What activities give me energy? – The weekly zoom with my ITU group, which tends to be “the highlight of my week”, giving me positive energy that tends to carry me for days;
– Writing, working on my book, but only when I’m ‘in the zone’, in a flow state. The challenge is to get there. I know for a fact that I can easily get there when I work consistently, every day, in the mornings, for several hours (ideally 3 or 4, sometimes more). I get my best ideas, my writing is better, I make faster progress per unit of time expended, sometimes writing upwards of ten thousand words per session. Afterwards I feel exhausted (a lot of energy has run through me), but in a good way. But these hours in the morning, when our son is in Kindergarten, I now need to work for money, so I can be at least somewhat present in the afternoon, when he’s home. Even if I get the occasional block of time I could use for the book, I am so far out of it, for lack of consistency, that I don’t even get started. It feels like having to pack all your skiing gear, shlepping it up the mountain, forcing yourself into the boots, gearing up, putting on the skis – only to ski for no more than ten meters, then peel out of it and shlepp everything back home again. It doesn’t make sense…

What Contributions can I make to society that I would be most proud of?
I often think that if seven billion people spit out a wad of chewing gum, that’s one big pile of chewing gum. The idea being: it’s very hard to make a real difference as an individual, when “everybody else” do their darnedest to wreck our planet and damage society. You might help one person, which might mean the world to them, but it could all be invalidated by something “people” do. We’re not living in small, basically independent villages anymore. Everything is more and more connected, and our problems spread to the farthest reaches of the world very quickly. I would be most proud to have a positive impact that really mattered, that made a difference, that helped to create a new society, based on responsibility for the planet and compassion towards each other and all creatures great and small. What humanity is lacking is a positive (shared) vision for the future, in particular one that includes everybody, and isn’t just a ruse to bring more power to one group at the detriment of (all) others. If fifty years from now we could say “for a while there it was touch and go, but we’ve pulled through, and are entering a golden age now”, and I knew that I had contributed in a significant way, I’d be very proud of that. And I believe that contributing to that needs to take place at scale, reaching not just a few people, but millions, and billions. And the only vehicle that can deliver the messages we need to shared with each other is basically the story. I agree with Tom on that. Delivering empowering messages and information, at scale, through the power of storytelling. It’s for that reason, in particular, that Tom is one of the three successful people I admire, because I aspire to a similar vision. The difference being that his track record in building billion-dollar-companies is better than mine (him: 1; I: 0), which, I suppose, makes for better starting conditions…
I also admire Jordan Peterson and Russel Brand, both for similar reasons. They both are fearless about what people might think or say about them. They both are very clear thinkers, who inspire me to think clearer myself, and to think for myself in the first place. They both “spread the word”, inspiring millions (while getting a lot of flak from others), believing that humans need to strive for betterment.
All three are internet personalities now, which is something I absolutely do not want to be. But I admire them for their courage and dedication, to go out there and express their convictions and thoughts, for all of us to benefit from, keeping up their faith that improvement and a better world is possible, but that it’s something we need to strive for, giving our best efforts, because it’s a hard challenge to tackle.

What makes me feel good? Reading, getting lost in a story that works for me. I love reading fantasy stories, if they are well done (which not nearly all fantasy is) and work for me, which most fantasy, unfortunately, doesn’t. I’d rather read a well-done thriller than ‘bad’ fantasy, even if good fantasy (measured by my own taste) is my favorite thing to read. That’s one of the reasons why I want to write fantasy myself, because I want to tell the kind of story that I love reading. As mentioned above, writing not only gives me energy, but also makes me feel good, but only when I manage to get into the ‘zone’, which is possible, provided I have enough blocked time, on a foundation of having worked enough on the story, consistently, every day, to be deeply ‘in it’. The more time and energy I can pour into my writing, consistently, every day, first thing in the morning, the better I feel doing it, up to a point of writing three, four, sometimes five hours every day, sometimes producing upwards of ten thousand words a day. That would be my ideal band of productivity, as my brain would allocate so many resources to it that I would come up with really exciting ideas and new directions. I know this for a fact, because I have been there, for a period of a few months, before our first child was born. Now he’s almost five, our second child is due to be born in January, we have built a house, but aren’t nearly finished (while living in it), and bills need to be paid, so currently I am not working in the zone, and not knowing how to make getting there possible again makes me sad.

What I can imagine is a different life, where I have the freedom to write my most productive amount of hours (four or five) every day, with no need to ever work on anything else, ever again, because I am earning enough from my book. Imagining that is easy enough. What I find basically impossible to imagine is how I get there from where I am now. I lack a plan, I lack an approach how to pull it off, I lack the belief that I can really “do it” (as I don’t even know what to do).

• This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by  Florian Huber.