Keep Showing Up for Practice

It’s easy to lose your headspace when the world around you feels like a tsunami. To question everything and throw even the most basic assumptions out the window.

As a writer, it’s tempting to write off the daily blog as a nuisance because almost no one reads it. In a world that is filling with information ever faster, little daily trinkets won’t win the war of engagement. In the long run, long-form, high-quality writing is required. But a daily blog, run, or home-made meal aren’t meant to win the war. They’re combat practice for the real fight that must happen later.

I can’t produce something mind-blowing in 15 minutes — but if I don’t spend 15 minutes warming up my fingers and brain every day, I might never produce anything mind-blowing at all. Don’t confuse the training for the competition. Otherwise, you might quit too early.

Remember that practice is just practice, and then keep showing up for it.

No Solutions, Only Tradeoffs

One of the few privileges my grandparents had that I didn’t is that they could keep their money in the same bank account for most of their lives without ever having to worry about it losing its value. Between 1955 and 1989, Germany always had real interest rates of 3-5%, meaning even after inflation, your money would grow a little bit every year.

Today, protecting your money is a much bigger feat — and the perfect bank account no longer exists. Trust me, I know. I have six of them.

One account with a neobank is for Four Minute Books. It’s fast and cheap for currency conversions, but verifying my identity, “proof of funds,” etc. is a nightmare. So I don’t want to hand them all my money.

Another account is for my writing activities. It’s smooth and easy to use, but it costs 10 euros per month, and I don’t get any interest whatsoever.

My personal account is with one of Germany’s oldest banks. It’s nice that they know me. I can call them with any problem, and they don’t fuss too much whenever I need to bump up my credit limit. Unfortunately, they’re terribly slow, often block and inquire about my transactions, and pay zero interest. Plus, their fees keep going up. They just raised them again — by 70%.

For every problem one account solves, it provides another challenge only a different bank handles well. It’s a never-ending circle, and so I keep opening and closing accounts, moving money around, and have to stay somewhat up to date on the developments with each bank. It’s hard work, and I’m not sure it’s always worth the hassle, but I’d rather pay too much attention to my money than too little.

Of course, what applies to banks applies to everything else in life, too. It’s a point well-made on a t-shirt Tim Ferriss saw someone wear while at a rock climbing gym: “No solutions, only tradeoffs.” For every plus, there’s a minus, and while you can swap ones and zeroes as much as you like, you’ll always end up with some wins and some losses.

Going back to my grandparents, while they might have enjoyed an average interest rate of 4% for more than half a century, the steady availability of those rates has turned Germany into an extremely risk-averse market for investors. Many people I know today still think stocks are dangerous and akin to gambling. Even ETFs “sound sketchy.” Historically, only around 10-15% of Germans even own any stocks at all — and that means entire generations, including my grandparents, have missed out on the massive growth in equities as compared to even very good interest rates.

No solutions, only tradeoffs. Pick your problems wisely, and don’t worry about perfection.

The Day Joshua Came Home

The skin on her fingertips was starting to peel. Both the cold and the adhesive were to blame. This was flyer number 1,273. “BOY GONE MISSING (8 YEARS OLD),” it read at the top. That was a lie. It had been two years. If Joshua was still alive, he was now 10 years, 5 weeks, and 3 days old. But Kate refused to acknowledge that fact. Acknowledging any of it meant admitting there was a chance her son would never come back. And despite plastering every telephone pole in Chicago three times over, Kate was not ready to do that just yet. But she was ready to call it a night. Just then, a phone call. The police station near the docks. A blonde boy dressed in nothing but a pair of soccer shorts and a torn blanket had just walked in — and he claimed his name was Joshua.


Sometimes, Kate looked at Joshua and tried to imagine what he looked like when he was nine. She had never seen him at that age, and she could never quite get the picture to de-pixelate. That’s what many of their interactions now felt like. She reached into a place, but there was no other hand to hold. The version of Joshua she longed to access was no longer there. That’s what the kidnappers had really taken. Not her boy, but a part of his soul. And unlike his body, that part might truly not return. It wasn’t that Joshua was mean, angry, or violent. On the surface, he seemed to be the same old Joshie, just more silent, more withdrawn, and that was a lot worse than any outbursts could ever have been. A black van, children in cages, the run for his life after a careless guard’s mistake — they never got past the central points of his story. Those were enough for the newspapers to spin a story in the same bold lettering Kate had used on her flyers — “THE BOY WHO LIVED — AND HIS NAME IS NOT HARRY” — but not sufficient to fill the hole in their relationship. The therapy helped, he reassured her time and again, but his mind had placed a firm lock on any of the deeper memories, and who could blame it? Would he ever be happy again? Would Kate?


When he was 15, Josh disappeared overnight. He missed both dinner and his curfew. All hell broke loose. First within Kate, and then all around her. She raised a search party, called the police, called the news. They combed the area around her house in a mile-long radius, but nothing. When the sun rose that summer morning, Joshua walked up the driveway, smiling. Waving. Holding a grey kitten with green eyes in his arms. He had chased her all night, determined to take a stray friend home. No matter what happened to them, it seemed teenagers would always insist on being teenagers.


By the time Grayla went to cat heaven, Joshua was 28 and had just finished vet school. Animals in cages, helping the helpless — the metaphors for his own story were all there, but Joshua didn’t see them. Didn’t need them. What point in telling a story when there’s someone you can help right in front of you? Whether it was the Eastern philosophy course, the book about Stoicism, or the years of therapy that did the trick, Joshua didn’t know. All he knew was that he had escaped from a dark place twice: once with his legs, and once with his mind. Whenever he returned home, his mom was beaming. She had never been a pet person, but whichever stray friend he brought with him, Kate was eager to cuddle and feed them.


Joshua didn’t become the world’s most sought-after veterinarian. Kate still had her mortgage to pay. There was no miracle reward for their trauma. But between the two of them, they often felt like Nobel Prize winners. If there was a gold medal for overcoming adversity, they sure each had dozens of them. And though the prize for their resilience was not one they could display in a glass cabinet, they forever carried it with them — and neither of them ever forgot the day Joshua came home.

“I Think”

As I was lying awake at night for the umpteenth time, I finally realized these are the two main problems in life. At least my life. “I think my email service provider should stop charging extra for telling you who are your most and least active subscribers.” “I think I should work on this piece of writing first thing in the morning.” “I think I need more focus this month, or otherwise I’ll never get anywhere this year.”

I. Think. I think, I think, I think. “I” and “think” are the two constructs most obstructive to inner peace and fully experiencing life as it is.

“I” means the ego is speaking. Not your true self but the character you’ve created and play in the world every day. The ego is self-centered. It is obsessed with survival beyond reason. It wants to accumulate fame, wealth, and pleasure. The ego shuns service, responsibility, presence, and all the other roads that lead to real freedom.

“Think” means your omniscient gut has left the chat. Thinking is the ego plotting its next move. Can you hear the gears rattling in your brain? It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Chasing thought after thought, getting ever more anxious, more worried, more regretful when, supposedly, thinking is the tool meant to lift you out of those holes. Why isn’t it working? For one, even the best tool becomes blunt when you overuse it, and for another, if all you have is a shovel, the only thing you can do is dig deeper. But you don’t need to think to earn your value as a human being. In fact, you don’t need to think at all. If all you do is be present for the life unfolding right in front of you, that’ll be more than enough.

If I give my ego permission to die, if only in my imagination, and I allow myself a break from thinking, I can sense something deeper. Something that dwells within me, and that’s still there when ego and thinking are absent. What is it? A ghost? A spark? The best way I can describe it is as a light of awareness. A glowing ball of sunshine, hovering in the space wherever one’s soul is supposed to sit. If I can feel my way to it, I know immediately: This is the true you at the root of everything. The entity that’s supposed to be in charge but that, ironically, so rarely gets to see the light of day.

I could spend forever curled up in my ball of sunshine, and I’d never feel in a rush to go anywhere. When I listen to its silent guidance, somehow, everything always happens at exactly the right time. Whether life on the outside goes up, down, sideways or upside down doesn’t matter. No one can take my light from me, and wherever I end up, inside my light is always home.

I don’t know how to stay in my light at all times. I don’t know what it’ll take for you to find yours. What shape it will appear in, or which name you’ll choose to give it. All I know is I must encourage you: Take a break from “I.” Take a break from “think.” You might find you’re so much more than ego and brains, and that the questions life truly asks us can’t be answered with either.

Beware the Sticky Mind

When I wake up after a strange dream or particularly restless night, thoughts come gushing out of me in the morning. On the one hand, this might make for multiple writing ideas, but on the other, it makes me incredibly slow.

Between exercise sets, I might sit there for five minutes and brood over my bank raising prices yet again. Before meditating, I may draft an entire response to an email in my head only to send a totally different one hours later. In other words, because I have so many differing thoughts, I get hung up on some of them. My mind is “sticky,” as Bruce Lee called it:

“Do not let the mind be grasping or sticky. Don’t look at ‘what is’ from the position of thinking what should be. It is not to be without emotion or feeling but to be one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked.” A non-sticky mind is “immune to emotional influences,” Bruce said. Like in a river, “everything is, flowing on ceaselessly without cessation or standing still.”

When a baby feels excess air in its system, it lets out a burp or a fart. We think it’s cute and pat it on the back. “Well done!” we even say. As adults, we’ve learned to suppress our bodily winds, be it for politeness sake or, more often, to avoid public embarrassment. But sooner or later, the air needs to come out — and so do our thoughts and feelings.

When I remember Bruce’s words while barreling down a distracting train of thought, I tell myself: “I’m a human being, and these thoughts are just passing through.” That makes it easier to let them go, and then both the thoughts and I can be on our way.

Beware the sticky mind. You are not your thoughts, and, often, the best thing you can do is wave them right on through.

The Feeling of Having Time

After I decided to once again hit pause on Empty Your Cup, I was sad, but I also felt an immediate sense of inner peace. I instantly knew that, now, I had enough time. None of my problems had yet disappeared, but deep in my gut, I had conviction that with the additional space and effort, I’d get a handle on everything.

Will that be true? Or am I just telling myself a story? It’s too soon to tell, but the pivot re-emphasizes a lesson I’ve already learned a few times: The feeling of having enough time is more important than how much time you actually have.

If whatever schedule you’ve set for yourself gets you to say, “I just know I’ll never be able to complete all of this,” then every day, you’ll behave like someone who’s fighting a losing battle — and those people tend to act like they’ve already lost. In reality, you might actually be able to achieve more than you think you can — but right now, that doesn’t matter. What matters is how you feel and how you’ll act as a result.

When I’m behind, I spend more time fretting, which, ironically, puts me more behind. When I’m ahead of the curve, that spurs me on to try and finish early. If you function in a similar way, I encourage you: Plan your life around feeling that you have enough time, not what you rationally think is physically possible.

Nothing motivates us more than hope, and no one has more hope than he who strongly believes he can win.

Pick Your Treadmill Speed

I rarely run, but I can walk 10,000 steps every day. I can’t launch a new product every month or publish a book every quarter, but I can write a Quora answer, Medium post, or short blog every day. Steady consistency over time is easy for me. Ergo, walking is a great speed for me on the treadmill.

“The treadmill,” as Youtuber Marques Brownlee describes the job of being a creator, consists of two parts: For one, you’ll have to make the art you want to make. In the beginning, that’s easy. There’s nothing to distract you from it.

But the more success you find, the more to-dos will start attaching themselves, like velcro, to the work. Suddenly, you need to write invoices. You need to do accounting. You need to manage sponsorship requests, deal with platform politics, and maybe hire an editor.

That’s the second part of the treadmill: everything that’s not the work but that, as you grow into your career, becomes part of the job. That, too, is asking you to keep going at a certain speed — and in both cases, you must find the setting that works for you.

“I can’t review all three [new] phones at once,” Marques says. “I’m only one person. So I’ve got to pick one. I can’t dive in and try to satisfy the algorithm every single time. I just can’t. So I am trying to pick the right speed on the treadmill.”

Someone else could have posted 300 videos in year one and grow their channel twice as fast, perhaps. Me? I could post one video per week for three years. So that’s what I did, and that worked okay too.

When you see people running around your neighborhood, you’ll notice everyone is going at a different speed. At work, especially in the world of creating, full throttle can look like the only option — but it’s not.

Don’t burn yourself out trying to sprint when you’re a walker, and don’t go slow and steady if intensity is your thing. Pick the right speed on the treadmill, and keep going forever.

The Future Is Not Yet Decided

Nine years ago, I took a course to get my email list off the ground. One of the assignments was to try and get featured in front of other people’s audience. How? You message the makers of the tools you’re already using, show them how you’ve used their software in a successful or unique way, and offer to do a write-up about it for their fans.

One of the people I messaged was Noah Kagan. I had been using one of his tools, SumoMe, to get people to opt in to my newsletter via banners, popups, etc. When I showed him my total opt-ins and conversion rate, he congratulated me and asked whether I had sent the email in hopes of them promoting us.

Knowing that Noah and the creator of my course were friends, I somehow figured he was clued in to the exercise, and I responded with something to the effect of, “Yeah, obviously!” Worse, I did it in such a crude way that I hurt his feelings. A day later, I got a message from the course creator. “Dude! What the fuck? How would you feel if someone said that to you?”

I’ll never forget that moment. I still get chills just thinking about it. I’m a sensitive guy and usually pretty in tune with other people’s emotions. That’s one reason why I became a writer. It still shocks me how my emotional radar could have been so on the fritz. I guess I was riding the high of success a little too early. As a result, I put my foot in my mouth in a massive way.

I apologized to both of them, and I sent Noah a gift card to his favorite taco place, Tacodeli in Austin. I never heard back from “my boss” in the course, but Noah eventually replied: “It’s all good.” It wasn’t exactly the kind of closure you’d hope for, but it was the best I could get in that moment. So I took it, and that was that. I knew those two bridges were likely burned forever, but oh well. You live, and you learn.

About a year later, I ended up writing a guest post for Noah’s company. I don’t remember the details of how it came about, but I don’t think I was in touch with him directly. At the very least, it was reassuring that he didn’t hold enough of a grudge against me to nip any collaboration in the bud.

Fast-forward eight more years, and I recognize a familiar name on the roster of books to be published in 2024: Noah Kagan. His first book with a major publisher, Million Dollar Weekend was a title I knew I had to summarize for Four Minute Books.

Recently, I had been making an effort to be fast in publishing new titles quickly, and while summarizing a book on a Tuesday (which is the most common release day) to release the post on a Wednesday (my publishing day) is certainly possible, it’s far from ideal. The solution? You ask for an advance copy. Given each summary gets promoted to 100,000+ email subscribers, it’s a good amount of free press, so technically, it’s a win-win. But not every author wants their book summarized and, more importantly, not every author is someone you insulted badly, even if it happened almost a decade ago.

I “beat my inner swine dog,” as we say in Germany, and sent Noah a brief email explaining what I was doing and whether he’d like to have his book summarized. His one-line response? “Bro let’s do it!” He gave me an advance copy and completely trusted me to deliver. I hope I did. I’m happy with the summary I wrote, and he liked it. I published it one day after the book’s release, and it even made it onto our Youtube channel just a few days later. May it sell plenty of books while already helping readers start their businesses!

No matter what you think, believe, or how you feel in the moment: The future is not yet decided. You never know how one of your countless life paths will play out years from now. What looks like a massive rock blocking the way may actually be a park bench, offering you to sit and take a break for ten years. Then, the road might open up again all on its own. What feels like an ended relationship is actually one that just needs some distance. And what seems like terrible luck today may turn into good fortune tomorrow.

The future is the future because it’s filled with infinite possibility at any given time. That’s hard to comprehend but important not to neglect. Tomorrow is not set in stone until tomorrow has happened — and since you never know, you might as well always stay open to it.

The Problem of No Problem

In one episode of Vikings, warrior Hvitserk happens upon a strange man in his Norwegian town of Kattegat. The man has traveled far, all the way from Asia, to now offer his wares in the town. Picking up a small wooden idol, Hvitserk asks if, like the idols he knows from Norse rituals, this one, too, portrays a god. The man breaks into hearty laughter — how could anyone mistake the big-bellied Buddha for a god?

When Hvitserk returns to his girlfriend that night, he relays some of the man’s teachings to her. “Everything is One. And only the One is. Life is a bridge, build no house upon it. It’s a river, but don’t cling to its banks. You’re on a journey.” Hvitserk is not entirely sure whether the Buddhist is serious or just messing with him, but he is now curious about enlightenment.

The next day, sitting across his brother Ivar, the current king of Kattegat, Hvitserk holds the little Buddha statue in his hand. Ivar once again laments Hvitserk’s conflictedness. Having abandoned another one of their brothers to join forces with Ivar, Hvitserk has regretted his choice ever since. But now, thanks to a new perspective

“You jumped ship to be with me, because you thought the gods planned it,” Ivar says. “But then everything I say or do makes you unhappy as if you never meant to jump ship at all.” “There is no contradiction,” Hvitserk responds, “because it’s possible that everything is part of the One.”

In a different world, at a different time, Bruce Lee once explained Zen as follows: “Zen reveals that there is nowhere for man to go out of this world; no tavern in which he can overcome anxiety; no jail in which he can expiate his guilt.” Therefore, if life is inescapable, we might as well embrace it.

“Instead of telling us what the problem is, Zen insists that the whole trouble is just our failure to realize that there is no problem.” As soon as Hvitserk stops brooding about his decision, he can accept where he is. He can live the life that’s already happening right in front of him. Will his path carry him elsewhere sometime? Perhaps, but who cares? Everything is as it is, and whether that’s on purpose or not, there is no problem.

The tricky part, of course, is that if there is no problem, “this means that there is no solution either,” Bruce noted. And humans really love solutions. Our brains want to craft them all the time — even if it means inventing problems where none exist.

Everything is One. And only the One is. Life is a bridge, build no house upon it. It’s a river, but don’t cling to its banks. You’re on a journey — and if you’re not sure where you’re going, just laugh.