The Fuckedupness of our Beliefs

Manishimwue, an orphan I was living with during my stay in Rwanda.

You know how they joke that a newly elected president will be busy cleaning up the mess of his predecessor? That’s sometimes how I feel when I think of my 20s. I once made the statement that our 20s are the most important decade of our lives. Why? Because that’s the time when we actually grow up, move out of our homes, and let behind those teenage dramas. It’s the decade during which we discover ourselves and take ownership of our lives. But there is one other important thing that defines our 20s. It’s the fact that we will be busy cleaning up the mess of our teenage years – the beliefs that have been drummed into us growing up. 

Look at babies for example (I’m approaching my 30s, the time when having babies actually becomes “a thing”). These creatures come to this world absolutely naked – both literally and metaphorically – "empty books" that will be filled over the years to come. And boy are they curious! So hungry for knowledge and unaware of their limitations. In fact, they thing they can do ANYTHING: grab that hot pan and chew that piece of plastic (or that dead bee that I ate when I was a kid because I thought it would turn into honey… I still think that’s a genius thought for a 2-year old).  

We come to existence absolutely innocent. Not knowing what a skin color is, what a religion is, what a sexual orientation is. Yet many grow up discriminating, hating and segregating (or experiencing such behavior themselves). The environments we grow up in tell us what we can and can not do. We are supposed to become lawyers and doctors and engineers. That certain type of people are "dangerous" and that some things in life are sinful. 

Over the years, we are being indoctrinated with what society expects us to do. And often enough, our parents function as a channeled reflection of that society. In their eyes, they are just passing down the "wisdom" that our grandparents taught them. I'm not doubting that they mean well, quite the opposite, I think they really love us and want the best for us, but who who says that all of their beliefs are truly what we should believe? 

So that empty book that we are, gets its pages filled with messages and expectations. Not capable of understanding what is actually happening, our subconsciousness takes it all in. That mean comment that someone makes about your body? It quickly affects your self-esteem. That person you love and who rejects you? You start to feel unworthy. My mom still tells me the story of how I once came back from Kindergarten crying, begging my parents to change the color of my skin. I couldn't tell back then, but these incidents certainly affected me, albeit subconsciously. 

Society shapes us. Big time. The book is being filled, but we rarely notice what is being written in it. Not because we don't want to know, but because the ability to reflect and read our subconsciousness comes to us later in life, if it comes at all. Many people walk through their lives with these limiting beliefs that they have soaked up over the years. They carry along this book that they never manage to read and understand. Yet the book becomes the underlying foundation of their actions, their thoughts and how they see and interpret the world.

But then there are others who get it. People who don't just live through their troubles but actually take a moment to understand them. That constant lack of money? Those constant love dramas? Chasing those wrong ideals? They pause, reflect, understand, challenge themselves. They open that book and read what has been written in it. They see the limiting beliefs that they have been indoctrinated with and they decide to erase them, to replace them with some better, real beliefs. Sadly though, not everyone in this world will be able to open his eyes and read the book they are carrying around.

And that's exactly why our 20s are so important (I'm saying 20s, but that process can certainly start earlier or later than that). It's the decade of our post-teenage life during which we are most flexible and independent. The time we are most exposed to new experiences and hungry to build our identities. In this process, we have the responsibility to be critical of the beliefs that guide our actions and thinking. The later we become aware of that, the longer we walk around guided or inhibited by the wrong ideas. We need to be better than that. 

The Power of Visualization

I was on the phone all morning today trying to find a place in San Francisco that I could use for an exhibition that I'm planning. When my colleague learned about my plans, his surprised reaction was: "You are organizing an exhibition? How do you find the time or motivation to do all these many things outside of work?" – a question that I get quite frequently. While there are many factors that motivate me, I want to talk about one thing specifically which I consider extremely powerful and which is one of the key techniques that I use in my life to motivate myself for those outlandish, I-feel-so-fecking-uncomfortable-type goals — like organizing my first ever photo exhibition. 

The technique I'm talking about is called "the power of visualization" (actually, I'm not sure what it's called. This is basically how I call it). What I mean by that is that oftentimes I start having a crazy idea, something that is far outside my comfort zone. For me to then go and realize that crazy idea, I start visualizing myself doing it. This visualization then becomes a source of motivation for me. Before I get into the details, let me give you a few examples. 

When I turned 27 this past December (dang, time flies!), I suddenly had this crazy idea to invite all my local friends and cook Persian food for them. "All my local friends" turned out to be 25+ people. To make my case: I had never ever cooked Persian before. But that didn't matter. I visualized myself doing it. In my mind, I was preparing those Kebabs like a master chef and I was seeing how folks were enjoying themselves and enjoying the food. For many days I imagined doing it until I was absolutely determined to pull it off. I read up on it, I watched YouTube videos, I had my aunts call me and give me tips. My mind was set on success. And so I pulled it off.

Visualization is also what drives me to learn languages. I imagine myself being in Brazil and talking to people in fluent Portuguese. Visualizing myself doing something motivates me. But not only that, it also impacts my actions. Best example is tennis. When the ball comes towards me, I don't think too much about how I'm going to take the ball, whether my feet are positioned correctly and if I'm all well-balanced. For a short moment I see myself taking the ball perfectly, a perfect swing, the right force. And often enough, it just works. This technique is also what I apply to my photography. If you are interested in learning more about the (visualization) story behind the picture that UPS licensed from me, you can read it here.  

So, why is that? Your mind can be your worst enemy and your biggest friend. It's important to know how to make it work in your favor. Think of your thoughts as a powerful instrument that can change the balance of the energy around you. A focused thought, which is a thought that is "soaked with emotional energy" (in other words: mental attention), has the power to change the environment around you, to influence your circumstances, to cause you to act in a never-seen-before way. It can change your attitude towards things.

By visualizing yourself doing something specific, you eventually change your reality. There is nothing material or supernatural going on, but simply the alteration of the mental attention you pay to something and the confidence in your abilities. Visualization programs your brain for success. It allows you to gather the mental resources you need to achieve what you are imagining. Simplified: your thoughts shape your attitude and your attitude influences your reality. And as I wrote in my previous article on this blog, it's also your attitude that will send high vibrations which, in return, will attract other things with high vibrations (in this case the people, resources, and circumstances you will need to achieve your goals).  You know how they say "fake it till you make it"? That idea is not much different.

Does it really work? Arnold Schwarzenegger (my childhood idol, #NoShame) says that "it's all in the mind". He won the Mr. Universe title five times, is a successful real estate tycoon, Hollywood star, and former governor of California (each of these ideas being completely our of his comfort zone one would imagine). There was a time when the only thing Arnold had was the belief that his mind was what he needed to achieving where he wanted to achieve.

“The mind is really so incredible. Before I won my first Mr. Universe title, I walked around the tournament like I owned it. I had won it so many times in my mind, the title was already mine. Then when I moved on to the movies I used the same technique. I visualized daily being a successful actor and earning big money." — Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Raising Your Frequency

My favorite ice cream parlor back in Dublin had a sign promoting, if not even promising, “instant karma” in exchange for tips. Quite a smart move. I mean, who doesn’t want to have good things happen to him in life? 

Inspired by that sign which I recently rediscovered as I was going through old pictures, I came to wonder how I could have this karma thing work for me and attract all the good things in life: the amazing experiences, the positive feelings, the unique opportunities and incredible people that could become part of my journey. How would I have to think about this world and my existence on it so that I could fully tap into all these great things that are out there?

There have certainly been times in my life when I saw a lot of good things happen to me, but I rarely had an explanation as to why they were occurring and with what kind of mindset I could further attract such things. Was I just lucky or did I attract those good things by having a particular approach to life? 

As we know, many people try to explain the world and life on the basis of God: be a good person according to the principles of your religion and good things shall happen to you. As someone who grew up exposed to different religions (I was burn Muslim but read the bible and was part of various Christian organizations), I have come to believe that they are all "different doors to the same house" (a Mexican cab driver once told me this analogy). They all try to explain the world from a different yet similar angle and on the basis of certain beliefs that form the foundation of their religion. Basically what they try to do is to make sense of this world and everything that happens to us.

Independent of where you stand with regards to religion, I want to discuss this topic while putting the G-word aside for a moment. That said, I think that there is an energy out there that is guiding us throughout the universe. An energy that is available to everyone on the world because the entire universe is made up of that energy. Even you are made of that energy. No matter how you want to call that energy (and the G-word is probably the most used one to do so), what is important is that you build a relationship with that energy that is around you and inside you. Why is that important? Because all of us are connected to this limitless power and most of us aren’t using but a fraction of it.

All this energy out there vibrates at a certain frequency. Anything that you desire in life has its own frequency. Same goes for everything that you don’t want. And given that you are made up of energy, it means you are vibrating at a certain frequency, too. So not only does everything vibrate at a given frequency, but vibration attracts similar vibration. 

The simplest example I can think of is smiling. Smiling vibrates at such a high frequency that it’s hard to resist someone’s smile and to not smile back. This is basically the law of attraction. Whether we want (or even realize) it or not, we are constantly attracting energy to ourselves. Whenever we vibrate at a low frequency, for example by feeling sad, depressive, alone and pessimistic, we simply attract misery and things that vibrate at low frequency. Only when we increase our frequency, we start attracting the desirable things in life.

Whatever vibration you put out there, the universe will respond to you on the same frequency. This is why when you are all positive and vibrating at a high frequency, you see all these great people and opportunities crashing into your life. To make this energy thing work for you and to truly raise your vibration onto a frequency level that attracts the good things in life, you have to believe that everything you want in your life is out there in the universe and available to you. The job you desire, the type of person you want to spend your life with, the dream apartment you have been looking for – all these things exist and are out there vibrating at their own (high) frequency. 

Why high? Because they are amazing things. If they weren't amazing, they would vibrate at low frequency and be way to easy to get. But to get those high-frequency things, you yourself need to get out there and vibrate at a high frequency. Put that smile on your face when you leave your apartment, be the person who gives a warm welcome to a new employee on the office floor, compliment the waitress for what she wears, be the person who others look for if they need someone to talk to. What goes around comes around. You can't put out negative energy at low frequency and then expect amazing things happen to you. If you vibrate at high frequency, the world will respond on your frequency level. This is what I consider karma and this is how I'd encourage you to approach life.

The generation that wants it all

We are quite an interesting generation of tech-enabled, informed, restless, urban-dwelling individuals. Probably the last group of people that has gone through the transition from offline to online dating. We remember calling our high school crush on their parents' land line, but have also met and courted through one of the numerous dating apps on our phones. While technology has enabled us to easily connect with others and to pursue our increasing need for self-fulfillment, it has also put us into this never-ending, FOMO-driven craze for "the next big thing”, thus challenging our ability to make long-term commitments .. to basically anything in life. 

With the world now quite literally in the palm of our hands, we now have a ton of information available to us. A trend that has fundamentally changed the way how we think and behave. We increasingly analyze the relationships we have with others as well as with ourselves. In fact, questioning the purpose of our lives, understanding our identity, and trying to reach (and maintain) a happy state of mind has become a recurring theme that I see in so many of my friends all over the world. 

And as we are striving for continuous betterment, the many opportunities at our hands have only fostered this unsatisfiable desire to realize ourselves. To constantly do more. Why? Because #YOLO! Our bucket lists used to stretch over a lifetime, but nowadays we barely manage to plan beyond the current year. Not limited by geographies anymore, our circle of friends stretches around the world from San Francisco to Sydney. There is hardly a dinner party at which my friends don't talk about their plans to move to just another metropolitan city, like their lives have become passport pages and the days within them are just stamps. A few years ago we still ridiculed Apple for continuously releasing a new product and making us constantly want the latest version, but today we have given in on this and just buy along. If it’s better, we need to have it. And while we are happy with what we do professionally, we always have to keep that LinkedIn profile updated, because someone might somehow come across our profile and offer us something better, right? 

Driven by this constant fear of missing out, it’s hard to settle for something and make decisions to last. We are not used to making commitments anymore. And even when we do, our exposure to all these other things let’s us second-guess what we decided on. You don’t like it anymore? You changed your mind? No worries, just return it! Previous generations chose one employer and stuck with that company for their entire life. Trying to make my parents understand why my job at a renowned tech company is really great, but that I feel ready for something new because "it doesn’t feel like it’s my calling”, only provokes looks of incomprehension. 

Just yesterday I ran into a former colleague who had left my team two years ago. It felt weird to admit that I was still working for the same department while she had left to pursue her own start-up. It felt weird because in today’s professional world you are expected to constantly move and optimize your career prospects. As we become increasingly aware of the multitude of options around us, the grass tends to look a lot greener on the other side of the fence. 

Needless to say, this new behavioral pattern also affects our dating habits. The next person we could meet is literally just a swipe away from us. There are not even physical barriers anymore. I once met this wonderful girl online while I was on a business trip in Colombia. After three days of chatting, there was such a strong connection that I changed my return flight just that we could meet at Bogota airport in between changing flights. We got along so well, that a month later she came and visited me in San Francisco for an entire week (I still think this could serve as the story of a romantic novel).

And so we constantly meet new people, go on numerous dates, but then often find a reason why “something doesn’t feel right” or “it’s not the right time”. And in case we do like each other, we often fall into this undefined space of being “mingles”, mutually single. We kind of date each other, but – GOD forbid – not officially! We hang out and enjoy each other’s company, are intimate, but don’t want to lose our autonomy or give up on all the goals we have set ourselves. We want to invest in the “I", not in a “We" because we are afraid of the opportunity cost. And even if one of the two realizes that their feelings are for real, there is no guarantee that the other person might feel the same. So we force ourselves to move on to not waste any time – because remember? Ain’t got no time for this! 

Ironically, we search and search and then don’t even recognize anymore when that what we were looking for in the first place is right in front of our eyes. The same friends of mine who complain that they are single, also complain when a guy or girl gives them too much attention or “tries too hard”. They want the perfect lover, but when that person goes above and beyond to show them how much they care, something just doesn’t feel that right anymore. 

So we have come to look for perfection, however not in what sits in front of our eyes, but in everything that does not. And while we always want what we can’t have, we hardly acknowledge that at the core of our restlessness is both our newly acquired fear of missing out and our desire to realize ourselves. How can we possibly know whether what we have is the best we could have? Doesn’t society constantly tell us to not settle for less than the best? Hasn’t great just been downgraded the new good? Let me check my newsfeed quickly… yes, that’s still the case.

Yet while technology has made so many things easier, it has not reduced the complexity we have to deal with in the relationships we hope to form for the long-term. As nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, we seem to have become a generation that is partially incapable of dealing with the complexities of modern-day relationships. We have become impatient, restless, constantly on the move. 

But are we really to blame? The technology that is taking over our lives can barely reflect our increasing sophistication as human beings. We all want that one partner that makes us laugh, is well educated, likes puppies, and what have you (just read through some Tinder profiles to get an idea what people look for these days). While these are legitimate desires, they are in no way going to function as the foundation of a happy partnership or as the glue that will keep things together in times of difficulties. 

Relationships don’t break because of the good things we bring into the relationship, but because of the natural deficiencies that we all have. It takes a lot of time and experience to build knowledge and muscle on how to deal with these deficiencies. Many of them only surface when we are in multi-year relationships, in which our character strength and commitment ability are stress tested. So it’s not just about finding someone who meets all the things on our wishlist, but someone who can also deal with our problems on the “blacklist". Sadly though, in these casual, no-commitment, mingle-type relationships of our generation, we tend to run away when such problems occur. When I tried to save my last serious relationship, my ex responded "I don't want something broken and then fixed”. Standing up and walking away from the problems in our lives has become easier than to sit and work things out. 

As this trend continues, we need to come to our senses and understand how we have robbed ourselves of the ability to make decisions to last. We need to appreciate more the beauty of the things we own and stop chasing the things that we don’t. I once lost someone who meant the world to me, simply because I had the urge to tick off one of those items on my bucket list. Just because "you always wanted to do something”, it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice everything else thinking that there is more out there. Our desire for self-fulfillment and betterment is legitimate, but it shouldn’t keep us from making commitments to the things we have. To the contrary, we should value more the loyalty that people show us. In today’s fast-moving and sometimes ephemeral world, commitment is worth a mint and remains the single most important factor for a relationship to last.

While technology is at the core of how our social interactions and expectations have changed, it deserves a lot of credit as well. I have married friends who met online. I have married friends who were physically apart for large periods of time and only managed to uphold their relationships through technology. We are a truly privileged generation if you ask me. Our parents grew up offline, our children will grow up online. We will be the only one that had the opportunity to experience both. Even more so, we are the generation that shapes the online world of the future. With that comes a lot of responsibility to be considerate and thoughtful of how the technology that we are creating today is changing the ways how we will be interacting with each other tomorrow. 

When to fight and when to surrender

"Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” — Eckhart Tolle. 

I used to be a very firm believer of the idea of fighting. Fighting for what is important to you. Fighting for what or whom you love. Fighting for what you want in your life. For your goals, for your dreams, for your desires. I always believed that what differentiates those people who get what they want and those who don’t, was their willingness to fight. To give everything they have, to prioritize that one thing over everything else. 

I still believe that today. However, I learned that this philosophy comes with a caveat sometimes. An exception if you want. Namely that sometimes, it’s not the fighting that will bring you closer to your goals, but more the act of surrendering. That just because you want something really bad, doesn’t mean that you are entitled to get it. No matter how much you think you deserve it or how much you tell yourself that it’s meant to be. 

Our view and understanding of the world is far too limited to recognize the absolute truth or to predict our own path. Not always are we able to control our circumstances by using our limited thinking and the structures we have created in our minds. In other words: life is so much bigger than we can possible comprehend and not everything will go the way we want things to go. "Wanting things" is a process that roots in us and that can be completely misaligned with what we are capable of what life has foreseen for us (you might have heard of the quote “life is what happens to you when you are busy planning”). 

I was reading a nice story in this book the other day which was the perfect anecdote for what I’m trying to express here. I will try to rephrase in my own words what it was about. 

Imagine it’s a beautiful summer day and you are standing at the window of your house looking outside into your garden. Suddenly you notice this truly beautiful butterfly flying around your garden plants. You see the butterfly and you think yourself how wonderful it is. “Goodness, I really want this butterfly. I want it so bad … I’m gonna go and get it”. So you run into your room and you grab your net. You run outside into the garden and run around trying to catch this butterfly. You hide, you jump, you stretch. You try your best, you give 110%. Just minutes later you are covered in sweat and your pulse is sky high. As much as you try, you simply can’t catch it. In the meantime, you have stepped on half of your garden plants and you are completely out of breath. Completely exhausted you sit down on your garden bench and try to get your head clear. You breathe in and out, you calm down. Suddenly you look up and you see how the butterfly flies towards you and sits down on your nose.

Some things in life are that butterfly. You put a tight grip on what you want, but the harder you try the more you actually push it away. And while you are trying, you don’t even notice how you are destroying some of the beautiful things around you. Only when you let go of your desire, only when you calm down and give it some time, only when you take the pressure off your desires and off yourself, you start attracting the things you were chasing all the time before.

That butterfly that ends up sitting on your nose in the story might be the butterfly that you were chasing at the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances, or it might be a completely different butterfly. One that is more beautiful and one that actually wants to be around you. 

As much as I like this story and as many life lessons it might contain, the biggest point here is that the protagonist is NOT giving up. He is simply surrendering to something that I would like to call “The Universe”. You can call it god, a spirit, an energy, what have you. Your faith that things will be all fine in the end needs to be stronger than your fear of not getting what you want. By surrendering, you not only accept that you have done your very best but you also trust that The Universe will fix it. That you can’t force the right things but that sometimes the right things will come and find you. That there is a bigger power that will ensure that you will be all fine at the end of it all and that if what you wanted in the first place, will happen if it's aligned with your life's purpose. 

My friend who lost her sight, yet gained an amazing perspective

Every now and then, you cross paths with people who will leave a lasting impact on your life. Alejandra is one those. Here is her story. 

End of June I was in Guadalajara to discuss a potential partnership opportunity with some local companies. As I often do, I use my work trips to also meet friends who live all over the place. It was my second time in Guadalajara and while I only had 36 hours, I made it a priority to meet up with some of my local friends. One of them was Ale, a girl that I had met back in 2008 during my semester abroad in Buenos Aires.

Ale is actually from Guadalajara and part of a bigger group of Mexicans with whom I used to hang out with in Argentina (surprisingly, I only made Mexican friends during my term abroad). While we managed to see each other only once – 2009 in Munich – we always remained in touch over Facebook and Instagram. 

Without knowing her full story, I always knew that there was something with her right eye. I didn’t know any details, but I remembered how there was always a green reflection in her eye on those pictures that existed of us back in 2008. I always thought she was slightly cross-eyed, but that was an assumption I made without knowing any specifics. 

As we were catching up over a few beers about the past 5 years, she casually mentioned twice that she underwent some treatments for her eye. As she was mentioning this, it was visible to me that part of her right eye had an uneven, slightly grainy, surface. Not knowing what astonishing story I was tapping into, I asked her about the story of her eye. 

You know how doctors talk about that <1% risk of complications when undergoing eye laser surgery to recover your sight? Well, she was that <1%. Back in 2007 she underwent such eye laster treatment but the surgery led to complications. What started as a complication, turned out to be an unfathomable ordeal of 36 eye surgeries to date. 

Since her first surgery, she had lost her sight on her right eye twice but was able to regain it as a result of the many surgeries. Upon losing her eye sight a third time, there was no possibility to regain her sight. To make things worse, her non-functioning eye became so low in pressure that some of her last and biggest surgeries were not even aiming at recovering her sight, but at maintaining her eye in tact. Fortunately, the doctors succeeded in doing so because otherwise she would be wearing a glass eye today. Imagine there were times she had to sit straight for weeks with closed eyes to avoid excess pressure. Weeks. All you want to do in that moment is to cry … but even that you can’t do. What a terrible ordeal. 

As someone who generally can’t see blood, wounds or listen to anatomy-related things, I was surprised with what fascination and curiosity I was listening to her story. What made her story so interesting was not the pain and suffering she had to go through, but the attitude and perspective she had on it. 

First off, I was amazed by how modest she was about her past. I was thinking of all the times we spent time together in Argentina back in 2008 or seeing each other again in 2009. Not a single time did she make her story a topic in our conversations. Knowing how often people have the necessity to share their grief and suffering with others, you could clearly see with what strength she had been handling her situation over the past years. 

As I was asking her more questions about her past, Ale was always sharing her stories with a strong sense of acceptance and calmness. If she was mad about the doctor I asked her. Ale said that she has accepted her fate and learned to live with this circumstance of her life. Throughout the entire conversation, there was not a single time that she would show resentment towards what had happened. Quite the opposite, she was telling the story with such sense of positivity and embracement that I couldn’t help myself but to compliment her for the admirable strength and resilience she had shown throughout all those difficult years.  

In the end of our evening while we were bidding farewell I told her that she might have lost her sight, but that she had gained an amazing perspective on what happened in her life. I further promised her to write about her story and thus inspire others. She is a marvelous example of a person who underwent some serious hardship but did not let it take her down. She didn’t develop resentment, but acceptance. She didn’t hate her circumstances, but understood that she was more than the sum of those. She embraced her fate, learned to live with it and made the best out of the means she had. I thought I was just going to have a beer with a friend. Little did I know I would walk away that inspired. 

Understanding your "Downers" and "Lifters"

While my apartment is in San Francisco, my office is located in Mountain View, which is 65km (40 miles) further south. This means that every morning I wake up at 6AM to take the 6.30AM shuttle to work (no, I’m not skipping the shower, I just live really close to the shuttle stop). Why so early you might wonder? My principal motivation is to avoid traffic. My second motivation is that my territory, Latin America, is up to 6 hours ahead of me. That’s why I try to start the day early. All in all, my daily commute takes 2.5 hours on average (returning to SF in the afternoon almost always involves traffic).

The other day I had an evening flight to Sydney and therefore decided to work from home so I could head to the airport directly. One might now think that working from home would be the "BEST. THING. EVER!!!" since it allows me to skip the commute and walk around naked in my apartment (hypothetically speaking), but that day I made the decision to never work from home again (at least to avoid it as much as I can). What happened? A few hours into the day, things started to feel weird. I didn’t feel motivated (it was a Friday after all, the happiest day in the week given the weekend anticipation), my mind felt blocked, my thoughts were full of doubts, I was not excited about Sydney, and I also started to feel quite lonely. 

In that moment, I realized that the act of working from home is a "Downer" for me. Being home alone by myself doesn’t make me happy. What I needed in that moment was to be around people. To see other faces. To feel the energy of collaborative working. None of that was there. It was just me in my (slightly messy) room. For some people this might be a completely insignificant circumstance ... but I realized that for me it wasn't.

I think that too often, we humans walk through life without really understanding ourselves. We try to understand others, all sorts of situations, things at work, world events, what have you…. but how often do we actually try to understand ourselves? I’m specifically referring to our understanding of what makes us happy and what doesn’t. I call them the "Downers" and "Lifters" of our lives. The things that take us down and the things that lift us up. 

In my initial example of the day that I worked from home, at some point my energy went down SO much that I just simply wanted to break free from this vicious cycle. I put on my running shoes and went for a full hour run. It was hard to motivate myself to do it, but I knew that working out was one of my "Lifters" and thus my only option to revert how I was feeling. 

I would like to encourage you to become more aware of when you are feeling down and when you are feeling happy. To really pinpoint what it is that makes you feel either way and to become super aware of it. It’s ok to have a bad day, but it’s important to understand why you have a bad day (as opposed to just acknowledging it without questioning it). And in the next step, know what you can do to lift yourself up again. Allow me to give you some more examples from my own life to explain what I mean.

I have learned that in order to keep my mind fresh and positive, I need to work out regularly. If I don’t work out for 2-3 days in a row, I can feel how my thinking turns negative and how I lose motivation in the things I do. I simply NEED sports to keep up my levels of energy, productivity and happiness. A second example is food. I used to weigh more than 100KG (220 lbs) and then lost 30KG in a short amount of time when I was 17. Overeating or eating unhealthy food really messes up my self-confidence (I therefore disciplined myself to eat less and moderately). The last example would be socializing with friends … there are some people in my life whose presence always makes me happy. People who make me forget my worries… I learned to appreciate those people and to purposefully spend time with them. 

In addition to learning what makes you happy and proactively seeking or creating those situations, you should also improve your awareness of when you are unhappy and what triggers those feelings. Lately I have experienced difficulties to get out of bed (despite my 8 hours of beauty sleep). I skip my 6.30AM shuttle, snooze around and try to avoid the day. Clearly, this is a sign that something is wrong. A simple question I commonly ask myself in these situations: from all the things in my life right now, what would I have to remove or resolve to make me feel better. “Would I feel better if you didn’t have to deal with X?” or “What if I had clarity about situation Y – would I feel more motivated?”. I go through the things that are on my mind to pinpoint the inference factor. Sometimes it’s a specific work problem, other times it’s a person in my life who gives me negative energy.

Your "Lifters" don't have to be big things. Often times they can be small things. It could be a song, listening to music in general, shopping, a creme brulée, a certain person, watching a movie, what have you. Same thing for the "Downers". It could be small things like a messy room, dirty dishes in your sink, being in the cold without gloves (or "handshoes" as I tend to literally translate them from German)

In summary, I'd like to encourage you to be more emotionally aware of your state of mind. If you catch yourself having a hard time leaving your bed or entering a work meeting with a negative mindset (f.ex. "I really don't want to be in this meeting right now"), then there is some kind of "Downer" at work in your life. Pinpoint them and combat them with one of the "Lifters" that work for you!

On the Meaning of Love & Partnership

This past weekend two of my close couple-friends got married. One of them in México and one in France. My decision-dilemma could be best described with a German saying that goes: "you can’t dance at two weddings at the same time”. Given that I was asked to be a groomsman in México, I was glad that the decision was taken out of my hands.

At one point, while we were standing in a close circle and signing the civil papers, my friend’s grandparents stepped up and said: “We have been married for 67 years and we hope your marriage stays as happy as ours”. This was quite an impressive moment given how visibly old they were and how they were holding hands. 67 years… my mind was blown. 

Having received 6 wedding invitations for this year and knowing that about 50% of marriages end in divorce, I couldn’t help myself but wonder what it means to find the right person for life. My former manager would probably conjure up a spreadsheet and say: “What needs to be true so that you know person X is the right one?”. Business jargon aside, I spent some time lately thinking about this topic and discussing it with some friends whom I would consider in happy relationships or marriages. 

Building a “we”, maintaining the “I” and loving yourself more than your partner

One of my friends made an interesting point about how a relationship is so much more a partnership than anything else. You have relationships with your family, friends and business partners. But with the person you want to share your life with, you actually have a partnership. Both sides bring together elements of who they are, give up a certain level of their autonomy, and form a new “identity” which didn’t exist before. It doesn’t mean that they give up who they are, but it means that they are committed to building a partnership that only enriches who they are as individuals. They form a “we” while they maintain the “I”. In fact, the “we” will make the “I”s only stronger, richer and better. It will unlock a lot of their potential as a human being – boost their overall happiness, confidence, and give them an increased sense of meaning in life. 

On my recent trip to México, my colleague mentioned how he misses his wife and how this showed him how much more complete he feels when they are together. Building a “we” doesn't mean that your “I” is not complete as it is, but it means that your partner will be the person who makes you an even better version of who you are. That said, while the “we” will make you a "better you”, maintaining your “I” is actually quite important for a healthy “we” (make sure you got that!). I have seen too many examples of people who completely gave up their “I” and defined themselves only through the “we”. Once the “we” didn’t work out anymore, they fell really hard. They had given up their own identity which would have been their safety net to keep them from being hurt. 

How to maintain a strong “I” while building a healthy “we”? Love yourself more than you love your partner. This sounds selfish, but you can’t love anyone else if you don’t love yourself first. Very often I see people giving up entirely who they are to be fully devoted to the “we”. They always say yes, compromise on everything, always put their desires second. They love their partner more than they love themselves. Believe me, this is a recipe for failure. As much as I believe in the importance of a strong “we”, I also believe that each person needs to maintain their own hobbies, their own friends, their own interests and their own space. Let the “we” make your “I” stronger, not replace it.  

Finding the right person

So how do you find the right person? Well, I don’t know the “how” (this is not an IKEA manual), but here are my thoughts on “what" you should look for. 

Let personality be your trump. While I certainly believe you should like your partner physically, do not forget that looks will fade over time. What will not fade are the person’s character and personality. We will all become old one day, so don’t let your partner’s physical appearance be the one thing that drives you into their arms. Be with someone because of the way they make you feel. Because of the person’s commitment to you and the way how they talk about you in front of others. The perspective and the energy they give you day after day. Love them for the way how they support you when you are down; not for how much money they spend on you to make you happy. The way they handle life’s complications because you, too, will have to overcome those together. You have to stick that personality until the end of your life. Make sure it’s someone who makes you a better version of who you are. 

Similarities help you get started. Differences help you grow. What is a recipe for success you might ask? Being very similar or being different? I have heard many people saying either or. Personally, I think it’s the healthy balance of both! On the one hand you want someone with whom you have shared interests and a common base on which you can build a future. I’m thinking here of similar interests (music, fashion, travel, life’s pleasures), a shared perspective on the world (values, political views, sense of justice), and certainly expectations that are aligned (founding family, place to live). On the other hand though, you want to ideally be with someone who *is* different from you in certain ways. Why? Because I think this is exactly what will make a partnership interesting and exciting. Let the other person be better and smarter than you at certain things so you can learn from them. Let the person be of a different background so you can appreciate a culture that you were not familiar with. You want to be able to throw an idea at that person and know that they can take it and expand it because they take different approaches to solving certain problems. The similarities give you a common ground to build a partnership and the differences will give you the opportunity to make you a “better you”. This way, 1+1 won’t equal 2, but 3. 

"What is Love? Baby don’t hu…”. No karaoke please. But seriously, what is love? I have come to believe that love is the feeling of wanting to make someone happy every single day of your life. It’s the desire to travel the entire world with that person. It’s the open-mindedness to experiment and explore new things in life together – from learning an unknown skill to doing drugs (hypothetically speaking). It’s the fascination you feel when you realize that your partner knows you better than you know yourself. It’s the urge to share your happiness and sadness with that person. It’s the acceptance of their flaws and appreciation of what they do 10 times better than you. It’s the pride you feel when your partner succeeds in life or at work. And it’s knowing that with your partner you can do just anything in life: spontaneously buy a ticket to a random destination, go to a multi-day music festival in your mid-40s, move to a new country together or simply sit at a window, watch the rain, and philosophize about life. Love is all of the above.

Learning to see things grey

Moving abroad helped me learn a lot about myself. I never knew how binary I was in some of my behaviors and perspectives until my international work environment made me aware of it.

One of the key things I learned about myself was that too often, I would see situations as either black or white. Things were either going well or going badly. I was either moving ahead in my career or falling behind. A person would either like me or simply be uninterested. Once a friend jokingly said I would be a "man of extremes". At first it sounded like a nice comment – if not even a compliment – but over time I saw that thinking and acting in extremes was hurting me more than helping me succeed in life. Especially outside the workplace. 

Turns out that life is full of grey situations. Life is full of uncertainty. Full of situations that are neither "Yes" nor "No", but subject to one of the endless variables in that grey area between black and white. As humans, we are limited by our subjective perspectives (which I consider strongly influenced by our experience, education and our personality — aspects that evolve over time). Given this limitation, not everything can fit into one of our neat little boxes that we have in our minds and with which we would like to interpret all the situations we encounter in our lives. 

Most recently, I applied to several MBA programs in the US. I was extremely fortunate that my top school invited me to interviews. So three weeks later I was anxiously waiting to hear back whether I was accepted or rejected. That's all I was expecting in that moment .. it was either going to be a Yes or a No. I opened up the notification message just to find out that I was waitlisted. Wait.. what!? I had no idea what that even meant. The only boxes in my head were "In" or "Out". Out of a sudden, I was thrown at this vast area of uncertainty. Having to wait, having to accept that I had done my best and that the final outcome would not be in my control anymore.

These types of grey areas can be quite unpredictable, confusing and seem unfair. Also, they come in all shapes and forms – they won't be always as definite as "Yes", "No" or "Maybe". To illustrate what I mean, just take 3 real physical items that you'd call white. Put them next to each other. You will see that these three items have different shades of white. Same thing if you take three physical items that you'd consider black. 

There are areas in which the range of shades of grey is far too vast to comprehend easily with the minds we have. Relationships between two people being one of them. In the business world for example, you will often find linearity in relationships of cause and effect. Example: You do a marketing campaign and your sales numbers increase (A led to B). In relationships though, you see B but it's extremely difficult to pinpoint A. Very often, there is no such thing as A, but B was caused by a multitude of factors that you can't even think of. There is this huge grey area in between what happens and what caused that event.  

This is more what situations in the real world look like. There are different types of Yes. There are different types of No. And in between, there is a multitude of situations that only reflect reality and the uncertainty we have to embrace in life. The more complex our world becomes (which it does), the more important it will be to learn to see things grey and to deal with it. A situation can be "just ok". Your career might find itself in a phase of stagnation. And the person that likes you, that person might just not be ready yet. Put aside your black and white thinking and learn to see things in different shades of grey. 

Change remains the only constant in life

I remember how I was once sitting in a talk by designer Steve Allen. He has been a designer for many years and was talking about how his designs had changed over the years. In that moment, I remembered those embarrassing moments when you come across Facebook pictures from 5+ years ago and just think yourself: "Oh dang... how could I have possibly worn this?". Even David Beckham commented recently that he regrets some of the haircuts he had in the past. Isn't that an interesting phenomenon? If that's the way how we think of the past, it also means that in the future we will potentially react to today's fashion, haircut, taste, preferences, etc. the same way how we react today about the past. 

Needless to say, that got me thinking a bit. Looking back, I would confidently say that I went through a lot of changes in my life, values, taste and personality. Looking forward though, I would rather say that my current life, values taste and personality are quite developed and won't change that much anymore. But isn't that what I used to say 10 years ago? And wouldn't I say the very same thing in 10 years as well?

Turns out that some proper research has been done about it. Psychologist Dan Gilbert gives this really interesting TED talk about the phenomenon that we think that our current state is close to a "final state" of who we are going to be until the rest of our lives – which is actually not the case. In his talk he demonstrates that while we acknowledge the change we went through in the past, we have a hard time imagining and visualizing the change we will go through in the future. Example: a group of 28 year old people and a group of 38 year old people is being asked to rate i) how much they changed over the past 10 years and how much they think they will change over the next 10 years. Turns out that the 28 year olds predicted less change for their next 10 years than the 38 year olds reported for their past 10 years. This pattern was analyzed for age groups from 18 to 68 (always with 10 years of difference) and you can see below how stark the difference was between the change that was predicted vs. reported. 

While this feels like an interesting research finding, it also bears a lot of meaning for the way how we make decisions in our lives. At any point in our lives, we seem to be thinking that we are close to what our final state is going to be. Turns out that this is not true. That's why making decisions for life is such a tricky thing. Many people say you should get married as late as possible because the later you do, the less change you will go through with your partner (and thus the lower the risk of divorce). As a matter of fact, change does slow down with age, but it is a constant, perpetual thing. Getting married later will therefore never remove the risk but only lower it.

At the end of all, it's important to recognize the importance and power of time throughout our lives. Time is what changes our preferences, taste, priorities, values and personality. While we appreciate this fact, we only seem to do so in hindsight. Looking back, we acknowledge the change we have been through, but looking forward, we have a hard time imagining how time will alter our beliefs and values. The challenge is to accept our current being not as the final state, but as a work in progress. We are not finished the way we are today. The person you are today is going to go through (almost) as many changes as the version of you from 10 years ago. Same applies to the version of you in 10 years time. After all, changes is the only constant in our lives.