The Friendly Anarchist

Kind Beyond Rules

Here’s the Beyond Rules approach to life: You can do whatever you want, as long as it makes someone else’s life a little better. Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “There’s only one rule I know of: goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

One simple fact: The world is what we make it.
One simple choice: Why trade in arms – when there is chocolate?
One simple rule: Be kind. (Goddamn it!)
One simple plan: Today, a little better than yesterday.

Read the complete How-to for making this plan real over at Amanda’s wonderful Kind Over Matter blog, where I was happy to publish this guest post! (Thanks for having me, Amanda!)

In other news, the 2011 Europe trip is coming along nicely and totally tempo giusto. After a couple of weeks near Hamburg, I will now continue to the Baltic Sea and visit Lübeck, before heading to Berlin to stay there during June. Let me know if you are around and would like to meet up!

Reason Why Productivity: A Simple Guide to Getting Things Done, Lasting Happiness and Saving the World

The bad news first: Of course we don’t save the world when all we do is filing boring papers, sitting in senseless meetings, and doing the busywork other people throw at us. Of course we aren’t all too happy doing that neither. As for productivity – let’s not even talk about it! In the end, what’s productive about killing time doing things that don’t really matter?

The short and sweet diagnosis of what’s wrong with our working world: Senseless busywork done without any good reason. And if we take a serious look at the typical tasks of today’s average office employee, there are more good reasons to procrastinate than to actually get anything done.

I believe this has to change.

And this is where the good news jump onto the stage, laughing, joking, confetti-throwing and all: I am convinced that this is totally possible, and it is possible here and now!

Yes, we can work less and still be way more productive than before. By doing so, we will be happier than ever. And at the same time, we can make this world a little bit better each day instead of a great deal worse – by making other people happy as well!

This is no hippie dream. It’s what I call a win-win-win situation. Or maybe, inspired by Leo Babauta, Win to Done. Or simply: Reason-Why productivity.

Reason-Why Productivity: The Happiness Approach to Getting Things Done

There are two big secrets to lasting happiness, and they are both tightly related to the way we work and to our approach to productivity:

To be happy, we have to do things.
To be happy, we have to help others.

Doing things makes people happy. Beware of blindfolded productivity evangelists, though: Doing anything just to keep us occupied will do more damage than good. Acting blindly on unimportant or even damaging tasks leads to burnout, warfare and discontent. The real solution lies in Reason-Why productivity.

No more eerie meetings. No more water-cooler talk with people you despise. No more zombie apocalypse in your office building. Reason-Why productivity is the easy ((…and probably the only!)) way to actually get things done and become a happy person on the way.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of “reasons why:” Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivation refers to motivation that comes from outside us, i.e. things like money, fame, etc. It’s basically working for rewards, and extrinsic motivation of different kinds is what keeps us in our boring jobs.

As so often, the old Greeks already knew that these motivations weren’t enough! As early as 330 BC, Aristotle noticed that whenever we pursued an external good, we did so with the desire to achieve something else. What could it be, that ultimate goal, that “highest good” that the philosopher describes in the Nichomachean Ethics? Enter Aristotle:

Now such a thing happiness (eudaimonia), above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for self and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.

Ultimately, we do things to be happy, to flourish as a human being. If we are happy doing whatever it is that we are doing, it allows us to really burn during our work, to do it effortlessly and with a big fat smile on our face. ((Just as I am writing this post.)) We will be better when doing it, and we will get results way easier than before.

There are different forms or expressions this can take in practice – curiosity, autonomy, play, flow – but in the end, it’s always about happiness. This is what we want to pursue: Tasks that fulfill us as we do them, not just when we receive a paycheck!

The Strange Case for Egoistic Altruism

We have seen that pursuing happiness can take many forms. One particularly beautiful approach is doing good things to other people. Interestingly, there’s both an egoistic and an altruistic component to it, so this is really a no-brainer, no matter how self-obsessed or how philanthropic we are. The latter component is self-explaining: If we do good things to others, they will feel better than before. Happiness will spread among the planet, and this is pretty amazing on its own.

The egoistic component, in contrast, is counterintuitive: It is based on the simple matter of fact that serving others will make us happy. Doing something good to another person triggers the same response in the reward centre of our brain as does eating chocolate! ((And it doesn’t make you fat!)) In England, Richard Layard launched a huge movement a couple of weeks ago based on this fact, and it has been proven again and again in scientific studies and philosophical inquiries on the topic: Do good things to others and you will be happy. ((For example, check this study on giving money to others opposed to spending it alone or The How of Happiness by research psychologist and University of California professor of psychology Sonja Lyubomirsky.))

This is Reason-Why productivity: Do something because it matters, do something because it makes you happy, and do something in order to make others happy as well. Simple. If, in contrast, you don’t have any good reason for whatever you are doing, you better change your job as soon as you can. Seriously. ((Even if it sounds hard.))

Burn Your To Do List!

The single most useless, dangerous and soul-destroying item for any creative person is a daily planner. Honestly, there are few things that have hindered us so much from getting our creative work done in a happy manner as these annoying bastards. ((Oh yes, I am totally polarizing here for your entertainment purposes. Why do you ask?))

Just look at any typical daily planner like the ones popular in many offices: We are provided with plenty of white space to fill the hours between 7 in the morning and 10 at night, and in consequence we tend to think that during these 15 hours it should be possible to change the world.

We get excited as we plan our day – but at night, when we lay down to sleep, nothing has worked out as foreseen: The novel wasn’t advanced (7-9am), the email inbox isn’t down to zero (9-10am), we didn’t go with the kids to the park (4-6pm) or with our buddies to have a few drinks (8-10pm), nor did we cook our own dinner (6-8pm) or found the time to read Proust (10pm+). The only thing we managed to do was getting to the office, but even there our work was mediocre at best. 15 hours slipped, and we don’t know what happened.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution for these problems: Burn your planners! Trash your to-do lists! Bury your productivity anxieties! And instead, become your own energy manager! As you do this, you allow yourself to go with the flow and stay happy with whatever task it is you are currently working on.

Energy Management 101

Time management simply doesn’t work for most of us. As it turns out, creative persons are thriving on a maker’s schedule rather than a manager’s schedule: The manager is used to working in clearly allotted time-slots – the maker isn’t. Now, the creative can ignore this fact, because managers are the cool shit and all, and force herself into adapting to the manager’s schedule. The end result, though, will most likely be tears and anger and no important work done whatsoever.

Alternatively, she could start to manage her energy rather than her time! Fortunately, managing our energy is simple and especially useful and enjoyable for creative workers. Here’s a quick how-to:

1. Identify how your energy flows during the day.
Are you a lark or a night owl? What food gives you energy, what food makes you feel tired? How about exercise, movement, fresh air? Also, consider your environment: Do you prefer heat or coolness, being alone or with people, silence or music or street noise, and do some of these work better for some tasks than others?

2. Experiment with sleep cycles.
Are six hours really enough for you? Try sleeping seven, eight, nine hours. Or, if you already sleep a lot, try reducing it a bit. Sometimes, oversleeping might suck your energies. During the day, then, take that nap. I am currently experimenting with biphasic sleep, i.e. sleeping one or two hours in the afternoon and only six hours at night. It feels wonderful so far, more on that soon on TFA!

3. Organize your tasks according to their energy requirements instead of simply filling a daily planner based on unrealistic fantasies of super-productivity.
Some categories you might want to consider:

Thinking and intellectual tasks
Creative and manual tasks
Household chores
Errands
Emotional tasks (Discussions, etc.)
Active leisure (Take a walk, cook with friends, sports, etc.)
Passive leisure (Watch a movie, sit in a café, etc.)
Sleep

4. Pause and switch between tasks regularly.
One common mistake is to reserve our high-energy hours for exclusively one single task that we deem to be important. While this is a nice idea that can work at times, our body often will not be able to pull through with it – even during the four hours reserved for writing that novel, even during the six hours reserved for coding that web site.

Consequently, be sustainably creative, as my online friend Michael Nobbs recommends! Plan to rest from time to time, and also switch from intellectual to physical to creative tasks in order to keep the momentum going without getting drained of all your energies.

5. Don’t freak out!
Plan your day according to these categories, but don’t freak out about building a perfectly synchronized list. Just go with the schedule. Find out what works for you, follow that grand scheme, but be ready and willing to adapt as you go through your day!

Save the World by Working Less

I already hear you protesting: “WTF, at first you advise me to do things in order to be happy – and now you’re pretty much saying the opposite?” Yeah, but not quite: The thing is, you shouldn’t entirely focus on your serious work! If you do that, you’ll probably find that it makes you neither happy nor productive – no matter how intelligently you handle your energy flows.

As I have written before, creative work is more about consistently staying on track than about drudging away 12 or 14 hours a day. Throughout history, many great writers and artists were actually “working” a mere three or four hours a day, and this seems to be a natural period of working time for many creative souls.

Consequently, work less – but do more! Here’s how:

1. Take advantage of Parkinson’s Law.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Try to reduce the amount of time you have for any thing you are working on. You will finish faster than ever! ((It sounds weird, I know! But it really works – just give it a try!))

2. Overcome your perfectionism!
Accept that when it’s done, it’s done – even if it isn’t perfect. Just take the time to compare a Big Mac with an ad for a Big Mac. Do you notice something? Okay, don’t lower the quality of your output as much as Mc Donald’s does, but accept that your creative “Big Mac” will look different in reality than in your perfectionist dreams. Yes, that’s fucking hard to accept if you’re a perfectionist! I know it from personal experience. The trick is this: You don’t have to overcome your perfectionism in a perfect way! ((It’s totally okay to be imperfectly imperfect!)) Just start by being a little less perfectionistic, and then continually improve!

“Okay, so the work is reduced – and now what? I’m seeing myself again sitting bored in front of my TV or reading every of the 2.000 new tweets that were posted since an hour ago!” This is where my last point enters:

3. Do more, not less – but have your reason why!
The trick to staying happy is to still do things – but not necessarily work-related stuff!

It is here where you can save the world: Become a volunteer at an organization in your neighborhood. Teach young people some of the things you know and care about, or learn from the elderly and at the same time entertain them a little with your presence. Clean a park. Plant some trees, or plant some food. Give a concert at your favorite pub, even if there’s just the barkeeper listening. If we want local culture, the best thing is to create it on our own! Walk with flowers, give free hugs, organize a techno/country/metal party under a bridge. Assume the task of inventing a delicious veggie barbecue and invite 10 of your best friends and 10 total strangers from the street to take part in it.

Do you notice something? This is not about work. It’s not about busy-ness. It’s about doing things that are fun and fulfilling – and about doing good things to others. It’s doing things that are intrinsically fulfilling, both in your work and in your free time. It’s a simple guide to productivity, lasting happiness and, ultimately, saving the world. Go try it!

If you liked this post and want to help me out a little, please retweet it or share it with a friend! I’d appreciate it! :)

Surprisingly Friendly

The surefire way to get frisked by distrustful Colombian cops is to walk on the streets of Cartagena with a bunch of longhaired metal fans dressed in black.

If you’re lucky, the first patrol might pass on because of more important matters on their to do list – but at the latest the second one will strike for sure. And there are many police patrols in a tourist stronghold like Cartagena. ((My personal record was getting searched three times within a couple of hours. Fun times.))

Now, if you get searched and harassed simply because of prejudice against Slayer t-shirts and bad hairdos, you basically have three options: You can either react neutrally and collaboratively, angrily and reluctantly, or exceptionally friendly and courteously. ((You can also resist and fight the power back, but then you will end up in an ugly prison cell for the night. If you don’t catch a bullet, that is.))

All three reactions are understandable, but here’s my take on it: Colombian cops are always poorly paid, often overworked, and sometimes not all that well-trained. Reacting neutrally is like showing them that they are doing the right thing. Reacting angrily when getting searched for the third time in a row is only human, yet ultimately reinforcing their unfounded distrust.

As I learned with my metal friends, reacting friendly and openly to their request is probably the best thing you can do: Show the cops that you respect their work, ((…or, at least, that your respect them as the human beings that they are!)) but that there isn’t any need to freak out just because of some metalhead walking down the street. In the end, it makes everybody’s day easier and chances are that a future encounter will proceed even smoother.

The underlying thought: If we want a kinder world, a world with less prejudice and hate, less awkwardness and discomfort, why not start where we are right now?

Surprising people with kindness when it’s least expected isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s breaking through the code of “dog eats dog,” and when it comes to changing perceptions, it’s one hell of a powerful tool to direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path towards a kinder planet.

The ‘Fuck It’ Moment

Fuck it. Let’s go to court. —Jeffrey Wigand

I never left a source hang out to dry, ever! Abandoned! Not ’till right fucking now. When I came on this job I came with my word intact. I’m gonna leave with my word intact. Fuck the rules of the game! —Lowell Bergman

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the movie or followed the case ‘The Insider’ narrates, this post is one huuuge spoiler. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the film will still be incredibly thrilling. Anyway, go watch it soon if you haven’t!

Michael Mann’s The Insider is one hell of a movie. Awesome in so many ways. And I mean the old, pre-marketing-sense-of-the-word “awesome.” It’s not just very good, it’s not just well made, it’s not just thought provoking. Mind you, it’s all that. But it’s more. It’s awesome.

Simply taking a look at the stills would suffice. Mann certainly has a passion for light. If you look at his imagery, it seems as if color film was invented specifically for him and his cinematographer, Dante Spinotti.

Then, there’s the music. The composition. The cutting. The editing. Everything fits right in. Not to mention the actors. Al Pacino as 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman is a perfect choice. And you almost wouldn’t believe that the second leading character, the fragile, distraught, white-haired chemist Jeffrey Wigand was performed by Russell Crowe – the same actor who would embody the beefy and fearless Gladiator in the homonymous blockbuster just a year later.

The technical mastery and the starring in conjunction with the setting create a stunning atmosphere. The movie takes place in the mid-Nineties and provides an intriguing glance into the heydays of old media and investigative journalism.

Mann celebrates every single moment of it: There are media people gathering for coffee in newsrooms, reporters fighting against their corporate bosses, unofficial meetings with colleagues in bars and with informants in back-alleys. ((Of course, this is not necessarily ‘better’ than today’s journalism. But it certainly creates some nostalgia: Deadlines are postponed in order to investigate issues thoroughly – not by an hour, but by an entire week. Unthinkable nowadays.

What’s more, everybody in the movie is wearing trench coats, so that the pre-Wikileaks back-alley meetings to exchange photocopies of insider information become even more atmospheric. No email, no Twitter, no text messages. It’s a time where communication is still dominated by fax and phone booths. Sure, there are some huge ass cell phones carried around, but that only serves to notice the difference.

Good stuff, really!))

The night scene where an issue of the New York Times is dispatched in the city is so haunting it’s hard to believe the movie was already shot in 1999. Sure, newspaper circulation was down by that time already, but the current crisis was still far away. Mann either sensed already what was going to happen to traditional media, or he unconsciously produced a beautiful swan song of investigative journalism as we knew it.

The Hero That Wasn’t One

The most important thing of all, though, is how it all fits in with the plot. “Logically, Michael Mann’s The Insider shouldn’t be the edge-of-your-seat, gut-churning thriller that it is,” Newsweek writes. They are right: Despite a complicated and even dry topic, the film captures the viewer from the first moment.

The Insider narrates the story of Jeffrey Wigand, who worked as a chemist in R&D for tobacco company Brown & Williamson and wants to reveal the dirty tricks big tobacco is using to conceal their knowledge of the addictive potential of nicotine. He gets in touch with Lowell Bergman who wants to feature his story.

Unsurprisingly, big tobacco isn’t precisely thrilled about that and tries everything to prevent Wigand from talking. And big tobacco isn’t playing nice: The chemist receives death threats. He becomes the victim of a smear campaign. He is being followed by strangers. Gag orders are issued, and every imaginable judicial trick is used in an attempt to silence him.

Even though Bergman does everything in his power to broadcast his story, the corporate bosses at CBS get cold feet. They want to cancel the feature, and this is where Wigand becomes really, really frightened. Not just a little worried, to be clear. Not just anxious. Not just afraid. After all the psychological and legal threats, Wigand is scared shitless!

What’s more, he isn’t any kind of natural born hero. He’s scared and he knows it. He’s scared and he shows it! He’s certainly not perfect, certainly not a shining example of the exemplary citizen: Wigand drinks, Wigand is a little choleric, and Wigand sometimes obviously doesn’t know quite well what he is doing when he loses his nerve.

But here’s the clou: Despite all that, Wigand does the right thing. He does the right thing even though all odds are against him: He loses his job. He loses his health benefits. He loses his wife. He loses his reputation. He even runs danger to lose his freedom and get sent to prison.

And still, he decides not to back down any longer.

Thanks to the support he receives from Bergman, Wigand decides not to accept all that legal crap without fighting back. He decides not to take the easy way out. He decides to pull through.

In the very moment when everybody else would just cry and run away and hide under a pile of pillows, Wigand is fed up. He has reached what I would like to call his ‘Fuck It’ Moment. And he goes all in.

Here’s how it works:

The result?

The secrets from the tobacco labs disclosed by Wigand lead to lawsuits in all 50 US states. Eventually, a $246 billion settlement is made by the companies with Mississippi and other States. Despite it all, whistleblower Wigand prevails and gets his life back. Real story. ((More or less, at least.))

Fuck It and Do the Right Thing

How could I miss to look at the nice lesson behind it all? Just think about it for a moment:

One guy deciding to do the right thing. ((And, of course, one reporter protecting his source, standing by his word.))
A $246 billion settlement and the reality behind the tobacco business – at least partially – revealed.
And probably thousands and thousands of lives saved in the aftermath.

No matter how scared you are: Once the stakes are high enough, you can pull it through. Once you reach your ‘Fuck It’ Moment, you are free to do the right thing.

The ‘Fuck It’ Moment leads to overcoming Resistance.
The ‘Fuck It’ Moment leads to taking a leap of faith.
The ‘Fuck It’ Moment leads to posting that blog post.
The ‘Fuck It’ Moment leads to leaving that job.
The ‘Fuck It’ Moment leads to burning that bridge.

If an imperfect, frightened, nervous man like Wigand can do it, why shouldn’t you? If he has the guts to take on the power of a multibillion-dollar industry, why shouldn’t you have the guts to have that serious conversation with your boss, your secret love, your publisher?

As far as I can tell, consciously looking for your personal ‘Fuck It’ Moment before it’s too late is always time well spent. And you’ll get bonus points if you save the world along the way.

Good Reads, Spring Abundance Edition

One of the most wonderful things in Germany around this time of the year is the beginning of spring season. Since a couple of weeks, everything is blooming, blossoming and flourishing and we are having some wonderfully sunny days.

One of the better things about living a couple of weeks of coldness and greyness during winter, in contrast, is being able to experience how even the worst things won’t last forever. ((Ski enthusiasts will disagree. As far as I am concerned, ice shall serve the penguins, the ice bears, and a bit of it will mix well with my rum, but that’s about it, thank you!)) (And how they can still teach us stuff! As the controversial Chögyam Trungpa puts it in his wonderful Shambhala teachings, ((Amazon affiliate link)) it’s important to look back into darkness in order to appreciate the light and get clarity about where we are coming from and where we are going to.)

This post includes links to some of the great things I read online during the last couple of weeks and a couple of photographs from nature near my house and from a wonderful walk we took in Belgium a couple of days ago.

It’s a visual meditation of the abundance of spring – I hope you’ll enjoy it! ((There’s even a life lesson hidden in one of the mouse-over texts of the images. These flowers are killers, I tell you!))

One of the problems I’ve faced throughout life is that I’m kind of lazy, or maybe I lack will power or discipline or something. Either way, it’s very difficult for me to do anything that I don’t feel like doing. If I try to force it, my energy disappears, and I hate life. Furthermore, not only were my parents not Chinese, but they had five kids, so there wasn’t time for Amy Chua’s style of parenting. I kind of had to figure it out on my own.

My strategy can be reduced to two rules:
1) Find a way to make it fun and
2) If that fails, find a way to do something else. […]

The approach I stumbled into is based on intrinsic motivation. To the greatest extent possible, do whatever is most fun, interesting, and personally rewarding (and not evil). External constraints, such as the need to go to school or make money are simply obstacles to be hacked. Be skeptical of external authorities, as they are often manipulating you for their own benefit, or for the benefit of the institutions they represent (often unknowingly, as they were already captured by the same systems which are attempted to ensnare you). Your identity comes from within — external recognition such as degrees and awards are only of tactical importance — don’t allow them to define who you are.

Must-read: Paul Buchheit (inventor of Gmail) on the two paths to success.

5. Experience now, share later.
It’s common to snap a picture with your phone and upload it to Facebook or email it to a friend. This overlaps the experience of being in a moment and sharing it. It also minimizes intimacy, since your entire audience joins your date or gathering in real time. Just as we aim to reduce our internal monologues to be present, we can do the same with our digital narration.

I pretty much agree with these: Ten Mindful Ways to Use Social Media

I recently got an email from Lucas Jatoba who told me about a wonderful idea he had. After living for three years in Barcelona he had to move to Sydney, but didn’t want to leave the city without a trace: As a small thank you for his great time there, he let 250 balloons fly, each of them including a free theater ticket for the finder!

Walk with flowers, balloons with tickets, this is definitely a great realization of kindess towards strangers! Thanks for sharing, Lucas!

My mom used to say to me, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
It used to drive me nuts. But now I know what she means.
Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.

Austin K. Leon on how to steal like an artist.

Made me realize how reading lots and lots of stuff isn’t really a waste of time, no matter how obscure the topics might be: All this stuff is my drive, my constant inspiration and it certainly leaves lots of positive traces in the texts and art I create. Yay for that!

This 15 minute documentary tells the story of Denis Smith. Two years ago he was in a high pressure sales job suffering with depression, debt and alcohol problems. Then he discovered light painting, and his life changed forever…

In all likelihood, we have never slept so soundly. Yes, the length of a single night’s sleep has decreased over the years (upward of 30 percent of adults average six or fewer hours), but the quality of our sleep has improved significantly. And quality, not quantity, sleep researchers tell us, is more important to feeling well rested.

Interesting op-ed from the New York Times on how humans were used to sleep in two cycles, getting up for an hour or so in the middle of the night to pray, make love, have a smoke or even talk to their neighbors.

If I think about how I sometimes fall asleep again an hour or two after getting up in the morning, I cannot agree enough…

Presented with a rose, we can observe and study it, or we can merely look and admire its beauty. For the intellecutual worker, only the former is really legitimate. Wonder is “a waste of time.” It produces nothing, nor does it further understanding. In this context, it is worth noting that Descartes hoped to explain extravagant natural phenomena such as meteors and lightning in such a way that “one will no longer have occasion to admire anything about what is seen.” Far from being a prelude to insight, wonder for Descartes was an impediment to the technology of knowledge.

Of course, we should not wish to do without the extraordinary benisons of that technology. We live in a world deeply shaped by the Cartesian imperative, and the first response of any sane person must be “Thank God for that.” But our first response needn’t be our only response. […]

The simplex intuitus, the “simple looking” (in-tueri: to look upon) that leisure provides, alerts us not to our power over reality but to our ultimate dependence on initiatives beyond our control. Thus it is that leisure is both an openness to reality and an affirmation of mystery, of “not being able to grasp” that which one beholds.

Interesting piece on leisure and Josef Pieper, whom I have been reading a bit again lately, not just for my post on the Indian birthday party!

There are a lot of people (people in public relations, or something) who claim that maybe their job is awesome. Or maybe guys that make a lot of money and think that they can be in on this love-fest too.

Wrong.

Doing something prestigious does not equal being awesome. In other words, awesome does not look the same close-up as it does from far away.

Once again, true words by Julien. This is part of the ‘delusion of awesomeness’ I mention in Beyond Rules: Awesome is what’s awesome to us, not to some imaginary Committee of Awesomeness Standardization.