I recently won a big personal grant, one that I had been pursuing for six years. For four years, I kept focusing on writing the best possible proposal. I kept rewriting the text, tweaking the idea, trying all kinds of “hacks” in the content and layout, and pretty much tried…

In order to multiply your value in your profession, you need to do a handful of things I love to take, entertain, and experiment with all kinds of advice. And you’re going to need to do the same if you want to grow as a professional — staying with the…

Two weeks ago, around 9 pm and right after putting the kids to bed, I got a *ding*. An email. You know, the same ding we all get 200 times a day. But this was no ordinary ding. It was the annual grant decision from the Academy of Finland. Typically…

Benjamin Franklin is best known as the iconic American polymath: writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat (and out of all things, a printer). Studying how he did all that is a masterclass on productive creativity. Luckily he also documented his own guidelines for us! These five principles from Mr. Franklin can…

Are there any solutions to the modern chaos around us? That’s what I was wondering just a month ago… I have a few thoughts to offer. And it has to do with where you focus in the now: We always talk about stopping but don’t have the time to do…

There’s been a lot of attention on our (lack of) focus over the past years. Best-selling books, such as Deep Work by Cal Newport, have made it very clear that focus is a long-lost art. Too many notifications. Too many blog posts like this. Too much everything. Scientists tend to…

The tyrants are invisible and pervasive around you. Watch out. In one of our all-time favourite books, Poke the Box by Seth Godin, there’s a catchy phrase “Reject the tyranny of being picked.” I’ve mentioned this phrase quite a few times before, but I find myself gravitating back to this…

The creator of logotherapy — Victor Frankl — during World War II hypothesized that “people who realize their life’s purpose can survive, whereas people without it die.” …

Seeing the world in black and white harms humanity as a whole. Take the pandemic, for example. Oversimplifying complex issues that nobody really can predict has polarised entire nations like nothing before. And it’s all thanks to social media. See what I just did that there? Of course it’s not…