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This Trap Prevents Most People From Clear Thinking

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How to stop clouding your judgment.

Photo by Niloofar Kanani on Unsplash

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

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

I disagree.

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

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

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

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

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

The Bias That Clouds Your Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did the evidence influence the participants thinking?

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

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

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

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

How to Rise Above the Confirmation Bias

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

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

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

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

1) Seek Contradicting Evidence

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

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

2) Dare to be wrong

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

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

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

3) Ask open-ended questions

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

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

4) Become a critical thinker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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3 Specific Ways to Benefit from the Zeigarnik Effect

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How interrupting your tasks can boost your creativity.

Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash

Have you ever felt guilty about not finishing a task?

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

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

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

A brief explanation of the Zeigarnik effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

created by Eva Keiffenheim vie Canva

How to use the Zeigarnik effect for you

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

1) Better recall through interleaving

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

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

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

2) Boost your creativity with this trick

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

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

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

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

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

— Steven King

3) Get people’s attention with cliffhangers

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

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

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

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

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This Quick Mental Model Can Improve How You Navigate Life

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Understanding entropy changed the way I think.

Photo by DesignClass on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You Should Know About Entropy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Stephen Hawking

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

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

What This Universal Law Means for Your Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Steven Pinker

How You Can Use Entropy to Your Advantage

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

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

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

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

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

Life would become predictable.

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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And how I use a Roamkasten to work with mine.

Photo by javier gonzalez from Pexels

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

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

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

Richard Feynman’s Mental Framework

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Richard Feynman

How to Find Your Favorite Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I Work With My 12 Favorite Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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7 Signs You’ve Internalized Capitalism

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

Photo by Keith Lobo from Pexels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Lee McKay Doe

2) You feel guilty when you do something enjoyable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Glennon Doyle

3) You prioritize work over health.

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

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

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

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

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

― Howard Thurman

4) You equate rest with laziness.

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

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

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

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

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

5) Activities exist in hierarchies.

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

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

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

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

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

6) You prioritize work over relationships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Ryan Holiday

7) You optimize for personal and monetary growth.

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

Whatever we see is an invitation to optimize.

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion

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

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

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

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My Life Became Richer the Day I Stopped Chasing Passive Income

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It’s worth questioning the beaten track.

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

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

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

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

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

Activities exist in hierarchies.

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

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

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

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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

Passive income makes you greedy.

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

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

Why? Material desires are limitless.

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

Maximum income ≠ maximum impact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passive income delays doing what you want to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You tie your self-worth to your net worth.

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

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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The Butterfly Effect: How Tiny Changes Massively Impact Outcomes

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Embrace the chaotic nature of life.

Image by Pixabay on Pexels

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

Tiny changes can lead to entirely different results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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

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

The butterfly effect is about the unpredictability of specific systems.

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

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

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

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

— Edward Lorenz in The Essence of Chaos.

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

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

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

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

Examples of the Butterfly Effect that Changed the World Forever

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

Franz Ferdinand

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

What if the driver would have gotten the message?

Covid-19

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

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

Adolf Hitler

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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6 Habits Worth Building to Improve as a Knowledge Worker

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Deliberate practice will help you advance in your career.

Photo by fauxels from Pexels

To get better runners run, writers write, musicians play. So all knowledge workers need to do is know?

Quite the opposite is true. The things you think you know — the illusion of knowledge — are the biggest enemies of improvement.

When you’re convinced to know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind. But people don’t want to change their minds; a principle psychologists call cognitive laziness.

“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995,” Adam Grant writes in Think Again. “We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt.”

But if knowing is counterproductive to improve as somebody who gets paid for thinking, what is it then that makes you better? The following habits can help you improve as a knowledge worker.

Work and think through writing.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman wasn’t a writer. Yet, he wrote — a lot. In an interview about his journals, a reporter asked: “And so this represents the record of the day-to-day work.” But Feynman rejects: “I actually did the work on the paper.”

The reporter doesn’t believe Feynman: “Well, the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” But Feynman says: “You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. OK?”

Many people still don’t get what Feynman tried to explain to the reporter: Writing is working because it facilitates thinking. When you write, you tie yourself to your train of thought.

You’ll also get more creative. Research shows the best ideas will arise once you flow into the writing process. So the more you create, the more creative you become.

Don’t know where or how to start? Block time-slots in your calendar, use a journal or empty document, and answer one of these prompts:

  • Which problem needs to be solved? What do you know about it?
  • What are you not seeing right now?
  • Which idea can’t you stop thinking about?

Build a personal knowledge management system.

A personal knowledge management system (PKM) helps you seek, consume, capture, connect, and apply whatever is kept in your head. Well-implemented it’s the career booster.

While most PKMs are kept private, some thinkfluencers learn in public. My favorite examples include Andy Matuschak’s working notes library, Maggie Appleton’s Digital Garden, or Luhmann’s digitized slip box.

Luhmann was living proof for an effective system. During his life, he wrote 70 books and 500 scholarly articles. He said this was only possible because of his Zettelkasten, the German word for slip box.

For the past years, I experimented with various note-taking systems — outlining, sketchnoting, mind-mapping, Notion workflows, and BulletJournals — before I finally settled on Zettelkasten.

I’ve been using the Zettelkasten with Roam for three months, and I can already see how it’s improving my reading and thinking.

A Zettelkasten can work as an idea-generation machine. You discover related ideas that you hadn’t thought of in the first place. As your notes grow, you will start seeing patterns. These patterns can serve as the basis of your original work.

On each slip are either literature notes (your synthesis of other people’s ideas) or permanent notes (your original thought).

Writing permanent notes is tough. You have to distill the quintessence from your thoughts. That’s why it’s also a great metric for tracking your progress as a knowledge worker.

Seek constructive feedback, always.

Feedback is the fuel for improvement but getting feedback is tricky. Most people don’t like to get direct feedback. Whenever you ask, “What can I do to improve,” you’ll likely receive a polite but fluffy “you’re doing so well, there’s nothing I can think of.”

Jane Park shared a great trick in Forge. Instead of asking people to criticize you, ask them about your shared goal: “Can you help me make this better for us?”

Use proven reading principles.

Do you ever finish a non-fiction book and worry whether reading is a time-waster? If you feel like a book can’t help you improve, it’s likely because you don’t know about crucial reading principles.

Reading non-fiction takes anywhere from six to nine hours — a significant time investment. These hours aren’t wasted if you read for entertainment.

But if you carve out the hours from a busy day to read books like Thinking Fast and Slow, you’re likely looking for something more than joyful reading time.

To make reading effective, you need to factor in the two components of learning and memory: the learned information itself and the so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the material you learned.

Here’s how you can do it.

  1. Elaborate. Use your own words to explain what you read and connect it to things you already know. After reading an interesting sentence, scribble your thoughts on the book’s page or your note-taking app.
  2. Retrieve. You learn something not only when you connect it to what you already know (step one) but when you try to access it. So after finishing a book, map out a summary from your memory.
  3. Space out self-testing. The more time has gone since you read a book, the more difficult it is to recall it. But by revisiting your summaries once in a while, you likelier remember what you read.

“What I know for sure is that reading opens you up. It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold.”

— Oprah Winfrey

Teach to learn.

You learned something new, but you struggle to explain it to other people? You likely don’t know what you think you know. Mortimer Adler said: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

So the best self-test to check whether you genuinely understood something is to explain and teach it to others — your co-workers, your family, your friends.

Pick the topic you want to remember, pretend you explain the content to a 12-year old (as simply as you can). Identify where you struggle to explain and fill your knowledge gaps by rechecking the original source.

Self-reflect and learn from experience.

After workshops, podcasts, public talks, interviews, I take a piece of paper and draw to columns: what went well and even better if. Then, I fill them with everything that comes to my mind.

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. Here are two questions worth answering by Julie Zhuo, a former Facebook VP:

  • When you remember your last success, what were the traits that enabled you to succeed?
  • What are the three most common pieces of advice from your team or boss on who you can improve?

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.”

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

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Start by defining what a great day means to you.

Photo by Kun Fotografi from Pexels

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

― Howard Thurman

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

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

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

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

1.) Did you do something meaningful?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.) Did you spend time in nature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My boyfriend in October 2020. (Picture by Victoria)

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

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

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

5.) Did you sharpen your mind?

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

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

— Arianna Huffington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All You Need to Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to think for yourself

Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

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

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

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

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

Consume Less Conventional Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make Thinking Time Non-Negotiable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn How to Think Critically

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

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

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

Find Other Independent Thinkers

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

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

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

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

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

Borrow the Brains from Dead People

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

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

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

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

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

1. Say No to Distractive Environments

1.1 Your phone in your bedroom.

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

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

— Ryan Holiday

1.2 Social media on your phone.

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

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

1.3 Phone notifications.

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

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

— Cal Newport

1.4 Distractions on your computer during deep work sessions.

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

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

1.5 Consuming the news.

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

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

— Marcus Aurelius

2. Say No to Destructive Habits

2.1 Finishing mediocre books.

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

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

— James Joyce

2.2 Consistently working more than 40 hours a week.

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

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

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

— Henry David Thoreau

2.3 Sugar.

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

2.4 Doing what everybody else is doing.

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

2.5 Quitting too early.

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

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

3. Eliminate Toxic Relationships

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

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

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

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

3.2 Bad listeners.

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

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

— Mark Twain

3.3 Other people’s agenda.

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

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

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

3.4 Naysayers and maybes.

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

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

4 Quit Harmful Mindsets

4.1 Using negative self-talk to motivate yourself.

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

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

4.2 Complaining when you can change things.

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

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

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

4.3 Downplaying your strengths.

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

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

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

— George Washington Carver

4.4 Focusing on results.

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

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

4.5 Wasting your time on perfection.

Perfection is destructive. It has nothing to do with self-improvement. Perfection is, at its core, is about trying to earn approval.

Let it go. Make your deadlines tighter, and don’t work on your stuff after your time runs out. Aim for consistency instead of perfection.

“Perfection is the enemy of progress.” — Winston Churchill

Remember improving your happiness and well-being is often about what you don’t do. Saying no feels hard at first. But it will get easier every time you do it.

Ultimately you realize saying no is a skill you can learn. Once you dare to say ‘no,’ all that follows becomes easier and easier.

So, what are you waiting for? You can do it.

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage — pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”

― Stephen Covey

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Philosophical Books that Can Still Improve Your Life Today

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Stop buying from bestseller lists.

Photo by BERK OZDEMIR from Pexels

If you look at humanity’s timeline —what are the chances that the truly great books have been written in the past 20 years? Approximately zero, right.

Still, many people buy the latest books instead of the greatest. Here’s what that leads to:

“A public that will leave unread writings of the noblest and rarest of minds (
), merely because these writings have been printed today and are still wet from the press.” — Schopenhauer

Common problems have been the same throughout all centuries: happiness, morality, power, justice, and love. That’s why the wisdom from great philosophers is still so applicable.

Here are eight books from great minds that you don’t find on current best-seller lists.

1. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Even though the title sounds complex, reading the Tao Te Ching is easy. The book helps us understand Taoism, which literally means ‘the way.’

Like Stoicism, Taoism also focuses on simplicity. But it also contains human values like patience and compassion. Stoicism is Jordan Peterson, Taoism is Brené Brown. I much more prefer the latter.

When you read through the 160-page short book written in 4th century BC, you feel trust and self-compassion rushing through you. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

“Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.”― Lao Tzu

2. Zhuangzi by Zhuangzi

If Tao Te Ching explains Taoism’s theoretical concepts, this book is its workbook. It shows us how to put Toaism into practice.

Zhuangzi gives us applicable guidance, like “A path is made by walking on it” or, “Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.” In sum, the book is a how-to guide for living a simple and natural but full and flourishing life.

It’s an ancient and even wiser version of Naval Ravikant and a great read for anyone who wants to bring more happiness and wisdom to their life.

3. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

The main goal of Nicomachean Ethics is learning to achieve eudaimonia, a Greek term with deep meaning. Philosophers say there’s no accurate translation for eudaimonia. But if we had to find a word, it’s happiness.

To achieve this kind of happiness, a person must first reach a state of inner balance. And to achieve personal harmony, there are two things you should do:

  1. Investing in your education, reasoning, and thinking.
  2. Cultivating important character virtues.

In the book, Aristotle explains how to build a virtuous character. First, by learning the difference between virtuous and not virtuous actions. Second, by creating habits that allow you to form a good character.

That’s how Aristotle goes one step further than James Clear. Before he tells you how to form habits, Aristotle gives you a decision guide for future actions.

4. Five Dialogues of Plato

When I started studying philosophy last fall, reading Plato was one of the first reading assignments. Different characters debate topics like justice, death, and virtue. They mostly try to find a conclusion (even though they can’t always find one).

What I love about Plato is his philosophy in dialogue form. The dialogue makes reading interesting.

The asking protagonists are the reader’s voice. They ask questions you will have. And this book contains 5 of the most important Platonic dialogues.

“Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” — Plato

5. What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant

Now, this isn’t really a book but an essay. But Kant is hard to read. And better to read a hard-digestible essay than not to read Kant’s work. It still contains the quintessence of his writings.

Kant popularized the idea that we should trust no authority except our own reason. He would sigh when looking at all the coaches, self-help books, and online courses that suggest how to live your life.

He’d say: Use your own reasoning and, by all means, dare to be wise.

So, this essay is excellent for anyone struggling with trusting their own beliefs. For writers who feel scared to form opinions. And for insecure overachievers.

Kant’s words are a great reminder of whom to trust making any decision in life — you.

6. PenseĂ©s by Blaise Pascal

The Penseés is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes, and essays. Pascal explores the contradictions of human nature from a psychological, social, theological, and metaphysical perspective.

While this collection is slightly pessimistic and tries to convince atheists of God’s existence, it’s still worth the read. You will realize the fundamental human problems were the same in 1670 as in 2021.

“Man’s condition: Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. But take away their distractions and you will see them wither from boredom.” — Blaise Pascal

7. The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne

Just like Bill Gates, Michel was one of the wealthiest men of his time. And just like Bill, Michel appreciated ‘thinking time.’

Yet, Michel’s thinking time far exceeded Bill’s think week. He isolated himself for 9 entire years to find what it means to be human.

Frankly, his essay’s topics seem random. They cover wide arrays and range from friendships to the imagination, to laughing, and more.

Reading his essays is not too difficult. But the sum (1344 pages) is daunting. If you decide to get this book, here is a selection of his most-discussed essays. Yet, when you choose, remember to use your own reason (see 5).

  • On Friendship
  • To philosophize is to learn how to die
  • Apology for Raymond Sebond
  • On Experience
  • On Solitude

8. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Betty Radice

What I dislike about most booklists is they don’t include female authors. Yet, I didn’t know that finding ancient female writing is a true research project.

HĂ©loĂŻse was a philosopher of love and friendship. Plus, she was important for the establishment of women in science. Her controversial thoughts about genre and marriage influenced the development of modern feminism.

HĂ©loĂŻse, a 12th-century woman raised in a convent, expressed her sexuality with such openness our generations can learn from.

“No one’s real worth is measured by his property or power: Fortune belongs to one category of things and virtue to another.” — HĂ©loĂŻse

In Summary

Learning from the greatest thinkers who have ever existed doesn’t need to feel like a burden. On the contrary — it can be fun and worthwhile.

Your life, your reading list. Use your own mind and pick the ones that resonate with you. Then, screw the rest. When in doubt, remember Schopenhauer’s suggestion:

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

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The Apeiron Blog — Big Questions, Made Simple.

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3 Quotes by Yuval Harari That Changed the Way I Think and Live

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On happiness, human extinction, and illusions.

Photo by Aleksander Vlad on Unsplash

To be honest, I fell asleep every time I read a few pages of Sapiens. I was overwhelmed by the width of Harari’s thoughts.

There’s a reason why he’s one of the most influential thinkers of our time. He regularly discusses global issues with heads of state, like Angela Merkel or Mauricio Macri.

In his recent interview on The Tim Ferriss Show, Yuval shared three thoughts I can’t stop thinking about. Chances are, they’ll change the way you think and go through life as well.

“We’re thousands of times more powerful than people in the stone age. But it’s not clear whether we are at all happier than they were.”

I’m an innovation enthusiast, and it took me some years and Tristan Harris to realize innovation doesn’t equal progress.

We don’t know whether we’re happier than our ancestors. We haven’t solved the equation of happiness, and we don’t know how to decrease human suffering.

With all that you’ve achieved in your personal life — are you happier than you were five years ago?

I no longer get drunk twice a week. I enjoy my life and earn money by doing things I love. But am I happier than my five-year younger self? I don’t know.

Whenever we improve something, it comes at the price of something else. After all, we don’t know whether we’re happier than our stone-age ancestors.

What to do:

Yuval practices Vipassana meditation for two hours every day and takes an annual meditation retreat for a month or two every year.

Here’s what he wrote about Vipassana in Tribe of Mentors:

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

I sat through my first Vipassana course in 2019. After ten days, everything clicked together. I felt true happiness: a complete silence of thoughts. I didn’t sit down for two hours every day afterward, so the effects soon vanished.

But prolonged meditation can help you reach peace of mind, better mental health, and more focus. It’s a proven path to decrease suffering and accessible to everyone. You can search for a donation-based course on Dhamma.

“As a species, we are very good in acquiring more power, but we are not good at all in translating power into happiness.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

“We created stories as a tool for us. We shouldn’t be enslaved by them.”

Yuval explains the only reason why the human species has more power than animals is that we can collaborate.

We created fictional constructs that help us work together. Stories about religion, money, states, and cooperations to create trust on a larger scale.

Often, we forget that humans were the inventors of these stories. When we start fights or even wars about self-made concepts, we should pause to remind us of what really matters.

He doesn’t oppose fictional stories as we need them as they’re the basis for cooperation. But he says we should regularly run the test of suffering.

What to do:

The test of suffering simply shows whether something is real. Humans and animals can suffer. Cooperations, countries, or cars can’t.

All we have to do is ask ourselves: What is real in the world? And what are fictional stories?

When I started working self-employed, I worried a lot about the financials. Will I make enough money to reach financial independence? Or will I miserably fail to pay the bills? Worries about stories aren’t real.

Since I learned about the test of suffering, I’ve found it easier to see worries about fictional stories as they arise. Whenever I do, I let them pass.

“Even in the best scenario, I don’t think Homo sapiens will be around in two or 300 years.”

While his other insights are inspiring, this one is rather frightening. Yuval lists three main global problems that bring him to his conclusion:

  1. As global tensions rise, so does the chance of a nuclear war.
  2. Climate change, destruction of habitats, and ecological collapse.
  3. Technological disruption, mainly from artificial intelligence and bioengineering.

He doesn’t think people will live like us in 200 years because the ongoing changes are too big. The best scenario is that Homo sapiens will disappear, but in a peaceful and gradual way, and be replaced by something better.

What to do:

Memento mori — remember your own mortality. Time and attention are your most valuable resources. Choose how you spend them wisely, and keep in mind that nothing will last forever.

“Change is the only certainty in life.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

Final Thoughts

We’re so often trapped in our heads that we forget the universe’s scale. Harari’s insights are a great reminder of the many axes of life.

These three quotes are so meaningful; your conclusion is likely different from mine. Here’s how Yuval’s insights changed the way I think and live:

  • Make Vipassana meditation a priority. Training your mind will lead to a calmer, happier, and more focused mind.
  • Don’t be enslaved by fictional stories. Break free whenever you’re worried about human-made constructs.
  • Know that one day you’ll die. So, speak your truth and follow your inner guidance.

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Five Principles By Naval Ravikant That Will Teach You True Wealth

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“Seek wealth, not money or status.”

Source: Needpix

When was the last time you came across a person that excited you so much you had to consume all their content?

Until this Sunday in my bathtub, I hadn’t read anything from Naval Ravikant. But after the first pages of the ‘Almanack of Naval Ravikant,’ I realized I just book-met one of the most interesting people alive.

The e-book kept me awake late that night. Monday, I spent half the day reading a 45-page interview and contemplating on his tweetstorms. Here are his key principles that will help you become wealthy.

“You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.”

What do you have in common with Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, and all the other billionaires on the planet?

Right, you live your life within the same time scale. No matter how wealthy you are, you can’t make a single day have 26 hours.

That’s why the most successful people on this planet say no to almost everything. Plus, truly rich people didn’t build their wealth by renting out their time.

Rich people got wealthy by establishing systems that make money independent from time.

Many people could live better lives if they made their time work for them, but continue to sell their limited hours. What they receive in return are limited rewards.

So, the questions are: How can you decouple money and time to create limitless wealth? How can you earn with your mind, not your time?

Build and sell products with no marginal cost of replication—things like books, media, movies, and code. You can multiply your returns without working more.

Owning your share of a scalable product is the ultimate goal.

Or, as Naval put it:

“You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.”

“Making money isn’t a thing you do — it’s a skill you learn.”

Most people aren’t smart about their finances and will never understand the fundamentals of money management.

It’s not because these people are too dumb to become smart investors. They’re just too lazy to learn.

Maybe you’ve built an emergency fund.

Maybe you know and track your net worth.

Maybe you automated your ETF savings plan.

And maybe you’ve done none of the above.

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether you decide to learn about your financials. Because money management is a skill, anybody can learn. And once you get the fundamentals right, not much can go wrong.

Yes, financial literacy is inherited. If your parents aren’t smart about money, the chances are high that you don’t know essential investing principles.

My parents don’t know much about investing. But I took masterclasses, asked smart people how they manage their money, and read finance books. I know from experience that money management is a skill anybody can learn.

No matter how far you’ve come on your financial journey, you can take your money management from good to great by reading applicable finance books, like ‘I will teach you to be rich’ by Ramit Sethi, or ‘The total money makeover’ by Dave Ramsey.

Like most things in life — when you commit to learning, you can master almost anything. Like Naval says,

“Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work.”

“Seek wealth, not money or status.”

Money is just a means to transfer wealth, and status just a label in our social hierarchy. You want neither of them.

I used to join the money and status game. Here’s what happened.

I bought the newest iPhone. But an expensive phone comes with the fear of a broken screen. So I also bought a fancy case and overpriced insurance. And yet, I worried about theft while traveling.

By focusing on money and status, we purchase things that add burdens to our lives. Ryan Holiday put it best; writing, “Mental and spiritual independence matters little if the things we own in the physical world end up owning us.”

You don’t want money or status. What you want is wealth because wealth is the ultimate freedom.

Here’s how Naval summarized it in one of his tweets:

“The purpose of wealth is freedom; it’s nothing more than that. It’s not to buy fur coats, or to drive Ferraris, or to sail yachts, or to jet around the world in a Gulf Stream. That stuff gets really boring and stupid, really fast. It’s about being your own sovereign individual.”

“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn.”

No life skill can pay you greater dividends than learning how to learn. Yet, most people don’t know how to do it.

When researchers asked, “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?” 73% of students answered “No.”

The majority uses ineffective learning strategies and ignores that humans don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.

But it doesn’t have to stay this way.

Learning how to learn is a skill you can easily learn.

In the last years, I read books on learning and taught as a Teach for All fellow. Here are the best resources for learning how to learn:

  • The book ‘Make it stick.’ (336 pages; 7 hours to read)
  • The free Coursera course ‘Learning How to Learn.’ (15 hours to complete)
  • The learning section on ‘FS blog.’ (10 minutes per article)
  • The book ‘Mindsets.’ (320 pages, 6.5 hours to read)

And whatever you learn, keep Naval’s words in mind:

“Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long. The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. The means of learning are abundant — it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”

“Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.”

In 2017, I read my first life-changing book. Since then, I have read at least one book a week.

Yet, when I stumbled upon this quote by Ratna Kusnur some time ago, I started to question the power of books: “Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”

Before building my first business, I had read dozens of books for each stage in the business lifecycle. But when it came to really starting, the biggest impact was just doing it.

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk found the right words: “But how many books from these ‘experts’ do you need to read before you can actually do something? You can only read so much, and at some point, you just have to do. Stop being a student, and start being an entrepreneur.”

Yes, reading is faster than listening. But doing and trying trumps theoretical lessons.

You’ll get farther bumping along on your own without any books than you ever will, reading a lot but not doing anything.

And yet, the combination of reading and doing trumps mere doing. Again, Naval:

“Read a lot — just read.”

On page 207, you’ll find a list of the books he recommends with short statements, why he recommends them. But before you dive into every single one, remember Naval who said reading is not about following the book advice of famous people:

“It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people.”

If you blindly copy Naval’s principles, you missed the most important point.

You’re the only person that best knows how to live your life.

Try everything, but test it for yourself. Stay skeptical and discard what doesn’t serve you. Ultimately, only keep the principles that work for you.

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Is It Time to Break Up With Your Résumé?

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Follow your heart for true career freedom

Photo: Colton Duke/Unsplash

My parents didn’t go to high school or university. Luckily, they had no idea what a ‘good rĂ©sumé’ should look like.

They didn’t stop me when I took a 6-month study break to work in India. Neither did they tell me to get a study-related job instead of selling gym memberships on Frankfurt’s sidewalks. As long as I paid for it, they supported my decision to pick an exchange semester location based on a climate graph.

But then, in 2015, everything changed.

A university friend said one of those sentences you can’t unlearn. You’ve likely heard it many times, in some variation, from your parents, study friends, or colleagues. It always goes something like this:

How will that look on your CV?

As a 23-year naĂŻve girl, I used this question as a new compass. I studied like a freak, aced my exams, landed a prestigious internship in Shanghai, followed by a fancy FinTech job in Frankfurt. At the end of my master’s studies, I had built the perfect rĂ©sumĂ© and found myself interviewing for a consultant job at McKinsey.

But then, sitting in the Berlin Office, solving case studies, cognitive dissonance kicked in. Something didn’t feel right. Only later I realized the tension came from the inconsistency between my actions and beliefs.

So, I broke up with my résumé.

I followed my gut, didn’t take the prestigious job, and instead went for what my heart was telling me. Here’s what happens when you stop building your life for your CV.

1. People Will Try To Stop You

Many people never dare to break up with their CV. They’re afraid of mind-made struggles like not finding a job anymore, earning less money, ending up on the street, and so on.

When these worried people see a person break out of their mind-made prison, they start to rebel. They’ll start projecting their fears upon you and will try everything to stop you.

Stopping you can take many forms. You’ll hear countless counterarguments on why you shouldn’t deviate from the norm. You’ll be asked ridiculous questions. You’ll see many shaking heads once you take ownership of your life.

My parents tried to stop me from becoming a full-time writer. Even after I made a full-time income with writing, they continued to send me job offers. While I felt devastated at first, a friend made me realize their reaction wasn’t linked to my actions. Instead, my parents acted upon their internalized need for security and stability.

2. You Start to Question Yourself

Unless you’re a stone, these people don’t leave you indifferent. You’ll start to feel insecure and wonder whether your decision is the right thing to do.

I had a ton of self-doubt in the year following my CV break-up. I was even considering reapplying for that consultant job. But somehow, I outlasted my inner-critic.

Eventually, my parents stopped sending me alternative job offers. After a while, they even accepted my decision. Once they saw how confident I continued on my path, they lost interest in trying to stop me.

You might embark on a similar path and overcome your inner critic. Once you’ve tasted freedom, you can’t help but continue on your new way.

3. You Lose Some Friends

So you go on. And some people in your inner circle won’t be able to handle it. Your level of self-ownership will bust their excuses on the way they live their life.

To them, you’re dangerous.

Your actions demonstrate everybody has the power to create the life of their dreams. These friends can no longer tell themselves life will fall apart if they stop perfecting their resume. They can indeed quit their job before two years in or work half-time because there’s a creative career they want to pursue.

4. You Win New Friends

Once the people who can’t accept your decisions are gone, your emotional space frees up. You no longer hold on to people who want you to stay as you were. You’re available for new connections.

You’ll attract like-minded people. Your new tribe ultimately helps you overcome any remaining self-doubts.

You no longer feel insecure as you see more people made the decision you just took long before you. In sharing your experiences, you rise by lifting each other.

Your new friends will feel like an energy booster. Plus, they’ll lead you towards your unknown unknowns — destinations, mindsets, and lifestyles you never knew existed.

5. You Will Unlock Streams of Energy

What felt like a burden before suddenly becomes a joy. You’re looking forward to getting up. You love Mondays.

Once you dare to do your heartwork, work doesn’t feel hard anymore.

You might feel energy shoots that overwhelm you. There will be so many ideas new ideas flowing in. You don’t know where to start. But you don’t need to hurry. This new strain of energy is unlimited.

Will life be easy?

No. And yes.

You’ll still encounter hardships. You’ll have problems that initially feel unsolvable. There will still be tasks that bore you.

Plus, living in extreme self-ownership can also feel exhausting. You can’t blame anyone but yourself.

And yet, knowing that you made your life choices will add layers of freedom and energy to your life.

You’ll continue to reinvent yourself again and again.

Once you start living your life, you’ll never want to go back.

Stop making your decisions through the lens of your CV.

At the end of the day, you won’t need to justify your life for any recruitment or your parents. Instead, the only one who’ll judge your life is you.

So, what‘s the next choice you make?

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How Would You Spend Your Time if Money Was No Object?

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Move closer to your authentic self.

Photo by Artem Podrez from Pexels

Knowing yourself doesn’t happen in an instant.

It happens through continuous inner work; by questioning yourself, and discovering single puzzle pieces to then, finally, putting the single pieces together to form a complete picture.

So, if you want to understand yourself, your values, your energy levels, or even your purpose on this planet, the question is not which books to read or which mentors to find. Instead, the question is:

“Which answers do I need to find that will allow me to discover the puzzle pieces that eventually, help me understand myself?”

1. What makes a ‘successful’ life for you? Why?

Most people never question their definition of success. They inherited their parents’ ideas, added a pinch of opinion when they finished school, and leave the picture untouched for the rest of eternity.

It takes courage to answer this question instead of blindly following society’s norms. More often than not, your answer sheds light on what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, meaning your actions contradict your beliefs.

You might have a specific success idea in mind but act in a way that pulls you away. Yet, once you take an honest account of your understanding of a successful life, you can adjust your actions.

Plus, according to this study, the definition of success varies over one’s lifespan. At 12, we want to be famous. At 17, own a fancy status symbol and five years later, accumulate all the money we can. In our mid-20s, success might equal a healthy lifestyle, and, after our phase of self-centeredness, we will equalize success with helping others.

And that’s what makes this question so powerful. By finding your answer in your current life phase, you’ll move one step closer to understanding yourself.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

— Mark Twain

2. How would you spend your time if you didn’t have to think about money?

This is a tough one. Earning money is the primary objective in our modern working world. By searching your answer to this question, you’ll explore spheres beyond your everyday orbit.

You won’t find your answer the first time you ask it.

But by revisiting this question, you’ll soon move past short-term vacation fluff. No, you don’t want to spend your life traveling through the Amazonas, joining Ayahuasca ceremonies while learning how to play the guitar.

That’s fine for a few weeks, or even months.

But you want to dig deeper.

What then? What comes after taking the vacation and seeing some new cultures? How would you spend your time if money wasn’t an issue? What would you be focusing on?

By thinking of answering this question, you’ll know more about your purpose than many people on this planet.

3. What gives you energy?

While the other questions were about deep thinking, this one is about observing. You want to take a closer look at your activities, environment, interactions, and objects.

The best way to find an accurate answer is a personal energy journal. For the next five days or so, make a list in your notebook (or whatever you’re using for your to-do list) and fill a simple, two-column table with the headlines activity and energy level.

Energy Tracker pictured by Author

Take an honest account of whether your activity elevated (+) or reduced ( — ) your energy level. Your answers to how you spend your days are the best insight, whether you’re engaging in the right kind of activities.

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

— Steve Jobs

4. Around which people do you feel like yourself?

Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and former Harvard professor, analyzed the longest study on human happiness and proved relationships to be the most important part of our lives.

In the 1930s, researchers invited 19-year-old sophomores from Harvard and teenagers from the poorest neighborhoods of Boston to take part. For over 75 years, scientists did interviews, medical tests, and checked up on their subjects every two years to see how they were doing.

While many of us think fame, fortune, and hard work will bring us happiness, Robert proves us wrong. He highlights ingredients for our health and well-being:

  • having social connections is better for our health and well being
  • having higher-quality close connections is more important for our well-being than the number of connections
  • having good relationships is not only good for our bodies but also for our brains

So, knowing around which people you feel like yourself is by far the most critical step in finding the puzzles of your life.

By getting your relationships right, by surrounding yourself with people you genuinely care about, you’ll eventually move closer to your true self.

If You Only Build a Few Habits in 2022, Build These

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If you want to be your best self, here’s what you need to do.

Foto von Wallace Chuck von Pexels

How many new habits have you built this year?

Most people will answer this question with zero.

Because the majority stops learning once they leave formal education. They stick to outdated beliefs and trot along on their known life path.

And meanwhile, they complain. A lot.

They grumble about their lives. About working in jobs they don’t want, surrounded by people they don’t admire.

These people are so focused on their misery, and they forget one important truth: everybody can change.

We all deserve to live happy, healthy, and wealthy lives.

It’s in our hands whether we dare to step outside our known patterns and try something new. If you only build a few habits in 2020, build these.

1. Read One Book a Week

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read.”

— Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s Business Partner)

Most people stop reading books once they leave high school. They might still read a lot. But text messages, e-mails, and news won’t make you wiser.

There’s a reason why Bill Gates, the second richest man in the world, took entire “think weeks” while being Microsoft’s CEO. He would travel to a small cabin and spend one week there alone, reading and thinking.

Books give you access to the smartest people on our planet. You can borrow the brains from ancient philosophers to modern business leaders. And, you can apply a book’s insights to your life.

Most of us can’t afford the luxury of disconnecting from life for an entire think week. But we can integrate reading into our everyday life.

I read one book a week for almost three years now, and it has changed my life for the better. And so can reading improve your existence.

Read one book a week, and you’ll find yourself on the fast track to a happier, healthier, and wealthier life.

2. Spend Less Than 1 Hour a Day On Your Phone

“Technology is a great servant, but a terrible master.”

— Stephen Covey

Most people forget how to protect their time. They give away junks of their lives to social media and entertainment apps.

They are constantly reacting to what’s happening around them and let other people dictate their days. By following the agenda of others, they’ll never live up to their potential.

To become successful, you want to do things unsuccessful people don’t do. By bringing the time you spend on your phone down to less than one hour, you’ll be doing what 99% of people are not doing.

Spending less than one hour on your phone will drastically improve your life. You’ll be reclaiming your time and taking control of your life.

If I had to choose one habit to build, it’d be this one. You’ll have so much of your life back.

In your newly won free time, you can create any other new habit you want to bring to your life — from building meaningful relationships to accelerating your career path.

Decreasing your screen time is hard, I know. But if I, a former Instagram addict, can do it, you can make this shift too.

3. Say Please and Thank You

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

— Melody Beattie

This one is tiny, yet so powerful. BrenĂ© Brown wrote in her book on vulnerability that scarcity is our culture’s version of post-traumatic stress.

Most people live in constant fear of not being or not having enough. They feel they’re unworthy and unconnected. They wander around in continuous anxiety.

They wake up and think about what’s lacking: sleep, time, money. Scarcity seems to be hardwired in our culture’s DNA.

It’s up to us whether we let scarcity ruin our days. To embrace the richness of life, we need to internalize the concept of gratitude.

The good thing is we don’t need to visualize gratitude to become a grateful person. All it takes is saying please and thank you.

By paying attention to small incidents in life, you’ll, step by step, bring more gratitude into your life.

4. Learn to Touch-Type

“Typing faster will change your life.” 
 — Niklas Göke

Even if you aren’t a writer, you’re a typer. You send e-mails and type search queries on a daily basis. And even though most people spend several hours a day in front of their computers, they work at a snail pace.

They waste hours of their lives because they navigate around their keyboard using three fingers, instead of all ten. And, most of the time ⌘+C/V is the only shortcut they know.

You might question whether such tiny actions will make a difference in your life. I promise they will.

You’ll bring a 3-second action down to a 1-second action. And because you repeat those actions hundreds of times each day, you’ll save hours a day.

Yes, learning touch typing will at first slow you down. But ultimately, you’ll get your time back. By learning to touch type, you’ll save hours a day. You’ll 10X your productivity while clearing up space for your free time.

I type 107 words per minute — can you beat me?

5. Reveal Your Vulnerable Side

Perfectionism is an illness of our society. And it’s terribly dull. In her book about imperfection BrenĂ© Brown, pinned down the core of perfectionism.

Reading the following lines, I felt she was talking right to my heart:

“Perfectionism is a defensive move. It’s the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around, thinking it will protect us, when in fact it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from being seen.”

“Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval.”

“Most perfectionists grew up being praised for achievement and performance (grades, manners, rule following, people pleasing, appearance, sports). Somewhere along the way, they adopted this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Please. Perform. Perfect.”

“Perfectionism is not the key to success. In fact, research shows that perfectionism hampers achievement.”

So let’s practice to share what we’re struggling with. Meaningful connections in relationships can only foster when you’re true to each other.

Let’s dare to be vulnerable. Yes, daring to be seen is risky, I know. We expose ourselves to external judgment. Yet, we can only experience the beauty and richness of life if we show up with all we got and let ourselves be seen.

6. Learn to Say No

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

— Warren Buffett

We all know focus leads to greater success. Yet, most people dilute their focus by saying yes when they should be saying no.

Whether we are driven by the fear of missing out or by the urge of pleasing others, saying yes too often weakens our personality.

Because the more often you say yes, the weaker your yes becomes. If you have 10 nuggets a day and say yes to 10 different things, you can give each thing one of your nuggets. If you only say yes to one thing, you can give it all of your have.

Nuggets are your time and energy. You only have a limited amount. And saying no is a skill you can learn, a habit you can build.

When delivered with respectfulness and tact, a “no” can be a fast track to a focused, better life.

7. Build Resilience

“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

— Nelson Mandela

2020 is a great year to practice resilience. With a global pandemic, we continue to have plenty of change in our lives.

Resilience is not about who we are, but about what we think. By using cognitive restructuring, we can reframe our thoughts about reality.

Resilience is not a fixed personality trait — as with most things in life, you can learn it through deliberate practice.

By training your mind to embrace the changes in life, you develop your muscle for overcoming obstacles. So let’s learn to persist in the face of struggle.

Pick What Resonates

You can live the life of your dreams.

And you’re capable of achieving a lot more than you think. By building these new habits, you can move one step closer to your best self.

All you need is to start with something.

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These 4 Concepts by Brené Brown Can Make You Shame-Resilient

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And improve your emotional literacy.

Photo by Victor L. from Pexels

Shame is toxic. Again and again, researches demonstrate the link between shame and addiction, depression, eating disorders, bullying, and suicide. And even though we know about the harmful effects of shame, it continues to exist in our classroom, workplaces, and homes.

Chances are high you’re among thė 85% of people who have experienced a shaming incidence at school that was so devastating it forever changed how you perceived yourself.

During the past decades, Brené Brown dug into the shame trauma from thousands of people. She was able to identify a pattern all shame-resilient people have in common.

Brené demonstrates how all of us can better cope with shame. And the solution is easier than you think: expanding your emotional vocabulary.

Once you know the difference between the following four concepts — shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment — you’ll be able to see and label your emotions as they arise. You’ll become resilient towards your feelings of shame.

Shame Is About Yourself

When we feel shame, we think we’re unworthy of connection. We might have done or not done something that makes us a worse human.

Brené defines shame as the painful feeling of believing we are flawed and, therefore, unworthy of love and belonging.

Here are common things we say to ourselves when experiencing shame:

“There’s something inherently wrong with me.”

“I screw up things, I am a bad person.”

“I’m so stupid for not studying.”

“I’m sorry, I am a mistake.”

When we’re experiencing shame, we want to run away from anything that’s causing this feeling. Shame leaves us paralyzed and makes us think we don’t add value to the world.

This feeling of unworthiness makes shame so toxic. It fuels our deep fear of being not good enough. Experience enough of it over time, and you’ll make yourself so small you may as well not exist.

“Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.”

— BrenĂ© Brown in The Power of Vulnerability

Guilt Is About Your Choices

In contrast to shame, guilt is not self-focused. It’s about your actions, rather than your personality.

BrenĂ© defines guilt as feeling bad about something you have said or done or failed to say or do. When you feel guilty you’re holding your actions against your values and experiencing a psychological discomfort.

Here’s the self-talk we have while experiencing guilt:

“I can’t believe I didn’t study. Not studying was such a bad thing to do.”

“I’m a good person, but I made a bad choice.”

Do you spot the profound difference between shame and guilt?

While shame self-talk is self-destructive, guilt is action-focused, adaptive, and helpful.

When we see our actions don’t match our intentions, we feel uncomfortable. Yet, this psychological discomfort often motivates us. It steers us in a positive direction, without downgrading our self-worth.

“The difference between shame and guilt lies in the way we talk to ourselves. Shame focus on self, while guilt focus on behavior.”

— BrenĂ© Brown in Daring Greatly

With Humiliation, You Know You Don’t Deserve It

Humiliation is much better than shame since we don’t talk ourselves down. This feeling arises because of circumstances that have nothing to do with our actions.

Brown states the difference between humiliation and shame is that we don’t believe we deserve our humiliation.

Here’s your self-talk when you’re experiencing humiliation:

“This person doesn’t know how to handle things. I don’t deserve this.”

“This is unfair to do to me. It’s not my fault.”

A police officer recently stopped me and said I’d crossed a red light. Even though I attest to the fact the light was green, he made me pay 30€. I didn’t feel guilt or shame — I felt humiliated.

Shame and guilt can feel like humiliation, but with the latter, the “not-deserving” part helps us to not buy into the message. We won’t identify with what has happened to us.

With Embarrassment, You Know You’re Not Alone

Embarrassment is a feeling of discomfort and luckily, doesn’t last very long. When we have the courage to laugh at ourselves, moments of embarrassment can actually be fun.

What differentiates embarrassment from the other emotions is that when we do something embarrassing, we know we’re not the only ones who have done that thing.

Here’s what we think when something embarrassing is happening:

“That’s awkward, but I know I’m not the only one who has ever done that.”

“Ouch. I know this has happened to somebody else before.”

Shame makes us feel we’re all alone in this. When we do something embarrassing, it can even be hilarious shortly after the moment has passed. It goes away quickly, and it doesn’t make you question your self-worth.

The last time I felt embarrassed, I was wearing a white skirt, sitting in the library, and unexpectedly got my period. I felt awkward walking past other people with a red spot on my skirt. Yet, quickly afterward, I was able to laugh about it.

“If you own this story you get to write the ending.”

—BrenĂ© Brown in Daring Greatly

How You Can Cope With Shame

By now, you’ve figured out guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation are okay. Yes, these feelings are uncomfortable, but you can manage them.

What you want to be cautious of is the feeling of shame — the emotion which downgrades your self-worth and harms your growth mindset.

When you or your loved ones feel shame, there are two things you should do:

  • Be Self-Compassionate
    Treat yourself with kindness and talk to yourself like you would speak to someone you love or care about.
  • Offer Empathy
    Connect with the people around you, so they know they’re not alone in this struggle. Share your experiences with shame and make them feel understood.

Conclusion

Emotions are different for all of us. What’s shaming for me might be embarrassing for you. How you experience emotions depends on your story, your history, and your expectations.

Yet, by knowing the differences between shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment, you’ll increase your emotional intelligence.

  • When you feel shame, you make the experience about yourself.
  • When you experience guilt, you know it’s about your behavior.
  • When you sense humiliation, you know you don’t deserve it.
  • When you feel embarrassed, it passes quickly and feels funny afterward.

Let’s get away from a culture of shame and embrace the power of self-compassion and empathy.

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How To Decide What To Do For A Living

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A step-by-step guide to bold decision making.

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

You are on a career path.

The question is: Is this path also the one you want to be on?

Do you make a living with something worth your time?

Does your work allow you to live the life you want to live?

To live the life you choose to live?

Most people were lured into their current career path. Parents, friends, and employer branding guided their decisions.

But unless you decide what to do for a living, you’re like a ship without a sail. Or as Gary Vaynerchuk puts it:

“The one thing I know for sure, is the outcome of what happens if you don’t decide. If you never make a decision, or deliberate for too long, all the upside or potential opportunity could be lost.”

My life changed once I took ownership of my career path. Since that decision, every minute of my time became precious. I want to be on the path I’m on.

If I can do it, you can do it, too.

Once you know what you want, you can land any job you want.

Here’s how you can boldly decide what to do for a living:

0) Get Into “Peak State”

How you start something determines how you finish it. No person made great decisions while feeling like a douche-bag.

A low-quality state of mind leads to low-quality choices.

But you shouldn’t settle for mediocre choices.

You deserve the best.

That’s why you want to be in a peak state when you think about your next move.

So before you consider making a decision, check whether you’re in a state to thinking this decision through. Put yourself in an environment that supports your clear, open mind. Get into a peak state.

How to apply this advice

If you have a powerful, ritualized morning routine, you’ll be in peak state right afterwards. The time frame after your routine is excellent for altered thinking and decision making.

Another way to peak state is to get your body moving and breathing. More oxygen equals more energy. Hike through a forest, or simply breathe fresh air before you sit down.

1) Determine Your Orbit

Be selective about how you spend your time.

Rather than asking what’s possible, ask which topic is worth dedicating your life to?

You have the skills. You have the knowledge. Your life is precious. But eventually, you will die.

Your lifetime is too precious to remain within the limited boundaries of your existing reality.

To make bold, right decisions, think outside of your current environment.

How to apply this advice

Which topic makes you want to jump out of bed at any time? What issue can’t you stop thinking or talking about?

There’s no wrong answer to it. Don’t even think about what other people think about your answer. There’s no right or wrong answer. Be honest with yourself.

If you can’t find anything, it comes down to two reasons. You’re not in your peak state, or you need more inspiration. Make learning a daily habit. Read books outside of your habitue. Visit meet-ups. Travel.

There’s no valid reason not to have any topic you burn for.

Find out what that topic is for you.

2) Analyze Your Energy Level

“The energy of the mind is the essence of life.”

— Aristotle

Two days, packed schedules.

Have you ever wondered at night, why on some days you feel drained and wasted, while on other evenings you’re still feeling fresh?

Your energy level determines how you experience your days, weeks, years, and ultimately, your life.

Yet, most people don’t have any clue about their energy drainers and givers. They never pay any attention to our energy. Our ignorance doesn’t protect us.

You won’t make smart decisions on what to do for a living unless you’re clear about your energy management.

How to apply this advice

Before you look for “what’s out there,” make sure you know “what’s inside” of you. Regularly ask yourself:

  1. Which activities make you feel good and give you energy?
  2. Which activities destroy your mood and drain your energy?

Once you pay attention, you’ll quickly realize different activities lead to different energy levels.

Feel free to copy this simple table to your journal or in your notepad and fill it for a week. You’ll be clear about energy givers and takers afterward.

Source: Author

After tracking and rating your activities, consolidate what you’ve learned. Here’s my general energy list. Notice that yours might be completely different.

Energy drainers: Repetitive tasks, hour-long computer work, detail-oriented tasks like filling spreadsheets, meetings with >5 people, PowerPoint, reading law texts, spending time with negative people, greasy food, WhatsApp, grocery shopping, driving a car

Energy givers: Teaching, writing, public speaking, networking, strategic planning, helping others, reading philosophy, self-reflection, organizing, music, time with my partner, laughing with friends, singing, meditation, ashtanga yoga, dancing, sunshine, cooking and then eating self-made dishes, driving in trains

When reading job descriptions or making job choices, we often forget what’s behind the fancy title. “Digital Transformation Consultant” might mean nothing more than sitting in front of a computer, building powerpoints, or sales pitches 3/4 of your time. “Customer Relationships” might equal sitting in front of a computer and inserting contact details into a spreadsheet. “Human Resource Specialist” might be another term for being on the phone with requiters and scheduling interviews for potential candidates.

Before deciding on a career path, be clear about your energy drainers and givers.

3) Focus On Growth

“Certainty is the enemy of growth. “
 — Mark Manson

When making your decision, focus on personal growth.

By working a job where you can acquire the skills for your future self, the chances are high that you’ll overperform.

Not because you’re smarter than your co-workers. It’s because you have a reason why you chose that career: Growth.

Pick work where you learn what you want to learn.

How to apply this advice

Where do you see yourself five years from now?

Which skills does your future self possess?

Only then think about your current reality and identify the gap from where you stand to where you want to become.

Your future job should, at least to some extent, help you bridging the skill gap.

4) Trust Your Intuition

“The more you trust your intuition, the more empowered you become, the stronger you become & the happier you become.” 
 — Gisele BĂŒndchen

Intuition is your body’s intelligence at its best. Your brain takes in any given situation, searches its files, matches past experiences, and cues from your self to send you a feeling.

This process happens so quickly that you don’t even register it on a conscious level. That’s why intuition simply points out the way without being in your logical, rational mind.

When was the last time you felt like you just know something?

Intuition exists in all of us. The more we learn about it and listen to it, the more we can use intuition to shape our decisions for the better.

How to apply this advice

Sit down in a quiet environment and ask yourself: What does my gut say on what to do for a living?

Then, listen.

Silence your rational voice.

Don’t start to justify and explain your feelings.

You’ll notice your intuition once you’re really listening.

Does this mean you should follow intuition blindly? No. Factor in common sense and a tickle of rationality, and you’ll find the optimal balance for bold and reach your best decisions.

5) Ask Specific Questions to Your Network

“Nobody can give you better advice than yourself.” 
 — Cicero

Having a strong network is powerful. So powerful, it can even interfere with your trajectory.

It’s tempting to follow smart people’s general opinions.

“What’s my next career step?” is a terrible question to ask your network.

You’ll find yourself living their imagination of a good life. You might sway into a choice that doesn’t work for you.

Regardless of your network’s size and quality, be very selective and specific with the questions you ask.

How to apply this advice

Instead of asking your network, consult yourself first. Before approaching any friend, colleague, or mentor for advice, be clear about your orbit, your energy management, your future self, and your intuition.

Then, come up with specific questions, like:

Do you know any job in _______ (your orbit) where I can deploy my _______ (activities that give you energy) and expand my ________ (skills you want to grow)?

Once you have a specific question, find the person that can give you the best answers to your questions.

If you aren’t satisfied with your opponent’s answer, finish with: Who else do you know in _____ (orbit) I could talk to regarding this question?

6) Invest In Your Decision

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest” 
 — Benjamin Franklin

Once you made a decision, it’s tempting to overthink. But the more you think about your decision, the more you talk yourself out of it.

We, humans, love to stick to what we know. Your rational mind doesn’t like big changes and might find ways to question your decisions.

The best way to make a decision is by putting high stakes into your decision.

Once you spend time and money on your decision, you’re signaling yourself that you’re serious about it.

How to apply this advice

Put effort into realizing your decision and invest in the decision you made.

Your initial investment is your time. But don’t just browse through books and articles. Invest time in crafting your application. Ask for intros to your future employer.

Besides, make a financial investment. Get a mentor. Go to conferences. Pay for learning experiences like online courses. Apply what you learn in the form of action.

The further you’re in, the less likely your ego will talk you out of it (because it’s generally afraid of everything new and outside of your comfort zone).

The Bottom Line

Get into a peak state, determine your area, analyze your energy level, focus on personal growth, ask and listen to your intuition, ask specific questions to your network, and invest time and money in your decision.

You’ll be blown away by everything that happens in your life, once you made a bold decision on what you want to do for a living.

Just watch the power of life unfold.

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