Speculating on Time

One micro-habit I’d love to drop is speculating more on time than necessary. That means in the long run, of course, for example by simply focusing on my work, earning money, and then buying assets I believe in whenever i have capital to spare, but it also applies in more immediate settings.

I spend a lot of time wondering how much sleep I’m getting while I’m trying to sleep. “What time might it be now? Hmm, it’s still dark. So not yet 7 AM. I slept at 12:45. Or was it 1 already? How much can I get if I go back to sleep in the next 15 minutes? Six and a half hours? Seven?” The exercise is entirely futile, of course.

I have an alarm, so I know when I’ll wake up. I try to go to bed on time, but I don’t always make it. Whatever happens in-between won’t change either of those established patterns. Nor will the knowledge help me throughout the day later on. When I’m tired, I’ll get some rest. And if I feel full of energy, I’ll do some extra work or writing.

Time speculation extends to other areas as well. You can wonder how long you’ll need at the bakery, how your bus coming five minutes later will affect your arrival time at your destination, and on and on. Most of the time, the settings we do most of our speculating in are situations where we actually control little of the outcome at all. The speculation acts like a pacifier. It feels productive, as if we’re doing something when, actually, it’s merely a way of distracting ourselves from our worries—about showing up late, about missing something important, and about, well, not sleeping enough.

Don’t fight dead time. Recognize it, then make it come alive. There’s no need for speculation when, in your heart, you already know what to do.

The Live Factor

Everything is ten times harder when it’s live. Teaching. Singing. Speaking. Dancing. Even something as seemingly trivial as moderating a 30-minute panel discussion.

At my company’s annual industry event, I watched such a discussion. Going in, I thought the host had the easiest job. Just introduce the guests and then make sure they piggyback well off one another, right? Ha! A few minutes in, it already became clear this is harder than it looks—and far from the whole job.

Do you introduce your guests? Or do you let them do that themselves? If so, for how long? Who do you call on first? How do you pass the baton? Can you adjust your prompts in real-time so you can move from one speaker to the next in a way that makes sense? When do you interrupt a guest because they are taking too much time? Where do you ask a follow-up question? It’s a Pandora’s box of questions, this moderation thing!

Clearly, the host in this panel struggled with it. He didn’t distribute time well between speakers. He called upon guests with questions they weren’t well-positioned to answer. And he frequently inserted his own talking points instead of maintaining the panel’s organic flow. All in all, the discussion could have been much more fruitful. Interesting. Substantial. Alas, our moderator was not ready for the live factor.

Preparation is “half the rent,” we say in Germany. For live events, the attention you put in before the spotlights go on is worth just as much as your presence on stage, perhaps more. Submit the challenge to your subconscious early on. Go and prepare and do it. Once the timer begins, all you can do is trust your intuition and let your training show its results.

Never underestimate the live factor.

The 5 Kinds of Highlights

Eight years after first talking about it, I still 100% believe in intuitive highlighting.

For a while, I tried creating a more sophisticated system for myself. I used markers in different colors to highlight in multiple tiers. Blue was a new concept or original idea. Green was a more common point that was still a good reminder. Yellow meant something else, and so on. It didn’t work. Too much hassle.

Anything that makes reading feel like a chore must go. It’s more important to enjoy reading—so you’ll maintain the habit—than to perfectly capture every detail. Therefore, intuitive highlighting it is. That doesn’t mean your highlights are meaningless, by the way.

Just because you don’t consciously decide doesn’t mean you won’t have a good reason for every line you mark in a book. Yesterday, I talked to a friend about this. We came up with five on the spot:

1. Reaffirming a belief. You read a line and go, “Yes, absolutely!” You connect with the author and find a mutual point of agreement. This is powerful. A universal yet special kind of attraction. As you run your highlighter over such lines, you’ll shape your character together.
2. Grasping aspirations. There are the beliefs we hold and the people we’d like to be in order to live in accordance with those beliefs. Books don’t just remind us of the former. They can also show us the latter—and even if we’re not perfect, we can always strive for better. Highlighting descriptions of better helps us cement it in our souls.
3. Capturing aha moments. Did the writer convince you of the opposite side of an argument with their unique take on it? Or did you discover a new perspective you’d never even considered? Epiphanies will automatically jump at you, so it’s no wonder you’ll pick them up with your marker.
4. Tracking arguments for understanding. Some books will make your brain sweat. For me, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus was a mental jungle gym. In hindsight, most of my highlights were me trying to go from one logical monkey bar to the next—and I didn’t have to be conscious of this process for it to work.
5. Preserving important seeds for whenever they’ll blossom. Your subconscious knows more than the active thinking machine that runs permanently while you’re awake. Intuitive highlighting allows the former to do its job. “I don’t know why this sentence feels important, but it does.” When revisiting such highlights later, you might be able to file them into one of the above categories. Or entirely new ones. Or none at all still. Given enough space, stars align in their own time. Let them.

Don’t be a surgeon when you’re reading. Be a graffiti artist. Spray your colors widely. Generously. Allow your mind to expand. Like in a stunning mural, different shapes will fit together in the end. These are just five of many kinds of highlights—and you won’t have to think about any of them in the moment for them to become part of your big picture.

Almost Missed It

I’m an organized guy for the most part. Ergo, my Pokémon card collection lives and dies by a spreadsheet. It’s great for keeping track and making sure that, for the investments, I buy items that make sense to hold together, for example all sealed items from one particular set. But it can also become a burrow I hole up in for no reason.

Sometimes, I add and remove collection targets on a whim. I’ve spent hours in that sheet arguing with myself. “Should I really try to buy all of these tins? Or just let them go?” Especially with vintage items, it’s hard to decide whether you should bite the bullet and buy it at a high price or accept you missed the boat. Most stuff will hold its value and even increase over time, but vintage doesn’t rise as fast as newer sets, and it’s already expensive to begin with. You can already see how it’s easy to go in circles.

Last night and this morning, I did just that. After finally talking myself out of buying some stuff I didn’t even know existed a few years ago, I looked up. The sun was rising, and the sky was a beautiful, wintery pink, specked with fluffy clouds. As it slowly bled into yellow and blue, I just sat there, gazing. “Huh. Almost missed it. Thank god I just closed that tab.“

Going From A to C Instead of B

A colleague asked me to create some slides for a case study we hadn’t covered previously. It was a startup from our ecosystem which had successfully listed a digital asset token backed by real rubies and sapphires from Greenland.

I wanted to see if AI could speed up the process, so I fired up Gemini and went to work. I uploaded two sets of slides from previous case studies, both of which followed the same structure. First, you show the challenge, then an insight, then the solution, and so on. I uploaded some materials about the company and asked Gemini to fill in the blanks. It worked, and the output was decent.

While transferring the material, I noticed I had to make edits. Text didn’t fit in boxes. Some details weren’t relevant. A few numbers didn’t fit or make sense. I went back and forth for a while, switching from my slides tab to the AI and back. After around two hours, the pack of six slides was finished.

Was that faster than if I had done it manually? Probably a little bit. Maybe even by an hour. But it felt…weird. I had delivered something, but I didn’t feel I had a good grasp on it. As if the thing wasn’t “mine.” It also left my brain in a fairly disjointed state. I felt torn, not satisfied.

When I write and ship an essay, I’m always content afterwards. I never know how it lands, but I know what I’ve made. I’ve walked every step of the way, and I can feel the effort in my bones. The more I use AI for tasks at work, the more I realize how much it breaks down any holistic process.

An MIT study from a few months ago suggested AI-first essay writers suffer severe cognitive debt. They can’t quote from their pieces, become dependent on the tool, and adopt shallow ideas without reflecting critically. Having experimented myself—and it’s good my job forces me to—I’m not surprised.

When you collaborate with AI, it really is as if another person is handing you input on an assembly line. You’re still going from A to Z, but you’re skipping half the alphabet. Where you used to cover A, then B, then C, now, B comes straight out of the chatbot, and so of course you can’t connect C back to B, let alone to A, as easily as if you’d manufactured all the parts.

In the study, experienced writers used AI more sparingly. Critically. To improve their existing work. For writing, an AI-assisted editing layer after you squeeze a first draft out of your own brain definitely feels more appropriate than starting with prompts. Still, the best defense for our thinking will always remain doing it ourselves—at least on a very regular basis.

Whatever you’re building, don’t forget the basics. Put stone on stone from time to time, and remember your ABCs.

What or Should?

During my first industry conference, I had dozens of fascinating conversations with the many visitors to our team’s booth. “I have a startup.” “I work in the media.” “I’m a professor at a local university.” No one person had the same background as the next, and everyone had an interesting story to tell.

Of course, people don’t pay 500 euros for kicks and giggles. They want to move their work forward, and that’s why most conversations at conferences follow the same pattern: “What do you do? What is your goal? And what can we do here together?” Both sides reflect on each other’s ambitions and try to find common ground.

After several days of meeting people and sparring with them nonstop, you’ll end up with dozens, maybe hundreds of potential starting points. Depending on how many notes you’ve taken, you might go home and think, “Okay, let me get working on these next week,” with the expectation of picking up every single thread once you’re back at your desk. At the very least, you’ll connect with everyone online, maybe follow up with a message.

This system is flawed and unkind. When you design your own business strategy, you naturally trade off time, energy, and resources. You’re not trying to follow every avenue. You know you must pick a lane and stick to it. But since no one wants to be the bad guy who rejects most people at a conference, we try to align, and that creates expectations. Yet, we could all make our lives so much easier if we traded just one question for another: Instead of asking, “What can we do here?” let’s ask, “Should we do something here?”

The if is more important than the what. It’s not the number of new contacts that counts. It’s how many remain after sending them through a strong, narrow filter of where your business needs to go next.

Thankfully, my boss understands this, and so she gave us a handful of channels into which to sort people before we even set up our booth. If someone ran a startup, I could point them to our accelerator. If someone worked in corporate, I could talk about our enterprise enablement workshops. And if they were just an individual trying to learn or educate about a certain blockchain topic, I showed them our online platform and open-source materials.

“What can we do here?” prompts you to be creative. To imagine until you can find an idea that seems feasible. But if you and a potential business partner are a strong match, the mode of cooperation should be obvious. If the what doesn’t appear on a silver platter, the odds of your collaboration leading to explosive growth are fairly low. So, at industry events, don’t look for common ground outside of trying to connect with people on a personal level.

“Should we do something here?” is a generous invitation. It’s a door that’s slightly ajar, just as happy to be closed again as it is to be fully opened. Let your should conjure an open crossroads in front of you and would-be partners. Approach it with a default: Most likely, everyone will go their own way, and that’s absolutely okay. And if the adventure ahead is indeed to be shared, it’ll be clear as day to everyone standing at the intersection—because the path that appears in front of you will glow in a color only this particular fellowship can recognize.

The Animals Made the Roads

The United States were born in 1776, but actually, there were few states and little unity. It was a hodgepodge of 13 colonies who agreed mainly on one item: We no longer want to be ruled by a king overseas.

It took America 125 years to include the first 48 of its 50 states. The last two took another 47 years to add. So the US you know today is actually just over 60 years old! With the initial 13 members all being stuck on the eastern coast of the country, perhaps it’s no wonder the rollout and re-gathering was a slow process. How did it even start?

Yesterday, a colleague told me. He once visited a whiskey maker in Kentucky. Their Buffalo Trace bourbon has been made in the rugged beast’s spirit for over 200 years, and its name was chosen deliberately: because the first westward riding settlers had no roads to ride their wagons on. Only trails, blazed by none other than the mighty buffalo.

Wherever the animals ran in herds, their strong hooves and heavy bodies made way. Literally. So the pioneers followed in the wake of their stampedes. Flat, sturdy surfaces. Wide, dusty paths. The first roads in America were not built by humans. It was the animals paving the way.

Look down. If you didn’t make it, how is there still ground for you to stand on? Appreciate it. Be thankful. No matter how in charge we appear to ourselves, we still live in nature, not off it—and on many days, we’re being carried on the shoulders of both giants and shrimps.

You Can Come Back Any Time

Kris Gage hit Medium like a whirlwind in 2017. She shared no-BS, clear-cut takes on love and relationships straight from her brain through her keyboard, and resonate they did. Within a few months, she had 10,000 followers. Two years in, 80,000. Then, she suddenly disappeared.

For a good five years, no new posts. No chirp. Nothing. It happens. In fact, most of my favorite Medium writers have quietly vanished over the years. But Kris did something unusual: She came back. As if not a day had passed, there it was. A new piece. Boom! Did half a decade go by already? Really?

Later, Kris explained she felt overwhelmed by all the attention, particularly people asking her for writing advice. As someone who writes just to write—and there are fewer and fewer of us—Kris did not understand the question. Folks asking louder and louder didn’t help. So she quit. Until writing felt right again. Until she had more stuff she couldn’t not say.

I’m happy Kris is back, and I’m happy she didn’t announce her return. Just showed up again the same way she used to. Thank you, Kris, for reminding us: There are no rules. You can come back any time—and, most likely, you’ve still got it.

The Short Version

Catching my breath in the back of the cab, I looked around. As I regained hope to still make my train, I noticed a transparent sticker with text on the left rear window of the car. “Berlin Taxi Rates,” it read. “Short Version.” I almost laughed.

The sticker was maybe ten centimeters wide, and it reached across half the height of the window. I couldn’t snap a clear picture of it, but I later found the document online. It had four sections, nine different prices, and listed all the various surcharges, edge cases, and payment conditions. 250 words in total. Welcome to Germany.

If I asked you to design the shortest version of a taxi pricing scheme you can think of, what would you come up with? In my head, when I read “Short Version,” I thought of something like this: “Base fee 5 €, every additional kilometer 1 €.” Boom. Five words, two numbers. Done.

Now, if you can’t make the system itself simple for whatever reason, you can still simplify your explanation of how it functions. Keep the five words, and add another line. “Extra charges and conditions may apply.” Throw in “Ask your driver” if you’re feeling generous. In any case, you can now save lots of sticker material—and customer confusion. After all, the end price is what matters to most people. Not how much which kilometer costs and why.

Sometimes, we do a lazy job and pretend it’s the best one we can do. But is it really? Would you have arrived here if you had started from scratch? Or are you just looking to clock out early?

Weighing your words is always worth it. But perhaps we should put them on the scale a second time when someone asks us for “the short version.”

The Suck Is Why We’re Here

On a catchup call, I told my friend Nick Wignall how someone had trained an AI model to write blog posts in my style. It was a pure research exercise on their part. The idea was to train the tool on my past work, then give it the headlines and opening paragraphs of my 2025 posts. Could it generate the rest of each piece in a similar fashion?

I only compared a handful of posts from their AI versions to their originals, but I quickly concluded the writing suffered from the same uncanny valley effect as many AI-generated images: It all looks fine enough at first glance, but pay attention just a little longer, and something feels off. The AI would veer off in a different direction or end up making the opposite argument. It sounded confident where I would have been doubtful and vice versa. And so on.

The creator wanted to know if such a model—once it worked properly, of course—could be useful to me. I told him even if it worked perfectly it wouldn’t. Why? Because I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think. It’s a daily practice for my brain. A creative ritual to strengthen my writing muscles. And a commitment to my readers. A promise that I’ll show up for them once a day. AI can generate output, but it can’t give me any of these benefits. The output is secondary. If it happens to attract new readers, all the better. And if not? That’s fine too.

Nick said my story reminded him of an interview with writer and Vox-founder Ezra Klein. Klein explained that, so far, AI hasn’t been all that useful to him. He uses it for light research or to structure some data, but that’s about it. Why? Because the writer doing the research is what makes the writing unique.

When you’re using AI as a writer, you’re “outsourcing the part of the work [you] need to do the most,” Klein believes. “Having AI summarize a book or a paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made.” This is why reading actual books in full might now be more valuable than it ever has been: Only if you’ve seen every word will you discover insights and links an AI would never include in its average-driven summary.

Nick pointed out the same applies to a writer struggling when creating a piece. “When you’re stuck and sit there, thinking, trying to come up with what’s next, that’s the valuable part of writing. It’s tempting to use AI to remove that stuck-ness, but it’s basically cheating—and leads to a very different result.” AI is great at giving you a list of ideas. You’ll almost always find one you can plug in and keep writing. But is it the idea that needs to slot into this gap? Or just a bad piece of filler that’ll make for a fragile mental bridge most readers won’t dare to cross?

The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger.

Whenever technology makes it feel like you can avoid the suck, it’s most likely a mirage. The path behind easy only leads to the lowest common denominator. The real artists, fighters, makers—they stick with a truth as old as time itself: The suck is why we’re here, and only those who overcome it themselves will reap all the rewards of their hard labor.

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