Every week, I find myself facing the same old question: are we going for dinner in one of the same five restaurants we always go to, or should we try something new from the endless list of bookmarked places on Google Maps?

This binary decision of staying with the things you know already vs. daring something new should feel familiar.

I would think about this as a spectrum with novelty (= trying-something-new) on one end and routine (sticking-with-what-you-know) on the other. All of us are sitting somewhere in between - where exactly somewhat depending on today’s mood, one’s personality and other factors.

the problem at hand: explore-exploit tradeoffs

Where we are on the spectrum is not fixed. You could rather see it as the result of countless tradeoff decisions day-in day-out.

For example, every time I stand in front of that restaurant decision I am actually facing what decision theorists call the explore-exploit tradeoff.

It got famous with the so-called multi-armed bandit problem1: You have a slot machine you know pays out reasonably well, and a row of others you’ve never pulled. Do you keep playing the one you trust, or spend a pull finding out if one of the others pays better?

My restaurant example is not too far away from this - do I stick with what I know is great (exploit) or ‘risk’ something new which could be even better or worse (explore)?

Some other examples for day-to-day tradeoffs of that kind could be…

• Do I spend my holidays in Italy again or go to a completely different country?

• Do I run my usual loop through the park or try another route?

• Do I re-watch the Harry Potter movies or pick up something I don’t know yet?

The key insight from the bandit problem is that there is no evergreen right answer. Neither routine, nor novelty are always the single right way to go.

The right choice depends on your current situation, how much you already know, how much time you have left to benefit from what you learn, how much you can afford to lose on a bad pull. It’s a decision you re-do each time, with (hopefully) varying results.

Let’s take a quick de-tour why each side of the spectrum, novelty our routine, have their place in life.

novelty matters

Why even bothering to try new things?

After overcoming initial discomfort, it actually feels good.

Your hippocampus is constantly comparing what’s in front of you against what’s already stored in memory. When it flags a mismatch, something new, it signals the brain’s reward system, which releases dopamine to then boost how strongly that moment gets encoded into memory2.

That has two positive effects:

The first is how time feels while it’s happening. Novel or unexpected moments seem to occupy more subjective duration than familiar ones, something researchers call the oddball effect3. A new experience feel longer while you’re in it.

The second runs the opposite direction and shows up in hindsight. Ever asked yourself how the last few months flew by so fast? Chances are you were knees deep in routine. Routine doesn’t get flagged for strong encoding, so a stretch of identical days leaves behind almost nothing to look back on. A week full of new experiences can drag at the time and then feel long in memory afterward, while a month of sameness flies by in the moment and barely exists once it’s over.

You’ll remember the new restaurant much more than the fortieth trip to your usual spot - even if you enjoyed it just as much.

staying with what we know is not a bad thing

None of that makes exploit (= sticking to what you know) the wrong move. There are upsides to it.

For one, it’s cheap. You’re not spending energy on decision-making and you know what you’re getting. This is particularly important when your resources are thin, e.g., you don’t have a lot of time, only limited budget or are just tired. The evening you’re most drained is exactly the evening you don’t want to gamble on a new restaurant that might turn out shitty.

Even more, constant novelty-seeking has its own problems. More options mean more decision fatigue and more room for regret over the road not taken (Schwartz’s paradox of choice). And chasing new experiences all the time runs straight into the hedonic treadmill: nothing stays satisfying for long if you never let yourself return to it. If every dinner is a new restaurant, at some point new restaurants stop meaning anything.

Both routine and novelty come at a price. So what determines our budget for explore-exploit decisions?

what keeps us where we are on the spectrum

Personality traits. Some of it comes down to who you are. Openness to experience is one of the five stable personality traits and people genuinely differ in how much novelty-seeking is their default setting. Some of you reading this already know you’re the type who wants the same order at the same restaurant every time.

Still we have to separate trait from state. Your baseline openness is relatively stable. But the capacity to go for the ‘explore’ option on a given day is available regardless of that baseline.

Day-to-day life. The even bigger factor is how work is structured. Same commute, same desk, same three lunch spots on rotation. Modern knowledge work pushes you hard toward exploit, because routine is efficient and predictable and nobody built your job around your need for novelty.

The result is that many people are drifted by their routine’s current towards the ‘exploit’ end of the spectrum without ever having consciously decided that. And suddenly, trying something different feels like a lot of effort.

Following that, the key would be to keep as much ‘fluidity’ on the spectrum as possible - to actively decide when it makes sense to opt for novelty or stay with what you know.

how we can move on the spectrum

Explore-exploit is a choice you make each and every time anew. Consequently, moving on the spectrum is just a matter of practice, not set in stone.

Comfort zones behave a bit like muscles. Used regularly, they keep their range or even expand. Left alone long enough, they shrink, and the same amount of novelty that used to feel like nothing starts to feel like a lot. So the small stuff matters less for its own sake and more as a way of keeping that range intact.

Low-stakes reps. Take a different route to work or university. Order something other than your usual at your favorite restaurant, or just try a different restaurant altogether. Walk through a part of your city you’ve somehow never seen despite living there for years. None of this needs to be significant - just do it from time to time.

On a bigger scale. Travel somewhere you’ve never been. Talk to strangers there and actually ask about their life. Take a random road and see where you end up. This end of the spectrum asks more of you, but it’s built on the same muscle you’ve been training with the smaller stuff.

What’s one small thing you could do differently today?

Meditation is one of those things everybody tells you you absolutely have to do. Somewhere between cold plunges and reading more books, it made it onto the standard self-improvement checklist.

I have been meditating every night for about half a year now without a break, and on and off for the eight years before that. This is my honest take on what’s actually in it for you, what probably isn’t, and how to start if you want to give it a first try.

where the hype comes from

I think the hype comes from two directions that don’t always agree with each other.

There is the spiritual side, which promises you some kind of awakening if you just sit still long enough. And there is the productivity and self-optimization crowd, riding on fairly strong research on stress modulation.

Both can be true at the same time. I have had moments during meditation that felt strange and interesting, glimpses of something outside my normal frame of mind. But I don’t think that’s where the real value comes from. If anything, chasing those moments is a good way to get frustrated with the whole practice.

what it actually does

My practice is absolutely no rocket science. Ten minutes every night, right before sleep. Think of it as a shower, just for your head.

For me, the biggest benefit is that you learn that you are not your thoughts. They are something happening to you, not something you are. Once you actually grasped this distinction, you get to choose whether to follow a thought or not, especially the toxic, dark or plainly unproductive ones.

That sounds almost too simple to justify eight years of practice. But simple and easy are not the same thing.

overhyped and underestimated

So where does that leave meditation? I would say it’s both overhyped and underestimated at once.

Overhyped, because people sell it to you as something that changes your life the moment you start. It doesn’t. The first weeks mostly feel like sitting with a very loud, very unimpressed mind.

Underestimated, because a practice repeated over months and years slowly rewires how you relate to your thoughts, and that makes everyday life easier. Not dramatically but rather similar to how a year at the gym doesn’t hand you one big moment of strength, it just means you carry the groceries upstairs without thinking about it.

There’s super interesting research behind the underestimated part. Harvard psychologists Killingsworth and Gilbert tracked people’s mind-wandering in real time via an iPhone app and found their minds wandered close to half the time, and that mind-wandering itself, regardless of what people were actually doing, predicted lower happiness (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). Meditation is essentially training for the moment you notice you’ve wandered off. And it consequently contributes positively to your happiness.

It’s less of a cure-all and more of a highly useful tool in your toolbox. One you can reach for whenever you need to work with your thoughts instead of being dragged along by them.

how to actually start

If you’ve never meditated, here is what I would do.

1. Get a meditation app. Headspace is where I started, and it still has some of the best beginner courses around, roughly ten minutes each. If you’re still studying, get the student discount, it’s basically free. Once you have some practice under your belt and want to explore more, Waking Up by Sam Harris is worth a look too. It goes beyond typical MBSR (meditation-based stress reduction) techniques and doubles down on nonduality meditation, which fundamentally challenges my previous point on the duality of you being an observer of your thoughts.

2. Give yourself 30 days, fully locked in. Commit to trying it seriously for a month straight. Full commitment for 30 days, then decide freely whether to keep going.

My old roommate and I used to run 30-day challenges together like this. We would draw a calendar on a sheet of paper, seven days per row from Monday to Sunday, four or five rows stacked below each other for the month, and cross off every day we did it. Hang that sheet somewhere visible and you have a physical record of the streak.

Life happens, so some days will get skipped. That’s fine. Just never let it slip two days in a row, what Matt D’Avella calls the two-day rule. That one rule alone did more for my consistency than any app reminder ever did.

3. Drop the assumption that you can’t meditate because you have too many thoughts. Everybody has thoughts, including people who have meditated for decades. The practice isn’t about having no thoughts, it’s about training yourself to notice when you’ve been swept up in one.

I like picturing the mind as a highway, with your thoughts as cars driving past. An untrained mind sits in every car that pulls up and gets driven wherever it goes, usually without noticing. A trained mind still sees the cars, but has learned it can step out and watch them pass instead of climbing in.

That’s it. Ten minutes, before bed, most nights. Eventually, you’ll notice you got out of the car - promised.

I’ve been feeling very uninspired lately.

In some periods I have ideas just ‘bubbling’ up for project ideas, newsletter pieces or whatever else to do with my life. In other periods, that’s just not coming.

And it’s frustrating, considering it’s so much easier to send you this little newsletter when I have a long list of ideas to work through.

I assume you know this cyclical nature of sometimes being highly inspired and sometimes staring at a blank page?

For example, the graph below shows the number of article ideas I added to my Notion dashboard per week. The ups and downs are evident.

It struck me that inspiration clearly isn’t equally distributed. Some weeks I added ten or more article ideas. Other weeks, none at all.

That raises the question of what changed over the weeks so that my inspiration varied that much.

Below is my take on the input and output drivers behind these fluctuations.

what’s inspiration?

Inspiration is something that rather comes to us. It’s this sense of excitement about a new idea or perspective, something that moves us forward.

It fundamentally has three features (Thrash & Elliot, 2003):

• you don’t decide to be inspired, it happens to you (evocation)

• it involves a glimpse of something better or beyond your current frame (transcendence)

• it yields a drive to express or actualize what you just glimpsed (motivation)

There are basically two sides to inspiration, one passive and one active.

Provoking inspiration is consequently something you can influence on both ends of the dichotomy - on the input as well as on the output side.

what drives inspiration?

input

Novel input matters to get new impulses you can process and link to what you already know. This is usually something very self-guided - if you’re interested in, say, tech startups, you will naturally consume more content on the topic and speak to people in the space, consequently influencing which kind of ideas might pop up in your mind.

Sometimes, however, it can feel like going down a rabbit hole that’s already been mined out by you. There is just no additional inspo-sparking input coming from a specific creator or category for you.

Once you’re there, there is massive value in diving into seemingly disconnected topics. Most brilliant new ideas are actually emerging from translating existing ideas into another domain.

For example, Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, took inspiration from US supermarkets, where shelves were restocked only as items were purchased. He translated this pull-based logic into manufacturing with kanban, which later was re-exported into software development.

For me, this would mean, once my career purpose / positive psychology rabbit holes have dried out, to look into topics like physics, philosophy or economics.

For novel input to unfold its impact on us, we also need temporary abstinence from constant stimulation - phases of zero input. Making space for your mind to wander by leaving your headphones off during a commute or by taking time for journalling.

Don’t let the shower be the only input-free chance for inspiration to hit you.

Looking back at the graph, my assumption is that those low-inspiration weeks were caused by exposing myself to little novel input or by continuing to consume things I already knew.

output

Now we have more inspirational creative thoughts popping up, great. But if we don’t find an outlet to do something with them, they might either quit coming or start running endless circles and thought spirals - keeping us hostage in our own mental worlds.

This was one of the reasons for me to start this newsletter more than a year ago. I was looking for a way to make ideas tangible, to force myself to put them down on paper instead of having thoughts crossing my mind here and there to be forgotten.

Finding an outlet for inspiration is twofold for me.

Short-term, it simply means having a place to note down thoughts and ideas. To have a notebook, a Notion page or simply sticky notes to write things out that feel worth keeping. That has the dual benefit of reducing mental load and opening opportunities for future use cases.

Mid-term, this means finding areas of application for this inspiration. As for my part, I was collecting ideas on how this newsletter early stages could look like / be about for years (a result of outlet #1), before finally starting to do something with all the notes gathered. To basically generate a forum for all the sparks of inspiration, to give them a purpose, something to do with.

And once working on a project like this, this will trigger further inspiration, since your mind is naturally working on how to take it further and generates ideas.

And this is a very important relationship to keep in mind. It’s not only the causal chain from inspiration to action, but the reverse is also true. Not sitting there and waiting to be inspired, but actually moving forward with whatever project you have in mind. Inspiration will follow.

Ideas accumulate if they have somewhere to go.

What can you do today to create an outlet for what inspires you?

I’ve had the draft for this newsletter piece on my Notion for one year now. The fact that I’m now working in a job this is partly about made it both harder to write and easier to understand.

Anyways, let me get to the point:

What would happen, if the thousands of highly talented young people streaming into prestigious jobs in strategy consulting or finance were to work in the impact sector instead? What if they set out to solve the climate crisis, famine or other problems instead of aligning boxes in PowerPoint?

The historian Rutger Bregman, author of the bestseller Humankind, made me question this in his latest book Moral Ambition.

He introduces the ambition-idealism matrix, which is Bregman’s framework for sorting career paths along two axes: ambition (how much drive, talent and resources you bring to the work) and idealism (how much the work is oriented toward genuine social benefit rather than personal gain).

The four quadrants:

• Low ambition, low idealism. People working in jobs that neither stretch their talent nor help anyone.

• Low ambition, high idealism. Traditional activism and much nonprofit work fall here. Good intentions, real moral seriousness, but often disorganized, under-resourced, or more focused on symbolic gestures and moral purity than on measurable results. Bregman’s critique here is that caring for a topic does not mean effectively changing it, with people often putting ideological consistency over outcomes.

• High ambition, low idealism. This is consulting, investment banking, corporate law, big tech product management. Enormous talent and drive channeled into work that, at best, is neutral for the world and at worst actively extracts value. Buckle up, he’s being quite harsh on that one: The people here are usually very capable and ambitious, but he sees their talent ‘wasted’ by being pointed at prestige accumulation rather than impact.

• High ambition, high idealism. This is the quadrant Bregman is recruiting for. Moral ambition means taking the same competitive drive, strategic thinking, and relentlessness that makes someone successful in finance or consulting, and redirecting it at the world’s biggest problems, pandemics, factory farming, tax avoidance, existential risk.

Currently finding myself in the top-left quadrant,I can’t fully subscribe to this critique. I know people who deliberately use these jobs as stepping stones toward more impactful careers. Or find environments within, where they can work on impactful projects.

Still, I think it is a valid question to ask why

1. so many people head for consulting/ finance instead of impact, and

2. what can be done to shift more talent towards moral ambition.

consulting > impact startup is the result of an individual’s expected value math

I think the main reason is actually rationality. A top-tier graduate choosing between McKinsey (or another color’s equivalent) and an impact startup is not making an irrational decision. Consulting and comparable paths offer immediate high status confirmation, a clear promotion ladder, social proof among peers and the promise of optionality (”I’ll do this for 2 years then exit”).

The impact path offers the opposite: ambiguity, lower salary, high failure rate and status in a much smaller reference group.

I think it’s a systemic problem incentivizing young talent to follow ‘default paths’.

Ironically, I wrote about this in my very first piece on this newsletter (link here)

Step by step, I realized that environments like business schools function like conveyor belts, guiding students toward a predefined future alongside their peers. You land in an overachiever’s script where success is measured by the prestige of the firm you join, the intensity of your schedule (“I only sleep four hours a night”), and the admiration of peers, mentors, and network contacts.

And the conveyor belt leaves you on the top-left of Bregman’s quadrant. And in the end it’s much less about a decision for or against consulting, but more the systemic problem of incentivizing young talent to follow default paths.

here are some ideas on what could be done to move more talent to moral ambition

a) Change the comparison set

Merely consuming moral calls-for-action (reading a book, attending a talk) has weak long-term effects on career decisions. Peer effects are much more effective. If five of your smartest friends are founding climate tech or mental health companies, the probability of you doing so as well will skyrocket. I bet replicating what YC managed in brand signalling but aimed at impact ventures would accomplish more than a thousand persuasive books.

b) Fix the financial risk asymmetry directly

The consulting-to-impact gap is also a financial risk gap. Most young professionals simply cannot afford the high-risk, low-salary work in an impact startup over a well-paid consulting job. It implies massive opportunity costs. What if the government threw more money on state-funded incubation programs like Germany’s EXIST, but for young impact founders, making it financially less risky to go this path?

c) Target the recruitment pipeline early on

The big finance and consulting firms recruit aggressively on campus from Bachelor’s onward. Impact organizations largely do not - probably due to financial constraints. The asymmetry in recruitment infrastructure yields a visibility asymmetry. Universities could subsidize such companies by providing slots for career fairs or job boards and would reversely benefit from embedding purpose & impact in their public appearance.

d) Decouple impact from sacrifice framing

Traditional activism feels somewhat guilt- and donation-based, simply not profitable for the individual. This complicates the beforementioned expected value calculation, making it simply unattractive for ambitious people. People don’t have to be selfless to pursue social entrepreneurship. There are countless examples thinking economic success and social impact in one. Thinking social impact more as Patagonia than Greenpeace could be the start of loosening the sacrifice framing.

The world has so many talented, ambitious young people. The effect of having even a small fraction of them working on the world’s biggest problems can hardly be overstated.

But we cannot wait for some brave individuals to pursue this path. We need to change structures so that more people play a different game.

When you signed up for this newsletter, I initially promised you a weekly essay in your inbox. After entering my new job in consulting, I opted for a bi-weekly pattern. I’ve now missed that twice, my last post being a month ago.

The last month’s work brought insanely long hours with barely any weekends or holidays. Still, I could have forced myself to write that newsletter.

I don’t think anyone receiving this mail was even realizing I haven’t delivered - it would have been more about enforcing a bargain I made with myself when I started this job.

The bargain to (a) preserve my health foundations with 3x sports a week, daily meditation, and so on and (b) hold dear to my values, i.e., showing up for my beloved ones and my passion projects (such as this).

Well. I didn’t. And the point of this piece is to say that that’s okay.

Many identities we created for ourselves are about consistency:

• “I am someone who never misses workouts.”

• “I am someone who regularly publishes.”

• “I am someone who always shows up.”

These are useful for keeping the engine running, until life becomes unusually demanding. Then they create a drift between expectations towards oneself and the inability to match them.

They stop serving and start being an additional source of stress.

Ironically, the people most likely to struggle with this are often the most disciplined ones. They build identities around reliability, consistency, and follow-through. The very traits that help them succeed become the source of guilt when circumstances temporarily make those standards impossible to maintain.

the point being: don’t be too hard on yourself

They say career is a marathon, not a sprint. In my short 1.5-ish years of work life I rather feel like it’s both. There are definitely periods where you have to run fast.

My current operating assumption is that in marathon times, you gotta hold tight to your healthy habits to make the long run. To be the guy never missing the workout, hitting send on the newsletter and showing up for your friends.

But in the sprint times, you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. It’s okay to let some responsibilities slip temporarily. As long as it ends before becoming chronic.

energy saver mode

The problem is that once an identity is off the table, say you’re no longer the guy showing up for sports 3x a week, it becomes much harder to get back into that. As James Clear said, “Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits.”

One thing that might be helpful for stressful phases is to bring some responsibilities into an energy saver mode: Allow yourself to do the absolute minimum of what you fear to let slip, like doing 20 pushups in the morning (sports), doing a body scan while brushing your teeth (meditation), or merely writing three things you’re grateful for each eve (journalling).

That’s the difference between quitting and temporarily downshifting.

After a sprint phase, it will be much easier to bounce back from that than having to rebuild a healthy habit from scratch.

For me it’s time to rebuild now. Until all of my systems get crushed in the next sprint. And that’s fine. I hope I won’t be too hard on myself then.

If you’re also of the sorts of pushing yourself a bit too hard, here’s a friendly reminder:

It’s okay if, while you’re trying to keep all balls in the air, one falls to the floor. As long as you pick it up after.

this article at a glance

I’m currently obsessed with Greek mythology. The amount of old wisdom hidden more or less obviously in these stories is striking.

Take the oracle of Delphi as an example, whose maxim “know thyself” reminds its visitors that self-awareness is the key to true wisdom, not its predictions for the future.

One of the oracle’s visitors is Sisyphus, whose life is a series of schemes, ultimately trying to cheat the gods and attain immortality.

Of Sisyphus’ punishment for his crimes you might have heard: he had to roll a massive boulder up a steep hill. And once he aaaalmost reached the peak, the boulder would roll down, causing Sisyphus to eternally and repeatedly do this senseless task of pushing it up, just to start all over again.

This ‘Sisyphean work’ might hit home for you. There is an undeniable parallel to today’s life.

• We hustle through our mails to get to inbox zero by the end of the day (boulder up), just to check in to a crowded inbox on the day after (boulder down).

• We finish one project (boulder up), just to start another one right after (boulder down).

• Or in uni times, we survived exam season (boulder up), just to realize that after the exam is before the exam (boulder down).

This pattern is also visible in bigger matters of life. Setting yourself a career goal, say getting that consulting job you always dreamed of, working towards it and getting there (boulder up), just to realize that now the real work starts (boulder down).

Once we have reached a goal, the work towards another starts right after.

Just like Sisyphus, we never really reach the peak. There will always be another boulder to push.

Albert Camus describes this dilemma as what he calls the absurd, i.e., the mismatch between a human’s need to attribute meaning to life and the mere senselessness and indifference of the universe towards that.

In light of this, we all have a little Sisyphus in us who is showing up day in, day out and doing pointless activities over and over again.

But this raises the question: why are we then doing all this? Why play the game of senseless effort if it’s nothing but suffering?

Maybe the resolution to this is to change the underlying assumption that reaching the peak is what makes us happy. Maybe the journey towards the peak is what makes life worth living, not reaching the top. Process over outcome.

Camus concludes:

This is so simple and so clever. We always imagine Sisyphus as a frustrated, suffering guy. If you look closely, you might actually see him smiling and having a hell of a time.

Maybe the big challenge is to find a boulder worth pushing.

this article at a glance

Lately, it feels like you’re either keeping up with AI or falling behind.

a) the wind of change is blowing so hard that one easily gets swiped off, and

b) the anxiety rates amongst Gen Z, who you’d expect to be the ones spearheading this change, are disproportionally high.

Many have pointed out how insanely technological change has accelerated over time.

Just look at the compression1:

• From the first stone tools to controlled fire: ~2.4 million years

• From the first powered flight (1903) to the moon landing (1969): 66 years

• From early large language models (~2022) to AI disrupting knowledge work: ~2–4 years

This pace of compounding change takes a toll on our minds, considering we constantly have to adapt to new realities. Most older generations have long given up following all the technological changes, while the young ones are still attempting to keep up.

We can’t change the situation, but we can change ourselves

You might have seen this graphic on LinkedIn already, at least my feed was full of people using it to show how much growth potential is still there for AI.

I would see it as the opposite. Holy shit, 16% of humanity are already using AI.

For reference: Facebook had 100m users 4 years after its introduction - our favorite AI tools combine already more than 1.3bn in the same time frame.

So if the genie is out of the bottle and we can’t change the circumstances, our only option is to change our attitude towards it.

I was thinking a lot about this, because I feel the majority of the AI discourse is on the large-scale impact on the workforce. What’s barely being considered is how our psyche should cope with these changes. How we get through these crazy times in one piece.

Let me, therefore, introduce the human-first AI operating system I’ve been trying to build for myself in the past months.

01 inside-out adoption > outside-in

One thing I realized in the past years is that I was way too prone to jumping on the next hype AI tool and trying to integrate it into my workflows. Something I call outside-in adoption: a new tool is presented, and you either eat it or don’t.

The problem with this approach is that it’s very easy to disrupt processes that are actually running well.

Best example is when I stumbled upon reclaim, an AI-based calendar management tool. I instantly started integrating when actually my previous time blocking system on normal Google Calendar was running well. I ultimately went back to it, because reclaim had tons of fancy functions I didn’t need. All it left me with was a waste of time and unnecessary disruption kicking against a functional system, just because another shiny object appeared on the horizon.

I propose to turn the tables. To first think where in your workflows you might need some technical support, to then look into which tools serve your exact needs best. Inside-out adoption.

For example in my old startup, we realized we were spending too much time trying to decipher the internal notes from sales calls. The outside solution? Deploying an AI notetaker to provide polished and easy-to-understand notes.

Think where in your life you actually need AI. Ignore all the fancy solutions coming out day-by-day.

02 understand the principles > always up-to-date

My current employer gave us a pretty good AI training starting from the basics. What’s a transformer, how does GenAI differ from machine learning, and so on… What this made me realize is that I actually had no clue of all this despite my close following on all the latest AI news.

I believe the reason is that it’s too easy to get stuck in the daily buzz of new AI features - not seeing the forest because of all the trees around.

I should have spent more time learning the basics and understanding the principles, instead of reactively following the buzz.

Understand from baseline what AI can and can’t do, how it works and why it can do some things better than others. This will help massively.

03 centaurism > minotaurism

My bet for the future is on emotional intelligence (EI). We can already see the renaissance of face-to-face interactions, events and products - against all odds from the COVID-induced digital coworking boom.

Despite computer scientists being the most AI native people, it is their profession that is being hit the hardest by AI. This tells us it’s not enough to spearhead the AI changes - we’ll need another edge. I think that’s people centrism.

We can give this EI-AI hybrid baby a name: a centaur:

The upper, human half: You still want to put humans first, use your creativity to solve problems and your charisma to work with people.

The lower, horse half: However, not having AI horsepower under your ass would mean falling back. In other words, the challenge is to best deploy AI as a force multiplier without suppressing the strengths that differs us from mere machines.

One concrete example for this would be the timing in a creation process. Say I want to brainstorm ideas on how I could promote and grow this newsletter (which, unfortunately, I don’t manage time-wise these days).

The easy impulse would be to just ask AI to come up with 10-ish ideas on that. And exactly that would be the opposite of centauric behavior. It would be minotauric - bullishly charging forward without using a human brain. The marketing ideas would most likely be average as hell. And the reason for that is simple, considering AI transformers work in the way that they generate outputs by lining up the most likely words one after another. It’s average by definition.

So the cure is the other way around - using AI after the spark, not instead of it. So I start using my own brain to gather all the ideas and creative view points I can come up with and, once that flow is ebbing, I use AI to enrich and elongate those ideas.

Otherwise there’s a minotauric dependency risk, i.e. me starting to lose self-reliance and needing average AI slop for the most basic creative processes.

04 generalism > specialism

AI is moving so fast that it makes careers obsolete we once deemed ‘safe bets’. Take computer science/ engineering as an example: 10 years ago everyone would have told you computer science is the most future-proof subject to study. Suddenly, as I argued in this post, US computer science grads have a twice the unemployment rate of their peers who studied philosophy (!).

I make this case to underline that specialist roles are increasing your surface area of risk towards being replaced by AI.

My bet is on generalist or at least T-shaped roles, because they will teach you not only a specific skill at hand, but to go on a meta level and learn to quickly acquire new skills and operate under high uncertainty.

The fact that generalists are usually stronger in learning how to approach a problem rather than being 100% literate in the problem space itself, gives versatility.

Generalists adapt across shifting systems, while specialists might be easier to automate.

05 cognitive flexibility > rigidity

Okay okay we got it - technological progress is moving super fast and hits work life like a wrecking ball. Our mental operating systems are not made for this. They are made for beating the shit out of a sabre-tooth tiger and making fire, not for orchestrating 5+ Claude agents.

I think a core skill to not burn out amidst this high pace is cognitive flexibility = the ability to adapt your thinking as circumstances change.

At its core, it means not taking every thought you have at face value. Because most of the anxiety we feel is less about reality itself and more about the stories we tell ourselves about it.

The biggest lever for this is probably through mindfulness. A couple of years ago I learned about the thought labeling/ noting technique and I think it’s incredibly useful to detach yourself a bit: Instead of getting pulled into a thought, you observe it.

It’s a visualization you can apply while meditating (or just in day-to-day). If you feel a thought popping up in your mind, you imagine that you write your thoughts on a sticky note attached to a balloon - and let them fly away.

May sound weird, but it teaches the duality of you being in control, or at least distanced, from your thoughts, not their prey.

We are not going to slow this AI wave down. It will keep evolving and get faster and faster.

So even more important than keeping up with everything that’s happening is this: Not losing yourself in the process.

Who are you?

Don’t just read over this. Really try to answer the question honestly. Who are you?

I think it’s eternally hard to answer because it forces us to deconstruct something that feels so naturally whole.

Answering this question is a bit like trying to capture water in your hands. You think you’ve got it, but the longer you hold on to it, the more the answer slips through your fingers.

I recently attended a two-week training bootcamp for my new consulting job and in one of the workshops, we were asked to answer a “simple” question within 2 minutes and in groups of 2: Who are you?

What’s been really interesting to me is how differently everyone approached this matter.

Some went into their background—where they’re from, what they worked or studied in the past.

Some doubled down on their interests, sports, favorite football clubs. Or they went a bit deeper—if they’re an introvert, what strengths they have, who they strive to be, and so on…

Bottom line is, you can approach your identity in so many different layers, from roles (father, worker, runner) to psychological traits (introvert, neurotic, creative, etc.).

And as different as these different perceptions might be, they have one thing in common: they are all stories you tell yourself about yourself.

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identity is nothing but a story

To prove this point, let’s do a brief thought experiment.

Let’s imagine Elon managed the whole population-on-Mars thing and you are offered the opportunity to go there. Since the commute is rather long, SpaceX invented special means of teleportation:

You’ll go into a little cell and your exact body details and mind (including memories, personality traits, etc.) will be uploaded to a cloud and perfectly reconstructed on Mars. In the same moment, your old version on planet Earth is being completely eradicated.

Will this copy of yours on Mars now think it is you? I mean, it remembers your whole life from childhood to adolescence; it can even recall entering the teleportation box 2 minutes/55 million km ago. Most people would argue yes, indeed it’s you.

Derek Parfit, the ideator of this paradox, goes even one step further: What happens if they keep the planet Earth version of you alive? Are there now two “you’s”?

I think what this reveals is that identity defined as the result of physical or psychological continuity is a flawed assumption. One could consider the Marsling as “you” although it is discontinuous on these parameters.

This paradox surfaced long before Parfit’s Mars mind games. The ancient Greek’s Plutarch (circa 46–120 AD) already tells the story of the Athenians preserving the legendary ship their hero Theseus supposedly used to sail to Crete to defeat the Minotaur in their harbor for many centuries. As the wooden planks of the ship gradually decayed over time, they replaced them with new timber.

But if you replace every plank, screw, and piece of a ship over time, is it still the same ship? Intuitively yes, because the ship’s being isn’t tied to any single plank but to the continuity of its story.

And the same logic applies to us. Our cells regenerate, our beliefs evolve, our memories fade and reshape themselves. Yet we still consider ourselves the same person, as our identity is woven through the narrative thread that connects our past to our present to our imagined future.

I am the story I tell myself.

no theory without a model

This is a service-oriented newsletter, of course, so I don’t want to purely rely on you having to do the deep thinking all by yourself. I’m also relying on the psychologist Dan McAdams, who comes to our aid with his “three layers of personality.”

He underlines the above point of you = the story you tell yourself by showing that we construct our personality in multiple layers:

Layer 1: Dispositional Traits: The first level contains your broad, stable personality traits (extroverted or introverted, conscientious or spontaneous, neurotic or emotionally stable, and so on…) that don’t change much over time and define someone’s tendencies. One popular example is the so-called Big Five.

Layer 2: Characteristic Adaptations: The middle layer includes your context-dependent goals, values, roles, and coping strategies that evolve with your circumstances—this is where you identify as “a runner” or “a leader” or hold specific values that guide your choices.

Layer 3: Life Story (Narrative Identity): The third layer is your internalized narrative, i.e., how you weave past experiences, present circumstances, and imagined future into a meaningful story. You unconsciously select which memories matter and how setbacks have shaped you.

If we now circle back to the “who are you?” question in my new job’s workshop, some examples might ring a bell.

Saying, for example, that you’re an introvert and a creative pulls from the Traits layer. Introducing yourself as a runner, father, or leader would fall into adaptations.

The twist is that once you claim those more or less neutral statements as part of who you are, you’ve already lifted it into Layer 3. You’ve made it a chapter in your story. You’re using narrative identity to interpret a trait or adaptation into a construct you call your identity.

And this is great news! It means that identity is not fixed, but a narrative we continuously write and rewrite. Understanding that you are fundamentally the story you tell yourself is both liberating and daunting.

It’s liberating because it means you’re not trapped by who you’ve been. The introvert can become more socially confident. The couch potato can become a runner. The scattered thinker can become organized.

But it’s also daunting because it places responsibility squarely on your shoulders. You can’t blame your genes, your past, or your circumstances entirely. While those factors shape the raw material you work with (those Layer 1 traits aren’t going anywhere), the story you build from them is ultimately yours to author.

You change who you are by acting differently, then letting those actions reshape your story.

Each small action is a sentence in a new chapter. String enough sentences together, and you’ve written a new narrative. Write enough chapters, and you’ve become someone new.

And thereby, the actually right question to ask is “who are you becoming?”, not “who are you?”.

We have all learned that ‘giving first’, doing good for others and paying it forward is the morally right way to go. Implicitly, we know that this is true. But morality alone is a weak motivator on a tired Saturday morning. So why is giving first actually a rational strategy?

saturday blues & cleaning the apartment

It’s a Saturday 10am. You really had a shitty week with long working hours, not enough sleep and barely any solo time.

You’re looking forward to just spending some time on the couch with your favorite quick-hit dopamine source.

Suddenly you remember that you made a deal with your roommate that you’d split the household chores this week – you’d clean the bathroom and she’d clean living room and kitchen.

The situation you’re facing now is what we learned in our first semesters at uni as a Prisoner’s Dilemma, one of game theory’s classic explanations for why two rational individuals fail to cooperate even when it would benefit both.

In our example, this looks like that:

In a single-shot version, the rational move is to slack. No matter what your roommate does, you’re better off resting. And since they face the same logic, both of you defect. You end up with a dirty apartment and mutual resentment.

In other words, if there is no future, pure self-interest wins short-term leisure over collective good.

This changes in an infinite (or indefinite) version. If you two are living together for the long run (no known end), cooperation suddenly becomes sustainable with a tit-for-tat strategy. In the first week, you clean your part diligently, signalling positive intent. You warn your roommate, that you will do as they do – they don’t clean, neither will you in the week after. This reciprocity yields a new Nash equilibrium of both of you properly doing their chores. Because if you don’t, this will unravel a mess at home.

We know single-shot prisoner’s dilemmas from many day-to-day situations.

• You’re a tourist buying from a street vendor in a foreign city you’ll never revisit, you’re overpaying big time.

• You’re riding a cab in a new city and the driver picks the longer route.

• A stranger on a car highway ahead won’t let you in during rush hour.

It’s tempting to label these people as *ssholes. But maybe they’re just responding to the incentives in front of them.

In situations that (a) have anonymity and (b) no continuation, the little devil on our right shoulder will urge us to maximize your own profit at the cost of greater good.

This feels wrong. This is not how our parents raised us.

The reason this still happens is due to two faults.

• people misunderstand the game they are playing, or…

• they are lacking ethical scaffolding to resist short-term temptation

play the right game

Life is an infinite game.

The world is smaller than we think and reputations travel faster than ever. Doing a bad job in your last internship week or pulling back from a signed job offer last-minute might serve you well in the short-time. Chances are, it will come back at you. Through a bad reference or by the counterpart suddenly crossing paths 10 years later again.

And even if you don’t, the reality of a 1:1 prisoner’s dilemma is actually one of countless intertwined versions. You fool one person, and this one person will take that doubt into all of their following interactions. Distrust spreads. And sooner or later, you live in the system you helped create.

This creates a ripple effect: Even if the other person never meets you again, your behavior leaks into the system. Every small defection lowers the baseline of trust, and every small cooperation raises it.

Assuming infinite instead of single-shot games as a default will do you good in the long run. Cooperation > defection.

play the game rightly

Still, there will always be douchebags playing the game for their own good only. That’s why laws exist. They transform single-shot temptations into repeated games with consequences.

This need for an ethical scaffolding is something the Greeks knew already long before Zaziki and Bifteki took the world by storm: Virtue ethics such as Aristotle’s underline that cultivating virtuous habits like courage, justice, and wisdom will lead toward eudaimonia, a flourishing life.

This sets “cooperation” as an ethical baseline, which consequently benefits all people together.

Your shitty-week couch urge? Aristotle tells you to clean anyways to cultivate a reliable self and consequently play the infinite game rightly.

Every small act of cooperation is a vote for the kind of person you are becoming.

giving first is a valid strategy in life

This little excourse into game theory and Nicomachean ethics was to prove one point only.

‘Giving first’ is a valid strategy in life.

• Rationally, it is the positive signal showing others that you are worth cooperating with in the infinite game of life.

• Ethically, giving first will pay into being a virtuous person one act at a time.

The game we are all playing is long-term. And every time you choose to give first, you’re deciding what kind of player you are.

“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

And although this is the same man who (allegedly) wrote “I will return in three days; don’t wash.” to his wife Josephine, he still has a point.

And he walked the talk, owning thousands of books and reportedly reading hundreds per year.

And he’s not the only reader in the ‘moving-the-world’ club

• Warren Buffett reads 80% of his day

• Bill Gates finishes around one book a week.

• Mark Cuban logs more than three hours a day.

You know who doesn’t read?

President Trump. He prefers the TV.

And while that’s anecdotal evidence of picking outstanding examples for the sake of an argument, I just wanted to say:

Books are great! They are a way to access the life’s work of great (wo)men, condensed into a few hundred pages, for nothing more than a few euros.

And if you appreciate book recommendations just as much as me, this piece is for you.

Here’s a collection of the twelve books that influenced me the most, or left the biggest impression.

If you end up reading any of them, let me know how you liked them!

• man‘s search for meaning — victor frankl
  Even if all your freedoms are taken (like the author’s during the Shoah), you still have the freedom to choose how you react.

• skin in the game — nassim taleb
  So many problems in the world stem from asymmetric risks, i.e. the fact that decision-makers don’t suffer the negative consequences of their decisions while benefiting from the upside.

• hell yeah or no — derek sivers
  Regularly say yes to the risky growth opportunities instead of safety. Still, if it’s not a “hell yeah,” it should probably be a “no.”

• the defining decade — meg jay
  Despite what everybody tells us, research suggests that the 20s are not the “greatest time of our lives.” It’s the time for exploration, trying stuff, building an identity.

• waking up — sam harris
  “I” am not a singular entity, I’m rather split into a thinker and an observer (a realization from duality meditation). More paradoxically, if you look close enough the self dissolves entirely, realizing there is no observer looking at the world from behind our eyes (non-duality meditation).

• the pathless path — paul millerd
  It’s too easy to follow the most prestigious, admired, and ‘default’ career tracks. But there’s a chance to do our own thing, to follow a “pathless path”. It took Paul several strategy consulting roles, including at McKinsey & BCG, to figure that out.

• die with zero — bill perkins
  Old school financial advice of backloading spendings, i.e. saving as much as possible when we’re young for retirement and inheritance has a big flaw: being young holds the best chance to live and experience the world. You most likely won’t backpack through India and sleep in 16-bed dorms at 70.

• beyond the wand — tom felton
  Will never forget the image of Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) taking “a breath of fresh air” with Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), just to pull a cigarette out of his fake wizard beard during the filming of Dumbledore’s death scene. A fun read for Harry Potter fans and a masterclass in finding the strength to show weakness (opening up about his alcohol addiction).

• irresistible — adam alter
  Addiction to phones & social media is a lopsided arms race, as the systems are made to play us. But we have the chance to build behavioral architectures to avoid this.

• dopamine nation — anna lembke
  This little neurotransmitter makes us miserable because we are working so hard not to be. Neuroadaptation forces us to seek more extreme dopamine hits next time. Using self-binding mechanisms, we can make this weakness our greatest power.

• siddharta — hermann hesse
  Some things can’t be taught, but have to be experienced. Hesse’s Siddhartha moves through the wildest life circumstances to achieve enlightenment, and so can we as a means of self-discovery.

• leonardo da vinci — walter isaacson
  To understand things in depth, you need to first look at all the details individually. You need to observe every single aspect before looking at the whole. Leonardo used this to become a jack-of-all-trades, e.g. by inferring that the heart valve opens and closes due to blood swirls, inspired by river flows (450 years before this was scientifically proven).

I’ve come to believe that the impact of a book is a function of three things:

• First, the content itself. Some books are simply better for a certain topic than others.

• Second, the reader. You can be interested or not in the writing style, subject, and line of argumentation. What hits home for one person might be boring as hell for another.

• And third, timing. So often did I read a book years ago and had zero resonance. But when I picked it up later again, it hit me with inspiration.

The point is, there are no books you ‘have to’ read, no matter how often everybody keeps telling you. If it doesn’t resonate, abandon it. Maybe it’ll find you again when you’re ready.

Would love to hear which books shaped you the most.

Most people spend more time planning a vacation than planning their career.

Considering the role our careers play in our life’s happiness and the 80,000+ hours input, we can do better than that.

However, most people merely choose their next step based on factors like salary, prestige, titles, or speed – so called first-order effects.

And while that’s all fair, shouldn’t these decisions be worth one thought more? Not to just think what happens next, but what happens after that. To take in long-term impacts on your life. That’s what is called second-order thinking.

early careerists are in a sticky situation

Never have there been more opportunities for young generations in the West than now.

Taking academia as an example, there are now more than 400 higher education institutions in Germany, which is around 13 times more than post-WW2.

Students can now select from 22,000 degree programs from classical fields (law, physics, philosophy,…) to new creations (CS, Entrepreneurship, Communication,…)1.

And while this may sound like paradise from a baby boomer’s perspective, it comes at a price.

The vast amount of options leads to an abundance paradox: having more options does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. It leads to choice overload and decision paralysis, leaving young people in an orientation crisis.

Therefore, it’s not a surprise that one in four students choose generalist, “safe-bet” subjects in business, administration and law2. Going down this path, many early-career decisions are made by outsourcing thinking to what feels safe, impressive, or “default”. First-order thinking.

The immediate consequence of this orientation crisis is a call for purposeful work. Having so many options, many people don’t just want to do another bullshit job, they want to work on something meaningful.

But in reality, there still is an inside-outside gap between what people value vs. what they do.

• 70% of employees say their sense of purpose is largely defined by work.

• But only 15% of frontline workers live that purpose at work3.

I believe the only answer to this lack of purpose are second-order careers.

Careers that are built by following a long-term vision instead of short-term amenities.

Careers that step off conventional paths (or tread them intentionally) instead of following a default mode.

Careers that dare to ask how can I make life & career decisions today that still make sense years from now?

That’s what second-order thinking is for.

There are several ways to think about your career in-depth. No matter which method you choose, what counts most is that you take the time to do so. Here’s a suggestion.

three foundations for building a second-order career

Meaningful career design builds on three pillars. Knowing where you are heading, what’s important to you, and generating ongoing proof of who you are (to be).

Second-order careers are…

1. guided by a north star,

2. aligned with what you value, and

3. are building dots you’ll later connect.

To make this a bit more tangible, I want to introduce you to young Yvon.

Growing up in Southern California as a Franco-Canadian, Yvon prefers the wilderness over the classroom. He spends his free time outdoor, climbing in Yosemite.

But like many of his peers, he is frustrated with the gear. Pitons (the metal spikes hammered into rock for safety) were often poorly made and left permanent scars on climbing routes.

And so he does the unexpected: he teaches himself blacksmithing.

19 years old, he buys a small second-hand forge to craft pitons behind his parents’ house – ones that were stronger and reusable. Since his friends and friends’ friends seemingly feel the same need, he soon starts selling these out of the back of his own car to make a first living with his company Chouinard Equipment, Ltd..

Around ten years later, after realizing that even his own pitons are harming Yosemite’s rock faces, he makes a difficult decision: to stop selling his most profitable product. He introduces aluminum chocks instead as “cleaner” climbing gear.

To support his semi-profitable equipment business, Yvon starts selling clothes as well. What begins with reselling of rugby shirts procured on a Scotland trip turns into a bigger apparel business. Climbers need clothes that work, and Yvon has a feeling for function and feel.

This is the birth hour of Patagonia, and young Yvon is Yvon Chouinard, it’s founder.

From day one, Patagonia reflects Yvon’s worldview: simple living, respect for the earth, and a belief that business can be a force for good. He proves this by…

• introducing organic cotton when learning how harmful conventional cotton is.

• committing 1% of sales to environmental causes.

• running ads telling people not to buy more stuff, including the now-iconic “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign.

And in 2022, he makes his perhaps boldest move: giving away the company entirely to a trust and nonprofit focused on fighting climate change.

His life is a masterclass in second-order thinking. Not everything was planned, but every dot, from the pitons to the pivot, from the rugby shirts to the billion-dollar giveaway, was placed carefully.

But why am I telling you this story? Because it perfectly embodies the three foundations of a second-order career. Let’s dive in.

01 second-order careers follow a north star

Life is a journey, we all know that. And it’s just so much harder to start it, if you don’t know where you are heading.

Having a clear future in mind you want to work towards, gives just so much of a WHY.

Why are you studying this, why are you getting up each morning to do that job?

In comes the north star – a vision of the life you want to live 5-10 (or so) years from now.

It is an explicit description of how you want your life to look life in the future.

• Relationships – What kind of love, friendships, and family life do you want to cultivate? Think about who you want beside you, how you want to show up in your connections, and what kind of dynamics make you feel most alive and supported.

• Work – What kind of work will energize you intellectually, emotionally, or ethically? What do you want your work to contribute to? What kind of impact or meaning are you building through your professional life?

• Health – This includes your physical body, your mental state, and your spiritual or emotional situation. How do you want to feel in your body ten years from now? What mental patterns or practices will support that version of you?

Maybe these sentences are helpful:

“In 10 years, I want to be someone who… I’ll be surrounded by… I’ll spend my time… And I’ll feel…”

You can tie this up by answering the following questions:

1. Why is this important to you?

2. What needs to happen for you to get there?

3. If you continued on your current path, where would you end up?

Circling back to Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard – he’s been remarkably clear on that. Always mentioning he didn’t want to be a business guy, but to protect the natural world. The impact this must have had on keeping him on track for building great products not at cost for the environment cannot be overestimated.

02 second-order careers are aligned with one’s values

Clarifying what you value is super hard, considering the line between ‘what’s important to you’ and ‘what society says is good’.

But once this listed is on paper, it is incredibly powerful to measure big decisions, your time management, or your behavior against this.

In other words: you need to know the person you strive to be before you can measure against that.

Such a list could encompass values like autonomy, honesty, ambition, loyalty, etc..

I provided a detailed guide in my Notion Companion, which you receive upon sign-up for this newsletter.

In short, I found three approaches to be very helpful to get clear on one’s values.

• normative: Values you would defend or protect, even at a cost, your “non-negotiables”.

• reflective: Examining big decisions or actions in the past, especially difficult or proud moments, what first principles drove these.

• explorative: Bottom-up, working through a long-list of most common values and prioritizing what hits the most.

When Yvon Chouinard stopped producing his profitable pitons, switched to organic cotton, or giving his company away, he showed that he had his priorities straight. He showcased value-driven decisions, not marketing stunts.

03 second-order careers build the dots you can later connect

When thinking about this foundation, I was juggling my favorite frameworks to realize one thing:

Our own life story always makes sense retrospectively as we connect all the dots that might have felt like ‘random’ steps back then.

But how can you do this while…

• focussing on the things that are in your influence and don’t get stressed by the things that are not (locus of control),

• throwing yourself out there and gather diverse experiences that will form your personality (identity capital), and

• you cannot ‘force luck’, but systematically create opportunities that will make it more likely (surface area of luck).

Building the dots means doing exactly that throughout your early stages. To do the internships, travel these countries, found those startup ideas, text this person you find inspiring.

It means stacking identity capital and maximizing your surface area of luck, all while staying focused on what you can control.

Just as Patagonia was born out of a outdoor obsessed Franco-Canadian forging pitons in his backyard and reselling Scottish Rugby shirts, eventually you’ll be able to connect the dots.

What if we gave our life’s direction just one thought more? Not just what happens next, but what happens after that?

So the reason I’m writing this is that I just stumbled upon Sam Harris’ book Waking Up lying on my bookshelf with a bookmark on page 41. The topic is a 10/10 for me, the author is brilliant, and the book is easily readable. And still, I started to get stuck somewhere in the first third and didn’t touch it again for three years – so frustrating.

It left me thinking about why that is and how I can do better. This piece is me thinking out loud on that.

But let’s take one step back.

The value of books as such cannot be understated. Capturing ideas and stories in text and making them accessible to a vast number of people can change or maintain whole systems.

Without books, knowledge would die with each generation. We would constantly need to reinvent the wheel. Take the Bible. This book provided a shared moral language (for better or worse) consistent over centuries, forming the tying bond for how societies worked across Europe and the world.

Or the introduction of the printing press, showing how the wide-ranging access to books (and, thus, knowledge) would spark massive transformations like the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.

Nani gigantum humeris insidentes – books allow us to stand on the shoulders of giants, i.e. to base our progress on the understanding of major thinkers in the past.

To this day, books are an incredible gateway to the life’s work of brilliant people, condensed in a few hundred pages.

The world of nonfiction (history, self-help, science, business, philosophy, etc.) leaves us with so many rabbit holes to dive into, yielding an abundance problem:

There is just not enough time in the world to read all the stuff we want to read. So where do we start? This is the first challenge in reading nonfiction, the WHAT – the selection problem of deciding which book to read.

Once we’ve maneuvered the bookshelves of our favorite store and picked a title, the before mentioned cycle returns: we read 20 pages, leave it lying on our night table for the next 4 months, until we decide to take on another book. This is super typical for so many people, including myself.

Many people get it wrong and try to force themselves to read nonfiction like a novel, from beginning to end. But we inevitably lose interest at some point and so we discontinue reading. And due to the false belief of wanting to ‘finish’ a book, we just don’t read at all.

This leaves us with the second challenge of reading nonfiction, the HOW – the execution problem of reading books in the way you can get the most out of them (be it joy or knowledge).

Let’s go through these two problems one by one.

the selection problem: picking the right book

We mostly pick books intuitively. And that’s exactly right – follow your intuition here. I suppose most choices are either goal- or interest-driven.

• Goal-driven meaning you want to learn more about a specific topic to acquire a skill or piece of knowledge – e.g. learning more about personal finance, leveling up your chess opening game, or improving your startup’s hiring process.

• Interest-driven selection follows more what sparks your curiosity, what resonates. I personally really enjoy history books, while they don’t really bring me closer to any of my goals, explicitly at least. I mean, most paths of our journey only start making sense in retrospect.

Both of these drivers are not necessarily MECE (mutually exclusive; collectively exhaustive). In the best case, they overlap.

Selecting books leaves us with a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ dilemma – an information asymmetry, with the risk of AI slop creating a market of lemons.

It’s a hidden value problem, as we don’t know how good a book is before reading it.

the older the better?

An interesting proxy is the so-called Lindy Effect. It says that the expected remaining lifespan (or relevance, popularity, usefulness) of a non-perishable thing is proportional to its current age.

In short – the longer a book has existed and been relevant, the higher the likelihood it’ll still be around in the future. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations will probably still be read in 50–100 years.

But beware: some knowledge expires (obsolescence effects). A 30-year-old book might not be the best pick, if you want to learn more about SEO, programming, or law/regulation.

but everyone and their mother read it already

The second proxy we all use is social proof. The best form is probably personal recommendations from your network. It’s extremely powerful, if you are looking for a specific category, to ask someone you deem to be an expert for suggestions.

Less personal are public ratings/reviews, e.g. on Goodreads. These are dangerous, though, for two reasons:

1. Audience mismatch: A bad rating might not necessarily mean the book is wrong for you. It could just be reviewed by the wrong target group – the very same book can be ‘life-changing’ for beginners and ‘nothing new’ for advanced readers.

2. Bandwagon effect: Books can become popular because they are already popular, independent of whether they are ‘good’ or not.

the execution problem: reinventing how we read

Once we’ve picked a great book, we have to rethink how we consume the information. For that, we need to understand how nonfiction is usually structured.

Most nonfiction books are structured around one major concept or framework and could often be just a long article. They are argument-driven, not narrative-driven. You get the most value by understanding the ideas – not by reading everything.

Instead of reading cover to cover, word by word, you’d rather cherry-pick what’s relevant for you.

nonfiction usually contains one big idea, complemented by supporting ideas and details

Nonfiction books are structured on multiple levels.

At the highest level, they follow a simple pattern: an introduction that frames the problem, a set of core chapters that develop the argument, and a conclusion that reinforces the main idea.

Many authors then group these chapters into larger parts, such as foundations, methods, or applications, but this doesn’t change the underlying structure. Each chapter still advances one piece of the central idea, sometimes modular, sometimes cumulative.

1. Introduction

   • States the main problem or question

   • Explains why this matters

   • Often previews the core argument (“This book will show that…”)

2. Core chapters

   • Each chapter supports one part of the main idea

   • Chapters are often semi-independent (you can skim or skip)

   • Structure within chapters:

     • Claim

     • Explanation

     • Evidence (studies, stories, examples) – sometimes coming first

     • Implications

3. Conclusion

   • Repeats the main idea in a stronger form

   • Suggests actions, implications, or future outlook

nonfiction = nonlinear

As mentioned earlier, this different structure necessitates a different approach to reading compared to a novel.

So here are some ideas on how to get the most out of it:

1. Scan, skim, pre-read

   Go through the book on a high level. Read the introduction. Scan the table of contents. Read chapter headings and subheadings. Skim the conclusion.

   Decide which parts deserve more of your attention, which ones you want to skip.

   Get an overview (= a mental map) of what the book is about and how it’s structured.

2. Read with a question

   Nonfiction sticks best when it answers a question or solves a problem.

   Examples:

   • “What can I apply immediately?”

   • “What belief is this challenging?”

   • “What decision will this help me make?”

   Clarify this for yourself beforehand and select the parts to be read accordingly.

3. Take notes

   Let’s be honest, you’ll forget 99% of the book. That’s fine, but there is a way to improve retention.

   ‘Work’ through the book. Write out your favorite quotes or ideas that resonated with you.

   If you’re the digital kind of person, you can use a Kindle to directly export notes/highlights and store them in a knowledge management system, e.g. on Notion. For the analogue ones, you can use an index card as a bookmark and just write everything you find interesting on it. You can collect and sort these cards in a little container for future reference.

4. Don’t finalize

   Not completing the book is a feature, not a failure.

   It’s completely fine to read only 30–50% of a nonfiction book, to skip chapters, and to abandon the book once you’ve extracted the value.

   Many nonfiction books repeat their core idea in different forms anyway.

“if you’re not having fun, then it’s probably time to call it quits and try something else”

(Richard Branson’s words, not mine)

Reading should, first and foremost, be fun and inspiring. It should be a tool for us to deepen our interests and follow them into deep rabbit holes of knowledge.

If there’s one takeaway from this piece, it’s a call to unblock yourself. Unblock yourself from starting a book, getting stuck in it, and quitting reading – again and again.

Dive in, take what’s valuable for you, and leave.

So last week I went to the gym again after a two month break. It was Wednesday around noon and the place was packed.

I stood there waiting for a machine I needed, scrolling on my phone, slightly annoyed, slightly amused. Every bench was taken. Every cable occupied. The room felt charged with that very specific January energy: good intentions with new outfits and the hope to finally get it right this year.

No mystery there. January always pulls people back in, driven by new year’s resolutions, myself included. And it makes sense. ‘More exercise’ consistently ranks number one among the most common resolutions [Sources 1, 2, and 3].

But don’t worry, help is already here. “Quitters Day”, the unofficial death day of many annual resolutions, has arrived on January 9th.

The term was introduced by Strava in a 2019 analysis of user data, showing that exercise activity drops sharply in the second week of January.

In other words, the statistics are not on our side. Only about 8 percent of new year’s resolutions survive the full year [Source].

Why is that?

you’re wanting too much too quickly

1. Unrealistic or overly ambitious goals lead to people drop out, as it’s too easy to aim for dramatic changes without gradual steps.

2. Temporary motivation fades quickly once the initial novelty and dopamine spike wear off.

3. Life happens. Work, family obligations, illness, or even bad weather overwhelm fragile new habits.

The internet, and by extension your favorite AI tool, is full of advice on how to solve this. Better goal setting, accountability systems, habit building frameworks, and so on.

I won’t repeat all of that. My point is slightly different, and simpler.

Consistency beats intensity. Especially after motivation fades.

your mid-january dip is the biggest chance to get serious

This is your reminder that you will not conquer your 2026 goals by doing them “best”. Not by running the longest distances, studying for hours on end, or eating perfectly every single day.

You win by sticking through.

A habit is formed after a median of 59-66 days [Source]. After that, things will get easier – I promise.

Simply staying with your resolution already puts you ahead of most people.

One example that got stuck with me from my own newsletter project:

• only 35% of Substack & LinkedIn newsletters publish more than one issue

• 17% make it to five issues, and just 11% reach ten [Source].

This means, before you are even seriously playing with the ‘big fish’, you have to bring up the consistency of publishing more than ten issues to be part of those top 10%.

Your biggest roadblock is your own inconsistency.

revisiting resolutions, but better

So let’s circle back to last week’s Quitters Day. You might already have fallen into it by skipping workouts or neglecting that language learning plan.

That is completely fine. Use it as an opportunity to reset properly and get serious now.

1 tighten your goals

First of all, we need to radically cut down on the list. I personally started with a list of 7 goals for the year, which is an impossible figure to reach (for now) - both in terms of time as well as attention allocation.

Get down to 1-3 you can actually can realize. Try to really think of a busy work week – would you still manage to keep it up as planned? Does it feel tangible? Try to avoid the initial over-enthusiasm and think small & achievable.

As I suggested in my annual review article, make goals motivationally solid by getting clear on two things:

• WHY you want to pursue them

• WHAT obstacles might come up, or what caused you to stop before

Once that is clear, we can move to step two.

2 create a system to get there

Now let’s circle back to the little framework we introduced on the article on reaching our goals:

What we are actually trying to do with our new year’s goals is to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

As this piece’s ambition is to propose a better way than the typical high-churn, low-structure resolutions, we think about goal progress as a reinforcing feedback system of inputs and outcomes.

We have three components:

1. goals

2. habits (= inputs)

3. success metrics (= outcomes)

Let’s break them down.

goals

By now you know the drill. And you’ve heard the best practices of SMART goals a gazillion times. Personally I find the exact goal formulation overrated (with the underlying systems underrated), so I will carefully break those conventions with my own goal I’m currently tackling:

Better manage and reduce my stress levels by raising my awareness and sense of presence.

You can absolutely define clear numerical targets with deadlines. In some cases, though, external factors make that less meaningful.

habits

Habits are your inputs. They are the part you control most directly. In my case, it would be to establish a daily meditation ritual.

It makes sense to move from mere activities you need to do get there (e.g. meditating x hours a week) to habits you establish as core part of your day. James Clear’s Atomic Habits is the gold standard on habit formation.

One consequence of the aforementioned problem of inconsistency, is that we want to do our best to establish the opposite: consistency in delivering these inputs.

This can be best done by doing habit tracking, on paper or digitally.

Personally I would recommend a phone habit tracker with a streak and a widget function to ensure you always see it. A nice iOS app by a great solo-developer is ‘Evoday’.

Your main job is to keep the streak alive. Useful guardrails are aiming for around 66 consecutive days and never skipping more than one day when life gets in the way (Matt D’Avella’s Two Day Rule).

success metrics

While habits ensure the inputs are happening, success metrics help you verify that you are pulling the right levers. For that, we need to think about which outcomes measure best whether you are successful in your efforts or not.

In my example, **this would be the WHOOP stress score, a mostly HRV-based metric. A subjective stress or energy scale could also work.

I will both track the overall development of this score as well as my capability to stay in the green zone.

Those success metric are a good way of keeping up the motivation or working as a warning sign – if they do not yield the results you are aiming for, it’s time to revisit.

How? Let’s take my previously model on reaching goals again:

Goal progress = Time invested × Productivity × Directionality

Go through each lever:

• are you allocating enough time?

• are you doing things right?

• are you doing the right things?

enough chitchat

Enough theory. I invite you to try it yourself. Take your laptop or a sheet of paper.

1. Revisit your 2026 goals. Prioritize and bullet-proof them as we discussed in the “tighten your goals” section.

2. Create a three column table: Goal | Habit (Inputs) | Success Metrics (Outcomes).

3. Get your remaining goals in there and think of the right inputs and outcomes to get there.

4. Set up a simple tracking system (on paper or digitally) and review it weekly, if not daily.

5. Get started with it same day. Don’t wait for a new week’s start or whatever excuses you come up with to “start properly later”

one last disclaimer

Whenever I write about personal development, I always have a bit of stomach rumbling: It can sound like preaching from the position of a productivity guru who has everything figured out.

That is not the case. I’m constantly struggling through all the mentioned topics by myself. I’m just thinking and learning out loud while navigating these topics.

So while the gyms are steadily emptying again, I hope this helps you to be the one that continues showing up.

Being “stressed” seems to be the baseline in modern-day work lives.

Stress, one might think, is the result of busy schedules or a loss of control over a project.

That’s a misconception. Stress comes not only from the trigger itself, but from how we perceive it.

Not just with deadlines or pressure, but with the interpretation of it.

Surely, not all stress is created equal.

We can differentiate between acute stress (short bursts triggered by specific events) and chronic stress (building up over time and slowly wearing you down). This piece focusses on the former, dissecting those situations where your system feels hijacked, but you still have the chance to pause, reframe, and choose a better response.

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

You might have heard of Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, who lost his wife, parents, and brother to a Nazi concentration camp and surviving the very same with one realization: the one thing that could never be taken from him was his ability to choose his response.

Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? If a man in such horrific circumstances can stand his ground in the gap between event and reaction, why can’t we?

wouldn’t it be so easy, then?

Stress often arises from distorted thinking. When your boss yells at you, you can’t think clearly anymore. Your whole system is alarmed.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman calls this an amygdala hijack: under stress, the emotional brain overrides rational control.

You overestimate the drama of the situation at hand and underestimate your agency within.

Since it’s much easier to see how we function when things are dysfunctional, let’s take a look at burnout patients:

When someone is burned out, their system starts treating every input as a threat. Their nervous system can’t tell the difference between an urgent crisis and a simple calendar reschedule. Everything becomes overwhelming, emotionally loaded, and deeply personal.

What’s happening here is a collapse of the ability to discern. And when we lose that capacity, we can no longer choose our response. We’re no longer reacting to reality but to a story that everything is unsafe.

Luckily, in a ‘healthy’ mind, it’s much easier to get yourself out of these situations.

You have two major challenges:

1. Catch yourself when being in panic mode

2. Hijack your rationality back and steer out of panic mode

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) offers super helpful tools for this —

re-frame your situation in five steps

1. Situation or trigger: Briefly describe the event.

Stress often begins with a specific event, but if you don’t name it clearly, your brain will generalize the threat.

Example: My boss raised their voice at me during a team meeting because I left a typo on a slide for an important client. It was unexpected and humiliating.

2. Automatic thought: Notice the first critical thought that popped up.

Automatic thoughts are fast, often distorted interpretations. Becoming aware of them is the first step to breaking the stress loop.

Example: “I’m incompetent. I keep messing up. I’m not cut out for this.”

3. Emotion & intensity: Label the feeling and rate its strength (1-10).

Naming emotions can reduce their intensity and gives you space to respond. The number helps track how big it feels right now.

Example: Shame (8), Anxiety (7), Defensiveness (5)

4. Evidence for / against: List facts supporting or refuting the thought.

Your brain under stress collects evidence to support its negative story. This step helps you slow down and see the full picture.

Example For: I made a mistake. My boss was clearly annoyed. I’ve made small errors before.

Example Against: I’ve delivered high-quality work consistently. Everyone makes mistakes. My boss often reacts strongly under pressure. This doesn’t reflect my overall value or capability.

5. Balanced thought: Craft a more helpful, realistic perspective.

A balanced thought gives you a truthful but empowering way to re-engage with the situation, calm, clear, and constructive.

Example: “I made a small mistake, and my boss reacted strongly. That doesn’t mean I’m incompetent. I can own the error, correct it, and continue doing good work.”

the sunny side: post-traumatic growth

Stress gets a bad rep, but not all stress is harmful. In fact, the way we relate to stress is often more important than the stressor itself.

Psychologist Kelly McGonigal calls this the “stress mindset effect”. In her research at Stanford, she found that when people view stress as enhancing – as the body rising to meet a challenge – they not only feel better under pressure, they perform better too. They experience less burnout and even show more resilience afterward.

• Your heart pounding? That’s energy.

• Sweaty palms? Your body is mobilizing.

• Laser focus? That’s your brain saying: “This matters.”

In this view, stress isn’t the enemy, it’s your system gearing up to protect what you care about.

When people go through real adversity, and come out the other side with tools, clarity, and a new story, they often report something called post-traumatic growth.

It’s not just “bouncing back.” It’s bouncing forward, with greater appreciation, deeper relationships, and sharper priorities.

The key difference is reflection. The people who grow after setbacks aren’t the ones who avoid pain. They’re the ones who pause, process, and reframe what happened.

Stress can be fuel. And fuel can both be set on fire or used to bring you further.

The good news is you can often pick.

The end of 2025 is closing in. Still digesting the mountains of Christmas food and carrying a mild wine-induced headache, I’m sitting on a train heading to a Danish island for a New Year’s wellness retreat. Really getting old.

2025 was a wild one. I finally took the leap and started this newsletter. Despite the cringe, despite the vulnerability of putting things out into the world with no idea who’s reading.

I graduated on a 40°C day in Lisbon, dressed in a thick cliché grad coat, sitting in direct sun with circulatory collapse just a breath away.

I worked too much. Then not at all. I solo-travelled through India, only to cut the trip after catching pneumonia in Nepal and flying back home.

There were ups and downs, as we all had.

But what made 2025 feel different was how much I learned; not just in the obvious ways, but through conversations, mistakes, transitions. So, inspired by the reflection theme of my last piece, I decided to ask some of my friends a few questions:

I asked them:

• Was there a moment, decision, or mistake you learned something important from?

• What do you think or do differently now compared to the beginning of the year?

• What would you tell your version of yourself from a year ago?

I took all their answers and grouped them into four themes.

I hope you find something useful in them.

how do I stay balanced?

• Creating a better balance between private life and other responsibilities is crucial. Key for this is to communicate earlier and more clearly helps prevent stress and overload. Plus it’s important to prepare for stressful phases in advance and build tools for stress resilience.

• Allowing more boredom and time without content consumption helps the mind process things consciously during the day instead of at night.

• Daily life requires a better balance between working toward goals and consciously enjoying time off (sports, friends, rest). Previously, I had phases with too much work and too little recovery eventually taking a toll, especially during intense periods.This also means time should be used more intentionally: spending free time on the phone does not truly clear the mind or restore energy.

• Being extremely goal-driven can negatively affect relationships, prioritizing my career over my friendships will not serve me in the long run. For that, it’s important to consciously allow more space and air in life, even during stressful work or study phases.

• My mental (and physical) health at work are my own responsibility. No manager will step in when things become too much, and no system will protect my routines for me. I need to notice early when I’m crossing my limits, actively stop overload, and deliberately create the conditions that allow me to stay healthy.

• Perfection often gets in the way of progress. Sometimes it’s better to send the message or complete the task even if it’s not ideal, instead of waiting for the perfect conditions that might never arrive.

• Prioritizing work too heavily eventually creates blind spots. It’s easy to lose touch with small but meaningful actions in your personal life, especially when you tell yourself you’ll get to them “soon.”

what guides my decisions?

• Letting go means accepting that the past cannot be changed, not forgetting it. Accepting what happened allows for psychological relief and closure, even if it’s still hard to live by consistently. Sometimes the most important learning is to accept things as they are, without labeling them as right or wrong.

• Decisions made from weak compromises or the wrong motivations lead to half-hearted outcomes and wasted life energy.

• In today’s environment, it’s not enough to have an opinion — developing a stance and being willing to accept consequences matters.

• With constantly changing expectations, intuition and personal priorities are the most reliable compass.

what paths am I willing to take?

• There are many more opportunities to learn and grow outside of university than expected, especially through free and remote programs. Feeling stuck locally does not mean opportunities don’t exist elsewhere.

• You don’t need to come from a target university, have perfect grades, or follow a conventional path to succeed. Listening too closely to people who claim to know “the right way” can be misleading.

• Feeling too secure in a job can be dangerous. You should never rely on things simply working out (e.g. being sure in holding a specific job offer) without continued effort.

• Walking away from something that no longer works for me — like a job — is not failure. Most of the fears around taking such steps dissolve once the step is actually taken. Ultimately, no one else can make these decisions for me; only I can take them.

• Telling your story, even if it still feels unfinished, can be a powerful act of self-understanding. Sharing it out loud helps make meaning from what you’ve lived.

• Keeping a sense of hope, even during uncertain times, makes forward motion possible. When hope is present, options begin to open up.

• Real success isn’t just about money or recognition. It also means showing up for the right people and fighting for the relationships that matter.

who do I want by my side?

• Deep relationships, communities, and networks help carry you through difficult times.

• I am capable of being alone and functioning well in many different contexts, even when left entirely to myself. But I’ve learned that just because I can do it doesn’t mean I want to — or that it’s what’s best for me. I am happier, more grounded, and more myself when I have people by my side.

What was your biggest learning this year?

That’s all from early stages for its first year live and running. That’s all from 2025.

Have a great start into the new year!

Merry Xmas!

There is just a magic in the days between Christmas and the first days of the new year. It smells like slowing down, reflecting, and getting ready for the new year.

To be fair, this period is as good as any time to pull back and get your sh*t together, but somehow, the notion of a new year starting gives the vibes to wipe the slate clean.

Interestingly enough, this is backed by Central European folklore calling this time ‘Rauhnächte’, or The Twelve Nights. Marking the time between Christmas and Epiphany, this idea was born out of pre-Christian traditions and a calendar mismatch, considering ancient calendars had 354 days in the lunar and 365 in the solar year, making the remaining “extra” days unnatural or sacred.

It’s a time of looking back and letting go (both symbolic and literal), of reflecting, cleaning the house, dropping worries.

Mystics aside, the point is that the end of the year offers an incredible opportunity to work through the past and set intentions for the future.

Doing our best not to get trapped in the beginning-of-January gym registration that leaves you with an unused and costly subscription for the next year.

While I was structuring my own annual reflection for 2025, I realized the internet is already full of templates, some are better and some are worse. But consequently, I will not reinvent the wheel.

Instead, I synthesized the templates out there, stole the best of them to create an easy, not-too-long reflection tool and will share it with you below. Looking at my old reflections, I realized that I left many templates unfinished, as the sheer amount of questions gets tiring at some point. Hence, I’m keeping it as short and essential as possible.

In case you don’t like the template or prefer more exhaustive ones, I’ll also provide further resources at the end of this piece you can use as a foundation.

No matter what you use, I can only invite you to carve out a few hours, in one or more sessions, to actually do this whole reflection. It’s both incredibly powerful and fascinating to go back to one year later.

When doing so, go all in. Turn off the phone, play some music, take your time, maybe even light that candle that’s been standing on the shelf untouched for years.

So instead of a checklist of endless questions, here’s the simple version I’ll use this year.

This reflection has three parts:

• retrospective: What happened in 2025? What were the highlights and lowlights?

• present: Where do you currently stand in your different life areas, and how can you adjust?

• prospective: Where are you heading for 2026?

retrospective

1. chronology

   Make the year “visible” by going through your calendar, photo roll, journals, notes, etc. Create a list of all highlights/significant events (maybe including negative ones) in chronological order.

   The idea is to get a bird’s-eye view of the year again while reducing memory bias.

2. highlights

   What are your three highlights (i.e., joyful, memorable moments) of the year? What made them special? Which people, locations, moods, etc.?

3. accomplishments

   What are the three biggest wins and successes you’ve achieved in 2025? What are you most proud of, what moved you forward the most?

4. challenges

   What three situations challenged you the most or were the biggest sources of stress or conflict? How did you overcome them?

5. learnings

   What did you learn about yourself in 2025? How did this change you? How will you take this with you into the future?

present

It’s time to close some open loops, to decide what’s done, what continues, or what you would like to initiate in the different areas of your life. This both wraps up and opens up where you are and where you want to be in your life.

For each area, gather some bullets for each of these three dimensions. I’ll provide an example for the life area ‘Physical Health’ below.

1. start

   What activities, habits, or even beliefs do you want to start with in the new year?

   (e.g., go to the gym at least three times a week)

2. stop

   What are the things that are not working or you’d like to quit?

   (e.g., cut down on sugar and quit party smoking)

3. continue

   What’s been going well and should be maintained?

   (e.g., reaching my protein goal each day and drinking 3+ liters of water)

In an older article, a systems view of modern life, I proposed eight life areas in four dimensions you can use for this exercise. However, this is highly individual and various conceptions work, you can just google ‘wheel of life’ for further inspiration.

Relationships:

• Partner (your romantic relationship, intimacy, shared experiences)

• Friends & Family (close connections, social bonds, meaningful communication)

Health:

• Mental Health (your emotional stability, self-compassion, inner dialogue)

• Physical Health (fitness, nutrition, energy levels, sleep)

Trajectory:

• Career (your work life, purpose, growth, and alignment with values)

• Finance (your financial health, spending habits, and investment systems)

Fulfillment:

• Self-Actualization (personal growth, creativity, learning, and expression)

• Joy (moments of fun, wonder, spontaneity, and emotional richness)

prospective

1. direction

   Where will you be exactly one year from now? What’s your life like? Who are the people around you? What does your day-to-day look like? How has your year been?

   What are the things you value, the priorities you live by?

   This is an optimistic scenario, dare to dream.

   You can even send this to your future self via tools like futureme.org.

2. intentions

   Create a list of the things you want to achieve next year. Go back to the life areas in the ‘present’ section, and think about what needs to happen to become the person you envisioned for one year from now.

   No need to make them too actionable or SMART yet, that will come in the next step.

3. goals

   Pick 3–5 goals you want to tackle first. Personally, I prefer shorter time horizons like a quarter, because, let’s be honest, nobody remembers their 1-year goals down the road.

   For each, specify:

   • What are your reasons for pursuing this goal? Do you truly believe it’s important? What would not reaching it mean for you?

   • How can you make sure you reach it? Which concrete daily or weekly actions do you need to take? (Maybe the framework from this article can help.)

   • Which obstacles might come up? How can you overcome them (or prevent them altogether)?

   • How can you measure your progress? A habit tracker, a specific KPI, or anything else?

all roads lead to rome

That’s my take on how to tackle an annual review. I believe it’s less about which exact prompts and tools you use and more about actually slowing down and taking the time.

So light that candle. Go for that solo café session. Or send this to a friend and hold each other accountable.

And if you do end up reflecting, I’d love to hear what comes up for you.

Here are some further helpful resources:

• YearCompass

• ink+volt Yearly Planning Worksheets

• Bullet Journal yearly migration

I recently had a convo with my boss about some life decisions, and she gave me great advice:

“Your 20s are for learning, not for maximizing income.”

I couldn’t agree more.

There are still so many years ahead to pay mortgages and make real money in some fancy job.

But our 20s are the best time to learn, explore, and take bold risks:

• No children (usually)

• Low living expenses and fewer financial responsibilities

• High flexibility and social mobility

• Fewer long-term obligations (like caring for a dog, a mortgage, or aging parents)

Now, having exceeded the halfway mark of my 20s, this sparked a bigger question:

What do I want to optimize for in this decade?

the best years of your life? or just the most challenging?

They say your 20s are supposed to be the best time of your life. Statistically, that’s questionable.

most decisions are large-world problems

Most life decisions in your 20s aren’t small-world problems like a game of chess — where you can know all the outcomes and calculate odds.

They’re large-world problems: ambiguous, high-stakes, and hard to predict.

• What should I do with my life?

• Is this the right career, city, relationship?

• What if I make the wrong choice?

No one can tell you. There’s no simulation mode. There are too many unknowns.

no wonder so many people report their 20s as one of the least happy decades in life

Despite the social media hype, your 20s are often not the happiest time of your life. Data show this decade is one of the most stressful:

• Identity formation – pressure to “find your purpose” while dealing with uncertainty

• Financial instability – low pay, student loans, rising cost of living

• Social comparison – everyone seems to be marrying, launching startups, or getting dream jobs

This is not to say you can’t make them the best time of your life. It’s merely to say that if you’ve been worrying about the expectation–experience gap: hold tight, the best time is (statistically) yet to come.

And there’s hope. These stressors can be growth triggers for building a life you love.

optimize for ‘identity capital’

In one of my favorite books, The Defining Decade, psychologist Meg Jay introduces a powerful idea: identity capital.

Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time.

These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are.

What counts as identity capital:

• Tangible: degrees, job experience, credentials, side projects

• Intangible: confidence, clarity, networks, self-awareness, emotional skills

It’s how we build ourselves. It’s the currency of adulthood we use to get the jobs, relationships, and other things we want.

It’s a nudge to invest intentionally. That doesn’t mean having everything figured out. But it means doing things that build toward someone you want to be.

identity capital maximizes the amount of optional future paths

Let’s revisit Nassim Taleb’s concept of optionality.

At its core, optionality simply refers to having a wide range of choices available.

For example, if you build a skill that opens up many different career paths, you possess more optionality than someone whose skill limits them to only a few job options.

The key benefit of optionality is that in an unpredictable world, it allows you to succeed even without knowing exactly what the future holds.

“Options, any options, by allowing you more upside than downside, are vectors of antifragility.

– Nassim Taleb, Antifragility

In your 20s, you may not know what you want long-term. That’s why it’s smart to build options rather than fixed plans early in life:

• Build transferable skills (problem-solving, writing, speaking, collaboration)

• Try different projects, roles, industries, or geographies

• Create things: a portfolio, a blog, a personal brand, a side hustle

Options create both leverage to negotiate and freedom in decision-making.

Optionality is not always the best strategy. If you’re aiming for a very specific path (e.g. malaria vaccine research), you do need to specialize early and give up alternatives.

Still, for most of us, early generalism and flexibility pay greater dividends than over-narrowing too soon.

your 20s don’t need to be optimized for money, stability, or perfection

They’re a decade to build identity capital as it gives you the freedom to shape your life.

Forget the pressure of the “perfect plan.” Most choices you make now are adjustable or reframable.

Explore widely. Try things out. Take detours. Invest in who you’re becoming, not just what you’re doing.

Most personal growth comes down to something pretty simple:

You start with where you are.

Are you happy with the status quo? What are the areas that need changing? Are you seeing your current situation clearly?

Once that’s figured out, you can begin to define where you want to go.

Who’s the person you want to become? What do you want to learn? What’s your north star?

Let’s say you want to learn a new language.

Right now, you speak German and English (your current state), but your goal is to hold a full conversation in French (your desired future state).

That’s the basic structure. But then the real question becomes:

how do you bridge the gap?

This is where most self-help literature lives – offering answers for how to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be.

The schools of thought vary widely:

• “Change your habits and systems” – Atomic Habits

• “Manifest your desired future” – The Secret

• “Get better at task management” – Getting Things Done

• “Remove distractions and work deeply” – Deep Work

• “Reflect and journal to gain clarity” – The Bullet Journal Method

Each of these frameworks touches something important and brings useful ideas to the table. But there is one big problem that many of these schools of thought share:

motion ≠ action

You can spend a lot of time managing the system and feel productive while doing so. However, you’re not getting closer to your goal.

James Clear brilliantly captured this with his concept of motion vs. action.

We spend 40–60% of our time in motion, when what we actually need is 95% action.

motion = planning, preparing, organizing, or learning about what to do

In the French example: watching YouTube videos on “how to learn a language,” reading blog posts comparing the best apps, or creating a Notion dashboard to track your progress

action = doing the thing that directly moves you forward

In this case: reviewing flashcards, practicing grammar, speaking French with someone

The problem is that motion feels safe, because it avoids failure or feedback while still giving you the false feeling of working on your goal. But without action, there’s no bridge between your current state and your goal.

a simple model

Once your goals are well-defined (a topic for another piece), goal achievement can be understood as the result of three core levers:

Goal progress = Time invested × Productivity × Directionality

01 time invested – are you allocating enough time?

Even if your system is perfect, it won’t matter if you’re only touching the goal for 10 minutes a week.

• Example: You’re trying to learn French, but you’re only practicing once every two weeks. You won’t get very far, no matter how efficient your tools are.

02 productivity – are you doing things right?

This is about efficiency and method.

• Example: You memorize 100 French words in 30 minutes instead of two hours.

This is where most self-help books place their focus. It might be the least important of the three levers.

03 directionality – are you doing the right things?

Are your actions actually aligned with your goal?

• Example: Instead of memorizing random vocabulary, you practice phrases you’ll actually use in conversation.

On the goals you’re working toward right now:

Which lever is your biggest bottleneck – and what can you do to resolve it?

Every day, in small and large ways, we negotiate between two selves:

The one who wants to enjoy life now, and the one who wants to build something for later.

• Do I go for a workout, or sink into the couch with Netflix?

• Salad or burger?

• New iPhone now, or ETF investments for future-me?

We’re constantly operating within the tension between two modes of being:

1. The self that delays pleasure for future gain

2. The self that embraces the present and values immediate experience

We’ll explore the case for each and then search for a middle ground.

delay of gratification – suffer now for future gain

There’s a reason this attitude is so embedded in productivity culture. Long-term thinking compounds:

• Skills, savings, and effort all reward patience

• Investing now creates future optionality

• Sacrifice today can build resilience and freedom tomorrow

This mindset shows up in philosophies like Stoicism and Aristotle’s virtue ethics, where the “good life” is one of discipline, virtue, and long-term values.

It also shows up in research.

The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment –

This is probably the most famous study in the world – I’ll eat my hat if you haven’t heard of it. Children were given a choice: eat one marshmallow now, or wait and get two later.

The ones who waited showed early signs of what’s called delayed gratification — the ability to resist immediate temptations in favor of a longer-term payoff.

Decades later, these same kids were more likely to have better life outcomes: academic, professional, even health-related.

What they overcame was our tendency to undervalue future rewards in favor of immediate ones – a cognitive bias known as hyperbolic discounting. It explains why saving, exercising, or learning a language often loses to scrolling Instagram. And why those who can override this bias through self-regulation tend to thrive long-term.

immediate gratification – enjoy now or never

Sometimes, the wiser choice is presence. Living fully in the moment. Taking the trip. Eating the cake.

This logic appears in hedonism, epicureanism, and modern wellness culture. This is less an argument for excess and more a recognition that life is fragile and joy isn’t guaranteed.

Mortality as a forcing function –

There’s a finitude to life. The fact that it will end (likely within the next 80 years) changes the optimization logic of now vs. then.

The Stoic idea of memento mori (“remember you must die”) is both morbid and a call to clarity: if life is short and uncertain, are you spending your time accordingly?

Delaying gratification forever is risky too. You can save for a dream retirement, only to be hit by a bus or arrive there with no health or energy left to enjoy it.

In his book Die With Zero, Bill Perkins argues that many people over-save and under-live. They hoard wealth, time, and energy for a future they might never enjoy. His core point:

The purpose of money, energy, and youth is to use them – not to hoard them.

Some experiences are time-bound. You likely won’t go backpacking at 35. You won’t watch children’s movies with your teenage kid. If you don’t choose certain experiences now, they may never happen.

how to find the middle ground

This isn’t a binary choice but a spectrum. And where you fall on it will shift depending on life stage, values, and context.

• Some people over-optimize for the future, constantly deferring joy

• Others over-index on the now, struggling to build anything that lasts

Neither extreme is wrong, but both come with tradeoffs.

Here are three ideas to help find balance:

01 match your investments (time, energy, money) to your life stage

This is the core of consumption smoothing. Perkins frames it as spreading your resources across life in a way that matches when you can best enjoy them.

If you pour all your savings into your 60s, you might rob your 20s and 30s of joy and growth. If you burn through everything now, you might reach your 50s without options.

Think of it as giving every version of you a fair shot at living well.

02 prioritize memories over goods

Memories pay “dividends” over time. You draw meaning from them long after the moment passes.

If you’re choosing between instant gratification options, pick wisely. The pleasure of buying a new iPhone will quickly drown (hedonic adaptation), but using this money to do a trip to a foreign country with your best friend will stay with you forever.

03 play with your defaults

You might want to think about where you are standing on this scale. Are you more future or more present leaning? Is this varying with different areas of life like health, career, relationships?

Once you’ve figured out where you stand, experiment by leaning into the other side. Rebalance.

If you always hustle for tomorrow, give yourself permission to enjoy today.

If you always chase pleasure, invest in something future-you will thank you for.

You don’t have to choose between now and later. You just need to be aware of the tension and intentional about how you move within it.

That awareness alone puts you ahead of 99% of people.

People and their actions fall somewhere on the active-passive spectrum. Are they merely accepting their destiny or actively shaping it?

Know that this isn’t binary, it’s a sliding scale. On a high energy day you might find yourself closer to the right end, while that Sunday morning hangover might rather have you suffering on the left side of it.

Where do you see yourself – today and over the past 12 months?

active:

• belief that you can shape your environment with your actions

• having goals and ideas, moving forward

• internal locus of control

passive:

• belief that things happen to you, rather than because of you

• tendency to wait, conform, or defer decisions to others

• external locus of control

Those who spend most of their time on the right end of the spectrum are what we might call high agency individuals.

what’s high agency?

High agency is a proactive posture toward life.

It’s the belief that you can influence outcomes, take responsibility for your path, and shape your circumstances instead of just navigating them.

Think: low conformity, high initiative.

It can be broken down into three sub-skills:

1. Clear thinking: Seeing the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. Recognizing which constraints are real vs. self-imposed.

2. Bias to action: Not waiting for permission or perfect conditions. Moving forward despite ambiguity.

3. Disagreeability: High willingness to challenge your own / others’ assumptions. Not outsourcing your decisions to norms, systems, or default paths.

To act with high agency means not just accepting your current locus of control – but continuously pushing its boundaries outward.

Want to explore this theme further? Read this related piece on control.

what it looks like in the wild

Who could be considered high agency?

• The colleague who builds a new process instead of complaining about inefficiencies

• The friend who moves cities to explore a new chapter; not because they have to, but because they want to

• The founder who starts shipping MVPs before the deck is even finished

In contrast, low agency could be:

• Waiting for a manager to define your role

• Blaming “the system” without ever trying to navigate or shape it

• Saying “I could never do that” without trying once

Low agency is often camouflaged as “being realistic,” “not wanting too much,” or “playing it safe.” All these things are fair to say, but they are also artificially constraining your locus of control.

how to build high agency

Good news! High agency isn’t something you’re born with. You build it by changing how you think and act. Here’s how you can start:

01 mindset: change your thinking

→ exchange low-agency language for a growth mindset

(Sorry for using the biggest BS term, ‘mindset’, but it’s the official one)

Start by noticing low-agency language in your thinking:

• “I’m just not the kind of person who…”

• “That’s probably not realistic.”

• “I could never pull that off.”

Each time you catch one, make a little dash on a sticky note or in your notes app.

You don’t need to analyze it. Just track it and build the awareness. Then, whenever possible, reframe:

“What would it take to move this forward?”

“Is this actually true or just something I’ve assumed?”

Language is a mirror. Changing it gradually reshapes how you see yourself and what you believe you’re capable of.

→ dig for when you proved them wrong in the past

Write a list, a “success log”, of things you handled well and where you overcame big challenges successfully.

This is your evidence that you can do it. Read through it whenever you start to doubt yourself.

02 behavior: change your actions

→ define your goals

Write down 3 goals that genuinely matter and feel meaningful to you.

→ pick the one that feels most intimidating

This is usually the one that reveals your self-imposed limits. The one you secretly want most, but keep putting off.

→ ask: what’s holding me back?

List every reason, fear, or obstacle that comes to mind. Then, for each one, ask:

“What would it take to bridge this gap?”

You’ll likely find that most of these boundaries are softer than they seem.

→ start with the smallest first step

Don’t wait until you “feel ready.” Pick the tiniest possible action you can take today – something so small it’s almost laughable.

Then do it.

the world bends to those who believe they can shape it

The shift toward high agency isn’t loud or dramatic, but rather gradual.

It starts in your mind, shows up in your calendar, and slowly rewrites how you see the world.

Every small act of agency is a vote for the life you want to build.

PS: One fantastic resource on this topic is George Mack’s article “High Agency In 30 Minutes”, highly recommended!