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. 

Because in the end, everything is going to be just all fine.

I happen to be sitting on a flight from Frankfurt to London while writing this post. I just spent the past weekend in both Frankfurt and my former university town, Oestrich-Winkel, which had been the center of my life for 3 years. I came here to celebrate the wedding of two close friends who met during those 3 years. To sum it up: it was tremendously beautiful and also nostalgic at times. I met so many people whom I had not seen for almost 5 years, reconnected with dear friends, got to know many new faces – just the perfect wedding weekend with tons of sun, chatting, dancing and celebrating. At some point we had a break in the wedding agenda, so my friend and I took a cab and drove to our old campus to revisit it for the first time since our graduation in the summer of 2009. 

Similarly to how it occurs in movies, we were sitting on the stairs that led down to the campus and reflected over our pasts. I remember vividly what my life was like back then. I was so stressed out about so many things; insecure about myself and in a lot of doubt about my future. Upon graduation, my life progressed really fast: I got a job with Google and moved abroad. I immersed into a completely new world and was thrown into adult life (the post-college adult life this is). Sure, I didn’t leave behind all of my worries, but I certainly didn’t look back very often. So sitting there on campus allowed me to make an easy comparison between what things were like back then and today. 

Did all my worries disappear? No, they didn’t. Do I now worry about things that I couldn’t even think of back then? You bet I do. Still, looking back and comparing what my world and mindset were like 5 years ago with what they are now, made me realize one important thing. Namely that in the end, everything is going to just all fine. What sounds like solacing, is certainly more than just that. Most of the things I was worried about in life back then turned out to be all fine in the end. And even if those things didn’t work out, better things came out of them eventually. So I ask myself: If the things that were on my mind 5 years ago are not important anymore today, will the things from today be important then in 5 years? 

In the grand scheme of things, life evolves in a cyclic pattern. There are ups and downs just like any cyclical movement, but the overall direction points to the upper right corner. Every down-phase is followed by an up-phase. Yet over time, the down-phases help us build resistance so each following “down” will hit us less harshly. As humans, we tend to strengthen over time. We tend to see things easier and we learn to cope with the “downs” of our lives. Yes, they still hit us hard, but we learn to stand up faster after each time we have been knocked down on the ground. 

Coming back to my own comparison, I was easily reminded of the sentence that says: "Everything will be all right in the end If it's not all right then it s not the end”. Some people might look at it and say it’s a circular statement – with no beginning or end – that is hard to rationalize, but I’m a big believer of it (mostly because it turned out to be true so often in my life). The beauty of understanding the cyclical life pattern I mentioned before is that every time things are not going that well in life, you have to know and believe that better things will come; that there will be sunshine after the rain. As a dear friend of mine said to me the other day: “every time when things don’t go well for me, I get quite excited actually. I know it’s just another down-phase that will be followed by a great high. I know it’s just temporary and that chances are that things won’t get worse than that but that there are good things looming on the horizon”. 

Knowing this is one thing, believing it is a completely different thing. So while I’m sitting in the airplane looking outside the window, I reflect over all the things that are on my mind right now. I think of my emotional ordeals, of my personal disappointments and of my professional pressures. If I just looked at them as they are, I would be scared and intimidated by their sheer size and gravity. All I would want to do is to surrender to them. But that's now how life is supposed to work nor is the perspective that would allow me to go through life at ease. What I do instead is to take a step back. I detach myself from those fears and disappointments – I zoom out. And instead of just seeing a down-phase of my curve of life, I see that this is just a temporary state and that it will be followed by good times. I even zoom out more and see that there will be more down-phases along the way, but that they are all less grave than this. I put my current situation into context and I realize that what keeps me up at night tonight, will probably not even exist in my life anymore in 5 years. In the grand scheme of things, everything is going to be just all fine in the end. 

Actually, turns out that you *do* only live once...

I was in a furniture store in Hayes Valley this weekend and noticed how there was a "store in store" concept in the back of it. A woman named Joan was running that place and we started talking about her art work which was actually wordart. I noticed how some letters were arranged as the #yolo hashtag and I ended up explaining to her what a hashtag actually is (she was in her 50s). As I continued my stroll through Hayes Valles, I couldn't stop thinking about the hashtag and what it has come to mean over the past few years since it spread all over. 

The phrase #yolo has achieved high popularity in youth culture over the years. Urban Dictionary entries date back to 2004, but only in 2011 it was highly popularized through the Drake song "The Motto". However, according to Wikipedia, variations of the phrase have been in use for over 100 years, including as far back as (the German equivalent of) "one lives but once in the world" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1774. 

Nowadays it's mostly known as a popular Twitter hashtag, an acronym that is used on merchandise worn by teenagers and as the "newest acronym you'll love to hate" (Huffington Post). Too often you see young people behaving recklessly and justifying it with the phrase that "you only live once". However, as much as there is criticism around this acronym, I can't stop to find appreciation for it.

As a matter of fact, you do live only once and you really only have one single shot at this thing called life. I'm 27 years old now and I think back of how I started my work career in Dublin back when I was 22. I think of all the years in between, the 23, the 24, the 25 and 26 and I realize that all these years are gone. They are over. I will never be 22 again. Nor 25. And soon enough, my 27 will be over, too. I look back on all these years that passed and can't help myself but to understand that this thing called life is going by very fast. Too fast. Wasn't it just last week when I failed my driver's test? Wasn't it yesterday when I surprised my dad for his 70th birthday? 

Understanding that our beautiful lives have an expiration date is extremely important. It's important because it can be the biggest motivator in your life. Here at work we have an internal site that shows all the Googlers that left the company with interesting data on what teams they were on and after how long they were with the company. Sometimes a colleague or friend would go into the system and also attach that person's farewell email. Since that is not often the case, I always become curious to read the farewell notes to see what people do once they leave the company. I remember how I saw this guy who left Google after just a year and saw that there was a farewell note. As I was reading through it, I noticed that he didn't leave Google, but that he passed away unexpectedly. Upon further research, I saw that the guy was just 29 years old and that one month prior to his death he was diagnosed with blood cancer. I was speechless.

That was truly a moment that made me realize a lot of things. This guys was certainly all healthy and then – boom – out of nowhere had to deal with something like blood cancer at the age of 29. I couldn't help myself but to think that fate could happen to me as well. Look at all those people who develop cancer in their 40s, that die in a car accident at 50 or don't even get beyond their 60s. All these people were certainly living a carefree life just like myself until something completely unexpected happened to them. 

So on the one hand I look back on my life and realize how time is running out and then I look into the future and realize that there is absolutely no guarantee that I would make it to the 60-, 70- or 80-year mark. There is simply no guarantee. And while this is a very daunting realization, it is SUCH a motivator to really maximize your life. One of the common questions I ask myself is: "Omid, when was the last time you did something for the first time?". Whenever I feel I don't have a good answer to it, I feel motivated to go out and try new things. Similar story when I see myself contemplating things like "should I go to Coachella?" or "should I buy that furniture?". Yes, these are investments and I might run short of money on another front, but then I tell myself that "I only live once" and that the richer I design this year of my life, the happier I will be once I look back on it from the future. 

As humans, we tend to get stuck in the moments we are in and therefore often lose sight of the big picture. We are worried about the importance of the project we are working on this week, while we forget that our entire career will go for more than 40 years. That's ±2,000 times that project. The same applies to life. Sometimes we lose ourselves in small annoyances while we lose sight of the fact that if everything goes well, we will have somewhere around 80 years that you can design and shape. 80 amazing years that you can use to experience the world and to make it a better place. 

I don't support stupid behavior, but I do support looking at your life, telling yourself that #yolo, and to go out there and do something that is outside your comfort zone, something that excites you, something you have dreamed about, or simply something that you are afraid of. The experiences you gather are all things that no one can ever take away from you. In fact, you will be taking them with you into your grave (sounds harsh, but think about it). 

So yes, you only live once. And you owe it to yourself to really make it the best, most vibrant, most beautiful life you could possible create for yourself. 

Optimism as a Self-fulfilling Prophecy

Last week I was fortunate to participate in a class called "Optimism at Work" by Dr. Laura Delizonna, a professor at Stanford University and the founder of the Choosing Happiness project. I took plenty of notes but also did some further research for this post.

While there is certainly not a single definition of what optimism actually means, I feel there are many descriptions of what it means to be an optimist. An optimist is someone who generally has a positive outlook on life. He looks over the horizon and senses good things to come. When facing a challenge, the optimist would find the cracks in the wall of the impossible. An optimist has the ability to create a sense of control over the circumstances of the situations he is in. And even in the case of a setback, he would conclude that it's not the end of things. If something didn't go well on one day, he believes that things will be better the next day. To say it in one of my favorite quotes, the optimist believes that:  

Everything will be OK in the end, if it's not OK, it's not the end – Fernando Sabino

"But what about real challenges?" you might wonder... well, optimism is not naivety. Being optimist does not mean you can overlook limitations, but it means you are open to the possibilities and you have the determination to give your best, even if you fail. Something that Laura mentioned in that session was that optimists and pessimists are equally good at facing the problem, however, their response and approach to it differs. It’s the power of perspective. 

Laura started the session with a really nice quote from the movie Apollo 13 movie which was a good example of the power of perspective: 

Director: This could be the worst disaster NASA's ever faced.              
Gene: With all due respect, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.

And while I was learning more and more about optimism, I started to wonder if an optimistic attitude could really influence the outcome. So I dug deeper and came across a phenomenon that is called "the optimism bias", an overly optimistic assessment of our own personal future (there is a good TED talk on this by Tali Sharot, a cognitive neuroscientist). A simple example is that you are getting married and you know that ≈40% of marriages end up in divorce, that's 2 out of 5. But if someone asked you on the day of your wedding, you would estimate your own likelihood of divorce at 0%. Alternatively, if you ask a group of people to assess how interesting, honest or modest they are, almost all would rate themselves above the average ... something that is statistically impossible, because we can't all be better than everyone else. However, if we believe we are better than the person next to us, then this means that we are probably gonna end up putting in the extra effort that will make us more likely to get that promotion, remain married, etc.

To link it back, the optimist expects more good things to happen to him. All that anticipation influences his attitude towards the challenges he will come across and enhance his wellbeing. As a result, optimism changes subjective reality. The way we expect the world to be, changes the way we see it. It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end, optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success. 

Are You Going to be a Player or a Victim?

The other day my colleague and I were talking about a person in our company who we felt was receiving preferred treatment. While I agreed with the notion, it felt uncomfortable to talk about that person in such a way. Not only because that person is a friend of mine, but also because I didn't like the victim perspective we were assuming in that moment. So I asked my colleague: "Do we really want to be like those people who are frustrated and talk behind another person's back?". We both agreed that we didn't. 

It was a simple question, but it made me think. Most importantly though, it reminded me of a Leadership Training I went to in Sydney last year as part of which we learned about the "Player vs. Victim" dogma. In summary, the Player/Victim principle is about how you respond to the circumstances in your life. When running late to a meeting, most people know how to blame external factors ("my previous meeting went over" .... "I was stuck in traffic") as opposed to take responsibility for their actions ("my previous meeting went over and I decided to stay" ... "I underestimated the traffic but should have known better"). 

The concept here is fairly simple. As a player, you take responsibility for the situations you are in. As the word responsibility already indicates, you have "response ability". You pay attention to the factors that you can influence and you do your best to affect the results. In moments of failure, the Player perspective is the only one that will allow you to learn from your mistakes and to become better. Why? Because you take responsibility for the outcome and don't blame the circumstances of your life. It's a self-empowering perspective that can get you far – very far – in both work and life... especially in life.

The Victim might say that a situation is hopeless. The Player will look at it and say he hasn't found a solution yet. The Victim will think himself that someone should take the first step, the Player is determined to pioneer ahead. The Victim will complain that he doesn't have time for a certain thing. The Player will admit that he has different priorities. The Victim will say he has to leave. The Player makes clear he wants to leave.  

You will come across so many situations in your life when things will just not go according to plan... From the sales quota that you won't hit to your dream business school that will reject you. From the promotion that you won't get to the beautiful date that won't work out. All these things happen but it will be up to you to decide how you deal with them.

Do you want to be the person who turns sour and depressed? Do you want to be the person who will blame the situation and claim that life is so unfair? When people ask you how you are doing, will you say "I'm ok" and subtly want them to ask what's going on so they can pity you?

... OR do you want to be the person who comes out of the situation stronger and wiser? The person who will look back and say "it didn't work the way I wanted but that's ok because life has better things planned for me!". 

"Life never goes according to plan. That's okay, because often our plans are much smaller than life intends. Probably EASIER, but smaller" — Stacey T. Hunt

So the next time you lose a deal, will you blame the customer or will you look at your own behavior and see where and when you could have effected a different outcome? The next time you get rejected by someone or something, do you dwell in despair or do you decide to that this is the beginning of something much better to come? 

Be the Player. The decision is yours.