval Harari That Changed the Way I Think and Live

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On happiness, human extinction, and illusions.

Photo by Aleksander Vlad on Unsplash

To be honest, I fell asleep every time I read a few pages of Sapiens. I was overwhelmed by the width of Harari’s thoughts.

There’s a reason why he’s one of the most influential thinkers of our time. He regularly discusses global issues with heads of state, like Angela Merkel or Mauricio Macri.

In his recent interview on The Tim Ferriss Show, Yuval shared three thoughts I can’t stop thinking about. Chances are, they’ll change the way you think and go through life as well.

“We’re thousands of times more powerful than people in the stone age. But it’s not clear whether we are at all happier than they were.”

I’m an innovation enthusiast, and it took me some years and Tristan Harris to realize innovation doesn’t equal progress.

We don’t know whether we’re happier than our ancestors. We haven’t solved the equation of happiness, and we don’t know how to decrease human suffering.

With all that you’ve achieved in your personal life — are you happier than you were five years ago?

I no longer get drunk twice a week. I enjoy my life and earn money by doing things I love. But am I happier than my five-year younger self? I don’t know.

Whenever we improve something, it comes at the price of something else. After all, we don’t know whether we’re happier than our stone-age ancestors.

What to do:

Yuval practices Vipassana meditation for two hours every day and takes an annual meditation retreat for a month or two every year.

Here’s what he wrote about Vipassana in Tribe of Mentors:

“It is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality. At least for two hours a day, I actually observe reality as it is, while for the other 22 hours, I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens and Homo Deus.”

I sat through my first Vipassana course in 2019. After ten days, everything clicked together. I felt true happiness: a complete silence of thoughts. I didn’t sit down for two hours every day afterward, so the effects soon vanished.

But prolonged meditation can help you reach peace of mind, better mental health, and more focus. It’s a proven path to decrease suffering and accessible to everyone. You can search for a donation-based course on Dhamma.

“As a species, we are very good in acquiring more power, but we are not good at all in translating power into happiness.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

“We created stories as a tool for us. We shouldn’t be enslaved by them.”

Yuval explains the only reason why the human species has more power than animals is that we can collaborate.

We created fictional constructs that help us work together. Stories about religion, money, states, and cooperations to create trust on a larger scale.

Often, we forget that humans were the inventors of these stories. When we start fights or even wars about self-made concepts, we should pause to remind us of what really matters.

He doesn’t oppose fictional stories as we need them as they’re the basis for cooperation. But he says we should regularly run the test of suffering.

What to do:

The test of suffering simply shows whether something is real. Humans and animals can suffer. Cooperations, countries, or cars can’t.

All we have to do is ask ourselves: What is real in the world? And what are fictional stories?

When I started working self-employed, I worried a lot about the financials. Will I make enough money to reach financial independence? Or will I miserably fail to pay the bills? Worries about stories aren’t real.

Since I learned about the test of suffering, I’ve found it easier to see worries about fictional stories as they arise. Whenever I do, I let them pass.

“Even in the best scenario, I don’t think Homo sapiens will be around in two or 300 years.”

While his other insights are inspiring, this one is rather frightening. Yuval lists three main global problems that bring him to his conclusion:

  1. As global tensions rise, so does the chance of a nuclear war.
  2. Climate change, destruction of habitats, and ecological collapse.
  3. Technological disruption, mainly from artificial intelligence and bioengineering.

He doesn’t think people will live like us in 200 years because the ongoing changes are too big. The best scenario is that Homo sapiens will disappear, but in a peaceful and gradual way, and be replaced by something better.

What to do:

Memento mori — remember your own mortality. Time and attention are your most valuable resources. Choose how you spend them wisely, and keep in mind that nothing will last forever.

“Change is the only certainty in life.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

Final Thoughts

We’re so often trapped in our heads that we forget the universe’s scale. Harari’s insights are a great reminder of the many axes of life.

These three quotes are so meaningful; your conclusion is likely different from mine. Here’s how Yuval’s insights changed the way I think and live:

  • Make Vipassana meditation a priority. Training your mind will lead to a calmer, happier, and more focused mind.
  • Don’t be enslaved by fictional stories. Break free whenever you’re worried about human-made constructs.
  • Know that one day you’ll die. So, speak your truth and follow your inner guidance.

Do you want to connect? Join my e-mail list here.

These Money Lessons by Morgan Housel Are Helping to Make Me a Better Investor

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Five mindset shifts to help you reach financial freedom

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Did you know that $81.5 billion of Warren Buffet’s $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday?

I didn’t until I started reading Morgan Housel’s finance blog.

Morgan earned credibility through his former finance column at The Wall Street Journal. But what’s even better is that Morgan practices what he preaches. He’s transparent about every step he takes and passes along precious advice.

In his new book, he shares timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness. Here are the ones that stuck with me. If applied, they can turn you into a better investor.

1.) Your Behavior Matters More than Your Financial Hard Skills

Until halfway through my economics studies, I avoided personal finance. Yes, I aced through my math-heavy exams. But knowing how to invest your own money?

I thought you’d have to be a genius.

Derivates, hedging, and exchange-traded funds sounded like Chinese. A beautiful language I’d never be able to learn.

As a life-long learner, I hear you sigh. Of course, with the right mindset and tools, you can learn anything in life.

When I picked up my first personal finance books, I started learning that making your money work for you is actually pretty simple. Morgan writes:

“Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.”

Once you understand the basics, like knowing your net worth, building an emergency fund, and the power of compound interest, behavior matters more than hard skills.

Psychological biases, like impulsive purchases, often have a far greater effect on financial success than understanding another portfolio theorem.

2.) Only You Can Determine When You Have Enough

I loved the following anecdote from the book as it shows the difference between being greedy and living in abundance.

At a billionaire’s party, Kurt Vonnegut teases his conversational partner Joseph Heller. He says the host earned more money on a single day than the author had made with his popular book Catch-22. Heller replies: “Yes, but I have something he will never have. Enough.”

How much money do you need to feel you’ve got enough? When can you truly feel satisfied and free from greed?

Abundance is a choice. You’re the one who determines whether you have enough. In Morgan’s words:

“The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.”

If you keep chasing more and more, you’ll waste your life. You’ll always feel you’re missing out on something.

When I became self-employed last summer, I defined my monthly minimum ($2K) and dream ($10K) income for a 35-hour workweek. In my fifth month of self-employment, I hit my income goal.

And yet, I moved my goalpost without realizing it. I kept trying to earn even more, put in more hours, said yes to more projects. With every additional working hour, I dropped another healthy habit.

Work and money have a diminishing marginal utility. From a certain point, more isn’t better but worse.

Once I pass the 35-hour threshold, every additional working hour decreases my joie de vivre. I move less, laugh less, and feel less. In the long-run, no additional income is worth this price.

Enoughness is a choice. Only you can get your goalpost to stop moving.

3.) Freedom is the Ultimate Form of Wealth

Why do you want to make a ton of money?

Do you want a specific car or luxurious clothing? Or are you past material status symbols and chasing new experiences, like traveling the world? Maybe you already found contentment in the presence and want to earn more to pay for your kid’s education or your mum’s retirement.

When you keep exploring your reasoning and peel down the outer layers, many people discover a fundamental core underneath.

The key motivation to become wealthy is the ultimate freedom.

Freedom means doing what you want whenever you want. Freedom means surrounding yourself with the people you want for as long as you want. As Morgan put it:

“Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays. Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is a powerful and universal drag on happiness.”

You no longer have to say “yes” when you feel like saying “no.” You can pick the projects you truly want without thinking about monetary rewards.

That’s also what Naval Ravikant means when he says that you should optimize for independence rather than pay whenever you can in life.

4.) Shut Up and Wait

$81.5 billion of Warren Buffet’s $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday. One of the richest people alive used the power of compounding interest to grow his money.

This piece of advice is so powerful yet often neglected. To become a better investor, you don’t need to consume financial news a few hours a day. Instead, it’s about remaining passive and wait it out.

If we look at long time horizons, we see nothing but economic growth. And that’s why the benefits of compounding are available for everyone who manages to stick to the same strategy.

Because all you need to do to benefit from compounding interest is keeping your money invested and wait it out. Good returns sustained over an uninterrupted period of time will ultimately win.

Billionaire Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s long-term business partner, sums it up nicely:

“Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.”

5.) Wealth is Income Not Spent

What would you do if you became a millionaire overnight? Most people answer this question by listing all the things they‘d buy. Soon they wouldn’t be millionaires any longer.

The math is simple. If you own a million but spend all of it on consumer goods, nothing will be left to pay the dividends.

Becoming wealthy isn’t solely about how much you make. It’s also about how much you save.

Earning $1200 or $8200 a month won’t increase your net worth if you’re spending all of it on food, clothes, beauty products, cars, furniture, hairdressers, insurances, phones, and travel.

By spending 100%, you will never accumulate wealth unless someone else is saving for you. If you own a million but spend all of it on consumer goods, you’ll soon be broke. Wealthy people remain wealthy because they don’t spend their money, they save it.

Wealth is invisible. It’s income you didn’t spend. As Morgan states:

“Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later.”

Bonus Tip: Don’t Trust Mutual Fund Portfolio Managers

Did you know that most wealth managers are salespeople? I didn’t.

That’s why I almost trusted a mutual fund manager when he told me about his investment opportunities. In my uninformed mind, 1% sounded pretty cheap. But it isn’t. Over time a 1% fee can reduce your returns by around 30%.

Morgan Housel likely agrees with Rami Sethi, who writes,

“If you are reading this and you’re paying over 1% in fees, I’m going to kill you. Get smart. You should be paying 0.1 to 0.3%.”

Fund managers and many other financial experts earn money per product they sell. And because they earn commissions, you’ll understand why they likely direct you to expensive mutual funds.

The financial times published an article revealing that half of all U.S. mutual fund portfolio managers do not invest a cent of their own money in their funds. So, better do the maths before investing in an overpriced product.

The Bottom Line

If you just remember one thing from the Psychology of Money, it should be the following: Inspirational lessons on investing and acting according to them aren’t the same thing.

Whenever you read through valuable investing advice, you have two options: Let it pass like a swift moment of inspiration, or ask yourself how to apply that insight in your decision making.

So, if you’re serious about becoming a better investor, pick your favorite lesson and change your behavior. Because ultimately, you are in charge of creating the life you want to live.

Do you want to join our tribe of life-long learners? Sign up here.

The 6 Best Investments I’ve Made In the Past 6 Years

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Spending money (or time) has boosted my health, happiness, and overall well-being.

Eva Keiffenheim on LinkedIn

Most people argue the best investments have the highest return rate.

Looking at my net worth’s development, they’d assume I start this article sharing my crypto portfolio or the compounding benefits of my ETFs.

But the best investment returns aren’t monetary, and I won’t bore you with asset classes. Instead, I’ll show you how the right investments can increase your long-term health, happiness, and well-being.

1) $1500 for Fixing My Eating Habits

It doesn’t matter what you eat but why you eat.

No fitness-tracker, diet, or sports-program will save you if you have underlying beliefs that destroy your plans.

I fought with my body weight since 2011. In 2013, I used will-power to reach my dream weight, and yet, I knew I would eventually fall back to old patterns. I felt my body was working against me, and I wasted hours a day worrying.

What helped me the most were investments in an intuitive eating course, psilocybin therapy, and a psychotherapist.

It took me four years and around $1500. But without these investments, it likely would have taken me a lifetime to uncover my underlying beliefs and change them.

Now, I feel aligned with my body. We’re a team, and it feels easy and natural to make healthy eating choices. Again, I reached my dream weight. But this time, there’s no willpower or fear involved—only trust and gratitude.

2) 10 Days for Joining a Vipassana Course

Here’s the daily schedule of a traditional course, based on Goenka:

The daily schedule at a Vipassana Course: Source: Pali on Dhamma.org

When I first read through this schedule, it seemed crazy. Why would anybody voluntarily meditate for 10 days, 10 hours a day, without speaking, talking, or writing?

By the time I’d been meditating with an app for some hundred sessions. I experienced the benefits that go along with meditation: a clear, focused, calm mind. And so, I leaped and signed up for a Vipassana course in 2019.

Afterward, I absolutely agree with Blaise Pascal, who said:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

By increasing your awareness, you’ll unleash any stuck emotions. You’ll understand yourself. You might even experience oneness.

The Vipassana technique is a mental tool that helps you deal with life’s hardships. After ten days, you understand the meaning of true happiness.

There’s no fixed fee for the course. Attending the course is donation based. You give what you would like to give. The real investment is ten days of your time. But I promise it’ll be worth it.

3) $250 on Journals for Organizing My Life

In 2017, when I first learned bullet journaling, I almost abandoned the system. I felt Cal Newport was boasting when he wrote, “it will not only help you get more organized but will also help you become a better person.”

I was wrong. And Cal was right.

Around 16 bullet journals in, I know this journaling technique improved my well-being like no other productivity tool did.

The system helped me establish an NGO, host a podcast, become self-employed, read 52 books a year, and so many other things while enjoying my life to the fullest.

Once a year, I sit down and envision the year ahead. Once a month, I translate the yearly goals into the next 30 days. Every week, I’ll break it further down to the next seven days. And every evening, I plan the next day.

$250 for the 16 bulleted journals are among my best investments because every page is a constant reminder of what I care about. Every day is a chance to move further towards my big five for life.

4) $1200 for Writing Courses & Coaching

During the first lockdown last March, I followed my gut feeling and bought access to Sinem GĂŒnel’s writing academy.

Before, I hadn’t written anything except for my Bachelor’s and Master’s thesis and around 1350 pages in my bullet journals.

While this investment has also paid monetary rewards, the personal benefits are even bigger.

While writing, my heart opens. While writing, I forget time. While writing, I’m at peace. And without the initial investment in the writing academy, followed by some other online courses, I probably would have quit.

Because the first articles are the hardest. A writing career isn’t linear. You write and write and write, and still don’t see any results.

Learning from people who’ve walked the way helped my trust in my own process. Without a blink, I’d reinvest the $1200 into a writing coach.

5) 7280 Hours for a Fulfilled Relationship

We met in 2014, some months before I’d move to India, then Argentina. And while our long-distance start is rather atypical for romantic relationships, we made it work.

Quantifying my relationship feels odd. In our 7-years together, I never calculated the time we spent with each other. And that’s a good thing.

Here’s a counterexample.

Ali Abdaal, a UK based doctor, YouTuber, instructor, and podcaster, is one of the most productive people on the internet. I admire his reading strategies.

Recently, he shared that in a hypothetic relationship, he’d love to spend 90% by himself and about 10% with his love.

But this thinking is flawed. We can’t, and we shouldn’t quantify our relationships.

Ryan Holiday summarized the phenomenon perfectly, writing in one of his books:

“Many relationships and moments of inner peace were sacrificed on the altar of achievement.”

One of the best investments for personal wellbeing is time spent with my partner. It’s time spent supporting, listening, being supported, loving, laughing, crying, and cuddling.

6) $200 On Turning My Books into Learning Devices

Many people are e-reading enemies until they read their first e-book. I wasn’t a fan until fifteen books in.

You can’t interact with your e-reader as you can with your book. You can’t inhale the smell, dog-ear your favorite pages, or elaborate in the margins.

But you can do something that far exceeds all of the above. You can transform your Kindle into a learning device. Here’s how I made it work for me:

I highlight everything I want to remember. Then, I use the kindle notes page to cut down my highlights to their essentials. Then, I use Readwise to import all highlights to my Notion library.

I spent $150 on a Kindle and $50 a year for Readwise. But the rewards are priceless. The investment in e-reading changed the way I store and access my knowledge.

The Bottom Line

Generalizing investment advice is impossible because every person is different. What might be an incredible investment for me might not resonate with you.

And while these six investments in eating habits, meditation, bullet journalling, writing, relationships, and an e-reader have been great for me, they might be meaningless for you.

Your life, your rules. Whatever you determine as your most valuable investment is up to you.

But in any case, remember: The best investment returns aren’t monetary but the ones that increase your long-term health, happiness, and well-being.

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A Complete Guide to Doing a 10-Day Fasting Retreat

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I’ve fasted twice a year for 3 years and find it essential to my well-being. Here’s how to do it yourself, day by day.

A selection of broths and tea.
Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

As a teenager, I thought my parents were crazy. Twice a year, they would avoid solid foods for two weeks. They survived on tea and vegetable broth.

And the weirdest thing — my parents enjoyed it.

As I grew older, judgment evolved into curiosity: why would somebody voluntarily skip food?

Fasting therapy has a long tradition in Europe. In 1917, a German doctor suffered from rheumatism. As a self-experiment, Dr. Buchinger fasted for three weeks. He cured his disease and devoted his career to fasting as a therapy.

But in May 2017, I hadn’t read a single guide on Buchinger fasting yet. I only knew what I saw from my parents. You take laxatives when you start and then consume liquids: vegetable broth, diluted fruit juice, plenty of unsweetened tea, and water.

I did my first 10-day fast, shockingly unprepared. I didn’t use an irrigator. I didn’t move and relax enough.

And yet, fasting had an incredibly positive impact.

Never before had I felt so happy and calm. I felt my body. My thoughts were clear. I felt grateful. And I improved my eating habits long after the fast.

In short: fasting had a lasting impact on my health and wellbeing. I see fasting as the most powerful natural medicine to heal the mind and body.

So, since 2017 I’ve fasted twice a year. My first four fasts were at home, my fifth in an administered fasting retreat, and the sixth during lockdown at home.

I made mistakes along the way and learned a lot during these six fasts. I read books, talked to my parents, exchanged experiences with others, and got a better fast step by step.

[Editor’s note: consult with your doctor before attempting a fast and/or taking a laxative. Especially do not embark on a fast if you are in any of the groups listed below.]

If you belong to one of the following, however, don’t do a long-term fast:

  • Pregnant and breastfeeding women.
  • Children.
  • People with hyperthyroidism.
  • People with circulatory disorders of the brain.
  • People with type 1 diabetes.
  • Cancer patients (due to the risk of malnutrition with permanent calorie restriction).
  • People with a history of eating disorders or being underweight.

Benefits from personal experience

To give you a background of my body: I’m a 27-year-old cisgender woman with a 21 BMI. I’ve never had health complaints or operations. Before my first fast, doctors said I’m healthy.

But I wasn’t healthy. I ate a glass of Nutella a week, hated cooking, and felt addicted to eating. Plus, I didn’t like my body. I worried about gaining weight and eating too much five times every day. I felt trapped in a vicious circle of negative self-chatter.

This is how fasting changed my life:

  • Food Appreciation: I started to enjoy cooking and seeing food as nourishment for my body rather than a threat.
  • Healthy Diet: After fasting, I didn’t like the taste of sugar and processed foods anymore. I changed my diet, but not because I forced myself. It felt only natural to become vegan and choose fresh ingredients.
  • Food Patience: I’m no longer hangry. I know my body can survive days without food, and another hour won’t hurt me.
  • Body Appreciation: I felt gratitude for my healthy body and mind. What I took for granted suddenly felt special. The gratitude always remains for some months after the fasting period.
  • Higher Energy Levels: I had high energy levels before my first fast. But after fasting, I’m able to tackle anything I previously avoided.
  • A Clear Mind: I felt laser-sharp focus. I could look at my life from a bird’s eye perspective. I saw toxic friendships and felt the need to end them. I changed my phone habits. I decided to become self-employed. A lot of major life decisions happened as a result of my fasting experiences.

Other friends had similar experiences. Not all turned vegan and not everybody started to love their bodies. But all of them reported a greater appreciation of mind and body.

This guide is the quintessence of what I learned from my at-home fasts, the administered professional fasting retreat, and knowledge exchange with friends and my parents.

If I could, I would force my younger self to read this tutorial before her first fast.

This article will show you exactly how to create a fasting retreat in the comfort of your home.

First, you learn about the health benefits. Then you get the schedule for your fast and answers to the most common questions, like “Will I feel hungry? Will I lose muscles? Will I lose weight?” Finally, you’ll learn how to overcome the biggest hindrances along the way.

The Benefits You Can Expect From Long-Term Fasting

During fasting, two mechanisms in the body help cleanse and detox it: ketone metabolism and autophagy.

Our body focuses on sustaining our brain, and it uses glucose to do so. Sugar is in our food, and our body can produce glucose itself. That’s why we don’t die when we don’t eat sugars, like in a low-carb diet.

But at around the second day of our fast, our body has used up the glucose reserves in the blood and the liver (and converted extent muscle protein to glucose). Then, the body switches to ketone metabolism.

Ketones are a backup fuel for cells and the brain. They save our body from degrading our muscles while supplying our brains with energy. You can detect ketone increase after a few days of fasting by a slight acetone smell in the breath.

Ketones nourish the brain and can protect the brain from inflammatory cells, which play an important role in degenerative brain diseases.

During fasting, the energy normally needed for digestion, resorption, transport, and storage of nutrients, is saved—the cell switches to a protected mode, where the aging pathways are deactivated.

“Up until the mid-twentieth century, it was more or less a rule of human life that food was not available 24/7. Hard winters and unpredictable circumstances could lead to bad crop harvests. Our body adapted to this regular deficit exceedingly well in its genetic development.“

— Prof. Dr. Andreas Michalsen

Yoshinori Ohsumi won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine because he discovered somatic cells have a recycling program’ that enables them to deconstruct old, damaged, or incorrectly folded proteins into the smallest structures and then rebuild them into new, healthy complexes. This process is called autophagy and is the second mechanism that happens during fasting.

Here’s why autophagy is great for fasting, according to Dr. Michalsen, a Professor of Clinical Complementary Medicine at the CharitĂ© University Medical Centre Berlin:

“This process is initiated in instances where the cell is in distress — during fasting, for example. That’s when the cell deconstructs components that have become unnecessary in order to release energy. This energy is then used to form urgently needed molecules. About thirty-five genes control the process of this internal digestion.”

In short, autophagy is a cleanup process in the body. During fasting, the body has more capacity to concentrate on recharging the cells with nutrients that are no longer being supplied.

What science says about fasting effects

“The positive effects of fasting begin after a period of fourteen to sixteen hours. You get those positive effects whether you fast consistently every night, or maybe one entire day a week, or seven to fourteen days,” writes Prof. Dr. Andreas Michalsen.

In his 2017 book, he explains how the body cleanses and detoxes itself during a long-term fast. Let’s look at specific parts of the body. The following list of effects of fasting is the result of ketone metabolism and autophagy.

  • Brain: Increases the growth factor BDNF; changes the messenger balance; enhances mood; stimulates the production of nerve cells; prevents dementia
  • Liver: Stimulates production of ketone bodies and breakdown of glycogen as an alternative source of energy; leads to the reduction of the growth hormone IGF-1
  • Pancreas: Decreases insulin production, recovery
  • Joints: Fasting counteracts rheumatism and arthritis; relieves pain
  • Cardiovascular system: Lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels; lowers the heart rate; improves heart rate variability
  • Gastrointestinal tract: Increases diversity of intestinal bacteria
  • Fat tissue: Leads to fat reduction; changes to messengers (e.g., decreased production of leptin; anti-inflammatory

There are numerous scientific studies from researchers independent from Dr. Michalsen that attest to the benefits of a 10-day fast. My favorite ones include the ones that show fasting strengthens your immune system, improves your cognitive ability, enhances your mood, and alleviates major health complaints. Plus, fasting has empirically documented beneficial effects on rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, fibromyalgia, chronic pain syndromes of the locomotor system, and hypertension.

The Step-by-Step Guide to a 10-Day Fast

Long-term fasts have three phases. The first is the transition phase, where you eat low fat and high fiber. The second phase of food abstinence begins with a day for colon cleansing, followed by fasting days. After you break the fast, you enter the third phase for slow food build-up.

In the following, you’ll find the exact shopping list I always use and a guide on the three phases for your fasting schedule.

Before you start: The Shopping List

It’s nice to start with the right equipment. While doing my first fast, I wasn’t well equipped and had to go to the store every other day. It’s unnecessary self-torture to walk past a well smelling bakery store during your first fast.

With good preparation, you can easily avoid going to any grocery. Here’s what I found helpful to have at home before you start your fast:

Fasting equipment & helpful tools:

  • 20 g–30 g Glauber’s salt, Bitter salt, or laxative tea for a one-time intestinal voiding.
  • A running-in device (irrigator/enema) for colon cleansing during fasting.
  • Massage glove or massage brush for supporting your skin’s blood flow.
  • A hot-water bottle for a liver wrap (more on that later).
  • Basic mineral bath salt for a full bath or foot bath.

Food for the transition phase:

  • 2 l–3 l drinking water (without carbonic acid—that is to say, not sparkling/fizzy water).
  • Various unsweetened herbal teas.
  • Oatmeal, apples, cinnamon, rice or couscous, unsalted nuts, vegetables (e.g., broccoli, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, eggplant).

Nutrients for 3–7 fasting days:

  • 10 l –15 l drinking water (without carbonic acid).
  • At least three different kinds of unsweetened herbal teas (my favorite ones include camomile, nettle, and herbal blends).
  • 1 kg–2 kg vegetables for cooking a vegetable broth.
  • 2 lemons.
  • 1 l–2 l juice, not-from-concentrate (e.g., carrots, tomato, beetroot).
Vegetable juices, teas, and supportive tools.
Vegetable juices, teas, and supportive tools. Source: Author

Day 1: Transition

The better the preparation, the easier the fast. In the days before fasting, you want to do anything that helps your body. This initial adjustment period with light food prepares your body and intestines slowly and gently for the transition to fasting.

The first time I fasted, I skipped the transition phase. I was like, “I should eat everything I can because I will feel so hungry during the next days.”

Hence, I ate a lot. Like a lot of lot. At least I didn’t drink alcohol, but I ate a glass of Nutella, crisps, and high-fat processed foods. Binge eating didn’t harm me but made the first days a lot more difficult.

The second time I fasted, I included a proper transition phase. Once I felt how much easier fasting was, I knew I would never skip this phase again.

Including the transition phase makes the first fasting days a lot more enjoyable.

To get the perfect start, stop eating meat, refined sugar, and processed foods. Restrain from alcohol, nicotine, and salt. Instead, drink plenty of water and unsweetened tea.

What helped me the most was a positive mindset. I avoided thinking too much about what I shouldn’t eat but focused on the recipes I would eat during the days before the fasting.

It’s a great idea to plan your meals for the transition phase. The table contains meal suggestions and supportive activities.

Meal suggestions and activities for the transition phase.
Source: Author

Day 2: Colon Cleansing

This day is a bit tricky because there will be a lot going on in your stomach and gut. But in my experience, once your inner organs are clean, you will feel free and light.

On the morning of this day, you start with a big cup of tea and laxatives. I personally prefer “Glauber salt” over other options such as Epsom salt or a high-dose of magnesium because it always worked really well for me.

In the retreat, most people used magnesium as it’s a bit more gentle. It worked for them as well.

Whatever laxative you choose, make sure to drink a lot of water and unsweetened tea. And keep a toilet near you for the entire day. Remember your physical hunger vanishes as soon as your stomach and digestive system are empty.

Suggested food and activities for colon cleansing.
Source: Author

Day 3–Day 7: Fasting days with tea and broths

During the days of fasting, you skip any solid food (no macronutrients). Instead, you drink plenty of water, unsweetened tea, mineral water, and an organic vegetable broth (micronutrients).

For cooking the broth, choose your favorite vegetables, or use an existing recipe like this one or this one.

The second and third day of fast is the toughest day when it comes to energy levels. Your body changes its metabolic processes. You might feel tired, weak, hungry, and moody. But going through this day is worth it.

Many people experience a “fasting high” from day four and onwards. My experience confirms the words from Prof. Dr. Andreas Michalsen:

“From the third to fifth day, most fasting people are in a positive mood and feel satisfied, some even euphoric.”

After the first days, your mind and body feel light and free. The suggested activities aim for the right balance between exercise and relaxation. You don’t want to do sports at 100%, but keep your metabolism going by doing some lighter exercises. If you feel tired, it’s likely due to a lack of movement.

Suggested food and activities for fasting days.
Source: Author

Day 8: Fast-breaking

Fast-breaking is a gradual build-up to your regular calorie intake.

On the first day of fast-breaking, you start the day by eating an apple. Eating an apple may sound unspectacular, but I promise it’ll be the best apple in your entire life.

After days of fasting, your gustatory nerves are super sensitive. You’ll have a taste sensation. So, celebrate your first solid food. Enjoy every bite and marvel at the stimulating eating experience.

It’s best to eat the apple in the morning, so your body has enough time to produce digestive juices and switch the metabolism. Just like your body needed time to ease into the fast, it now needs time to start its digestive mechanism again.

Suggested food and activities for fast-breaking.
Source: Author

Day 9–10: Build up and reintroduction to ingesting solid foods

I know the urge to eat everything you craved for shortly after the fast break.

But resist this urge.

Give your body time to adjust.

The 2013 fasting guidelines state: “For successful fasting, a mindful and stepwise reintroduction of solid food intake is of importance and a cornerstone to successfully adopt a more healthy lifestyle following fasting.”

If you were to eat normal portion size again immediately, you would not only negate the positive effects of fasting but would actually harm yourself.

“Every fool can fast, but only a wise person knows how to break a fast.”

— George Bernard Shaw

During the build-up days, you eat easily digestible food high in fiber. The fresher, the better. The following days you proceed with a healthy whole-food diet. All ingredients should be as fresh and natural as possible.

Start with small food portions; your stomach is smaller and won’t need as much as before. Chew each bite well until there is only liquid in the mouth. Eat as slowly as you can; it might help to put the fork down after every bite. And most importantly, stop eating when you’re full.

Suggested food and activities for build-up.
Source: Author

Answers to the Most Common Questions

Many people have a lot of questions before they first start. Here are the ones I always hear from friends, as well as the answers to those questions.

Will I feel hungry?

Not as much as you think. You might feel physical hunger as long as your gut is not completely empty yet. But from day two onward, you’ll unlikely feel any hunger.

A 2019 study with almost 1,500 participants showed periodic Buchinger fasting wasn’t linked to a relevant perception of hunger. On the contrary, fasting was subjectively experienced as enjoyable, which is an important factor for compliance.

Will I lose muscles?

My boyfriend does weight-lifting six times a week. He didn’t join my first three fasts as he was afraid of losing muscles. In 2019 he did some research (he’s a 5th-year medical student) and joined fasting ever since.

Here’s how he explained to me what happens to our muscles.

From a purely evolutionary point of view, it’s logical our body doesn’t lose all muscles during a fasting period. Some 4,000 years ago, our species survived by hunting and gathering. We had no refrigerators to preserve our food. So we ate most of what we found immediately.

If we’d lose muscle mass anytime we hadn’t food around us, we couldn’t survive. With less and less strength, the chance of hunting and gathering new food would decrease. So, what happens?

A little muscle mass is lost during fasting but the extent of degradation is very small. In the first fasting days, the empty gastrointestinal tract and the lack of carbohydrate causes the insulin and thus the blood sugar level to drop.

This results in higher levels of glucagon (the antagonist of insulin) and adrenaline. As a result, more fatty acids are released from fat tissue and the absorption of these into our cells (as an alternative energy supply) is simplified.

Glycogenolysis also starts — glycogen stored in the liver is released and converted into glucose, which in turn supplies us with energy. Gluconeogenesis also starts — glucose is newly synthesized from lactate, amino acids, and glycerine.

The amino acids that are used here come primarily from skeletal muscles and represent the small part in which muscles are broken down.

It’s so small because after about 14 hours the ketone metabolism, ketogenesis, gets going and is responsible for the entire energy balance after 2–4 days at the latest. Glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis then go back to almost zero.

The substrate, i.e. the starting substance for the ketone bodies, are fatty acids, the amino acids of the muscles are no longer touched and consequently, no further muscles are lost.

Will I lose weight?

In the short-term, yes. But weight reduction is only a side effect. As Dr. Michalsen writes: “Fasting is not about reducing calories — if you simply eat less, the effect is not the same as fasting. Fasting is about using food deprivation to expose the body to small doses of stress, which leads to a stimulus reaction that detoxes the body and regulates it anew.”

Fasting can be a perfect start for changing your eating behavior. But ultimately, the kilos you lose while fasting will only stay if you manage to change into a healthy eating behavior.

Can I do fasting while working?

It depends. During those 10 days, you don’t want to have any social must attends, like weddings or birthdays. The temptation to eat makes the event unenjoyable.

You can fast while working. I fasted while I worked as a full-time teacher. I fasted while I built my startup. Here, the important thing is to do the colon cleansing while staying at home, like on the weekend.

Yet, the easiest way to fast is when you don’t have much work to do. The fewer external distractions and stress, the easier it will be for you to balance exercise and movement. It’s also easier to listen to your body.

If you have the luxury of leftover holidays, it’s a great time to use it because you can give your body all the time it needs. Home office during quarantine is actually a great time to do it, as you might be able to schedule your days more flexibly.

Is long-term fasting good for anyone?

No. Fasting is good for healthy individuals and can help treat skin diseases, rheumatism, and type 2 diabetics. But certain groups shouldn’t fast.

If you belong to one of the following, don’t do a long-term fast:

  • Pregnant and breastfeeding women.
  • Children.
  • People with hyperthyroidism.
  • People with circulatory disorders of the brain.
  • People with type 1 diabetes.
  • Cancer patients (due to the risk of malnutrition with permanent calorie restriction).
  • People with a history of eating disorders or underweight.
An apple sliced into four.
Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash

Biggest Obstacles and Tips to Overcome Them

Let’s be honest: even if you follow all of the tips and the preparation above — have all ingredients in the fridge, follow the activities, take time to be with your body — you might be tempted to break some rules or even entirely quit the fasting halfway through.

Knowing the name of these obstacles will make it easier for you to deal with each of them. The hindrances show up differently for everyone, and some don’t experience any of them.

Yet, a lot of people experience some side effects. Our bodies’ metabolic products and toxins are excreted during fasting through our detoxification organs, the intestines, liver, kidneys, and skin. Side effects like fatigue, headache, and dizziness can be natural side effects of the detoxification process.

1. Food cravings

Even if you don’t feel hungry, you might want to eat. Many people are emotional eaters and take a bite without being hungry. Anytime you smell food from a store nearby or think of food, you might experience cravings.

What to do: Start a “want-to-eat” list. Write down what you’re craving for and promise yourself to cook all these things once you’re done. By putting your desire on a sheet of paper, it’s out of your head.

2. Fatigue

You might feel a lack of energy. This might be a sign that your body wants movement. As this fasting study writes, physical activity causes a general stimulation of the macro-and microcirculation in the body, and also in excretory organs, and can enhance their activity

What to do: Move your body at 60–80% exposure. If you go running regularly, go for a light jog. If you normally jog, go for a brisk walk. Dance in your home, or do a guided yoga session.

3. Lack of concentration

Especially during the first days, focusing or sitting for a long time can be tough. You might think slower, or your comprehension isn’t that good at all. That’s why it’s a great benefit not to have a full-scheduled working week.

What to do: Be gentle with yourself. Give yourself a break and take time to rest or move. Accept that fasting can slow your brain in the short-term but know that it’ll ultimately support your body’s healing.

4. Headache

Your body and mind recover from food. When you fast, you free a lot of energy that was previously needed for digestion. You allow your body to repair and rebuild itself.

Yet, this rebuilding process also requires energy. Depending on the toxicity of your previous lifestyle (stress, processed foods, movement), the repair process will feel harder for some than for others.

What to do: If you have a headache, a large glass of water is a great first choice. Plus, using your irrigator can relieve your headache.

5. Dizziness

Especially after some time in bed, for example, in the morning, you might feel dizzy when you get up. During our last fast, my boyfriend got up so quickly in the morning that he fell back straight into his bed.

Your body’s metabolism needs more time to get going, and dizziness is a natural reaction.

What to do: You can easily prevent morning dizziness by sitting before you get out of bed. What also helps is preparing a bottle of water with some squeezed lemon, which you can drink before you leave your bed.

7. Boredom

You don’t have to go grocery shopping, cook, order food, and eat anymore. You gain one to three hours during your days, and boredom might arise. You can use this time to do something good for yourself.

What to do: If you feel bored, the first choice should be doing anything that feels good for your body. Pick your favorite activity. Go for a walk, do some yoga, journal, meditate, read, talk to friends, or sleep.

And, if you really don’t know what to do anymore, read some scientific papers on the health benefits of fasting. This is always a motivation boost.

8. Bad Taste

From day two onwards, you might experience a bad taste. Your body uses your tongue for detoxification, and bad taste is only natural.

What to do: Drink a glass of water with squeezed lemon. If you feel like it, you can also use a tongue scraper.

Are You Ready for Your Fasting Retreat?

Almost four years have passed since my ill-prepared fast in 2017. Six fasting experiences later, I truly understand why my parents stuck to this curious habit for most of their adult life.

Indeed, a liquid fast is a holistic, mind-altering, and cost-efficient way to improve your health, and thereby, your life.

However, I’d lie if I said fasting is easy and simple and like a great holiday because it isn’t. Fasting is a powerful tool that eases your body — often painful — toxins and feelings which our eating habits otherwise tend to override.

When it’s only your body without food for ten days, you’ll have not much to ease your emotions, which can be tiring, hard, annoying, and, frankly, also boring.

We’re so used to eating that our body and mind rebel like a child when we force ourselves to refrain from food intake.

But if you stick through the initial hurdles, your fasting retreat might become one of the most rewarding and grounding experiences you’ve done in life.

May your personal fasting retreat feel as rewarding and incredibly healing for you as it was — and continues to be — for me.

“Fasting is not just a physical discipline; it can be a spiritual feast.”

— Jentezen Franklin

7 Priceless Gifts That Will Improve Your Money Management

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Time with Naval, automation, books, net worth tracking, and so much more.

Photo by MayoFi from Pexels

Do you ever find yourself dragging your money tasks from month to month without tackling them?

By postponing your investments from month to month, year to year, you’re missing the most important principle for accumulating wealth.

Just like successful investor Naval Ravikant said:

“All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.”

If you don’t know how to tackle your financials, it’s likely because you’ve ignored some of the fundamentals.

Here are seven priceless yet invaluable gifts to give yourself that will improve the way you manage your money.

1) The Best Way to Learn from Successful Investors

You make all financial decisions in life. So, the best way to make better investment decisions is by knowing how the most successful investors play the money game.

That’s what Benjamin Franklin meant when he said: “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

And books are the single best way to learn from the most successful investors. Books are affordable and accessible wherever you are.

Reading gives you access to the smartest money minds. You can pick whatever investor brain you like. By learning the principles that guide top investor’s decisions, you’ll find yourself on the fast track to making better money choices.

So, which books should you read?

I started with the free audio-book of ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ on Spotify. Then, I ordered more fundamentals, like ‘Think and Grow Rich,’ The Intelligent Investor, and ‘The Millionaire Next Door.’

However, if I’d start again, I’d go for entertaining, short, and applicable books first, like ‘I Will Teach You to Be Rich’ by Ramit Sethi.

What you can gift yourself:

Your life, your rules. The books I love might not be the ones you like. Choose the brains you want to borrow and read what fits your lifestyle.

To find a book you want to read, visit your favorite library, bookstore, or browse through popular finance books GoodReads sections.

But whichever book you choose, remember even the best books are worthless unless applied. Summarize your learnings and reflect on them, for example, by sharing your new knowledge with co-workers and friends.

2) Book a Counseling Session with a True Expert

Did you know that most financial consultants are salespeople?

I didn’t. In 2016, I asked my bank advisor for financial advice. He told me to start saving on a building loan contract. And so I made my first uniformed investment decision.

Bank consultants and many other financial experts earn money per product they sell. And because they earn commissions, you’ll understand why they likely direct you to expensive products like loan contracts, bloated funds, life insurance, and so on.

What you can gift yourself:

Don’t ask a bank advisor or an insurance rep for money advice. Instead, get a fee-only adviser who is a fiduciary. He will put your financial interest first.

If you’re living in the states, you can find these advisors on the national association of personal financial advisors; in Germany, it’d be this one. You can find the perfect match if you google for fee-only financial advisors.

In an introduction call, ask questions like: How do you make money? Is it through commission or strictly fee-only? Have you worked with people in similar situations? What’s your working style?

3) Three Hours With Naval Ravikant

Tim Ferriss described Naval best, writing:

Sure, he’s the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList. Sure, he previously co-founded Vast.com and Epinions, which went public as part of Shopping.com. Sure, he’s an angel investor and has invested in many mega successes, including Twitter, Uber, Yammer, and OpenDNS, to name but a few.

That’s all great, of course, and it shows Naval is a world-class operator instead of an armchair philosopher.

But I don’t take his perspectives, maxims, and thoughts seriously because of the business stuff. There are lots of miserable “successful” people out there. Be careful about modeling those, as you will get all the bathwater with the baby.

I take Naval seriously because he:

→ Questions nearly everything 
→ Can think from first principles 
→ Tests things well 
→ Is good at not fooling himself 
→ Changes his mind regularly 
→ Laughs a lot 
→ Thinks holistically 
→ Thinks long-term 
→ And
doesn’t take himself too goddamn seriously.

And Naval’s investment principles reflect his personality.

One of my favorite lessons from Naval is to find a way to detach your income from your time investment. He tweeted, “You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.”

The most profitable income is the one that doesn’t pay you for your time but for your scalable creations, like text, code, voice, video, or sound.

Rich people got wealthy by establishing systems that make money independent from time. Just like Warren Buffett said, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”

What you can gift yourself:

Naval is literally the smartest investor I know. Luckily, he launched his own podcast.

In this three hour audio, you find a collection of every episode he recorded on the topic of money, wealth, and investments. I promise three hours with Naval will be one of the worthiest investments you ever give to yourself.

4) Gift Yourself a Way to Track Your Wealth

Your net worth is the best number to measure your wealth. If you want to become a better money manager, tracking it is essential.

Your net worth is what you own minus what you owe. It’s your assets minus your liabilities.

It’s a reflection of your financial habits. Just like James Clear put it: “Your outcomes are lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits.”

Whether you’re earning $1k or $10k a month, you may not like your financial situation. And that’s okay. But while having a net worth of zero is no obstacle in becoming wealthy, not knowing about your net worth is.

What you can gift yourself:

Set up your net worth planner, or use apps like mint. Once you set up you’ve filled your net worth tracker, revisit it once a month.

When you look at your numbers over some months, you’ll see powerful patterns and the effects of cutting expenses, earning more, and investing wisely.

I go through my net worth once a month. In the beginning, I didn’t like it, but once I saw my money growing, it became a habit I enjoy. Every month I set aside 15 minutes and update the sheet.

Gifting yourself a net worth tracker is priceless yet invaluable on your journey to long-term wealth.

5) Make the Right Choices Easy by Using Automation

Increasing your financial wealth isn’t solely about how much you make. It’s also about how much you save.

Earning $1.000 or $10.000 a month won’t increase your net worth if you’re spending all of it on consumer goods like food, clothes, beauty products, cars, furniture, hairdressers, phones, and travel.

Your salary won’t make you rich, but your spending habits will.

People who spend 100% or even more will never accumulate wealth. So, smart investors save before spending.

The more you invest each month, the faster your money will grow. And by automating your investments, you don’t have to remember to save every month.

What you can gift yourself:

Set up a default option that automates your investments. Determine a fixed savings rate and set up a system that transfers your income to the right buckets.

Ramit Sethi, a personal finance advisor and Standford graduate suggests, using 50–60% for Fixed costs (rent, utilities, debt), 10% for Investments (401(k), Roth IRA, ETF saving plans), 5–10% for saving goals (vacations, gifts, house down payment, emergency fund) and 20–35% for guilt-free spending money (dining, drinking, movies, clothes, etc.).

Whatever you do, don’t save what is left after spending but spend what is left after saving. By gifting yourself the automation setup, you’ll consistently get the basics right.

6) Freedom From Stuff You Don’t Need

Did you know that 50% of the more than 1000 millionaires surveyed in ‘The millionaire next door’ never spend more than $400 on a suit, $140 for a pair of shoes, or $235 for a wristwatch?

They could buy expensive things, but they don’t. Because what made them rich in the first place is spending money on things that matter and investing the rest. Conscious spenders care about the value of something rather than the price.

As Ryan Holiday put it: “Mental and spiritual independence matters little if the things we own in the physical world end up owning us.”

New things cost money. And to earn money, you work. And to work, you give away your life. So, in the end, what you exchange for new stuff is your time on this planet.

What you can gift yourself:

Gift yourself mental freedom and stop buying things you don’t need. Instead, spend more time on the things that matter. Give yourself quality time with friends. Initiative get-togethers and weekend reunions. Start to meditate.

And, remind yourself that you have enough, do enough, and are enough. No material possession can help you feel inner wealth.

7) Gift Yourself Free Subscriptions to Superb Blogs

By now, you know about the great ways to take your money management from good to great.

And while most of the gifts require either time (reading books, listening to Naval, automation, net-worth tracker), or money (fee-only consultation), this last option is great for people without much time or money.

Free subscriptions to high-quality money blogs are a great way to receive easy-digestible regular insights.

What you can gift yourself:

Find two to three trustworthy blogs and gift yourself a subscription to their newsletters. Here’s a selection of my favorites:

  • Morgan Housel’s blog on psychology and money
  • Mr. Money Mustace on financial independence and retiring early (FIRE)
  • Dan Solin’s newsletters about flaws in the investing industry (e.g., “Cracks in the Robo-Advisor Facade,” or “Find the Courage to Be Different.”)
  • Ron Lieber’s money column for the New York Times
  • Madame Moneypenny (German only) on ETFs and investment tips

The Bottom Line

When I first tapped into the world of personal finance, I read as many books as I could. I went to seminars, joined masterclasses, and watched online courses. I saved 7,000€ for my emergency fund, tracked my net worth’s development, and set up an automated investment plan.

But managing your money isn’t complex long, or exhaustive. You don’t have to do all these things to improve your money management.

By gifting you one or two things, you can level up your financials. Just like Naval said: “Making money isn’t a thing you do — it’s a skill you learn.”

This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

How Social Media Captivates Your Mind

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Have you ever wondered how much lifetime you spend on social media?

According to this meta-analysis, it’s around two hours every day. And while you might think two hours a day is reasonable, the time adds up. By the age of 50, you’ll have spent more than 4 entire years on LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any social invention of the future.

“If you are not paying for the product, you are the product,” Jaron Lanier, a computer philosophy writer, said in a social media docudrama. In 2017, I co-founded a company against screen addiction and spent weeks researching addictive technology, persuasive design, and hooking mechanisms. And yet, Lanier’s words made me pause.

In our so-called attention economy, businesses make money by developing technology that attracts and retains attention for as long as possible. The more attention a social media platform can get from you, the more attractive its advertising space becomes, and the more it can charge its advertisers. We feel the platform is free to use, while we pay with our life’s limited attention.

This article is not going to teach you how to spend less time on your phone. Instead, it shows you the most common hooking mechanisms. Knowing them will help you identify platforms that use you as a product.

1) Red Notification Badges Alert Your Senses

20 years ago, Apple introduced with its Mac OS X the first version of the red notification badge — tiny, red, rounded, with numbers inside. Today, the red icon is almost everywhere. There are red dots next to the apps on your home screen and the horizontal toolbar of almost any social media platform.

When you see the red notification badge, you know there’s something you need to check: new activities, messages you need to reply to, people liking or commenting on your pictures, people who mentioned you, people that started following you, contact requests, or important announcements.

And the surprise factor behind the notification number makes these tiny red notification badges so powerful. You investigate because they could mean anything: a career-boosting email from your boss, a reminder for your hair dresser’s appointment today; a message from your crush; or a family member checking in with you.

This psychological strategy tells you that there’s information you want to know but requires you to click through to the site to find out more.

“Red is a trigger color,” design ethicist Tristan Harris said in an interview with the Guardian. “That’s why it is used as an alarm signal.” When you see such a badge, you need to click on it. It’s a visual form of screaming, shouting something like “hey, click on me; I’m important, you’re important.”

“I’ve met dots that existed only to inform me of the existence of other dots, new dots, dots with almost no meaning at all.”

— John Herrman in the New York Times

2) Pull-to-Refresh Works Like A Slot Machine

B.F. Skinner, a behavioral psychologist, experimented with mice on incentives and rewards in the 1950s. What he found led to a mechanism all social media platforms use: the intermittent variable reward.

Skinner discovered mice respond compulsively to random rewards. The mice would press a lever and sometimes got a small treat, other times a large treat, and other times nothing at all. Unlike the mice that received the same treat every time, the mice that received variable rewards pressed the lever compulsively.

Just like lab mice in Skinner’s box, we respond most voraciously to random rewards.

We crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. And that’s why we continue to pull-to-refresh. We don’t know when we’ll be rewarded. Most of the time, we won’t find anything noteworthy. But just like with gambling, we continue to refresh in the hope of a quick dopamine shot.

“You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing.”

— Tristan Harris in one of his essays

3) There’s No End to Infinite Scrolling Design

As we’ve established, nothing holds our attention better than the unknown. And that’s why often find ourselves subconsciously scrolling through social media apps for entire hours. Translating scrolling time into scrolling distance, this report shows we scroll for more than 200 meters per day.

According to Nir Eyal, the author of two best-selling books on persuasive design, wrote in Psychology Today, “The infinite scroll is interaction design’s answer to our penchant for endlessly searching for novelty.”

One finger flick away, we continue searching in the uncertainty of what’s next. Using platforms that deploy infinite scrolls can feel like solving a mystery, looking for a final puzzle piece. And during the aimless search, we give away much of our lifetime.

“Time worth 200,000 human lifetimes are wasted on a daily basis due to our act of infinite scrolling.”

— Aza Raskin, creator of the infinite scroll in an interview

4) Push Notifications Recapture Your Attention

If you’ve watched the Social Dilemma of Netflix, you might remember the following scene: two friends talk to each other in a cafeteria. Then, one gets a notification and checks in with his phone. Shortly after, both friends stare at their screens and disengage with the physical world around them.

“If you disengage, you get peppered with little messages or bonus offers to get your attention and pull you back in.”

— Natasha SchĂŒll, author of Addiction by Design.

Push notifications remind you to go back to a social platform. Something ‘exciting’ happened, something you shouldn’t miss. A friend posted a photo or tagged you in a story. You can’t help yourself but see it.

“The vast majority of push notifications are just distractions that pull us out of the moment,” Justin Rosenstein, the co-creator of the like button, said in an interview with Vice. “They get us hooked on pulling our phones out and getting lost in a quick hit of information that could wait for later, or doesn’t matter at all.”

For you, push notifications are disturbing. For the platforms using them, they’re a great tool. According to a report from analytics company Urban Airship, sending out weekly notifications doubles the app-retention on mobile operating systems.

5) Algorithmic Filtering Monetizes Your Mood

Have you ever wondered why you spend more time on your newsfeed than you intended to? Algorithmic filtering is the answer. Platforms like Facebook developed machine learning algorithms that study your behavior on the platform.

So-called ‘Text mining’ enables social media platforms to analyze your emotions. It’s common practice to record what you like and record how long you hover over a certain post. In this way, platforms do not only know what you’re interested in but also what mood you are in.

This 2019 study from two German Universities concluded Facebook has a great interest in studying your behavior as detailed as possible. At best, you only see interesting information in your ‘Newsfeed.’ Filtering information to maximize your engagement stops you from leaving the app.

6) Social Validation Makes You Want To Stay

One of the most prominent features of social reward mechanisms is the iconic ‘thumbs up.’ According to this 2019 study, a ‘like’ demonstrates positive social feedback on one’s own post or gives another person such feedback.

A group of neuroscientists investigated our brain’s responses to social validation. Instagram users were confronted with their own posted pictures. These pictures were manipulated by being presented either with many or few ‘Likes.’ When the participants saw more likes on their pictures, their brains showed greater activity in neural regions for reward processing, social cognition, and imitation. And that’s why we keep posting our pictures.

“We were not evolved to get social approval being dosed upon us every 5 minutes.”

— Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook Executive

With each tweet and post, we wonder how much social validation we’ll receive. This goes as far as quantifying our social influences with tools like Klout. And above all, it means we adapt our public behavior on the platforms to receive the maximum amount of recognition.

Final Thoughts

Persuasive design and addictive technology will continue to exist. There will always be tools competing for your attention. Yet, knowing the key mechanisms behind social media platforms can help you identify software that takes away your time. Watch out for:

  1. Notification Badges
  2. Pull-to-Refresh Triggers
  3. Infinite Scrolling
  4. Push Notifications
  5. Algorithmic Filtering
  6. Social Validation Cues

And whatever you do, charge your phone outside of your bedroom and keep Tristan Harris words in mind:

“Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn’t choose, wouldn’t we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens?”

Five Principles By Naval Ravikant That Will Teach You True Wealth

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“Seek wealth, not money or status.”

Source: Needpix

When was the last time you came across a person that excited you so much you had to consume all their content?

Until this Sunday in my bathtub, I hadn’t read anything from Naval Ravikant. But after the first pages of the ‘Almanack of Naval Ravikant,’ I realized I just book-met one of the most interesting people alive.

The e-book kept me awake late that night. Monday, I spent half the day reading a 45-page interview and contemplating on his tweetstorms. Here are his key principles that will help you become wealthy.

“You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.”

What do you have in common with Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, and all the other billionaires on the planet?

Right, you live your life within the same time scale. No matter how wealthy you are, you can’t make a single day have 26 hours.

That’s why the most successful people on this planet say no to almost everything. Plus, truly rich people didn’t build their wealth by renting out their time.

Rich people got wealthy by establishing systems that make money independent from time.

Many people could live better lives if they made their time work for them, but continue to sell their limited hours. What they receive in return are limited rewards.

So, the questions are: How can you decouple money and time to create limitless wealth? How can you earn with your mind, not your time?

Build and sell products with no marginal cost of replication—things like books, media, movies, and code. You can multiply your returns without working more.

Owning your share of a scalable product is the ultimate goal.

Or, as Naval put it:

“You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.”

“Making money isn’t a thing you do — it’s a skill you learn.”

Most people aren’t smart about their finances and will never understand the fundamentals of money management.

It’s not because these people are too dumb to become smart investors. They’re just too lazy to learn.

Maybe you’ve built an emergency fund.

Maybe you know and track your net worth.

Maybe you automated your ETF savings plan.

And maybe you’ve done none of the above.

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether you decide to learn about your financials. Because money management is a skill, anybody can learn. And once you get the fundamentals right, not much can go wrong.

Yes, financial literacy is inherited. If your parents aren’t smart about money, the chances are high that you don’t know essential investing principles.

My parents don’t know much about investing. But I took masterclasses, asked smart people how they manage their money, and read finance books. I know from experience that money management is a skill anybody can learn.

No matter how far you’ve come on your financial journey, you can take your money management from good to great by reading applicable finance books, like ‘I will teach you to be rich’ by Ramit Sethi, or ‘The total money makeover’ by Dave Ramsey.

Like most things in life — when you commit to learning, you can master almost anything. Like Naval says,

“Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work.”

“Seek wealth, not money or status.”

Money is just a means to transfer wealth, and status just a label in our social hierarchy. You want neither of them.

I used to join the money and status game. Here’s what happened.

I bought the newest iPhone. But an expensive phone comes with the fear of a broken screen. So I also bought a fancy case and overpriced insurance. And yet, I worried about theft while traveling.

By focusing on money and status, we purchase things that add burdens to our lives. Ryan Holiday put it best; writing, “Mental and spiritual independence matters little if the things we own in the physical world end up owning us.”

You don’t want money or status. What you want is wealth because wealth is the ultimate freedom.

Here’s how Naval summarized it in one of his tweets:

“The purpose of wealth is freedom; it’s nothing more than that. It’s not to buy fur coats, or to drive Ferraris, or to sail yachts, or to jet around the world in a Gulf Stream. That stuff gets really boring and stupid, really fast. It’s about being your own sovereign individual.”

“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn.”

No life skill can pay you greater dividends than learning how to learn. Yet, most people don’t know how to do it.

When researchers asked, “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?” 73% of students answered “No.”

The majority uses ineffective learning strategies and ignores that humans don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.

But it doesn’t have to stay this way.

Learning how to learn is a skill you can easily learn.

In the last years, I read books on learning and taught as a Teach for All fellow. Here are the best resources for learning how to learn:

  • The book ‘Make it stick.’ (336 pages; 7 hours to read)
  • The free Coursera course ‘Learning How to Learn.’ (15 hours to complete)
  • The learning section on ‘FS blog.’ (10 minutes per article)
  • The book ‘Mindsets.’ (320 pages, 6.5 hours to read)

And whatever you learn, keep Naval’s words in mind:

“Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long. The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. The means of learning are abundant — it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”

“Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.”

In 2017, I read my first life-changing book. Since then, I have read at least one book a week.

Yet, when I stumbled upon this quote by Ratna Kusnur some time ago, I started to question the power of books: “Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”

Before building my first business, I had read dozens of books for each stage in the business lifecycle. But when it came to really starting, the biggest impact was just doing it.

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk found the right words: “But how many books from these ‘experts’ do you need to read before you can actually do something? You can only read so much, and at some point, you just have to do. Stop being a student, and start being an entrepreneur.”

Yes, reading is faster than listening. But doing and trying trumps theoretical lessons.

You’ll get farther bumping along on your own without any books than you ever will, reading a lot but not doing anything.

And yet, the combination of reading and doing trumps mere doing. Again, Naval:

“Read a lot — just read.”

On page 207, you’ll find a list of the books he recommends with short statements, why he recommends them. But before you dive into every single one, remember Naval who said reading is not about following the book advice of famous people:

“It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people.”

If you blindly copy Naval’s principles, you missed the most important point.

You’re the only person that best knows how to live your life.

Try everything, but test it for yourself. Stay skeptical and discard what doesn’t serve you. Ultimately, only keep the principles that work for you.

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