🎯 Better Living

Audre Lorde Completely Changed How I Relate to Pleasure and Sex

January 15, 2023 by luikangmk

These revolutionary ideas can rewire how you think about the erotic.

When my tantra teacher read out a sentence, I didn’t anticipate how much the words would influence my life.

It was last August, and the sentence was one of those where you need to put in some mental effort to get it. I didn’t.

My brain was fogged from Vienna’s summer heat, and I only managed to save a link in my read-later app.

A week afterward, I read the entire essay. Again. And again. I have read it ten times since. And I discover new layers of meaning every single time.

Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ is one of those timeless essays with the power to change you. Below are some of her ideas that have transformed how I relate to pleasure and sex.

Tapping Into The Most Underrated Source of Power

I remember the moment I started to fear the yes within myself.

It was a week before I turned 13, in the bedroom of my then-best friend. We stroked our skin, and I felt an until-then-unknown heat arising from deep within.

It was in this moment of embodied desire towards another woman that my friend’s mum opened the door — eyes wide open, lips pressed together, her head shaking in disapproval.

I froze.

My deep-felt YES turned into something shameful to be ignored and avoided at all costs.

Audre Lorde writes, “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” She goes on to dismantle the oppression of the erotic in a patriarchal society.

Depending on where you live, there are implicit and explicit rules for acceptable behaviour in sex, pleasure, and desire.

Most societies are organized around patriarchy, with laws and media representation of practices that keep existing power dynamics in place (e.g. sex in a marriage between a cisman and ciswomen), and stigmatization, violence, or laws against practices that threaten them (e.g. free love of whoever they want, including other women and trans bodies).

Forty-five years after Lorde published her essay, cisgender women still learn to be submissive and obedient instead of being self-affirming, emotionally complex, and erotic powerhouses.

And while I feel troubled by the fact that Lorde’s text from 1978 applies almost half a century later, her words also make me feel hopeful.

Because as Lorde writes, “once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered.” Calling out dysfunctional structures and learned behaviour is empowering.

Despite global suppression, our deepest non-rational YES is still there.

“We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.”
— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Before, I was unaware of the erotic as a resource, a replenishing and guiding life force. But, since reading her essays, I started to prioritize pleasure.

Thanks to women who have done this for a much longer and are now sharing their tools, I learned to invite and embrace the DEEP YES within myself.

I am doing practices that teach my brain to connect power and pleasure. I am letting go of shame. I am uncovering what happens if I replace the roles patriarchy has scripted into me with actions guided by what I want to create instead.

I am learning my feelings are the most genuine path to knowledge. I am unlocking new levels of satisfaction, power, and completeness.

Eroticism is a source of female power — and power not meaning power over (as within our Western framework of individuality and independence) but power with others (self-actualization linked with the community).

Unlearning How Porn Fucked Up My Mind

Lorde writes how the erotic is a question of what we do and how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. She argues pornography isolates sex from feelings, thereby abusing the erotic.

In my first few reads, my mind objected. Porn can extend our spectrum of sexual imagination. Some films blend feelings, sensuality, and sex (see, for example, Getcheex or Erika Lust).

But most porn doesn’t.

I must have been around 14 when I watched my first YouPorn video. At that point, I had no sex education from school or my parents (beyond contraception and wrong depictions of female genitals).

I did not know almost all porn videos portray sex (seemingly) optimized for male pleasure, the male gaze. I did not sense that the sex I saw was only one very limited and female pleasure-ignoring form of sex created inside a mainstream paradigm stretching between rape culture and a culture of repression.

The most popular search terms on pornhub, a site people visit more often than Amazon or Netflix, revolve around racialized power dynamics, incest, or sexual encounters with women as objects.

Building upon Lorde’s essay, adrienne brown writes in her ‘Pleasure Activism’ “, While we didn’t create the water we are swimming in, it’s still poisoning us.”

“But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Lorde helped me investigate how porn has shaped sexual interests and behaviours.

The sexual scripts I learned from porn guided my sexual self-expectations and made me fake orgasms long into my twenties. I pretended to be satisfied, thinking this was normal, while now understanding, I followed scripts robbing any real sexual pleasure.

Lorde’s essay helped me understand how most porn was created from a patriarchal standpoint. These storylines wired my brain around fantasies and desires that are unhealthy for me. I also acknowledge the power of fantasies, as they can contribute to perpetuating existing inequalities.

I have started to retrain my brain around desires that stem from a new paradigm that centres around female pleasure, inclusivity, consensual non-monogamy, non-gender conforming roles, and a broader spectrum of beauty and attraction.

“I have been intentionally working on developing new fantasies. Fantasy is where I first explored the impossible idea that I am desirable. The improbable idea that fat bodies, brown and Black bodies, scarred and dimpled bodies, bodies that hurt and lurch and roll, bodies with hair and acne, bodies that sweat and make sounds and messes — that all of our bodies are desirable. This work has shifted my reality of lovers and my reality of how I see myself and let myself be treated.”
— Adrienne Marie Brown

Not Settling For Less Than Excellence in Life

Have you ever felt you are asking for too much?

Many women have been taught accommodation and obedience, with partners or families expecting them to sacrifice their desires for their partner’s or families’ greater good.

In her essay, Lorde encourages striving toward excellence in the erotic and not misconstructing it as demanding something impossible.

And this goes beyond intimate connections with ourselves or others. The erotic is a form of embodied energy that can inform many areas of our lives.

Lorde writes, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” She invites us to connect with our capacity for joy.

“It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Lorde made me realize that liberating pleasure is a precondition for satisfaction, joy, and excellence.

I don’t fear the yes inside myself, but I invite it. I dare to demand and aspire for what I truly want and not settle for less. I show up as the most empowered version that feels most like me in the context of the reality I was given.

Her words, and the interpretation of her words by brilliant minds such as adrienne brown, Minna Salami, and bell hooks, helped me understand that our power starts from within. Our pleasure and most non-rational knowledge can guide us to our most authentic desires.

I will continue to explore the erotic as power by sharing my deepest desires through my writing and the spoken word, engaging in more activities at a speed that allows me to feel fully (ecstatic dancing, self-pleasure practice and embodied awareness through breath, sound, feeling), and cultivating all my senses, and especially my felt-sense of touch (as opposed to my overdeveloped sense of sight).

Final Feelings

Every woman, cis or trans, experiences the erotic and discrimination against it. Yet, the ways of experience differ because of factors like race, class, disability, and gender presentation.

Lorde’s words still hold revolutionary power for all of us, as she shows how the erotic is a form of power that both reveals and endangers oppressive forces.

Organizing your life around pleasure is one of the most revolutionary things to do while nourishing our minds, bodies, and souls.

Ready to bring more pleasure into your life?

Sign-up free for the Pleasure Letter, a monthly newsletter where I share the best resources, reads, and tools for leading a more pleasurable life. If you want to become a fearless writer, sign-up for my free Write Letter.

A Reasonably Detailed Annual Review Guide for Better Health, Wealth, and Wellbeing

January 4, 2023 by luikangmk

A no-fluff template for living a more intentional life.

I should not compare myself to others, but I do it anyway.

I browse social feeds and see acquaintances mastering the most challenging yoga pose or raising millions of venture capital. I then enter thought patterns of no being and doing enough.

At the turn of the year, it’s easy to get lost in thoughts about what you don’t have instead of focusing on all the things you do have. But not much good can grow from the feeling of insufficiency.

One tool that helps me overcome feelings of inadequacy and start the new year with a deep sense of trust and power is my annual review.

I have done the review for six years in a row, and it has been life-transforming, specifically through two side effects:

Boosting self-efficacy— you zoom out to take a more nuanced look at your progress, revealing the factors that contributed to your failures and successes, recognising patterns, learning from key insights, and integrating them into your next year.
Increasing intentional living — you develop an understanding of what matters to you; you can see whether what you’re doing with your life is what you actually want to direct your time and energy to.

For example, as a late millennial and first-gen student from a well-resourced country, I grew up in a society that equates hard work with success. I unconsciously learned what’s acceptable (attaching self-worth to productivity) and what’s not (embodying felt emotions). Reflecting on how I relate to work helped me see patterns and unlearn beliefs and habits I perceived as harmful to my well-being and relationships.

This article guides you through the process and questions I use to look at the past, the future, and distinct life areas — from health to work to relationships, wealth, and more.

“My Annual Review forces me to look at my actions over the past 12 months and ask, ‘Are my choices helping me live the life I want to live?’”
— James Clear

Before you start, keep this in mind

I review my review each year and look for ways to improve it. Over the years, different brilliant minds and resources have inspired my thinking, such as Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Sara Blakely, James Clear, Michael Simmons, the free YearCompass, and the book Designing Your Life.

There is no single right way to do it. The best way to complete it depends on how much time you have and what you want to focus on.

Take anything that feels helpful for you and ignore the rest. You might do the entire review or just answer one or two questions.

This is not a test you need to pass — it’s a framework intended to help you wherever you are. So treat it like a buffet, and just take what looks delicious and nurturing for you.

The review is split into three parts — your past, a deep dive into your life’s areas, and your future. The below screenshots are from a template I create (access it free here).

Doing such a review is intense — you’re revisiting your key emotions and lived experiences. It’s normal to feel resistance or tiredness. Take breaks whenever you need them. I like to spread my review over an entire week, completing it a couple of questions at a time. But again — you are the only one to judge how you want to do it. Ready? Let’s start.

1) Reflecting on the past

Starting with open-ended explorative questions allows your most memorable experiences to bubble up. How have you lived your life? What feelings remain? By beginning with an explorative investigation, you allow your

Start with recalling things from your memory. Once you’re done, look at journals, calendars, diaries, and your camera roll, and add anything note-worthy.

Once you feel your answers are more or less complete, you can stop. Then, if you feel like it, share your highlights and lowlights with a friend, or send kind messages to people that were part of your most memorable experiences.

2) Diving deep into your areas of life

In this part, you take a more in-depth look at each area of your life. If you don’t feel the six life areas apply to you, feel free to replace them with whatever seems more adequate for you.

I’m most happy when I put equal focus on all life areas. I can be in perfect health, but I might be unhappy if my relationships are loaded with unresolved conflict and a feeling of disconnection.

Source: Your Annual Review Template (get the full template free here).

When looking at each life area, it is most helpful to consider three prompts. When answering “What went well?” and “What could have gone better?” I focus on the things you had an influence on — something where my choices or behaviour made a difference.

“Next year’s goals, focus and action steps” implies the following sub-questions: What habits, behaviours, or attitudes will you need to develop or adopt next year? What things or habits do you need to stop doing? Have you developed any healthy habits you want to keep? What helped you learn them?

Look at your overall health and well-being in the past year — how were you physically, emotionally, and mentally?

Which activities left you feeling drained, and which activities gave you energy? Has your health improved, deteriorated, or remained constant? How do you feel about your levels of movement, sleep, stress, awareness, pleasure, and time with yourself? Did you move in ways that supported your strength, health, and energy levels?

It can be tempting to lose yourself in storylines — either on how great you are doing or on how much you fucked up. But neither is true. Try to let go of any judgment and take stock of what you did and didn’t do.

Think about the relationships in your life and the people you spend time with — your partner(s), friends, parents, siblings, and more.

Which relationships gave you energy? Which relationships drained your energy? With which people do you feel safe? Who can you be vulnerable with? When have you felt connected to your community? How have you supported the people you love? Which conversations moved you? What new relationships would you like to bring to your life in the next year?

Consider how you spend your time and energy on work. Use your work emails, your work calendar, or meeting notes as evidence to get a better picture of what you worked on this year.

How do you feel about the role work has in your life? What achievements and challenges are you most proud of? What were your favourite projects? What professional relationships impacted your trajectory? How have you supported fellow workers? When did you feel most and least productive?

Most people live from paycheck to paycheck. Don’t feel bad if you have neglected this part of your life so far. Financial literacy is inherited — if your parents aren’t smart about money, chances are high that you don’t know essential investing principles.

Your annual review is a chance to take stock of where you’re at. Are you happy with how much you earned, spent, saved, and invested? How did you develop your net worth (assets (what you own) minus liabilities (what you owe))?

Knowledge isn’t permanent. Most of what we consider truth today decays within a decade from now. Nothing will benefit you more than learning how to learn and becoming a lifelong learner.

When you look at your year, ask yourself what things you have learned, e.g. through online courses, books, podcasts, or formal training. What was the most helpful thing you learned this year? What skills have you developed, and how did you progress? What do you need to continue and accelerate your desired learning path(s)? What new skills do you want to develop?

Your purpose is a deep understanding of the impact you’d like to make on the world. It’s the fuel behind your efforts and where you spend your time and energy. I find this the most challenging part, and I never felt done.

What fills you with excitement and passion? What can you contribute to have a positive impact on the world and our interconnected beings? What makes your life meaningful? How are you useful to humanity?

Write down your best version of your purpose statement(s). Don’t stress about the perfect purpose(s); you can adapt and change them anytime. You can have as many purposes, statements, and goals as you like.

3) Looking into the future

In this last part of your annual review, you look into your next year. You write from your future self, involving all of your senses.

Where do you live? What do you smell, see, hear, or touch? How do you feel when you wake up? Which habits do you follow? What do you work on? Which projects have you committed to? What have you let go of? What people do you spend time with? What hobbies are you pursuing? What are you learning?

Don’t edit yourself while writing the story — it can be as long as you like. You can do it in your journal, on a piece of paper, in the template, or in a text file.

The more vividly you describe your future life, the more emotions will emerge. And your feelings can serve as a helpful primer for your unconsciousness. This narrative is no fixed roadmap; this prompt invites you to dream and think big. Don’t edit yourself while writing it; try to ignore your judgmental voice as much as possible.

Conclusion

Taking the time to do your review, one question at a time, will help you reveal life lessons and critical insights you can integrate into your next year.

Do it a couple of years in a row, and you self-witness the power of consistency over a long period. You can replace all-or-nothing sprints with a more sustainable marathon mentality.

Whether you have 15 minutes or 10 hours doesn’t matter — the most important part is that you do it. Save the template, schedule in a couple of minutes, and give yourself space for one of the most direction-setting activities you can do all year.

Want to get more helpful tools like this?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven resources that elevate your love for learning and help you live a happier and healthier life.

How Optimizing Your Workdays for Focus Can Help You Do More in Less Time

December 7, 2022 by luikangmk

Staying productive, sane, and healthy as a solopreneur.

Source: Salzburg Global Seminar // Katrin Kerschbaumer

The first six months of working self-employed felt like a constant struggle between doing too much and barely enough.

Nobody sets your priorities or boundaries. You’re maximum self-reliant.

I felt guilty when I wasn’t working and stressed when I was.

It took me more than a year to benefit from the freedom and impact that can go along with it. Two and a half years in, I feel at peace with my workload most of the time.

Below are the mind shifts I took and tools I use to spend only a couple of hours at my screen each day.

1) Understanding that Working Less Doesn’t Equal Laziness

Are you sometimes judging yourself for not doing enough?

Societal structures have shaped our thoughts about productivity, rest, and enjoyment.

The working world values busyness and working for long hours. Rest, pleasure, and play are often equated with laziness. No wonder we often measure our worth by how much we achieve.

It took me years to unlearn this belief and untie my self-worth from achievement.

My grandparents were World War II survivors and peasants in a rural 800-village. My parents worked hard to offer my sister and me a childhood with more opportunities and prosperity than they had experienced.

For a long time, I felt guilty just thinking I wanted to work less than my parents. Their words always echoed inside my head:

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.)

It took me years of inner work, which included psychotherapy, rapid transformational therapy, and psychedelics, to feel my self-worth even in unproductive times.

I now know and feel (most of the time) that I AM ENOUGH — just in being, no matter what I do or don’t do.

This led to major behavioural shifts. I no longer sacrifice my health and relationships for work. I won’t wait for retirement to do what I really want to do. And this all doesn’t mean I’m lazy. It just means I no longer need productivity to feel worthy.

And yet, I want to have an impact on what I do. So apart from this inner work, I changed a couple of things in my working days to do more in less time.

2) The Key to Doing More in Less Time

Energy levels change during the day. The longer I sit, the slower I think. Writing an email at 5 pm might take thrice as long as writing it at 10 am.

I used to think the more hours I put in, the better the results. And I know so many people who brag about working long hours. But time spent is only one part of the equation.

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

You can spend eight hours with zero focus and not produce any high-quality work at all.

I decided to optimize for focus, thereby reducing the time I needed to produce my desired outcomes.

But building focus takes time.

I started with a single 20-minute block daily. I increased the duration to three to four 50 minutes blocks a day.

You won’t believe what’s possible if you work with a complete focus for four uninterrupted hours each day.

As Tim Denning wrote: “As much as it sounds like clickbait, 4 hours of deep work a day can be enough for most people to finish all their work.”

On most days of the year, I work up to four hours a day at my computer.

There are exceptions, though; weeks with time-sensitive client work while running my cohort-based online course, where I am back at 50-hour work weeks and many weekdays on which I don’t work at all.

3) The Things I Stopped Doing to Get Everything Done in Four Hours a Day

If you only have four 50-minute intervals a day to get your work done, there are some things to unlearn and deprioritize.

I no longer have my phone at my desk. My phone is in a different room. I enable flight mode until I’ve finished my focused work intervals.

If I have thoughts that require a phone, I write them down to do it after the in-depth work sessions (e.g. using the tan app for sending bank transfers, texting a friend about something etc.).

I don’t do online meetings except with my direct clients and those who work for me. I ask for or prepare prioritized agendas for weekly check-ins.

I “grab virtual coffees” audio-only over a walk in the park.

If you look at my calendar, you will barely find more than three hours of meetings in a week.

I don’t talk to people when I’m in focus mode. People around me know that if I wear my headphones, they can’t speak to me until the next break.

I don’t use messaging apps on my computer. I don’t have the WhatsApp application, and I’m not logged into LinkedIn, Facebook, or Slack.

I disabled all notifications on my computer and phone.

I don’t ever get notifications on my computer. I’m writing this in Manila, where I am visiting a friend and classrooms in the Philippines.

4) The Tools I Use to Maximize Productivity

There are only a couple of tools I use every day.

Headspace is the first app I use in the morning. I open the app on my old phone (while my real phone is still in flight mode in another room) and meditate for 10 or 15 minutes.

When I meditate, I follow my breath — inhales and exhales. The goal of meditation isn’t to get rid of thoughts. Thoughts are the weights in your mental gym. Your job is to return your attention away from them and back to your breath.

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.

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

Happiness is a by-product of complete presence, and meditation is one entryway into this presence.

Once I get to work and deep focus, I rely on three tools — noise-cancelling headphones, the free beFocused apps to schedule 50-minute intervals, and the free BlockSite extension that prevents me from visiting my distraction sites.

I start my workdays with the most thinking-intense task, which often includes some form of creation (writing concept notes, papers or articles).

Readwise and Roam power this creation process (more here).

My newest extension to this powerhouse is the Reader App by Readwise. It allows me to read through RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions and manually save documents in one beautiful interface. All highlights get synched to my Roam.

The Reader App is still in private beta mode, but anyone who signs up at Readwise through my link (even free trial users) can get access.

I often end my work hours by providing feedback to people who work for me. For that, I use a free project management tool called Clickup.

And that’s when I’m done with using digital tools (apart from my Kindle and a sports aggregator app called MyClubs). In the afternoon, I travel, read, meet friends, or learn something new (e.g. DJing this year).

Conclusion

The above advice doesn’t apply to most people on this planet.

I’m a cis-gender woman in a Western European Country where a single income can afford rent, food, and travel. I am privileged, and most of what I have achieved is not due to hard work or focus but rather my privileges.

But if you read this and can afford a $5 Medium subscription, you might be similarly privileged. In this case, the above strategies and tools can help you spend less time working on a laptop if you want to.

Want to feel inspired and become more thoughtful about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

A Comprehensive Metaverse x Learning Guide For Curious But Busy People

October 11, 2022 by luikangmk

Research-based predictions for a soon-to-be reality.

Have you ever wondered how the metaverse might shape the future of education and learning?

Trying to find answers can be frustrating. While there’s much writing on the metaverse, most of it lacks substance. Unless you’ve got time for thorough research, finding no-fluff scenarios is a challenge.

But don’t worry, I’ve got you.

As a teacher-turned-writer, I have the time to follow metaverse rabbit holes so that you don’t have to. In the past weeks, I read everything I could find on the topic (I even visited a web3 exhibition in New York).

This comprehensive guide is a no-fluff, distilled version of what I learned about the metaverse and its impact on education and learning.

The article will help you understand what the metaverse is (1), how it might — or might not — disrupt learning (2), companies worth knowing (3), and what is required to build a great metaverse for all (4).

Table of Contents1 The Metaverse is More Than Meta
1.1 A brief history of the metaverse
1.2 How tech leaders define the metaverse2 Can the Metaverse Do What EdTech Failed to Do?
2.1 Doing the Same, Only Better
2.2 Disrupting How We Learn3 These Companies Are Already Disrupting Learning
3.1 Roblox
3.2 Labster
3.3 FundamentalVR
3.4 Talespin, Mursion, and Unimersiv4 Prerequisites for Building Something Great
4.1 Diverse content development teams
4.2 Hardware access for all learners
4.3 Governance to ensure privacy, safety and security5 Conclusion

1) The Metaverse is More Than Meta

Since Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation in October 2021, the metaverse has been on most people’s radars. But what many don’t know is that there won’t be just one metaverse.

Here’s a brief history of the metaverse, as well as the current definition of what it actually is.

1.1) A brief history of the metaverse

The term metaverse first appeared in Neil Stevenson’s 1982 novel Snow Crash and referred to a hellscape of corporate control.

At the time, Stevenson wrote, “the people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the metaverse.”

Since then, different companies have started to develop and build on metaverse technology. For example, they have introduced VR machines, glasses, and applications long before Facebook’s metaverse (for example, IKEA’s place app in 2017).

History of the Metaverse. Source: Days Tech

1.2) How tech leaders define the metaverse

Since Stevenson’s novel, the understanding of the metaverse has shifted. Cathy Hackl, an expert on web3, asked 20 tech leaders how they’d explain the metaverse.

In essence, what they said is that the metaverse will bridge the gap between reality and a virtual world by relying on technologies such as virtual reality (a full immersion in virtual environments, e.g., through a VR headset) and augmented reality (the real world enhanced with virtual objects, e.g., through your phone).

“The Metaverse is the internet, but you can go into it (VR) or it can come out to you (AR). As with any new technology we invent, there will be unintended consequences which require us to stop and think ‘What is the future we all want to see?’”
– Alan Smithson

Experts are predicting several use cases, including virtual retail venues for shopping, virtual co-working spaces, advertising channels for brands, fitness and telehealth hubs, social gaming platforms, space for global convenings, and even digital lecture halls.

Yet, tech leaders agree that we’re still far from the metaverse becoming our new reality. We’re still in the early stages of development.

Eric Hazan, one of the lead authors of a McKinsey report on the metaverse, writes: “There’s a lot of excitement about the potential this technology holds, but the computing power isn’t there yet to make the metaverse of people’s imaginations feasible.”

For instance, the graph below shows the different layers needed to unlock the metaverse’s potential. As you might notice, we’ve barely unlocked each stage.

But supposing we had the sufficient infrastructure, human interfaces, and enough computing power, what would the actual predictions for the metaverse’s impact on learning in future scenarios be? And can the Metaverse achieve EdTech’s promise?

2) Can the Metaverse Do What EdTech Failed to Do?

Analyzing the past twenty-five years of education technology, you’ll realize that EdTech often has over-promised but under-delivered.

Massive Open Online Courses scaled traditional chalk and talk settings, and you can now learn from the best experts on MasterClass. However, despite the high-quality videos, the format remains painfully static. Even though learning science revealed the ineffectiveness of passive content consumption, it often remains a predominant paradigm in EdTech.

Education technology has yet to transform how we learn, but a true disruption of this paradigm should include fully immersive, active, and experiential learning experiences.

The metaverse could enable such unpredictable, real-life scenarios by combining augmented, virtual, and mixed reality within a shared, explorable, and adaptive virtual universe.

But will the metaverse live up to its potential? Here are two predictions for how the metaverse will or won’t change how we learn.

2.1) Doing the Same, Only Better

This 30-second clip by Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook ) displays what happens when metaverse builders fall into the same trap that many EdTechs have fallen prey to — doing the same, only better.

Source: Meta/Youtube

The metaverse allows you to “step inside your textbooks.” You can see learning objects — such as the planet Saturn — in 3D, and you can zoom in and zoom out to study its details.

So what’s the problem?

We’re doing the same thing we’ve always done. It’s just bigger and a bit better, but not different.

Meta Platforms, Inc. is not the only metaverse builder following that route. Most examples I came across are variations of the following two use cases.

Visit the world without the cost, effort, and climate footprint of traveling. You can do field trips and visit museums, nature, monuments, and historical sites worldwide. You could be living in Austria but visiting the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City or exploring biodiversity in South Africa.

Travelling becomes less resource-intense and more accessible, which is disruptive for travelling.

But is it for learning?

Learning remains the same; it’s just delivered in a different format. You’re still a passive consumer, watching, seeing, or witnessing the learning objects.

Here’s another example that feels innovative but doesn’t disrupt learning itself. Knowing what you know now, you might already sense the missed opportunities behind the initial excitement.

Imagine not reading about historical events but immersing yourself in them. You could be participating in key historical moments to feel how they changed the course of humanity. You might, for example, stand in a crowd of 250,000 people while Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.

Again, this use-case copies what we’ve been doing into a new format while not adding additional benefits for the learner.

Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explains: “I don’t think just porting material to some new format is the way to go. I think what we need to do is explore what is the gift that this new platform can offer us.”

So what will it take for the metaverse to truly transform how we learn?

2.2) Disrupting How We Learn

To revolutionize how we learn, the metaverse needs to offer experiences that go beyond immersion. Here’s what this could look like:

Work as Marie Curie’s lab assistant during her discovery of radioactivity. You could also run any chemical experiments that would be too dangerous for any classroom, like melting aluminum or smashing a flower that’s been frozen with liquid nitrogen. You could test gravity by dropping a feather and a hammer under Earth-like conditions, on Mars, or under the sulfur rainfalls on Venus.

In a metaverse that builds on experiential learning, you’re not simply watching a 3D movie. Instead, you can interact with your environment and experience changed conditions and get live feedback based on your interactions.

You can learn high-risk skills such as driving, performing surgery, flying, sailing, skiing, or firefighting in virtual environments. Instead of reading books on public speaking, you can practice in real settings with an actual audience — and receive feedback given your performance.

Disruptive learning experiences in the metaverse go beyond immersion and virtual field trips. The learner’s experience changes based on the questions asked and the decisions made in hands-on, minds-on virtual environments.

Through deliberate and repeated practice opportunities and feedback loops, learners can benefit from more engagement, confidence, and application.

“Are you going to try to make something that’s good for people, just like junk food, or you’re going to make something that’s healthy […] .Let’s make it good. And let’s not go down a rabbit hole that is going to be dangerous for children.”
— Dr Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

3) These Companies Are Already Disrupting Learning

As you know, the metaverse is more than Meta (formerly Facebook). There’ll be many metaverses.

Against the backdrop of metaverses and learning, these companies are operating on the edge of transforming how we learn.

3.1) Roblox — An ecosystem to disrupt teaching and learning

Roblox is a platform for virtual gaming experiences, and they already have a metaverse. As of August 2020, Roblox had over 164 million monthly active users, including more than half of all American children under 16, and plenty of educators are using Roblox.

Roblox aspires to help 100 million students learn by 2030 and intends to offer an ecosystem of educational experiences that are both fun and engaging. One prominent example of this is Project Lead The Way, which offers STEM educational learning experiences in an engaging, hands-on classroom environment to PreK-12.

3.2) Labster — Science for High School and Higher Ed

Labster, a company founded by educators, scientists, and game designers, builds on learning science to offer virtual labs, science simulations, and interactive learning environments.

Their simulations could enable the described Marie-Curie experience by giving students access to a million-dollar laboratory with highly immersive learning experiences.

What excites me most about Labster is its evidence-based product development. In fact, the company conducted 11-peer reviewed research studies to inform product development and improve learning outcomes.

Use a realistic and high-tech hologram to observe the structures & important organs in our new Female Reproductive System: Gross Anatomy #simulation: https://t.co/9t7NvlZBxR #edtech #STEMlearning #STEM #labster #scienceeducation #virtuallabs #virtuallearning #education #eduverse pic.twitter.com/BoxuuEqTkT
— Labster (@labster) July 11, 2022

3.3) FundamentalVR — Medical training for professionals

FundamentalVR focuses on teaching healthcare and medical training through mixed reality. The company patented a haptic intelligence engine to deliver high-fidelity physical interaction and offer cross-platform multi-user VR.

Plus, FundamentalVR partnered with Microsoft’s HoloLens. They created experiential learning experiences you can practice surgery with colleagues from around the world.

FundamentalVR partnerned with Microsoft’s HoloLens.

3.4) Immersive learning for workforce re- and upskilling

There are a number of companies operating in workforce re- and upskilling. Three of the most promising ones include:

Talespin, a platform for XR workforce learning. Talespin offers a no-code authoring tool for immersive soft skills content, as well as off-the-shelf learning content on emotional intelligence, critical thinking, communication, and leadership development.

Mursion, a platform that provides immersive simulated practice for social-emotional skills in the workplace. In 1:1 immersive training simulations, learners can practice difficult and high-stakes conversations.

Unimersiv, a platform for VR educational experience. It offers, among other things, training solutions for corporations, such as forklift and excavator training.

Unimersiv’s Forklift VR Training example

“We challenge those creating educational products in the metaverse to partner with educators and scientists to ensure that children experience real human social interaction as they navigate virtual spaces. Children’s agency is supported as they explore these spaces.”
— Center for Universal Education at Brookings

5) The Metaverse’s Three Key Challenges

The metaverse can bring many benefits to the education world, such as overcoming obstacles that prevent you from doing something in real life or experiencing truly experiential learning with people from across the world (for example, through holoportation).

And yet, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when building a metaverse that’s great for all learners.

5.1) Diverse content developers to build an inclusive metaverse

Virtual worlds reflect the visions of the people building them. For now, the metaverse is mostly built by white male developers.

We’ve learnt from other technologies about the risk of built-in bias when they’re only developed by a dominant group (for example, gender and skin-type bias in facial recognition software).

To unlock the metaverse’s full potential, diversity must be part of its very fabric. One way to do this is to have development teams with diverse ages, genders, ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, health status, physical attributes, sexuality, and other important factors that characterize us human beings. Learners and educators must be given agency in the design process. Excitingly, the World Economic Forum announced a new initiative to build an equitable, interoperable and safe Metaverse.

5.2) Hardware to enable access for all learners

The World Bank states that the metaverse could potentially democratize education, by “bringing people from geographically dispersed locations and varied economic backgrounds together to learn, in a cost-effective, flexible, and quicker duration.”

However, to fulfill this promise, all learners need access to the required infrastructure and hardware. For instance, while the price of a VR headset dropped from $500 in 2016 to $300 in 2021, the devices enabling immersive metaverse experiences are still reserved for resource-rich countries and households.

Initiatives, funding, and government support will be essential to make hardware accessible for all instead of increasing an already wide digital inequality divide.

5.3) Governance to ensure privacy, safety and security

How can all users feel safe and secure in the metaverse? Learning researcher Sirkka Freigang reports that the challenges we have encountered on social media platforms will likely be present and amplified in the metaverse.

Terri Horton highlights that significant vulnerabilities such as issues of corporate surveillance, access to worker biodata, privacy, data security, mental health impacts, identity, and reputation theft can have overwhelmingly adverse effects on organizations, workers, and society.

If left unregulated, the data generated in the metaverse — even in educational contexts — can be sold for targeted marketing, nudging, and influencing consumer behaviour.

This means that metaverse governance will be a multifaceted challenge that requires particular attention to interoperability, privacy, safety, and security.

Calls to Action & Conclusion

The metaverse has the potential to revolutionize learning. Whether it will live up to its potential is yet to be determined — which also offers the opportunity to develop education technology based on principles from the science of learning.

The future might be better than we think it is, but we need to create a vision of what we want instead of simply doing what’s possible.

Perhaps, by 2035, young learners will look back at the web3 and metaverse developments from 2022 to 2030 similarly to how we look at the internet’s development between 1998 and 2006.

If you want to learn the skills you need to co-create the metaverse, check out these resources:

Roblox Studio offers learning resources to help you navigate through the most popular metaverse gaming platforms.
Coursera’s Virtual Reality Specialization will teach you about the hardware and software needed to create immersive 3D worlds.
Udemy’s Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Metaverse Business course will teach you how to create business ideas from scratch that will allow you to jump in the metaverse wave.
Web3 Blockchain Bootcamp offers training for javascript developers that want to learn the fundamentals of web3 technologies.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe to my Learn Letter for free. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Hope or Hell? A No-Fluff Guide to Understand the Metaverse

July 25, 2022 by luikangmk

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the inventor and other things worth knowing.

More than half of all asked adults have no clue about the metaverse. A majority feel uninterested and indifferent.

But the question is not if you’ll use it one day, but when. If you’re among the 50,000 early adopters, you’re already using it.

I’m among the laggards. I’m not interested in escaping reality and feel resistant to immersing myself in a digital environment.

But I decided to stop being ignorant and instead understand the metaverse basics. So what follows is a no-bullshit guide for laggards (including me).

Source: Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY 2.5

How to Define the Metaverse

“How would you explain the metaverse?” Cathy Hackl asked 20 tech leaders.

What all answers have in common is the conviction that the metaverse will bridge the gap between reality and a virtual world.

But that’s where commonalities stop.

Tech leaders define the metaverse very differently, drawing on many emotions:

Fears: “At a time when technology is pulling us apart, this word literally says that in the future, we will live in separate universes.”
Hopes: “Owned by young people who care more about community than profit and use it for the good of the real and virtual world.”
Dreams: “Live digital universe that affords individuals a sense of agency, social presence, and shared spatial awareness.”
Expectations: “This is the next iteration of life.”

So if you can’t define the metaverse, you shouldn’t feel dumb. Experts don’t agree on one metaverse definition (yet).

“We are already in the MetaVerse, it’s just mostly 1D (text apps, clubhouse), 2D (Zoom, shared productivity apps like Google Sheets), 2.5D (games like Fortnite, Virbela) — 3D (VR/AR) is just in the development stages.”
— Forbes

Three Technologies to Understand the Metaverse

To understand how the metaverse actually bridges the gap between reality and a virtual world, you want to understand three things:

Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented Reality (AR)
Mixed Reality (MR).

In essence, the metaverse combines these experiences within a shared and persistent virtual universe.

Virtual Reality — VR

VR is a fully computer-generated environment where you can immerse yourself in artificially constructed realities. To experience VR, you need some kind of hardware, for example, glasses, controllers, or body suits with detectors.

Augmented Reality — AR

AR think Pokémon GO. You are in the real world while seeing objects from augmented reality. You can, for example, enrich your reality with new objects through your smartphone.

Mixed Reality — MR

MR is a mix of virtual methods and real-world spaces. For example, someone could create an exhibit either at a museum or a conference on mixed reality.

The State of the Metaverse in 2022

I was among the naïve who thought Marc Zuckerberg introduced the Metaverse in October 2021.

But the Metaverse has a much longer history.

“Metaverse” first app have eared in Neil Stevenson’s 1982 novel, Snow Crash. Since then, different companies introduced VR machines, created VR glasses, or developed applications (such as IKEA in 2017 with their Place app).

When we now talk about the metaverse, there is a number of companies that work in that space. Here’s a non-exhaustive start:

Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook)

According to Meta, the “metaverse” is an integrated environment that links all of the company’s products and services. Zuckerberg wrote that the metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world.

Microsoft Mesh

Microsoft launched Microsoft Mesh, a mixed reality platform for digital collaboration. You can use Microsoft’s services through your smartphone or laptop without VR headsets. Through Holoportation, you can project yourself as your photorealistic self and move through a fluid, digital reality.

Roblox

Roblox is a platform for virtual gaming experiences. One can argue they already do offer an early version of a metaverse. As of August 2020, Roblox had over 164 million monthly active users, including more than half of all American children under 16.

Nvidia

Nvidia Corp creates an omniverse to connect 3D virtual worlds in one shared universe. Building on photorealistic rendering capabilities and advanced AI, Nvidia can create an industrial metaverse.

“You could learn to do firefighting, skiing, etc from anywhere/time in the world and in a safe way”
— Gisel Armando CTO of Anything World

Where to Go From Here

The metaverse infrastructure is still under construction. When one looks at the examples, the metaverse appears as the internet in 1999 — pixelated and promising.

One can not tell yet whether it’ll be hope or hell. Technology is not ready yet for mass adoption. If you want to learn skills to co-create the metaverse, check out these resources:

Coursera — Virtual Reality Specialization, where you learn about the hardware and software needed to create immersive 3D worlds.
Udemy — Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Metaverse Business, a course that helps you build business ideas from scratch to jump on the metaverse wave.
Web3 Blockchain Bootcamp, a training for javascript developers to learn the fundamentals of web3 technologies.
Roblox Studio offers learning resources to help you navigate through the most popular metaverse gaming platforms.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

How Change Starts Within Yourself

June 30, 2022 by luikangmk

Personal transformation is systemic transformation.

Eva Keiffenheim and Romana Shaikh / Credits: Dominic Regester

Last month, I had the privilege to interview Romana Shaikh at Salzburg Global Seminar — Education Futures: Shaping A New Education Story.

Romana Shaikh is the Chief Programming Officer for Kizazi, which partners with local NGOs who work with government schools to design, implement, and codify breakthrough school models for a deeper purpose of education. Romana is committed to creating and enabling a thriving life for every child.

My questions build upon insights from the global research A New Education Story — Three Drivers to Transform Education Systems. Romana’s perspective connects to the three drivers, purpose, power, and practice, and sheds light on the mindset shifts and actions needed so that all children can thrive.

In your work as an educator and leadership developer, what have you learned about power as a lever for system change?

All systemic oppressions that exist on the outside have an impact on each of us on the inside. Even though I was a speaker at this global conference, able to talk about what I wanted to talk about, I am aware of being the minority in the room — as an Indian Muslim Woman.

A few months ago, at home, in India, “indianmuslimgenocide” was a trending hashtag on Twitter. The increasing violence against Muslims, the increasing felt sense of hate and otherness, has created a sense of powerlessness, of feeling like a victim. There is a fear in my mind, in my body. If I express my voice, what is going to be at stake? Am I going to get attacked for this? Will my family get attacked? Will I lose friends?

Even though my work has afforded me many privileges and so much power, there is this part that continues to feel powerless. Do I really have power and agency in a system that sees me through a single lens of being Muslim? A system that discriminates against this one part of my identity? That fails to see me in my wholeness.

Whatever you do in life, if some parts of your identity are those that are not the majority, you are always looked at differently. The system treats you differently.

That’s why to understand power; you need to understand identity. I saw all these different identities or parts inside me and how different identities shape my experience of the world in a particular way. Many systemic challenges stem from how we perceive our own identity. And more so from the way, others perceive us, which gets shaped by social norms and the access we have in the system we grow up in. The personal exploration of my identities, and the impact that they’ve had on me, helped me begin to see these patterns in the world more clearly.

Before, it always felt like, “oh, this is just something that happened to me”. But what I’m experiencing is not just my experience. Every other person who shares some shades of my identity, some intersections, is probably experiencing the same thing. So, “This is not just my problem. I’m not the only one who’s gone through this” was a big insight. I’m not the only one who has to fight this fight. There are other women and Muslims who’ve experienced the world the same way i have, many have experienced worse. There’s a pattern there.

And then, once you recognise this, acknowledge this, and understand this pattern exists, you begin to question, “why is it?”

When you begin to really drill it down, at one point, you will come to more universal constructs of our identity — gender, race, religion, caste, class, and sexuality. In different parts of the world, there are different constructs. Seeing these in daily interactions in life gave me a lens that helped me to see patterns in the inequity in education.

The question is, what is the rest of the world doing about it?

Can you share an example of this shift in perception?

When I was at Teach for India, I was leading our program. I saw classrooms across urban cities in India and later some rural parts of India as well. Over the years of visiting government and low-cost private schools that were all providing an English medium instruction, I recognised patterns that enable real progress for children. But there were also some schools and classrooms that were just not making the same progress. Academically these classrooms started lower than others; there was more dysregulation or ‘acting out’ of children in the classrooms. Different teachers tried and tried but still failed.

When we started looking outside the classroom, outside the school, we began to see more patterns. The poverty was more extreme, the exposure to violence was higher, the sanitation was poorer, and often there was a larger Muslim population. All this information painted a complete picture of how things are today.

As I’ve looked at data across the country, specifically for Muslims in India, I’ve begun to understand that Muslims in India have been systematically oppressed — Only 17% of Muslims complete Grade 10 compared to a 26% national average, almost one-third (31%) of the Indian Muslims are living below the poverty line, till date, Muslims are denied housing in many parts of the country furthering the geographical segregation which in turn, leads to Muslim ghettos that then continue to have limited access to healthcare, education, or government subsidy.

More recent studies have shown that the Muslim child is most marginalised because of the added political marginalisation the community experiences. So as a Muslim child, there are fewer people around you that have benefitted from education, there is more discrimination you face on a daily basis, and more of your family has been in multi-generational poverty.

You can’t just say ‘it’s a poor person’s problem. The system has made them poor and the system is maintaining that poverty.

With this acknowledgement that so much is at play when you work with children from marginalised backgrounds, the narrative about high expectations in education is one I find quite unfair today. We’re saying to children, “I have high expectations of you; you need to get here.” But then, we’re not giving children any chance to get there. And it’s not just language, it’s the way we see the world, we keep seeing the need for students to work harder than their privileged counterparts.

Anyone who is growing up marginalised knows they have to work harder. The question is, what is the rest of the world doing about it?

Romana Shaikh — Credits: Salzburg Global Seminar/Katrin Kerschbaumer

Romana, you said acknowledging the shared parts of identity started within yourself and continued through a sense of shared experience.

When you talk about ghettoised Muslim communities, it sounds as if starting on an individual level is insufficient because of a larger systemic injustice. What do you think is needed from a systems perspective to be fairer to children in these contexts?

Yes absolutely. Rising from the personal to the systemic is very important. But you can’t have systemic change without a personal change. We have to acknowledge that it’s not right to demand and expect the same things from all children. Because no child starts at the same point.

Before you replicate any school or education system, you have to contextualise. At a systemic level, we need to ask, “What’s needed here? And how does my system need to change to serve that?” And since I’m part of the system, I would need to change for my system to change.

What’s needed here? And how does my system need to change to serve that?

So let’s ask what is needed here. Let’s acknowledge that a child brings into the school and classroom their experience of marginalisation, of poverty, of oppression. A child who works to support their family needs something different from school than a child who is bullied because of her religious identity. A child who is growing up in a single-parent household has different needs from the adults in school than a child who is raising their siblings. All the intersectionalities of their identity are part of their experience which they bring into class.

Then let’s ask how my system needs to change to serve these needs. Our education system has for far too long been a “one size fits all” that focuses very narrowly on a cognitive kind of education — one that’s all about knowledge acquisition and retention. Our children need and deserve more than that. They deserve to be seen and responded to as whole human beings. So when a child doesn’t complete their homework or falls asleep in class or struggles to retain information or doesn’t believe education is important for them, we have to pause and remember everything that contributes to the life this child experiences.

And then, we will realise how the design of schools with their grading systems, their rules of discipline, the rigidity of curriculum and their notion of success need to shift to truly honour and empower each child. This requires us, as adults in the system today, to redefine the values and structures of the school system itself.

It’s acknowledging that an education system is not separate from other systems; we are human, we are whole, and we carry our whole experience with us everywhere. We learn what’s socially acceptable and how to express ourselves in school. So even education needs to see itself in relation to the whole system, in relation to the social system and to the economic system. Then you begin to see the bigger picture and what needs to shift. But this process is not easy.

It’s acknowledging that an education system is not separate from other systems, we are human, we are whole, we carry our whole experience with us everywhere.

Apart from your experience in teaching and school development, you’re also a trained psychotherapist. Based on your insights in trauma work, where do you see the need for a shift on a practice level in the classroom?

My biggest realization during trauma work is that if there’s one thing that’s universal, it’s trauma. It needs the least contextualization. I get goosebumps thinking about it.

The events that traumatize us are different across cultures — but we’re all human and how we experience trauma is very similar. What makes you sad and what makes me sad, maybe different. But sadness for you and sadness for me, feels the same. Because that’s how the body works. And the body is, again, something that’s so fundamental, which none of us learn to take care of. In most education systems — and in what I’ve seen across Africa, Armenia, and India, — you’re taught biology, but you’re not actually learning your own biology.

Our education systems need to create space for us to learn about our own human-ness. How our body works, how our mind works and how we can take care of ourselves and each other.

Trauma happens inside our bodies. It stays there and gets triggered by different incidents in our daily life. We see it playing out in our classrooms every day in the bodies and faces of teachers and children. Every time a child (or an adult) reacts in a way that feels disproportionate, or gets too confused or too scared, that is a sign for us to know there’s more going on in the body-mind than what we can see.

The high-stakes nature of examinations, the achievement orientation, the vast syllabi — we all have a childhood memory of school that has shaped some belief in our personality. At a fundamental level, the way we see children and in turn, treat children needs to shift. We need to see them as whole human beings, each unique in how they will grow and each bringing in a unique story of stress, strength and resilience. And this work needs to start with the adults in the system. They too, carry their own intersectionalities and stress, strength and resilience into the school.

Trauma is a much more prevalent experience than we’ve acknowledged in education.

Our education systems need to create space for us to learn about our own human-ness. How our body works, how our mind works and how we can take care of ourselves and each other.

So would you say a shift in practice towards more social-emotional learning can be a way to bring this knowledge about our own biology into classrooms?

Yes, and no. Much of our systemic injustice is rooted in a lack of social and emotional capacities. And while it’s great that social-emotional learning is becoming the new big thing, I worry it will be compromised into our existing assessment and curriculum structure.

Our generation today and our elders had so much trauma. They didn’t learn to love, to live, and to be healthy — They experienced war, conflict, fights for independence, fights for social justice. And those fights have not ended. We’ve inherited that trauma, it’s in our collective consciousness. There’s a reason we are so scared to share, to trust, to love freely. There’s a reason we’re asking about the cost of returns on feeding a child. No parent would do that. We are biologically wired to nurture. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Social-emotional learning and trauma informed teaching can be a part of healing and working with it. But we have to be mindful of how to integrate it.

How can we meaningfully integrate social-emotional learning into practice?

We must recognize social-emotional learning is not a subject, but a way of life. It’s not a means to an end. Education is about the present and it’s about all of us, young people and adults.

If I’m a teacher, coming to school in the morning, and having a fight with my family at home, and carrying that with me, do I have to pretend everything is fine or do I get a morning meeting to check-in?

In Seroond schools in Armenia, we’ve seen how conversations have changed. There’s no pretending anymore. Teachers take 15 minutes in the morning and start their day with a check-in: “Hey, how’s everyone doing? Let’s check in with each other and with ourselves.” We need to give ourselves that permission to be human.

To include social-emotional learning in pedagogy and practice, it has to be done together and for everyone. In India, the Simple Education Foundation learned this quickly during the pandemic. They started wellbeing circles for their teachers and their families. In a regular virtual gathering, each person shared how they are and give and receive support from each other. The teachers didn’t need training on how to care for children. They needed the space to receive care for themselves.

In Sierra Leone, one of the most important things our local partner National Youth Awareness Forum has done is bringing families to the school. There are school management committees with families to co-determine the purpose and practice of schools. They’ve asked families “What do you want the school to do?”They’ve shared responsibilities of managing the school with families.

Initiating a dialogue within communities is a powerful lever for change. Because we’re in this together. We’re all doing this for our space. This is our planet, our country, whatever that unit is. And so social-emotional learning is about really integrating it into the way we live, into the way we relate.

You’re the chief program officer at Kizazi and you work with local partners around the world to catalyze innovation in school design to increase opportunities for all children. In addition to India, Armenia and Sierra Leone, where do you see community-inclusive education transformation?

One really good example is the Aspire Connect Transform microschools from Egypt. The school’s founders created a network of microschools that strives to create young ACTors throughout the continent who transform their communities for the better.

They have a very strong inclusion policy. Moreover, they’ve broken age barriers and taught in a small group, multi-age, and in multigrade settings. Curriculums are designed around cultural and national identities and a sense of belonging. Another example in this school in the US that has redesigned itself around the whole child. –

Another excellent example is Dream a Dream, an organisation that empowers children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and thrive in a fast-changing world.

In India, an organisation that focuses on social — emotional learning in government schools — Apni Shaala and supports teachers, families as well as children in developing practices that support wellbeing. There is a school network — Akanksha Schools that has a holistic vision for children, it puts values and character education at the heart of their work.

There’s work that I haven’t seen myself, but I’m aware of through the trauma studies that can be a real resource for us to begin to integrate into our work with teachers and families — Some excellent networks offer resources and trainings for parents & educators — The Attachment and Trauma Network, for example, places a great focus on the role of attachment and the quality of relationships a child experiences with the adults in their lives.

Touch the future, though created for parents, has great resources and insights for educators. Especially the resources that talk about the critical role of play in a child’s development.

Thank you, Romana, for taking the time and for sharing your perspective.

How You Can Write with the Right Mindset to Fuel Sustainable Growth

June 23, 2022 by luikangmk

And create a solid base for your online writing journey

Credits: Salzburg Global Seminar/Katrin Kerschbaumer

When I started writing in March 2020, I felt like quitting all the time.

I had no idea how to write stuff people want to read. I didn’t know how to write articles on a consistent basis, and I tried and tested a lot before I got into a solid writing habit. It was a real roller-coaster ride.

The reason why I still pushed through when nothing seemed to work was my mindset. In the following lines, I’ll share every thought that can help you stick through on your creative journey.

Since March 2020, more than 2M people have read my work and I’ve supported more than 40 people in my learner-centric, cohort-based writing courses, the Writing Online Accelerator.

This is how my mindset created a solid base for my writing journey. And how to make it work for you as well.

Why do you write?

To build a consistent writing habit you want to know your why. What’s the reason for your becoming a writer?

Do you write to make more money? To learn something new every day? To have a hobby you enjoy? For growing an audience and building an online business? Is it making an impact on people’s lives by sharing what you know?

While there are no wrong answers, knowing your why can be your fuel.

When I started, I had several whys. I wanted to learn a new skill. I wanted to clarify my thinking. And I wanted to have a voice. My whys changed during the years. Now I write because I love to learn. I love the fuzzy feeling I get when I enter the writing flow states. I love the freedom to work from anywhere. And I love the opportunities writing has created for me.

Now you

What are your best answers to the questions below?

Why do you write?
What’s the underlying reason for your journey?
How does writing fit into your life?
What’s your long-term goal with writing?

Your why will likely change. But knowing the reason why you want to take the time to write can be your biggest asset.

Success in writing isn’t linear

I worked with Sinem Günel as a writing coach and one of the most helpful lessons she shared with me was the following: Success in writing isn’t linear but exponential. You have to write up to 100 articles without expecting anything in return.

Most writers give up too early before they experience exponential growth.

Don’t expect to go viral after your third article. It took me 40 pieces to reach 100,000 people. Exponential growth will surprise you when you keep improving. Writing isn’t a sprint: it’s a marathon. Don’t expect overnight success, but build a solid habit you can stick with.

I feel you.

It’s soul-draining to write in the void until you experience exponential growth.

You’ll feel lonesome in the vastness of the online world. You won’t get any external feedback because no one will care about your writing. For a while, no one will even click on your work. You’ll be one more person who creates noise in the already crowded parts of the internet.

Then very slowly, people will start to come. They’ll comment and reach out to you and actually read your words.

But until then, writing online is damn difficult.

Hang in there. If you’re committed to writing consistently, readers will notice you.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

Now you

A specific, measurable, time-bound, and realistic plan can help you stick through.

To create a plan, answer the following questions:

How many articles will you publish in the next 6 weeks?
When and where will you write?
When do you enjoy writing the most?
When are you most productive? What might prevent you from publishing consistently?
What are your strategies to overcome your barriers?
If you stop publishing consistently, what will you do to get back to the habit quickly?

Prepare for an emotional roller-coaster ride

The journey of writing can feel like riding an emotional roller coaster.

Sometimes your writing flows; sometimes it flops. Sometimes your best articles won’t get any traction, and your worst pieces will be read by thousands of people. Sometimes you’ll be able to finish an article in one sit, while other times, you’ll struggle to put a single paragraph onto your screen.

You’ll feel your ideas are great. Then you’ll think they’re terrible. It’s all part of the journey. Your feelings are valid.

Make peace with the hard times and have a clear goal that keeps you on track when writing doesn’t feel easy.

What to Keep in Mind

90% of the people don’t stick to writing. They give up too early and expect overnight success when in reality, writing isn’t a sprint but a marathon.

To stick through until you’ve achieved your personal “why”, these are the four mindset snippets that can keep you on track

Know your why
Make a plan to stick through until you’ve reached exponential success
Know that all creators go through a shared emotional roller-coaster ride

Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

A Powerful Mental Shift to Lead a Happier Life

June 13, 2022 by luikangmk

How you can overcome confirmation bias and make better choices.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995,” psychology professor Adam Grant writes.

Cognitive scientists call this thinking pattern confirmation bias. Once you form a belief, you rarely question it again.

A 2016 study published by Cambridge University Press suggests the more intelligent you are (with intelligence equated to quantitative reasoning capacity), the harder you struggle to change your opinion.

Human brains love shortcuts to save mental energy. Evaluating disconfirming evidence takes up a lot of energy. So most people don’t do it.

And worse, most of the time, they don’t even realize their close-mindedness. As a result, they make important life choices based on outdated beliefs.

Why is it that most of us are bad at updating our worldview? And how can we overcome the psychological bias most people remain unaware of?

This bias lets you see what you expect to see

It’s a summer evening in 2017, and the first time I enter a yoga studio. The air smells woody, and the dimmed lights make the room look cosy.

Yet, my inner world is as far from cosy as it can get.

I look at the other model-esque people on their mats. With matching outfits and perfect bodies, they look freshly printed from an Instagram feed.

I feel uncomfortable and insecure. My downward facing dog must look like a crumpled grasshopper. The teacher glances at me, and I can tell he’s hiding a smirk. The hour-long class becomes inner torture.

I step out of the studio, deciding that was my first and last yoga experience.

I knew it! You are lucky to have a flexible body, or you aren’t.

What I didn’t realize back then is how confirmation bias tricked my mind.

I looked for evidence that confirmed my insecurities and beliefs about yoga.

I filtered out any information that contradicted my worldview.

I didn’t notice other people’s imperfections, their struggles, or the teacher’s supportive glance.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for, interpret, and favour information that is aligned with our pre-existing beliefs.

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
— Robertson Davies

How confirmation bias affects your life

A person feels lazy during a home office day. He opens his LinkedIn, sees everyone else’s work achievement posts, and thinks, “I knew it. I’m such a lazy loser.”

Another person is on the train home from a day hike with her mum. She opens LinkedIn, sees the same posts, and thinks, “I can tell these people are not happy. I’m so grateful I chose to work less and spend more time with my family.”

Confirmation bias means we look at the same information and perceive it differently. We interpret facts, so it fits into our current understanding of the world.

“Whether you go through life believing that people are inherently good or people are inherently bad, you will find daily proof to support your case,” Rolf Dobelli writes in The Art of Thinking Clearly.

Confirmation bias affects your perception of reality, most of the time without you noticing it.

“The confirmation bias is so fundamental to your development and your reality that you might not even realize it is happening. We look for evidence that supports our beliefs and opinions about the world but excludes those that run contrary to our own.”
— Sia Mohajer

How you can overcome confirmation bias to make better choices

No single magic formula can uncloud your perception. But the following tools can help you overcome confirmation bias.

Build a challenge network

Connect with people you disagree with. Adam Grant says you should build a “challenge network” rather than a support network.

You do need both. Keep cheerleaders in your network, but also look for thoughtful critics. Tell your coworkers and friends you value honesty over consent.

You can also build a virtual challenge network, for example, through Allsides, a website that features information from all sides of the political spectrum.

Ask the right questions

Don’t ask questions to get validation, but ask questions you have no answers to. Dare to ask the questions that reveal your knowledge gaps.

If a person’s opinion doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because you’ve not understood the root of their belief. Keep on asking to get the full context.

While ego-boosting questions feel more comfortable, learner’s questions help you expand your understanding.

Foster intellectual humility

Remain aware of what you don’t know. What are your areas of ignorance and fixed beliefs your hold?

When you read a book or an article, ask yourself: “Which sections did I automatically agree with? Which parts did I ignore? What if I thought the opposite?”

Build your identity through character traits rather than opinions

Value personal character traits, not opinions. Label yourself as a curious, humble learner searching for knowledge instead of labelling yourself as an expert in a specific topic.

This mindset shift gives you the freedom to disagree with your former self.

Changing your opinion when presented with evidence or arguments is one of the most valuable skills you can have in the 21st century.

Confirmation bias is a natural part of how our brain works, and the goal isn’t to completely overcome it. And yet, being aware of it will help you make better life choices.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to the Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

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

January 11, 2022 by Eva Keiffenheim

Simple mindset shifts I see not many readers following.

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

September 9, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

How to stop clouding your judgment.

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

August 31, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

How interrupting your tasks can boost your creativity.

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.

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?

What I Learned from Meditating Every Day for 2193 Days

August 17, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

Training your mind can transform your life.

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, Thích Nhất Hạnh, 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?

5 Quick Fixes for a Calmer, More Focused Life

July 21, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

How to not be distracted all the time.

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.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Three Books That Prevent You from Forgetting Cruel History

July 20, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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

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

Want to improve your learning?

This Quick Mental Model Can Improve How You Navigate Life

June 2, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

Understanding entropy changed the way I think.

“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

May 11, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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.

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.

Sign up for the free Learn Letter and receive weekly ideas right into your inbox.

How To Unlock the Promise of Meditation

May 11, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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. (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, Thích Nhất Hạnh, 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.

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.

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

May 10, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

And how I use a Roamkasten to work with mine.

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.

Sign up for the Learn Letter to get weekly inspirations on reading, learning, and growth.

7 Signs You’ve Internalized Capitalism

May 6, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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

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.

Sign up for the free Learn Letter and receive weekly ideas right into your inbox.

My Life Became Richer the Day I Stopped Chasing Passive Income

May 4, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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.

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.

Sign up for the Learn Letter to get weekly inspirations on reading, learning, and growth.

How Better Non-Fiction Books Would Look Like

May 3, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

Using learning design to make knowledge stick with us.

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

April 30, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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

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.

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.

The Butterfly Effect: How Tiny Changes Massively Impact Outcomes

April 25, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

Embrace the chaotic nature of life.

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 … 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.

Sign up for the Learn Letter to get weekly inspirations on reading, learning, and growth.

A Former Facebook VP Shares Lessons to Manage Your Team Better

April 14, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

Ideas that can help every entrepreneur achieve more.

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.

Sign up for the Learn Letter to get weekly inspiration on reading, learning, and growth.

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

March 10, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

Start by defining what a great day means to you.

“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:

Did you do something meaningful?
Did you spend time in nature?
Did you learn something you didn’t know before?
Did you feel your mind-body connection?
Did you sharpen your mind?
Did you spend undivided attention with fellow humans?
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.

Are you a life-long learner? Join my e-mail newsletter for insights on reading, learning, and growth.

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

March 7, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

How to think for yourself

“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.

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:

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.
Reason through logic. Seek whether arguments are supported by evidence: Do arguments build on each other to produce a sound conclusion?
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.

Are you a life-long learner? Join my e-mail newsletter for insights on reading, learning, and growth.

Albert Einstein Was a Genius, but a Terrible Husband

March 5, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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

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?

Want to join a tribe of life-long learners? Sign up for the Learner’s Letter to get more stories like this.

This is Exactly How Reading 197 Books Improved My Life

March 4, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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

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 fiancé, 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

Want to join a tribe of life-long learners? Sign up for free.

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

March 3, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

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

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, Brené), 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

Sign up for free to the Learner’s Letter to get insights on reading, learning, and growth.

Avoiding These 6 Things Will Help You Tell Stories People Want to Hear

March 1, 2021 by Eva Keiffenheim

How to create a cinema for the mind.

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:

Don’t give time-stamp listicles of events and facts. Instead, build your story around one emotionally transforming moment.
Don’t make any story about your best self. Show vulnerability and imperfection. Talk about the lessons you learned along the way.
Don’t take too much space. Allow others to take the stage and listen carefully.
Don’t get lost in abstractions. Be as specific as you can, include physical locations, and create a cinematic mind experience.
Don’t take away the surprise. If you need a thesis statement, use it in the end, not in the beginning.
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.