Design is too often only an afterthought.

I’m not referring to overpriced furniture, but to the architecture of our days and the makeup of our surroundings. They quietly shape how we feel, think, and act. They determine the quality of our decisions and the outcomes we’re able to achieve.

There’s a reason why more creative ideas are sparked at the cozy street-corner café than in a fluorescent-lit meeting room. Why insights come more often on walks in nature than while staring at a screen. Why conversations feel deeper when there are no phones on the table.

Design is where it all starts.

And design is a choice. One that if not made consciously is quickly made for you.

Those designs optimize for short-term gratification at the expense of long-term wellbeing — treat over treadmill, scrolling over socializing. Persuasive by design.

Some come disguised as virtues and are socially rewarded — the business of back-to-back Zoom days, the illusionary productivity of multitasking. They leave us unfocused, perpetually distracted. Never genuinely present, never really here. Out of fear of missing something somewhere else.

Poor design choices have unfortunately become the norm, fragmenting our attention and eroding our presence. And they are costly. Not just for everyone personally. They are costly for an organization and most importantly they are costly for society at large.

The complex, social and systemic challenges we face require sustained, nuanced attention — which is exactly what we’re increasingly lacking. So how can we reclaim our attention and presence? How can we opt into better designs?

This Practical shares a framework for creating presence where and when it matters most: from the immediately accessible moment, the architecture of your day, to consciously choosing the container. Each level more challenging to change and more impactful once ingrained.

An honest inventory

So where exactly am I then, you might be wondering. Whether you think you’re already quite aware or blissfully unconscious of exactly how much your mind is distracted — an honest stocktake of your level of presence (or lack thereof) is where change begins.

Here are a few questions for you to go through at your own pace — all at once, or over the course of this week:

1. Where’s your phone right now? Was it within sight during your last video call, conversation, coffee break?

2. Think about yesterday: when did you make the most important decisions of the day? When did you get to tackle that one thing that mattered to you most on that day?

3. Have a look at your schedule for next week: how many blocks of 60 minutes or more are in there dedicated to one activity (a task or project, a conversation or book, a walk or workout)? How many of those do you think will actually consist of one activity? No task-switching, no multi-focus, no podcasts or music on the side.

4. How much unscheduled time — actual white space — is on your calendar for next week?

Chances are, if you’re plugged into modern society, the default design is distraction.

And the switching costs of these distractions are real. Not only in productivity terms. Every interruption we experience causes a spike in cortisol levels — that’s the stress hormone you’ve been designed to emit when you heard the saber-toothed tiger in the bush.

While on a rational level you know that rather than a saber-toothed tiger, the pling you just heard simply announces the arrival of a new text message, your physical response remains the same.

Change the design

A lack of attention and presence is not testament to a lack of willpower, discipline, or to an inherent inability to give your undivided focus to a single task (or human being across from you). It’s the result of the design of your schedule and environment. That design exploits something real: sitting with a genuinely hard problem is uncomfortable, and we’ve made the escape effortless.

When discipline fights design, the latter wins.

So just as you wouldn’t hire even the most well-intentioned fox to guard the henhouse, you shouldn’t be surprised to find your attention fragmented and the quality of the outcomes you produce deteriorate if you allow for multiple screens, frequent beeps, and a too tightly packed schedule to continuously fight over it.

What if instead of your discipline fighting design, they could work together to produce the attention and presence you desire? You can’t out-willpower an environment optimized against you. Better to change the architecture. Starting with the moment.

1— Redesign your moment

Instead of leaping straight into heroic efforts to create zen-like presence in every moment, try to experiment with one micro change at a time:

1. Presence in interactions:

   Phones off the table. Whether it’s in your next virtual meeting or in-person conversation: get phones out of sight. Not just your own, but any phone, if possible. You’ll be surprised how much that little act can change the depth of the interaction for everyone involved.

   Hide your self view. A feature that I believe is utterly underused: minimize that little box in the bottom right corner of your next video call that shows your own camera view. What feels strange at first, can be a real game-changer. Less distracted by your own image, you can be more present with the people you’re here to interact with.

2. Presence in transitions:

   Empty your working memory. Despite your best design efforts, rapid context-switching is sometimes inevitable. To prevent attentional residue — your mind still rotating around the meeting you just got out of while heading into the next — dump all of those thoughts into a note: where did you leave things off, what loops are still open, what decision needs to be made? Personally, I find a voice memo particularly useful for this, but you choose your preferred tool. Just make sure you get those thoughts out of your head and file them away so you give the next thing your full attention.

   One breath, one question. Sometimes even a five-minute brain dump can feel like too much of a lift. In such situations, just give yourself one moment in-between: Become aware of where you are — the space you’re in, any physical sensations you feel — and what you are about to start. Take one deep breath and ask yourself: what question, if answered, would make this next thing worthwhile? You’re not drafting an agenda for the meeting. You’re simply getting clear on one thing you want to get out of it. Now you are present and ready to transition to the next activity with purpose.

2— Redesign your schedule

Once you’ve experimented with the moment, let’s move to your day. This is where the deeper design work begins.

1. The one thing:
   At the end of each day, jot down one thing you want to get done tomorrow. Not what you wish might happen or what you think will take up most of your time. Pick one thing, within your control, that if you did it tomorrow would make that day a success. It takes a bit of practice to choose that one thing, but I’ve found this beautifully focuses the day. Schedule it like you would any business meeting and treat it like the most important one of that day.

2. Protect your peak:
   Most people do their deepest thinking, their highest-quality decisions in the first hours of their day. Those also tend to be those hours that get booked up with meetings first. Unless one of those meetings — or rather a decision or outcome from it — is your one thing for the day, don’t let that happen. Relegating your most important work to the last hours of the day is setting yourself up for failure as those are too often taken up by emergencies and urgent chores. So whether it’s a morning focus block or a sacred lunch break for you — find out when you’re at your peak and use that momentum for your most important work. I’d suggest blocking out at least 60 minutes at a time, ideally 90. If you can get just one of these each day, you’ll be surprised by what you will achieve within a week.

3. White space:
   If you’re not back-to-back or double-booked, you must be slacking. That’s the unfortunate but prevalent ethos of many professional environments. One that’s costly not only to organizational productivity and quality of outcomes, but also to your own mental health. So I can only encourage you to opt out of it. Intentionally schedule white space, maybe even a little boredom. You probably want to choose another title for that calendar blocker, but that’s in essence the idea: Unstructured time. Whether that’s for a walk in the park, for a lunch without devices, or just a micro moment of boredom while waiting in line without pulling out your phone. Intentionally create a little space during your day. That mind-wandering state restores attention. And it’s where subconscious processing and creative connection happen. Boredom is a design choice, not an accident to avoid. And it might turn out to be one of the most productive times of your day.

3— Redesign your container

Changing the architecture of the moment and your schedule offer practical, readily accessible opportunities for you to design more presence into your days.

For some of the genuinely knotty problems you encounter, those might not be enough though. For these, you will need tools that operate at a higher level. One that is harder to access, but also more impactful and durable once you did: your container.

This container has three dimensions: The physical space around you, the mental frame inside you, and the people alongside you. All three together form your Symbiotic Container — the single most important variable you can redesign to be more present and improve the quality of the outcomes you generate.

Changing your container is the shift from perpetual distraction to deliberate presence — from reacting to what’s loudest to focusing on what matters most.

Here are three ways in which you can consciously change your container so that it’s in service of the results you seek:

1. Change the room:
   When you’re stuck, move. This one sits at the most accessible level of redesigning your container: When you’re stuck at a problem, task, or in some non-constructive mood, change your immediate surroundings. Leave your desk, the room you are in. Step outside for a moment — whether that’s actually outdoors or just the hallway. A change of light, smells, noises around you. These can already lead to subtle but important shifts in perspective, bringing you back to this very moment, so that when you re-enter the room you can show up differently.
   A slight reframe of change the room is to put physical distance between you and any notification hub — phones, screens, or people who might frequently interrupt you. These container changes remove barriers to presence without relying on your willpower.

2. Break the pattern:
   When you’re genuinely stuck, unable to focus or make progress on a question, problem, or specific situation, it’s often wise to follow the same steps you would with a malfunctioning wifi router: unplug, then restart.
   Deliberate pattern interruption can work wonders. You can’t think new thoughts in the same thinking container. Your nervous system needs genuine restoration, not just time off your calendar. Practical versions could look like:

   1. Boundary walk: A deliberate 45-minute walk with nothing else — no podcast, no phone, no destination beyond the walk itself. The constraint is part of the design.

   2. Reset Saturday: For one day, go analog, device-free, offline, or whatever version works best for you. Make it half a day if a full one feels too scary at first. The key here is to practice presence by slowing things deliberately down, minimizing all (digital) input, and engaging in activities in real life.

   3. Thinking day: The office version of the reset Saturday. Schedule one work day per quarter (or month) blocked with no meetings, no Slack, no email. Structured around one hard problem or strategic question. Not a vacation — a working container redesign. And it doesn’t have to happen at the office of course.

3. Design the conditions:
   Moving when you’re stuck is a start. A couple of hours that break familiar patterns is a meaningful intervention. But there’s one more level you can access on which all three elements of your Symbiotic Container are deliberately redesigned for specific kinds of thinking and being: a designed retreat.
   To regain genuine presence, to think through knotty problems, to shift perspective — these things need dedicated time and space. Some breakthroughs happen on walks or a day offline, but they often require stepping out of the system entirely, for an extended period of time. A designed retreat creates conditions where the thinking that shapes everything else can finally happen.

   1. Collective presence: A space designed to achieve individual breakthroughs in collective experience. You’re not thinking alone. You’re in a room with a handful of peers doing the same work. This is not networking, it’s genuine intellectual and existential companionship. Your thinking becomes sharper because you’re thinking together.

   2. Structural simplicity: Retreats offer you a break from daily logistics, no decisions about what to cook or what chores to run. The design allows for all cognitive load to go to deep conversations, presence, and the actual work.

   3. Time at depth: The real thinking, the honest conversations, the deep insights — those barely happen within a day. A retreat gives you the time for genuine liminal work.

   4. Space as permission: Back-to-backs masquerade as productivity. A retreat gives you permission to sit with a problem for six hours and produce nothing but clarified thinking. That’s not wasted time — that’s the work.

Presence first, tools second

Deliberately choosing designs that foster genuine presence is a practice. A challenging one. It means opting out of those persuasive, attention-grabbing designs we started to see as the norm. Without these our lives seem barely imaginable anymore. So while they are to blame for our perpetual distraction, our tech and digital tools do have their place. A crucial one actually. But only if and when we use them with intention. To choose the right tool, at the right moment, with the right intent.

The tools are only as good as the thinking you bring to them. The complexity arriving over the next decade will require your best thinking. Your full presence.

Books to go deeper

The frameworks in this article draw on a wide range of research and practice. Here are a few I can particularly recommend:

• Chris Hayes — The Sirens’ Call (2025)

• Oliver Burkeman — Four Thousand Weeks (2021)

• Nir Eyal — Indistractable (2019)

• Ryan Holiday — Stillness is the Key (2019)

• Michael Easter — The Comfort Crisis (2021)

• Brad Stulberg — The Practice of Groundedness (2021)

How can we make this more Practical?

I want to hear from you: what would make these more useful? What kind of Practical are you looking for and don’t find good guidance on while navigating your own wellbeing, that of your organization, or striving to align both with the wider planet? (And, hopefully, all three eventually.)

Use the comments section below or reach out directly.

If you want to go deeper on the why behind these frameworks, see

Deep dives

Beliefs create emotions. Emotions create actions. Choose a belief for the action it creates.

— “Useful Not True” by Derek Sivers

We have reached the end of “I don’t know how”.

What has never been a very glamorous excuse to begin with is simply not true anymore. We now have access to personal assistants who will happily, and patiently, go down the deepest rabbit holes to answer any how-to question with a carefully curated, tailored step-by-step guide.

For all the exciting new possibilities that this opens up, what AI won’t optimize for is the quality of your questions, the quality of your thoughts — the things that you decide to pay attention to.

This Practical offers three frameworks to improve the quality of your thinking: By making your limiting beliefs visible, widening what you think is possible, and getting you moving before you feel ready.

One: Beliefs are tools not facts

The quality of your thinking starts with the beliefs running underneath it, most of which you’ve never chosen to examine.

The title of Derek Sivers’ book Useful Not True summarizes this framework well: beliefs are best understood as useful concepts, not unchangeable truths. This is so easily missed, especially with our most dearly held beliefs. And that’s exactly why it’s essential to keep questioning them.

First though comes awareness. Limiting beliefs are, well, limiting. Nobody would consciously choose a limiting belief — unless it served some purpose. Strange as this might sound, we often take on limiting beliefs because they offer some kind of reassurance, a feeling of certainty and safety.

“I am not the kind of person who…” keeps you safe within the confines of your comfort zone. A reason to never stretch yourself beyond, never to risk failing in public (or even in private). What sounds like self-knowledge is often rather a self-imposed ceiling on potential.

“Now is not the right time” is a particularly tricky one since it’s always defendable on some level. And the delay offers safety. This belief doesn’t protect you from commitment though — it becomes the commitment. To staying exactly where you are.

“That’s just how the system works, who am I to question it?” Right, and if nobody ever questions the system, we’ll forever be caught in our collective prisoner’s dilemmas. The fatalism of this belief offers relief from responsibility and quietly hopes for someone else to show the courage (by those protecting the status quo labeled arrogance) to step forward and question it.

Luckily, these beliefs are learned, not fixed — and open for revision anytime. Just as your first thought is often an obstacle rather than a conclusion, the beliefs you hold are not facts. Once recognized, pause and ask: is this belief leading me toward the change I want to see — or away from it?

Two: From certainty to possibility

In her book, The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef distinguishes between the soldier and the scout mindset. In soldier-mode, we’re defending what we already believe. As a scout, we genuinely try to find what else might be out there.

When we focus on building arguments rather than updating our models, we’re in soldier mode. Again, this offers safety, whereas looking for reasons to actually change one’s mind threatens one’s identity.

But once you start recognizing limiting beliefs for what they are, the self-imposed ceiling behind the soldier mindset becomes visible. And you can choose a thought, belief, and mindset that serve you better.

The key is to recognize that possibility is always there. It might just not be in your current frame. Once you widen that frame though, i.e., dare to think and act differently, possibility suddenly comes into view.

A useful practice: consciously generate different framings of the situation in front of you. These might feel forced initially. Try anyway. Instead of “I am not the kind of person who…”, think “What would someone who does these kinds of things do in my situation?” Instead of “This is not the right time”, think “If I were to treat this as an experiment instead of an irrevocable decision, how would I go about it differently?”

Three: Act as if

When you start to move in tiny experiments, obstacles turn into possibilities. All that’s left now is to act.

You can think and reframe all day long. If you don’t start to take decisive action, you won’t get different outcomes. You’ve got to act in accordance with the belief you want to nurture, the person you want to become.

Action precedes conviction, not the other way around.

There’s one critical trap people, especially those in leadership positions, often fall into: I’ve always done it this way, that’s what got me here, so I’ll continue to do things this way.

Ironically, the things that have made you successful in the past are most likely to be the very patterns that prevent further growth.

Moving past limiting beliefs evokes Resistance. It always does. That’s how you know you’re near something important. While the thought of possibility feels good, courageously stepping into it will still feel scary.

But that’s exactly what is needed: courage. Taking the first step. As a tiny experiment. You won’t feel ready. Readiness follows the first step, not the other way around. The doing produces the evidence.

Small as those first actions appear, they compound. That’s how tiny experiments become giant leaps.

Liminal spaces: Disrupt on purpose

Beliefs defend themselves most in familiar environments. To break with your most ingrained beliefs, breaking out of your daily space is often the best way to start. Purposefully disrupting your known patterns of daily commutes, corporate offices, and even the people you interact with creates the conditions for your mind to rewire.

What’s unfortunately often belittled as “taking a break” in our hustle culture might just be the most important work you do. Breakthroughs in thinking barely happen at the desk. That’s just where you return to act on the new insights gained. But it’s the liminal spaces that create the conditions for the change you seek to make.

The people who will successfully navigate what’s coming are those who invest in how they think. Who learn to think in possibilities, not limitations. While there’s a place for the how-to assistant in the process, models trained on past behavior are poor sparring partners for better thinking.

Most of us hold our beliefs like we hold our breath — unconsciously, and for far too long. Disrupting on purpose is the exhale. And in the space that follows, between the old belief and the new one, is where the most important thinking happens.

Tools to experiment with, references to dive deeper

Here are some further tools and references I’d encourage you to explore.

1 — Exercise: Belief audit

For the next week, notice every “I can’t”, “I’m not the kind of person who”, and similar limiting beliefs that cross your mind — and write them down.

On a calm Sunday morning at the end of that week, take 30 minutes and for each one, ask a single question: is this a fact, or a conclusion I’ve been carrying?

Notice which ones suddenly feel less solid than they did when you first had them.

2 — Experiment: Belief challenge

Pick one of the beliefs from the exercise above that you want to test. Define the smallest possible action that would challenge it, something you could do this week, not someday. Commit to seven days — short enough for you to stick with it, long enough to see what changes if that belief were not true.

Each day that you’ve successfully taken action against that belief, counts as one of the seven. Continue until you’ve reached a full week streak.

That’s a tiny experiment. Run enough of them and the cumulative shift will surprise you.

3 — Books to go deeper

The frameworks in this article draw primarily on:

• Nir Eyal — Beyond Belief (2026)

• Derek Sivers — Useful Not True (2024)

• Dave Gray — Liminal Thinking (2016)

• Julia Galef — The Scout Mindset (2021)

• Anne-Laure Le Cunff — Tiny Experiments (2025)

If you want to go even deeper, I can also highly recommend:

• Steven Pressfield — The War of Art (2002)

• Adam Grant — Think Again (2021)

• Ryan Holiday — Courage is Calling (2021)

• Rosamund & Benjamin Zander — The Art of Possibility (2000)

• Brad Stulberg — The Practice of Groundedness (2021) / Master of Change (2024)

How can we make this more Practical?

I want to hear from you: what would make these more useful? What kind of Practical are you looking for and don’t find good guidance on while navigating your own wellbeing, that of your organization, or striving to align both with the wider planet? (And, hopefully, all three eventually.)

Use the comments section below or reach out directly.

If you want to go deeper on the why behind these frameworks, see

Deep dives

From the mundane of what’s for dinner to the profound, big choices in life around health, love, and professional endeavors. The choices we make, big and small, determine the trajectory of our lives.

This fact is easily forgotten though, as the world becomes increasingly noisy and our days increasingly busy. Choices made unconsciously fall victim to short-term incentives and mistake the loudest voice for the strongest signal.

This Practical offers an alternative. A framework for more conscious decision-making — and a more conscious life.

Part one: Signal first

Before any decision comes information. Often an overwhelming amount. So the first step to making conscious choices is to identify the truly relevant information — the signal.

1 — Pause and process

This is likely the most important step — and the one most people skip. Your ability to create a gap between stimulus (incoming information) and response (your action) can make the difference between an impulsive purchase and a smart investment.

2 — Shift your reference point

The bargain of today might undermine your ambitions of tomorrow. Become aware of your current reference point, biases, and desires — and consciously shift these. You can assess the information presented much more holistically when stepping outside of your current circumstances for a moment. Two key shifts to try:

• Change your time horizon: Give the situation you’re in right now the context of your long-term goals and values. How does this change what appears relevant?

• Change your perspective: Your view is always shaped (and biased) by your circumstances and past experiences. How would another person look at the situation? If someone else is already involved, what are their motivation and needs? This is where individual decision-making can become leadership.

3 — Determine the signal

Having created space and situational awareness, you can now more easily see the noise — impulsive triggers and narrowly focused perspectives — and choose to give your attention to the signal — the truly relevant information for your decision.

You’ll find how noise often shows up in the form of scarcity thinking, plays on your fear of missing out, and on emotions such as outrage and sensationalism.

Signal, on the contrary, stands the test of time and perspective change. Often, this is information backed by knowledgeable experts of a given field, picked up by and evolved over various cycles of long-form writing and thinking. Does it mean signal always travels slowly? Not necessarily, but the underlying concepts usually do. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.

Part two: Decision-making

A clear-eyed view on the signal helps. But you still have to make the choice. Here are four dimensions of decision-making for you to act on the signal.

A — Reversible vs irreversible decisions

How consequential is the decision at hand? If it is easily reversible with reasonable effort (time, money, etc.) and the signal you’ve got feels strong enough, don’t overcomplicate it — try out that new restaurant or coffee shop, run the A/B test for your new campaign, and give the smaller supplier a chance.

If the decision is not easily reversible and/or the signal feels weak, consult more people and spend some more time on second-order thinking — You don’t want to remodel your home or undergo a major medical intervention without sufficient expert consultation any more than you want to make a rushed hiring decision or a significant pivot in your business model.

What counts as reversible will differ a lot from person to person and based on the circumstances. For some, moving cities feels like a low-risk, easy-to-reverse decision while for others that’d be a major life commitment. Calibrate the difference based on where you’re at in life right now.

B — Second-order thinking

Just because you’ve cut through the noise it does not mean that the signal you’ve got is all there is. Second-order thinking is the process of asking: And then what? And then what? And then… what?

This might sound a bit ridiculous, but try it. You’ll be surprised about what you find after the third “and then…”.

C — Prioritization

With 100s of decisions to be made every day, it’s important to identify the ones to prioritize and spend more time on. Let’s say you have identified some knotty, not-easily-reversible decisions to be made (step A) and thought through their consequences (and the consequences of the consequences, step B). Which are now the one or two decisions to prioritize?

Two questions help me to determine how much of my time and attention a decision should receive on any given day:

1. If I do not do this today, will it give me anxiety?
   In contrast to the data-driven, analytical parts above, this is about how you feel about a decision or problem you face. The anxiety signal is most useful after you’ve done the analytical work — it tells you which of your well-considered options carries the most weight. Tackle those that produce spikes of anxiety first.

2. If I do not do this today, will it block someone else?
   You’ve already gone through the perspective shifting exercise above to view your situation and information in a different light and you have the second-order consequences mapped out. Now use what you’ve learned: Can you make other parts of the system (team, family, community) work better by taking action now?

D — Take decisive action

To prevent the preceding script from leading to analysis paralysis, the last and most important concept is this: Make a decision.

Certainty will always evade you, don’t chase it, or wait for it to find you, you will never catch it and it will never come. What you ultimately need is the courage to act based on the signal you’ve got. Not impulsively or unconsciously — which is what the preceding parts mean to prevent — but deliberately and decisively.

Sometimes, the most important decision is to make a decision.

Tools to experiment with, references to dive deeper

Here are some further tools and references I’d encourage you to explore (in no particular order).

1 — Postmortem: Decision journal

I’ve just revisited mine from five years ago and must say I’ve (re-)discovered some gems of hard-earned wisdom.

The journal is just five columns to fill in as you go through your day, week, and months:

1. Date

2. The situation and information at the time

3. The rationale behind the decision

4. Expected outcome at the time of the decision

5. Retrospective

The last column is the most interesting one: Revisit the decision after some time and write down how it actually turned out and whether your expectations were met or not. The timing of the retro depends on the particular decision — anything from the next day to the next year is possible. It’s worth keeping those journals for some time and going over past decisions maybe once a month, quarter, or year.

2 — The one decision that removes a thousand

This concept just keeps paying off for me. I love to find one decision that removes many other decisions down the road. A few examples:

• I don’t do dessert — is easier than deciding every time if today is that special occasion to treat yourself or not.

• I don’t make [professional / donation /…] commitments over the phone — this not only removes the choice but also does not risk offending the other party since it’s simply your rule and nothing personal. They can follow up in writing.

• I am working out every day — even if it’s just some stretches. It removes what is for many a daily struggle and sets you up for success in your fitness goals.

• I always wear [chinos + white shirt /…] to the office – removes the daily struggle of deciding what to wear today.

• I don’t commit to travel engagements more than a month out — sure, that trip to Warsaw six months from now sounds fun, but your future self might have very different priorities for that week in September than you can imagine now.

This, by the way, not only works with personal rules but also beautifully for organizational principles.

3 — Books and websites

Here are some further readings on decision-making and clear thinking:

• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown

• Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

• Farnam Street / The Knowledge Project (they also publish a short weekly newsletter, quoted above)

• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – Adam Grant

• Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman

• How to Live – Derek Sivers

• The Art of Living – Thich Nhat Hanh

• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger – Peter Bevelin

• Mastery – Robert Greene

How can we make this more Practical?

As I’m ramping up these Practical posts, I want to hear from you: What feels most helpful? What kind of Practical are you looking for and don’t find good guidance on while navigating your own wellbeing, that of your organization, or striving to align both with the wider planet? (And, hopefully, all three eventually.)

Use the comments section below or reach out directly.

If you want to go deeper on the why behind these frameworks, see

Deep dives

How do an ancient Zen proverb, tracking lions, and Adlerian psychology fit together? Well, if you ask me, they provide an oddly beautiful foundation for how to approach life. As they also happen to be the topics of three of my favorite books, let’s get practical and look at some key lessons I have drawn from these.

Chop Wood, Carry Water - Joshua Medcalf

Medcalf’s book offers a very accessible exploration of the Zen proverb “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water”. Here are some practical takeaways I gleaned from this short story about Samurai and mastering the art of archery.

1 - You are always building your own house

This is a reminder that with every action, with every decision you are, metaphorically, building your own house. At every moment adding another brick to it. Whether it’s in your relationships, at your workplace, or just the mundane daily habits such as what you eat and what you buy. You are constantly shaping your own life, your own destiny.

What is desirable then is a dedication to the process, a willingness to master your craft, and a relentless devotion to keep learning.

2 - Faithful in the small things

What does greatness look like? Contrary to what most think, greatness is not about lofty achievements or overnight success. No, Medcalf reminds us that greatness is most of the time far from being sexy. “It is dirty, hard work, usually required to be done in the dark, when no one is watching, while your dreams are so far off they feel like fairy tales”, writes the author. His advice?

• Dream big.

• Start small.

• Be ridiculously faithful.

• Focus on what you can control.

3 - Uncomfortable isn't a choice

I love this next lesson. Life will always be difficult somewhere. I think we’ve all witnessed or experienced this. No matter where you are in life, there will always be problems and challenges to overcome. So while hard isn't a choice, where you experience it is. We can choose to experience difficulty now, or push it off until later. Often, most of us choose the latter and with this fall short of their full potential. With comfort zones narrowing, life increasingly becomes a struggle and small obstacles feel overwhelming. So dare more now. And if you choose to do what others won't, eventually you will get to do what others can't.

4 - Principles instead of feelings

Since I discovered John Barlow’s 25 principles of adult behavior, I became a huge fan of living by principles. In Chop Wood, Carry Water, Medcalf expresses how living by our feelings is like riding an emotional rollercoaster. And while happiness may come from a life lived in endless pursuit of feelings, fulfillment comes from a life lived in faithful commitment to principles. When you make the choice to live by a certain set of principles, it will not only protect you from being at the whim of your feelings, it will allow you to step into your greatest potential.

5 - Climb mountains, chase lions

The last lesson I took away from the book is one heard and read many times before. Yet at least I need to be constantly reminded of it. We only get one lifetime. The pain of regret lasts much longer than the pain of temporary failure or setbacks. Mountains were meant to be climbed. In the words of Medcalf: “When given the option to stay comfortable where you are, or risk the cold, injury, and more, most people choose comfortable. But I hope that instead, you choose to do what others won't, and eventually you will be able to do what others can't”.

Choose to climb the mountains and chase the lions in your life.

A Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life - Boyd Varty

Speaking of chasing lions! This beautiful little book — and its author who narrates the audio version and happens to be a brilliant storyteller — accompanied me on many long walks and hikes. It’s short, and I can only encourage everyone to commit a few hours of their lives to this adventure through Africa’s wilderness. Here are a few takeaways that I’ve found extremely helpful in my own life.

1 - The art of living is not about following a straight path.

While I’ve heard variations of this lesson before, Varty’s story delivers the message so well. In the past, I often felt the strong impulse to pursue some kind of straight trajectory. Whether in my professional life or in (romantic) relationships. There was always the assumption that there’s a path I’m supposed to be on, as it’s lived by most people around me. Deviating from it always left me feeling off track and I found myself asking what just went wrong and how to get back on that straight line again. Varty’s book offers a different perspective. Embracing life as an exercise in tracking, where one takes on an observer’s perspective, looking for cues that inform your next step, instead of following a predefined sequence of moves (the next promotion, the salary raise, buying a house, settling and starting a family). This way of living feels so much more aligned with my true nature, and I can imagine it might on some level resonate with you, too.

2 - It’s okay to lose the track

So if you’re with me on the first takeaway, this next one follows almost inevitably. Losing the track of your life from time to time is an integral part of approaching life as a tracker. It is okay not to know where exactly you are going. In fact this is what makes life so rich. Not to know where this path will lead you to. And embarking on it nevertheless in excitement for what you might discover while you are on it. Yes, too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.

3 - Get more out there

Do I need to say more? Get more out in nature, into real, wild nature. Observe, listen, track. No headphones, no distractions other than the next thing you notice, the next bird you hear, or the next animal (lion?) track you see on the ground.

The Courage to be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

Drawn in by its title, this book was my introduction to Adlerian psychology. Now hold on a second before you assume this is not for you. It’s not at all technical but conveys the key concepts of Adler in the form of a dialogue between student and teacher. Here’s something practical I took away from it:

1 - You can change any time, you just choose not to.

This is probably a tough one to accept. According to Adler, we are often unable to change because we (consciously or unconsciously) make the decision not to. We all have dreams but most choose not to fulfill them. We don’t commit to anything because we want to leave the possibility open of "I could do it if I tried".

This realization, uncomfortable as it might feel at first, can actually feel very empowering — assuming one finds the courage to choose. Accept yourself now, and regardless of the outcome, have the courage to step forward.

2 - Deny the desire for recognition.

This lesson is closely related to the title of the book. Wishing so hard to be recognized by others will lead to a life of following expectations held by other people who want you to be “this kind of person”. This leads you to forget who you really are and live other people’s lives. You are playing by the rules of other people’s games, and mostly are unaware of doing so in the first place.

Denying one’s desire for recognition might sound a little extreme. Personally, I do not think that denying one’s desire is a sustainable solution in the long run. Rather, whenever I feel the desire for recognition showing up in my own life, I remind myself that I am not living to satisfy other people’s expectations. Just as other people aren’t living to satisfy my expectations. Truly embracing this approach naturally decreased my desire for recognition.

This naturally leads to another insight I took from this book: The cost of freedom in relationships is that one can be disliked by other people. Sadly, the fear of being disliked keeps many people in unhealthy relationships or jobs. But unless you are truly unconcerned by other people’s judgments and have no fear of being disliked by other people, and pay the cost that you might never be recognized, you will never follow through in your own way of living. You won’t ever be free.

3 - Live life as if you are dancing.

Many people treat their existence as a straight line. Everything is, or has to be, tied together, following from one another, and needs to make sense in succession. Instead, Adlerian psychology encourages us to think of life as a series of dots. A series of moments called “now”.

When you are dancing, you don’t really have a goal in mind, do you? You are not actually trying to get anywhere. The goal is not to move from point A to point B. Instead, dancing itself is the goal. You are not concerned with arriving somewhere by doing it.

I think this is a beautiful metaphor to close this Practical with. And, I just realized, it also appears to be the common thread throughout all three of the books above. The goal of climbing a mountain is the climbing itself, not getting to the top. Life is a journey, an adventure, where one does not know where one is going but faithfully finds and follows one’s own, unique track. According to one’s own principles, one’s own rules.