The 46 Greatest Ideas of 2019
Sometimes an idea just clicks. It changes your understanding of the world or of yourself. Here are 46 of exactly these kinds of ideas.
Sometimes an idea just clicks. You hear it or read it somewhere or develop it in your own mind, and then — boom — your understanding of yourself, of the world, or of yourself in this world has changed.
I write these ideas down in an Evernote file. All the time. I’ve been doing this for years now. And it has profoundly changed how I engage with the things I encounter.
Now, I want to share with you the 46 most powerful of these ideas that I wrote down in 2019.
Enjoy 🖤
1
Goals are not always destinations. Sometimes they are just directions.
A goal is meaningful not when we reach it. It is meaningful when it inspires behaviors and actions — a process — that makes our lives better in some shape or form. Goals ought to put us on a path, they ought to give us direction. And along the way we might even change the destination we’re aiming at.
“We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefit of walking it.”
— Sam Harris
2
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we all choose what’s important to us; we choose what we value.
If I put my lazy ass in front of the PlayStation 4 to play some FIFA instead of writing this article, that’s simply because I value quick entertainment and comfort in this moment more than putting in the effort needed to create something of value — even if I don’t like to hear it. We vote with our actions.
3
What you allow in your presence is your standard.
Powerful.
4
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
— Edith Wharton
I don’t have to re-invent the wheel. I don’t even have to be original in my thought. Creating value with ideas is a matter of the ideas themselves and how they are being received by people. Amplifying the signal of good ideas and meaningful thoughts is just as important as coming up with them in the first place.
5
The questions you ask yourself define how you look at the world.
They determine both what you selectively perceive and how you interpret what you observe. If you want to see bad, you’ll find it. If you want to see good, you’ll find it.
6
Whatever lessons the past offers, it will never be enough to be certain about the future.
There’s just too much that can happen.
7
“The most satisfying form of freedom is not a life without responsibilities, but a life where you are free to choose your responsibilities.”
— James Clear
This is taken form one of my top book recommendations: Atomic Habits
Inspired by one of Mark Manson’s articles:
If we don’t commit to anything, our freedom doesn’t mean anything. If we have no freedom, our commitments don’t mean anything.
We ought to commit to things that help us grow and thus increase our freedom of living a good life (exercise, education, social relationships etc.).
8
We are the universe observing itself.
We came form the universe and we are observing it. We are the consciousness that observes that which created the consciousness.
9
“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.”
— Zhuangzi
Happiness is not a goal in itself you can reach. It’s the byproduct of living your life in the right way.
10
An overemphasis on the Positive will make the Negative harder to take.
If you feed off of positive feedback and this is what keeps you going, you will become extremely vulnerable to a lack of this positive reinforcement, or, even worse, negative feedback.
The best path might be somewhere in the middle: You take note of the positive feedback and try to use it to improve, but you don’t bathe in it. This will make it much easier to do exactly the same with negative feedback (which is inevitable whenever you try to create something of value).
Inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk.
11
“Love is not just admiration for strength it is also tolerance for weakness.”
— Melanie Klein
12
If you let go of something, you’re only scared because your mind can only measure what you will lose, but it can’t clearly see yet what it will gain.
If we leave our home, a job or a relationship, we have an understanding of what it is we will lose. We have experience with it. Memories. But we can’t conceptualize any of the things that we don’t know anything about yet — by definition. But the pool of possibility we jump into when letting go of something is almost infinite. And within this infinity lies tremendous potential for improvement, growth and happiness.
Also, most people think that the things that are temporary are the permanent things (e.g.: when you are going through a breakup, you don’t understand that in x months from now, you will be fine).
Often when you feel lost, you’re just addicted to the old story.
Inspired by: Kyle Cease who got interviewed on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu.
13
No one really breaks your heart — they break your expectations.
Powerful. Also Kyle Cease.
14
“Seeking the positive is in itself a negative experience. Bearing the negative is in itself a positive experience.”
— Alan Watts
15
Something you do every day is a significant percentage of your life. Even if it’s just 10 min per day.
So make sure that you make the things you do every day are really really good. For example, coming home and getting hugged by your kids or giving your spouse a kiss. Or how you are eating dinner at home. These things repeatedly influence your life every single day.
16
“You should be afraid to take risks and pursue what is meaningful. But you should be even more afraid to stay where you are if it makes you miserable.”
— Dr. Jordan Peterson
Don’t choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
17
We misinterpret our own emotions.
Emotions originate as physical arousal designed to capture our attention. They begin as chemical reactions and sensations we must then translate into words. But because they are processed in a different part of the brain from language and thinking, this translation is often slippery and inaccurate. We do not have conscious access to the origins of our emotions and the moods they generate. Once we feel them, all we can do is try to interpret the emotion, translate it into language. Often, we get this wrong. We interpret them in a way that is simple and suits us. Or we remain baffled. This makes it hard to learn from them.
Source: Robert Greene, The Laws Of Human Nature
18
The map is not the territory.
We need to have a map (beliefs, assumptions, expectations, opinions etc.) because the actual territory (the world we live in) is just too complex to always fully keep track of. But we can’t have a map with infinite fidelity.
If our map is useful, it has a similar structure than the territory. But territories can change and maps need to adapt. Hence, we need to be open to changing our beliefs and assumptions and update our navigation system.
19
Achieving success in life is not merely as important as our definition of success.
I think I got this from Mark Manson’s latest book Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. There are two ways in which I think about this.
First, we tend buy into other people’s definition of success. Or we readily take on what our society tells us success means (degrees, job titles, money, cars, cool clothes and iPhones). That puts us into a hamster wheel of trying to meet others’ ever-changing and growing expectations (better job titles, more money, newer iPhones, cooler clothes, better Yoga poses).
Second, we default to pursuing that which we can be “successful” at — that which we think we won’t fail at. But isn’t it much more important to pursue that which really matters to you and failing at it than that which you succeed in but just don’t give a fuck about? Maybe our definition of success needs a meaning component.
In our fast-paced multi-input world, taking a step back and deciding what success actually means for oneself is more important than ever.
20
“If you never decide on a vision for your life, you’ll often find yourself living someone else’s dream. “
— James Clear
21
It’s easier to make money with people’s weaknesses than with helping them to overcome them.
Technology in particular, but also products and services in general, often fail to help people mitigate their weaknesses and overcome limitations. Instead, they exploit them.
22
Success: Do what you can with what you have with where you are.
Simple as that.
23
We can never really know whether our choices are the best ones or even the “right” ones as there is no clear framework that we can measure that against.
The internet provides so many options and confusing information that we can always feel insufficient and inadequate and generally missing out.
24
“If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.”
— Yuval Noah Harari
25
All forms of life, except humans, have a lower and an upper limit. Humans only have a lower.
Each individual human being and human beings as a collective have limitless potential. But that is also part of the human misery, because it creates a never ending feeling of “not enough.”
Inspired by Sadhguru.
26
Creative people don’t produce “better” output. They just produce more output which means that there is more to be found at both ends of the spectrum (good and bad).
Mozart or Beethoven created 10x as much as the average composer. The mean quality of their work wasn’t better — they simply had higher peaks.
Whether the numbers here are fully accurate or not — the general message here makes sense I think. And it’s a call to trying more and putting more out there.
27
“We have two lives. The second one begins when we realize we only have one.”
— Confucius
We all tacitly assume that we will live forever… We won’t. This truth should inspire us to live life to its fullest and not leave anything on the table.
Memento Mori. Memento Vivere.
28
Being aware of that you don’t know what you really want is better than thinking you know it when that thing is wrong…
… because it’s one step further towards actually identifying the real thing — you are free to think about it and might even be motivated to look for it in your life. However, it is far more painful than just having any goals. That’s why we avoid that truth and happily pick up goals that our society and culture hand to us so conveniently.
29
Aspiring to be the best vs. aspiring to improve.
Iddo Landau wrote about these two fundamentally different life strategies in his book Finding Meaning In An Imperfect World. The first will likely lead to an infinite game of competition and frustration because it is extremely unlikely you will ever be the best at anything. The second might inspire meaningful development.
In an aeon article the author projected this onto love and wrote:
“The same type of distinction applies to romantic love. If romantic meaning mainly concerns achieving the best, lovers will always be restless, consumed with concern about missing the perfect person, or perhaps the younger, the richer or the more beautiful one. If, however, romantic flourishing mainly involves improvement, achieving it lies much more in our hands.”
30
“In a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.”
— Nassim Taleb
In our day and age, getting more — things or information — isn’t a challenge. Choosing what matters is. Increasingly so.
Also Nassim Taleb: “Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
From Taleb’s book: The Bed of Procrustes
31
On Stoicism and mindfulness.
Stoicism is a thought-based reframing of life, it’s circumstances and emotions like anger or worry. Mindfulness is a skill to pay attention to whatever is arising, whether positive or negative.
Mindfulness helps you to not get carried away by thought and emotions and to more clearly feel what it is like to be you. Negative emotions can dissipate if you pay more attention to them. Stoicism is a school of thought that helps you think differently about what is happening which can alter how you feel about things in the first place. They both complement each other really well.
Mindfulness makes you more aware of your experience, Stoic philosophy changes your relation to it.
32
We might be not as much confined by suffering but by fear of suffering.
Uncertainty and the anticipation of bad things happening — isn’t this what creates most of the (mental) suffering?
33
You can’t incentivize performance (effect), you can only incentivize behavior (cause).
If you incentive performance you might create adverse behaviors when things do not go well. Instead, incentivize the behaviors you care about and treat performance as a measuring stick to adjust the desired behaviors.
I got this from Simon Sinek’s new book The Infinite Game: How Great Businesses Achieve Long-Lasting Success.
34
“The Self is not the thing that does the perceiving. It’s in itself a perception.”
— Anil Seth
In 2019, I’ve spent many hours meditating on what the Buddhists call the ‘illusion’ of Self. I could only get a glimpse into how selflessness feels like here and there — but the experiences were pretty profound. What Anil Seth describes is something you can feel for yourself — but it’s super hard and not intuitive.
35
“Behind every criticism is a wish.”
— Esther Perel
I believe this holds true both in your personal environment and in your professional life. Whenever your friend, partner, colleague or boss criticizes you, ask yourself (or event better, them!): what is the wish behind this?
36
Life is full of false dichotomies.
Often, conversations about challenges in life become simplistic and polarising (good — bad, villain — hero, perpetrator — saint, right — wrong, mistake — success, etc.) because that is what gets attention and can be more easily understood. It gives people security and something to hold on to — a (false) sense of certainty. In reality, though, life is complex and we need to embrace complexity to find answers that can truly help us.
37
Although the world looks extremely diverse, at the heart of things lies a very small set of parts.
20 amino acids comprise every living thing, every particle is made of a few quarks. #morenerdalarm
38
“If it chases you, you’re prey. If you confront it, you can transcend it.”
— Dr. Jordan Peterson
39
Life is much more complex than all of the external ideas we create to describe it.
As humans, we want to understand. We want the story to make sense. We believe in dichotomies such as good and bad or right and wrong because they help us navigate complexity. And we create constructs such as freedom, status, happiness, politics, money, movies, … We need those constructs to communicate and to understand ourselves. But nothing ever describes reality in its whole.
40
Without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions.
We tend to assume that not having to follow rules creates maximal freedom. It is obvious that many rules do in fact restrict our freedom. But not having any rules at all will give a lot more power to our animal nature and its passions and desires than it should have — and there is nothing freeing about that.
I got this from Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules For Life.
41
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
42
Everything that can’t be transferred into a digital version gets left behind. It doesn’t make it into the next level of the simulation.
This sounds scary, maybe even sad — doesn’t it? I don’t know what to make of it exactly. I didn’t write down where I heard or read this (I believe it was in a podcast). I can’t tell if this is really true, but it definitely feels true somehow. You decide.
43
Complexity emerges when entropy is somewhere in between really low and really high.
Life is possible because, in our universe, we’re in a phase from super low entropy towards maximally high entropy.
I got this from Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast.
44
Freedom is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.
Greater commitment allows for greater depth (relationships, friends, jobs, …). A lack of commitment requires superficiality.
The most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitment, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice.
You can become freer right now simply by choosing the limitations you want to impose on yourself. Limitations can set your free because they will liberate your time, attention and power of choice.
Inspired by Mark Manson.
45
Not condemning something doesn’t mean you are tolerating it.
… and trying to understand doesn’t mean you are justifying. Often, what holds us back from understanding our partner (or anyone else for that matter) or from defusing a situation, is that we feel like we have to push back hard against something we disagree with. But we don’t — at least not always and not immediately.
Inspired by Esther Perel on LondonReal.
46
We talk at 200–250 wpm (words per minute) but can listen at 300–500 wpm.
Spend more time listening.
Let me know what your favorite idea is down in the comments.
The End
Feel free share this article with the people you care about!
For more powerful ideas in the same style, check out the (still highly relevant) pieces I have written about this in 2018 and 2017.
Join me on my journey to help people become more curious about life and develop a growth mindset: