Retrospective of an Extraterrestrial

First things first, why would you read this? I don’t know either, but maybe you’re “special” (in a good way, this time) and you want to. And maybe I’m strange enough to write this article, despite the fact that I can’t tell you why you should read it. You might want to stop doing so. Now. No? Ok, your choice, you’ve been warned.

So let’s face it, I am strange enough. But is this article inspiring? Educational?

You decide. I can only tell you that it’s full of me. My thoughts, my learnings, my experiences over the course of the year 2019.

Wait, we have January already and you write one of these “New Year, New Me” articles?

First: No. New Year - Old Me.

Second: It’s the Chinese New Year today, so yes, I’m totally meeting the deadline!

(I wrote down three lines before today, so I was maybe procrastinating, but only a bit!)

Have you watched “Tim Urban’s “Inside the mind of a master procrastinator”? It’s my first, but chronologically one of the latter learnings:

WE ARE ALL PROCRASTINATORS. Sort of.

(We’re just procrastinating on different levels or things.)

If this doesn’t apply in any way to you, then congratulations. You made an achievement I haven’t made yet. I’m still procrastinating on many things. But more no longer on others.

The important learning here is that procrastinators are motivated eventually by what Tim calls the “Panic Monster”. It’s the deadline, the consequence which scares us into doing the work and finishing it at the very last possibility. And what impacted, probably even scared me is this simple question:

What if there is no deadline for it?

Oh and just saying, the talk is only 14 minutes long and has >25Mil. views. You decide if you want to give it a try.

So what was the biggest achievement of mine? What was it exactly I stopped procrastinating on? Well, it wasn’t even related to business at first glance. I simply stopped smoking. When I started I was barely 16 and smoked a pack of heavy tobacco hand-rolled without a filter per day. Because hey, it were the early 2000’s and smoking was so damn cool. Oh man, I cringe writing that, but that was exactly how it was for us, back then.

So what’s the relation to business on the second glance? I was running out of energy. I couldn’t even walk properly anymore after being a really heavy smoker for almost 15 years. For cardio reasons I walk as fast as I can, almost jogging, but suddenly I couldn’t do that anymore. My legs started to hurt so badly, I couldn’t even control them properly. I would have risked falling down to the ground if I kept the same speed. Which really scared me. Sure, I knew that I “had to stop smoking at some point” since I was 16. Since I started. Probably nobody starts smoking and thinks “Hey I’m making a career out of this!”. But it still took me almost 15 years to finally do it. Without any deadline. Booya!

What I achieved further was to “fix my teeth”. It is a really long story about how I’m not dumb like a broken rock and still let things evolve to such a bad state.

But long story short:

pauL haven’t been to a dentist for 16 years - teeth in bad state - pauL goes to dentist - dentist starts fixing it - one tooth becomes infected - pauL has such severe pain, he ends up in emergency surgery - infection gets cut open - one week later all four wisdom tooth get removed - a whole month later, including a lot of painkillers, pauL feels like a human again.

Oooof. I literally laid down for over a month, barely able to do anything besides the absolutely necessary. But, hey, whatever, annoying episode of my life over, topic closed.

The impact that these two events had on me is incredible. After I was finally able to eat, I suddenly ate a ton. Without exaggeration, I would eat 2,5 kilograms in one sitting for example. I got fatter. But I never had such an operation before, so I thought, “Hey, if I crave it that much, then my body maybe just needs it?” and I kept going for a while.

And oh my god, it tasted so good. For the very first time in my adult life, I started to fully taste! It was a whole new experience to eat for me. I mean you can taste as a smoker of course, but it’s all “damped”. Is that the right word? You’ll get what I mean.

Due to this effect, I rediscovered tea for myself. Another reason for that was that I stopped drinking anything else than water, coffee, tea, and juice. Nothing with added sugar anymore.

Suddenly I had the urge to renovate the whole kitchen. My living partner was not exactly convinced spending hundreds of dollars on a new espresso machine, kitchen equipment, teapots, and mugs, but the polemic that I am, I managed to make her agree anyway (dare you to tell her that I said that!).

By now I drink tea pretty much daily and I’m fully trained in “How to make an official espresso by the standard of the INEI (Istituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano)”. I’m not producing any kind of “Latte Art” so far, but my Latte’s where savored with great joy, still, as well as my espresso’s. Oh, and I just want to add, if you never tried “Guayusa” you might want to give it a try. It’s a traditional tea from Equador with an energizing effect. I absolutely love to mix it with a bit of mango tea as an alternative to coffee or espresso. I have given out free samples to friends and family visiting me, so far everyone was amazed by its effect. But again, I’m not trying to push you into anything, it’s really up to you.

To keep things going and mention another learning I made, I’ll tell you why I learned so much about espresso-making instead of “just using/buying a fully automatic machine". By now, I can tell you the differences between a variety of coffee-based drinks, I know about coffee grinders, different products of the industry and gimmicks to it, the German “Coffee-Community”, coffee plants, roasting, and whatnot. In other words a ton of knowledge. And rather important to me, its applied knowledge, too.

So the reason is that I wondered, how much time does it take, on average, to learn a new skill. You know they say, you need 10 000 hours to learn skill XY. I didn’t want to believe that. It sounded so overexaggerated. A little bit of research later, it turns out it is. 

There is a beautiful TEDTalk by Josh Kaufman, called “The first 20 hours - how to learn anything”. The title gives away how much time you actually need, but Josh also tells why that is as well under which specific circumstances. As a synopsis:

Identify what you need to learn exactly, the core steps and then learn that, stop wasting time on anything else. If you do so, you would need roughly 20 hours to learn a new skill. So I put 20 hours on the topic of learning everything about espresso.

And no, you will not become a master in Kung Fu within 20 hours, but you could learn the basic stances of Qigong and start training! Which could be the base to become a master one day, who knows?! 

And that’s another thing I did. Learning Qigong. A practice carried through generations of Shaolin monks for a variety of reasons. Almost ten years ago, I was the last time “trained out”. I weighed 128 kg, with a relatively low body fat percentage and practiced a lot, including martial arts. Over the years I trained, but it was barely doing 20 push-ups to remain in a state where you could move, rather than being really fit and energized.

Seems my plans work out if I do. My energy levels are increasing. I get more stuff done and I’m overall happier than I have been for a long time. You know this relief when you get something off your back you carried around for a while? Even worse for years or decades? That’s just so lovely. And I really, wholeheartedly appreciate it.

Most of the time. More precisely around 80% of the time. Why not all the time you might ask. Pretty simple reason:

There is no light without shadows.

If I don’t feel miserable about anything anymore, no matter how hard I try, you’ll find me maybe sitting next to the Dalai Lama meditating and all the issues our world faced are resolved. So far, that’s not the case. But, dissatisfaction is a great motivator to change things and it is great to keep appreciating what actually satisfies you. Live outside the comfort zone, hooray! Recently I learned that psychology suggests that if you think of an event that happened more than 18 months ago and you still have an emotional reaction, that event probably yields an unresolved issue for you. Sounds reasonable to me. Sidenote: I believe that this suggests negative emotions because If I think in 18 months about the fact that I quit smoking, I’ll be freaking happy and that’s no unresolved issue for sure!

And this is just one thing among hundreds. I consumed so much knowledge over the last months, it's incredible. Not only reading books but I also spend almost any day on Youtube, listening to great minds. You hear people like Gary Vaynerchuck, Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan talk all the time. Yet if you'd ask them they tell you that they're listening more then they talk actually.

Oh and just saying, are you aware that Joe Rogan is kind of a thought-leader, too by now? Do you wonder why I would think that? Well, let me ask you, how many people do you think are listening to him? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? By the second quarter of 2019, he had on average more than 300 million downloads of his podcast per month! Try to imagine for a moment you're speaking on a stage and there are more than 300 million people listening....that's just crazy!

So to come back to the topic of 2019 being over….Yeah, I feel great about it. Got a lot of stuff done. Transforming my business as well, as I'm about to start a new collaboration. But that’s a story for another article. For now, I just want to say how grateful I am. And thankful for all the amazing people who were following along or were so kind as to let me follow their journey….

...yes I’m talking about YOU!

Thank YOU for being here. 

Thank You for letting me be a part of your journey or being a part of mine.

...and I really hope you will stick around. Onward to 2020, my friend!

With the warmest regards out of the cold space,

your Alien,

pauL